A Fish out of Water

Artists are often asked “When did you decide to be an artist?”, for me the answer is simple, “Always! “, but, for a long time in my life, I had no idea what an artist was. We didn’t have art books or paintings in my home (other than my uncle’s). But the training did start early for me, as I was kept quiet with felt tip pens and rolls of wallpaper. By age 6 I had created the equivalent of 100 Bayeux Tapestries and won my first art prize for a Fuzzy Felt rendition of The Battle of Waterloo. Later, during my school holidays, and in order to get me out of the way, I was sent to stay with my grandma and my uncle Pete in Scarborough. Uncle Pete was a signalman on the railway. He also had many hobbies, renovating British motorbikes, train sets, and making paintings of steam trains, mainly set in Rotherham. He was an accomplished amateur. It was at his Gristhorpe signal box every day, where he taught me to paint. At school I was the “go to” person, for all things creative.

Then, ambition hit institution, and my courage failed me at a critical moment. In my final year careers meeting the old fart that did my interview said, “What do you want to do after school?”. I replied, “I want to go to art college”. He said, “People from Brinsworth don’t go to art college. What does your father do?”. “A roofer”, I replied. He said, “I strongly recommended you go and work with your father”, sadly, I did. As I said, my courage failed me. Time passed, money was earned, house and car were bought, and I met my wife and eventually had kids. But art never left me. I would draw on the backs of the technical drawings I used every day on site, I painted at home, and I involve myself in any opportunity to be creative.

Outside of work I had taken up scuba diving as a hobby. It was my passion. Through which, in the late 80s, when the stock market crashed and I found myself struggling to find work, I wound up working aboard a salvage ship in the North and Irish seas. My wife and my mother were horrified, mainly through fear for my safety. They were right to be, it was a risky job. On the other hand, I was having a great time! Every day was exhilarating, and in the downtime between dives, I got to paint and draw in my cabin. You can imagine, I mostly painted ships, and drew shipwrecks, as well as my crew mates and their families. Anyway, the near-death moments kept piling up and there is only so much the anus can take. My nerve eventually went. I handed in my notice in late August 1992.

I did two more expeditions before I left, but it was after the first of these that everything changed for me. We had been diving near the Isle of Man and were returning to Liverpool to stock up on oxygen for the decompression chamber and to get some fuel. The trip had been uneventful, and the weather was fine. During the return journey Steve 2 and myself were in the hold all day making grappling hooks, cutting bars, bending them, and welding them together. We landed and I drove home with 24 hours of shore leave. That night I woke up screaming in agony! I had welder’s flash. Which is where the welding arc dries out your eyes. I ended up in casualty at two in the morning getting drops in my eyes.

Anyway, at some point during this Palaver my wife pointed out an advert in the local paper for a course called “Access to Art”, at Rotherham College. The next morning, unable to drive, I called the ship to delay sailing, and I called Rotherham College to get an interview. I did my interview for art college with a packet of drawings on the table in front of me, and patches on both my eyes. They accepted me and I started my course in October, just a few weeks later.

At this moment it’s safe to say I hadn’t got a clue where all this was heading. I’d gone to college thinking I could go into graphic design, or interior design. Essentially, something vocational. My wife and mum thought I’d soon get bored, or sick of being skint, and go back into construction. How wrong they were. In late October we had our first college outing to London. We did the tour, Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy, and finally we went to the National Gallery to see “The Frieze of Life”, an exhibition by Edvard Munch. Standing in that room with all that amazing work, and the artists soul laid bare, I had tears in my eyes. I had never been so moved by anything in my life before. At that moment I turned to my tutor, Derek Allport, and said “I am going to be an artist”. To which he replied, “It's a lonely path Richard”. How right he was – but, despite all of the tribulations that decision brought about, I have never had a moment of regret. And so began my art career and a lifelong struggle to find my muse.

I was very lucky with University, I got to do my BA at Bretton Hall, which was situated in the middle of what would become the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A sublime, albeit sculpted landscape, peppered with the sculptures of Barbera Hepworth and Henry Moore. The studios were light and spacious, and the course leader David Walker Barker, was an accomplished and dedicated artist in his own right. Even if he was a grumpy sod at times. In hindsight I realise Dave was happiest in his studio, and teaching was a terrible distraction for him.

Steppingstones

Most artists have a moment of realisation, but not all. Whether it's a mark that opens up a new way of mark making, a piece of written text that opens the door to a new way of thinking, or something said that brings clarity or direction. For me, that moment was accumulative and realised alone in a field in Lincolnshire. It’s a complex story, but I will try and tell it so you might better understand what brought me to this point and the work I am making right now. To understand this though, we must time travel back to my first year studying art at Bretton Hall University, and the influences from that time that have carried through my entire career.

Firstly, there was the project “Culture, Nature, Environment”. Which I guess was exactly what it says on the tin… look at the land, try to understand the truth of it, realise its cultural value, make art about it. Me, I looked at the history of where I lived, the ancient land of Thorgeirr and Godric. I made paintings on paper, akin to maps, tore them up, and then made collages from the pieces. What this actually did though was awaken in me a love of history and break me away from working figuratively. This was the first moment I began to understand paint.

Then came “The Systems Project”. We were given 2 square feet of polythene sheet, 2 ft of dowel, 2 lb of sand, a ball of string, a roll of masking tape, and a copy of Gaston Bachelard’s book “The Poetics of Space”. With this we were told to make structures and draw. Me, I took it into the swimming pool. Still diving at that time, I made weights and buoyancy structures and documented the results with my underwater camera. In my studio I reversed them using the sand as weight, and I drew. From this I learned about process, about working with the constraints of a few elements, and about composition.

Then we were set free. Having come to art college from a career in marine salvage I was automatically drawn to make work about that experience. I fiddled about with little success until one day, talking to a fellow student who was attempting to make work about his climbing experience, I realised that it didn’t work! You cannot make people know the physicality of your experiences. And so, I began to focus on the material I had worked with in salvage, copper, iron, brass, and bronze, and began to use chemicals to patina them. Which brings me to the biggest influence of my career, Ursula Szulakowska, one of my art history tutors. She advised me to look at alchemy.

At first it was material, then it became about coding, and finally about process. Alchemy is all about process. Alongside this enquiry we were also studying the postmodern thinkers, Lacan, Baudrillard, Lyotard, as well as Barthes and Berger. But it was Art in the Age of mechanical reproduction, J.A Walker, and a story about a contemporary alchemist who photocopied a Da Vinci drawing, zooming in and copying the resulting print over and over again, 200,000 times, until he revealed a new Da Vinci masterpiece, that changed everything and made me understand what “Base into gold” really meant.

The culmination of all of the above resulted in the work I made for the following 8 years. Repetition of media images was everything to me. It was how I began to see the world.  Not only as a commentary on a society full of idealised objects, mostly as marketing, but also the process of dissecting the photocopies hundreds of times, became a form of alchemical process, distilling the sign to a maddening intensity. That said, I am a painter and even though the sign and what was signified was the reason the work existed, I placed these objects within landscapes, experimented with paint, creating texture and washes and, using the language of graphic design, created hard edged structures of vibrant colours and flat plains. I was prolific. As one is when one believes in the work.

Through this work I achieved success. I got representation with a London art dealer and eventually was represented by Paton Gallery in Hackney. I sold a lot of work, I had solo shows, and I got a lot of media attention. It was a fun time and from it I managed to become a full-time artist and quit the part time job that had sustained me to that point.

Life goes on, and on, and on!

In 2004 I attended an MA at Sheffield Hallam University. I began to make installations, and I dabbled in sculpture. Once again, success came, and I began to exhibit. I also received my first Arts Council funding. That said, my work had become highly political. It wasn’t me. It gnawed at my conscience. I continued to paint, but it was an aside.

Then in 2005, I went to London to see the exhibition “Turks: a journey of a thousand years” at the Royal Academy. There I encountered the work of 14th century miniature painter and storyteller Mehmet Siyah Kalem. I was blown away! His work wasn’t what I was usually drawn to but there was something within it that I identified with, that felt contemporary to me, something inspiring. I decided there and then that I would go to Turkey, Istanbul in fact, and see what I could make as a result of this influence.

And so, I attended my first artist residency in Istanbul in 2008. At the prestigious art institution Platform Garanti. For 6 months I wandered the streets with my catalogue of Siyah Kalem’s drawing in my hand, failing utterly to make anything that wasn’t derivative or downright obvious. I came home with little physical to show for my efforts, but I had created a new international network, and the seeds of everything that was to come in the future were well and truly sown.

From this I did further residencies, had work on the fringe of the Istanbul Biennial in 2009, work that went on to be show cased at the Copenhagen and Jihlava film festivals. I was a part of the 2010 Mardin Biennial, and I began to ponder my work and my future in a much deeper way. In 2012 I received my first major solo exhibition at a museum institute: Deities at the Bottom of the Garden, at 2021 Gallery in Scunthorpe. The work I made for this was directly influenced by my life in Istanbul. Specifically, the architecture.

Time passed by, I made new work, exhibited, made a few sales, and occasionally thumbed through the Siyah Kalem catalogue that sat on my studio shelf. More time passed by… and then one day it hit me “Don’t think of the characters in Siyah Kalem’s drawings as mere renderings of his world. See them as living entities, present in the modern city”, it was a revelation.  From this I began to marry the small maquette sculptures I was making at the time with this new focus. I returned to Istanbul in 2017 to attend a residency at Halka Sanat Projects. The resulting exhibition, whilst not fully resolved, was a series of small sculptures, each representing a different drawing from Siyah Kalem’s social observations.

After all this my attention turned to Siyah Kalem’s wild and imaginative demon Paintings. My second residency at Halka Sanat was all about this. I did try to bring the same 3-dimensional concept to this work, but in the end, it was painting that made most sense. The resulting works were made using the projected outlines of his demons, which I used as empty vessels in which to create textures and marks based on the city around me, the street art, and the political stencils. I made three manifestations of this project, one where I took the exact measurement of the fragments of his work and scaled them up from millimetres to centimetres, one with decimal point moved over once, and the last where I converted millimetres to inches. It was this work that became my second museum level solo exhibition Nomadic Tales, at The Millenium Galleries, Sheffield.

An Aside

I can’t really write a biography without mentioning Bloc Studios. Bloc began in 1996 after art college. I was rooted to Sheffield because of my family, and I didn't want to work alone (I tried it and nearly went insane). So, I set up Bloc with 3 other graduates from Bretton Hall in a disused former cutlery factory in the city centre. There were four of us at first, but over the years, as they left, I inherited the business. In 1999 I inherited another 6 studios in another part of the building. Then, in 2001 we relocated to a new “old” building, over the road, and 10 became 24. It was then that Bloc Gallery was born, later becoming Bloc Projects. In 2005 I inherited another part of the building and 24 became 54 studios.

I love Bloc, its core idea of helping artists to be artists remains as strong today as it was at the beginning. For me it came about because I had a skillset I could use to create and maintain something communal, a community I can be a part of. I’ve put a lot of my personal money over the years, spending the proceeds of two big commissions on its expansion, and a lot of time. But why this is an aside? It’s not how I introduce myself… I am and artist, not a studio manager. I am a tenant in my own creation. Even if being always tied that creation can sometimes feel like a bit of a millstone around my neck.

War and Pestilence

So, after my residencies in Istanbul, I ended up renting an apartment there. I had finished with Siyah Kalem and began to paint again. In the text above I keep saying “time passed by, I made new work”. Well, this had a lot to do with what I considered to be my midlife crisis. Which was all about getting fit. Yoga, running, mountaineering, running up mountains. And, under the influence of Haruki Murakami’s book “What I talk about when I talk about running”, I began to make work about the rocks at my feet as I ran. At first this was based on the rocks I encountered on the Cornish coast. Later I made similar work about the rocks I was traversing on the Istanbul Bosphorus shoreline.

I ran in the Istanbul Marathon in November 2019. By January the following year Covid hit hard. Travel was tough, and I kept getting caught in both country’s lockdowns. I had 4 all together! But it was the war in Russia that ended my time there. Istanbul began to fill up with fleeing Russians and Ukrainians, the economy collapsed, inflation went crazy, and my rent went up 400% over night. I left Istanbul.

Home Sweet Home

Life in Istanbul was good, but it was tough at times, lonely, and I was homesick often. Little things sustained me, an occasional curry, a trip to the islands, and British comedy, in particular The Detectorists. So, when I found myself at home again, cut off from my muse, and drifting around looking for the next thing to make, finding myself in a Lincolnshire field with a metal detector felt like a natural thing to do. If Mackenzie Crook can do it, so can I (FYI. It’s exactly like it is in the TV program). But Detecting was a way to reengage with my own landscape. I have to thank my wonderful friends Jim and Jo Scholey here, not only for supporting me for decades by collecting my work but also letting me camp on their land and wander their fields with my detector.

As you have probably already realised, nothing in my life remains apart from my art or my work ethic. Scuba diving becomes salvage diving, a holiday to Turkey becomes a string of residencies, running becomes about representing what’s at my feet, and detecting was inevitably to become something in furtherance of making art. With that said, the moment of realisation wasn’t gradual and certainly not obvious to me. What came about was in an instance of realisation and a coming together of everything in my career so far in a single moment. It happened like this…

There I was, on a cold November morning, wandering through a muddy field, swinging my detector before me as I paced. My thoughts were about the past, the things I’d made, and what from all that I would make again. I’d loved the rock paintings, they were joyous to make, splashing paint around and experimenting all the time with mark making. I’d loved the demons, feeling the texture of the world and recreating it, engaging with the world around me. And I’d really loved how the demons floated on raw canvas. It was a winning formula. I’d sold most of them! But what to paint? And then it hit me, I was standing in a field of flints. I could paint those. Why hadn’t I seen it before? I realised, it was a matter of scale. Zoom in close and a small rock is a big rock. Eureka! Big canvases, small rocks.

So, I took out my phone and snapped away. But something nagged me. It wasn’t enough! What had always excited me, ever since my exposure to the Structuralist and Post structuralist, was meaning. Meaning and narrative, told through what “things” signify, and how the meaning of signs can slip as the context of them changes. My detector beeped. Kneeling in the mud, with an Edward III silver penny in my hand it hit me. The penny was a part of a story, it had a grand history, as well as a hidden history that belonged to the person who had lost it many centuries ago. In fact, everything I found was imbued with narrative, of people and the land, of migration and settlement, and of the cultural melting pot that Britain is. Later, I realised too that the oxidisation process of the metal objects I was finding had a direct relationship with the work I had done many years ago around alchemy.

From then on it was just a matter of making the work, and detecting became a performative act as a part of that process. Other realisations happened, happy ones. Like realising that Baudrillard’s Simulacra had returned to my work, and that old story “On Exactitude in Science”, the map that's so accurate it can lay over the land was a part of what I was making. I had talked for many years about my work existing on the threshold between the objective and the subjective, that was back, albeit as the notion of the liminal space, between past and present, abstract and representation, and the imagined and the real.

In more practical terms, my 30 years of perfecting a style of hard-edged paintings and the elimination of bleeding from the edges of my work, have come to fruition when dealing with working on clean, raw (clear primed) canvas. Likewise, the transformation many years ago from working with cutout images, adhered directly to the canvas, to a highly refined transfer technique, has become a useful tool when working with the patterns of the pieced of broken ceramic that I now use within my work. Finally, the processes I have learned and developed to build up layers of paint, splattering, scraping, pouring, and then sanding back, have all come together within the surfaces of this work. It’s as if everything I have been making over the years has been preparation for this moment and this work.