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Brian McAvera: Richard, you were born in 1946. In 1969 you graduated
from Trinity College with a degree in business administration. It was
to be another eight years before you attended the Dun Laoghaire School
of Art and Design (1977-80). So you were over 30-years-old before you
attended art school. What did you do in the meantime, and what impelled
you towards art ?
Richard Gorman: When I was a child I was constantly lying on the floor
drawing and painting. However as the eldest son of a family whose business
was a garage there was an expectation and ambition, on the part of my
father, that I should follow into the family business. I allowed myself
to be persuaded away from painting and went to Trinity College, Dublin
and read business studies. I then spent my twenties in the motor trade,
first at Ford in England and subsequently at the family business. I continued
however to go to night classes in art and related subjects until in 1976
I began a much more serious evening diploma in art at Dun Laoghaire School
of Art. It was a revelation. By 1977 I decided if it were possible I would
join the art school full time, and was in fact accepted as a full-time
student at Dun Laoghaire.
B McA: What was Dun Laoghaire College of Art like in the seventies?
Were there any lecturers there who were influential - you were after all
a mature student and therefore more likely to know what you needed - and
what was the ethos of the place?
R G: The school under Trevor Scott was based on Bauhaus principles filtered
through those of Black Mountain in America. It had a very open and enquiring
atmosphere. However, at that time not very much weight was given to art
history and almost none to contemporary art practice. It is much more
sophisticated academically now. For me, the greatest influence was the
importance given to external tutors and occasional lectures and visits
by contemporary artists. Micheal Farrell and the lithographer Jacques
de Champfleury came to the school, which was to impact on decisions later
on. The greatest individual influence was without doubt Charlie Tyrrell
- his analytic approach and pragmatism and encouragement were fundamental.
I think it is very important to have ‘working’ artists visiting
an art school. I still keep a connection with Dun Laoghaire - in fact
I have been external examiner in painting there for the last couple of
years.
B McA: You live and work in Milan (Fig 2) for part of the year. Could
you explain your reasons for leaving Ireland and why you chose Milan?
R G: Well, I prepared my first one-man show at the studio I had in Ringsend
in Dublin. The show was in 1983 at the Project Gallery in Temple Bar.
Thinking back on it now it must have looked like a group show because
it included lithography, etching, painting, and welded and fabricated
sculptures. You could say it was not a success, much of it was a bit glib,
rather jokey and defensive, and it did not get unqualified critical acclaim!
This brought me up sharply, I realised that I had turned my back on a
lot, in order to make art, and that I had better get it right, and narrow
the focus.
I decided to address two of the problems I now understood as a result
of the exhibition. Firstly, I would concentrate on only one medium at
least for a year, and secondly, I would exile myself from Dublin life
and so attempt to deepen my understanding of who I was and what I was
doing. In Dublin I was known from my previous life, and this was confusing
to me. Our perception of ourselves is at least partly based on how we
perceive others perceiving us. I realised that I could redefine myself
if I left Ireland and printed, or painted, and so become more completely
what I did. So I sold the house in Ringsend and went to Paris and spent
a year making lithographs at Atelier Champfleury. At the end of that year
I had achieved what I had wanted in terms of confidence and focus, and
I made an exhibition of the lithographs in the atelier. I wanted to paint,
and although Paris still worked in its exile function, I did not like
it enough then to consider setting up a painting studio there. I chose
Italy for its history of art, specially the Renaissance, and I chose Milan
because it is not romantic, and because it is relatively north.
BMcA: You live some of the year in Italy, one of the world’s great
repositories of classical painting. I’ve often been intrigued by
abstract artists who have reproductions of classical paintings in their
studios, often 15th-and 16th-century artists. I suspect it’s the
quality of the colour, and if it’s not paradoxical, just as art historians
often prefer black and white reproductions so that they can see the ‘formal’
areas more clearly, painters simply don’t need the black and white
because they respond to the formal shapes, as well as to the saturation
of the colours instinctively. Would you agree?
R G: Yes. If you look at a Bellini, Mantegna, or Piero della Francesca,
you are struck by the clear calm arrangements of masses, and the careful
tensions. It also struck me that it is the the painting itself, rather
than its subject matter, which makes it memorable, if the narrative was
all-important then all the pietàs would be equal, and they are
not. In fact it was this, amongst other things, which caused me to question
my reliance then on a narrative underpinning to justify my own paintings.
B McA: You have previously referred to Donald Judd and his rather obvious
comment that form and content are inseparable, which you have quoted approvingly.
Now surely there’s a strong argument for saying that minimalist sculptors
like Judd or Carl Andre do the exact opposite: form is put on a pedestal,
literally, and content is relegated to any accidental association a viewer
may have. Fundamentally, aren’t works of this kind largely devoid
of content?
R G: Well, that depends on what is defined as being content. Surely the
effect produced by a painting, sculpture or video is primarily a visual
sensation. I understand that the part of our brain which reacts to visual
stimulation is deep in the cortex, indicating that it is a very early
development. We could recognise things before we had words to describe
them, we knew to get up a tree when a wild animal approached, before we
could name it. A finished work is the result of a ‘conflict with
disorder’, which the painter encountered in its making, together
with the sum of previous encounters with paint experienced by the artist
(Figs 3 & 4). I was in my studio in Milan a couple of years ago on
a summer evening and the doors were open on to the courtyard – it
was just before dinner and two waiters from the trattoria, whose kitchen
is opposite, came in. ‘So what do those paintings mean?’ came
the inevitable question, and suddenly I knew ‘They mean they are
what I spend my time doing’.
I don’t make paintings as messages to anyone, and I don’t now
seek to have them ‘interpreted’ in any way . I do understand
that much contemporary work is narrative based. It invites the viewer
to look through the surface to the idea or the narrative, the surface
is somehow a matrix to carry the verbal intellectual interpretation to
the viewer to permit a ‘decoding’ of its message. However, I
ask only that the viewer stops to look at the surface of the picture,
and experience that. After all, when we look at a painting, what we are
looking at is paint.
BMcA: You’ve said that in printmaking, the decision anticipates the
execution, which is another way of saying that everything is planned beforehand
and nothing is left to chance. But with an etcher like Diarmuid Delargy
for instance, it’s the chance element, coupled with his ability to
use it, that makes the work. And surely many printmakers from at least
the 19th century onwards used chance elements in exactly the same way
as painters use turps in washes of paint which can’t be fully controlled?
R G: Well, for one thing I am not an institution with a dogma to protect,
like the Church or the law, where I must follow my own precedence; I have
made remarks at different times over the years to attempt to clarify for
myself what I am making and what I am thinking about it at the time. I
am attempting to constantly re-evaluate what it is that I am doing. This
remark was certainly true for me when I was making the more gestural paintings:
the decision making and execution became almost fused in an intuitive
moment (Fig 6). Now with my ‘slower’ paintings it is less true,
but the general thrust of the argument remains true (Fig 1). A painting
can be changed in a very short time. You are right of course: there is
room for ‘the happy accident’ in printmaking, and indeed painting,
and Diarmuid certainly uses this, but I would say in his case it is the
excellent draughtsmanship which is the key to the success of his prints.
Of course chance can be used in painting but I don’t see that argues
against the truth that in paint the decision process, and the making process,
are very close, paintings are easy to change suddenly. I think this is
what makes painting very immediate.
BMcA: You changed style quite radically. Work in the late eighties
and early nineties was a layered, physical, tactile form of painting,
reminiscent of painters like De Staël, in which figurative readings
seemed to be regularly present (Fig 5). Then you shifted quite decisively
into a form of colour-field painting. Why?
R G: The shift you mention happened over about five years. Takashi Suzuki
in his essay for the catalogue Paintings and Paper Works describes it
as ‘a series of connected transformations.’ It came about as
I began to question the need of the figurative or narrative starting point
of the painting, which up until then I had believed necessary to underpin
or ‘justify’ a work. The earlier gestural painting I was making
began with a figurative drawing, and then continued by destroying the
figuration by a series of energetic gestures and marks. The remaining
‘accretion of cancellations’ became the finished work. The organic
and often linear nature of the work invited literal interpretation, and
the interpretation was often far from my original, although now hidden
intent. At first these unintended interpretations fascinated me, but later
I began to question the value of this kind of mystification. Also, gestural
marks depend on the articulation of one’s arms and one’s height
and so begin to look a bit similar to each other. There was also this
shamanistic ‘other’ state of mind, which seemed necessary to
make such paintings. These conditions tended to make the paintings look
similar to each other and I was driven to try for a more analytic approach.
It is true to say that the paintings I am making now do look different,
but I can see continuity within that difference, back to those ‘connected
transformations’ I mentioned.
BMcA: In your various experiments in the 90s, shaped canvases, primary
colours, various forms of geometric or minimalist style canvases, one
immediately thinks of Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Rothko, Morris Louis,
Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and so forth. Did you see artists
like these as exemplars?
R G: The experiments were more personal really, it began when I questioned
what was inside and what was outside a painting. I decided to make some
paintings which would be within the sweep of my reach, so I took a piece
of charcoal and described the arc of my ambit on the wall. I measured
the resulting oval, which turned out to be 150 x 115cm, and had stretchers
made up and then I attached the linen, and prepared the surfaces. The
idea forced me to deal more clearly with the shapes occurring within the
painting, in the context of the border of the support. I then had stretchers
made up which reflected the arc of the top of the windows in my studio
- and one or two other shapes suggested themselves to me, finishing up
with two 200 x 400cm half-circle triptychs one of which is in the collection
of the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny and the other of which is now in the
Nissan Collection in Dublin. After some time working like this I reverted
almost entirely to the square which had always been the basic support
shape within which I have worked. The shaped supports had by then suggested
internal shapes, which now inhabit my paintings, and which exist in relation
to the square which defines them.
BMcA: In conversation with the painter Sean Shanahan in 1992 you stated
that you no longer depended on a narrative starting point, did not attempt
any longer to illustrate an emotion or to elaborate a memory, and as such
you ‘have to invest significance in the gestures and the marks which
evolve during the confrontation between me and the surface’. I’m
interested in those words ‘investing significance in the gestures
and marks’. To invest significance requires a codification of some
sort, an agreed vocabulary, otherwise no one is able to know what the
significance is. So what is your agreed vocabulary?
R G: Well, put like that it sounds as if I was trying a little too hard
to be intellectual there! This was the first time that I really tried
to think hard about what it was that I was doing, and Sean had a hard
time getting words out of me - I remember it took three days! At that
time the work I was making remained essentially gestural but was already
without the underlying figuration I mentioned. ‘Investing significance’
there should be taken to mean that the marks and gestures themselves conveyed
the energy and traced the physical presence of the actions of the maker.
Perhaps ‘an agreed vocabulary’ is unnecessary. We are often
confronted with the idea that somehow abstract painting needed some kind
of secret key to ‘de-codify’ it. But as I said earlier, images
came before words, and I don’t think we always need words to interpret
images. Words work in a different way to areas of colour, or indeed music.
Each has its place and they often overlap and assist each other but are
not necessarily convergent.
B McA: Many members of the general public, when faced with colour-field
painting or paintings which seem to be non-objective, not only do not
understand them but think them too ‘easy’, too simplistic, too
obviously literal, a failure of the imagination. How would you try to
alert, explain or introduce a viewer into the world of your current work?
RG: I agree that there is sometimes that perception - but simplicity may
be distilled from complexity. To return to the music analogy. A person
can listen to a piece of music and be touched by it without the necessity
of asking ‘but what does it signify?’ Shapes and colours have
an effect and a resonance for a viewer, even when the image is not ‘readable’
in any precise narrative or memory sense. I mentioned earlier that the
paintings I am making at the moment admittedly have less to look at in
them, but do however elicit reactions from people - not of course always
positive ones, but that is normal . There is no ‘key’ or code
to ‘unlocking meaning’ when looking at abstract paintings. I
would say to a viewer, ‘look at painting as you would listen to music,
without prejudice.’
B McA: I know that you are interested in Japan but I’m not sure
if it’s the visual culture, printmaking for example, or the Japanese
sensibility and philosophy of life. Could you explain?
R G: I was introduced to Japan by my friend Mika Sato. While we were there
many years ago my work was seen by the director of a gallery there - Yanagisawa
- and I have been working with him ever since. He now works with three
Irish artists, John Graham, Fergus Feehily and myself. In fact we are
bringing an exhibition of prints of Yanagisawa Gallery artists to the
Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo and Graphic Studio Gallery Dublin
opening simultaneously at the beginning of March 2004. I’m attracted
by the extreme strangeness of Japan. Every time I go there the only thing
I understand is that I’ve misunderstood something I finally thought
I had understood the previous visit. It’s constantly surprising,
bewildering almost. I am also attracted to Ukioye woodblock prints by
their simplicity and clarity, and I am fascinated by Japanese literature,
authors like Junichiro Tanizaki and Kenzaburo Oe for example. Gerard O’Toole,
the Executive Chairman of Nissan, has sponsored exhibitions I have made
in Japan at Itami City Museum of Art and Mitaka City Gallery of Art in
1998 and 1999, and ‘Paintings and Paper Works’ at Koriyama City
Museum of Art, The Center for Contemporary Graphic Art Fukushima, and
at Yokohama Portside Gallery in 2003. I visited the traditional washi
paper makers Iwano Heyzaburo in Imadate and made a series of new large
format (212 cm x 320cm) paper diptychs for the CCGA show. Perhaps you
will remember that I made a show of large format paper works of a similar
kind at the Ormeau Baths Gallery in 2000 called ‘Made in Japan’?
B McA: Do you consider yourself to be an Irish painter, or a European
one?
R G: Just a painter.
B McA: Most painters who abstract, especially non-figurative artists,
minimalists, colour-field painters and so forth, often claim a spiritual
imperative, that they are trying to achieve some form of spiritual, contemplative
essence. Would that be your standpoint?
R G: Well, I try to make paintings that are good. If I succeed I hope
to make paintings which are contemplative. I would feel more comfortable
with the word contemplative than the word spiritual. The best paintings
I have seen in my life, for example Velasquez or Mantegna or Bellini,
make me feel full of a kind of quiet exaltation.
B McA: Let me make a distinction between ‘decorative’ and
decoration. In Western societies, decorative usually means pretty: something
to harmonise with the wallpaper or the designer dress. In Eastern societies,
especially Islamic ones, it is often seen as having a religious function,
but that is a product of a specific culture. Do you see your more recent
works as ‘decorative’ in either of these senses?
R G: The word decorative is often understood in a pejorative sense. In
the Islamic example you quote, the decorative element, especially as applied
in calligraphy, happens of course because of the proscription of figurative
representation - which is interesting when it comes to our own apprehension
of abstract art. Of course there is a decorative element in image making
of any kind but I seek to transcend the decorative. In my painting at
present I deal with colour, flat shapes, contours, lines, tensions and
ambiguities.
B McA: You’ve said that you want your work to be neither illusionistic
nor allusionistic, yet you quoted Judd approvingly when he effectively
said the opposite. Isn’t the aim impossible?
R G: A painting will have a resonance in the viewer, it is inevitable.
Form and content are inextricably linked however. In a sense the act of
painting is a little like play, play which eventually involves the viewer,
whose job it is to complete the painting.
B McA: Serious play, as in Huizanga’s notion of play?
R G: If you read Anthony Storr in The Dynamics of Creation, he too talks
about art as play. It’s based on the premise that sometimes people
need to create a world they can trust, a world of their own.
B McA: Clement Greenberg, the American critic and promoter of Modernism,
argued that art form advanced towards a concentration of its own formal
nature. With Post Painterly Abstraction as he called it, painting was
heading towards an assertion of its own flatness. From today’s perspective
Greenberg’s philosophy seems like a cul de sac, yet in many ways
you yourself could be seen as fitting into his theories. Do you think
this is true?
R G: Well, I think as a painter I have been constantly painting myself
in and out of corners. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, writing
about the Clement Greenberg argument of modernist painting in the Itami/Mitaka
catalogue a couple of years ago, said: ‘...it sometimes appears as
if this classic account of modernist painting has been subconsciously
revisited and recast by Gorman as a voyage of personal discovery’.
And I think this is essentially true. However I am now painting in a way
which does not suggest to me that I am trapped in any kind of dogma –
either my own or anyone else’s.
B McA: You are quoted as saying: ‘I am interested in industrial
shapes and in colour in an industrial sense, colour that is denatured,
removed from its associative realm’. If you remove figurative implications
and you denature colour, what’s left?
R G: What’s left is paint.
Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and
curator.
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