Brian McAvera :I’d like you to talk about the actual process of painting. Francis Bacon always said, to the English, that chance paid a large part in the process, but to the French he stressed the controlled element of chance. You’ve often talked about what is ‘revealed in the process of painting’, about ‘making things happen’. So can you tell us about this process of generating mark-making, how it proceeds, and how it finishes?
David Crone: There are certain ideas which are generated through scribbly drawings and sketches: a proposal to myself. They contain the basic set-up of the paintings; the divisions, and organisations of shapes are determined by that, and are layered in very often with a coloured ground underneath. I vary this process from time to time to challenge it. Often a drawing will go into the wet paint, whether by the brush or with charcoal. Then I rework it. What determines what happens, is the extent to which the paint is slippery or scumbly and so forth. It gets scraped and scratched and worked on again and again. At any given point where changes are taking place, it’s because of a sense that it isn’t working. There will be an obliterative move: scraping back, or overpainting. It’s a coalescence of layers which gather up in a painting. To finish a painting? That’s when I can’t think of anything else to do!
You ask yourself questions: is it a good painting? Have you moved away from your initial statements in the piece? Often a painting will move back to those original statements. When there’s no irritation or annoyance in the piece, then I’m finished. My notebooks are just little scribbly marks, not studied drawings like those of a Sickert. The painting itself can come out of a simple proposal – a certain sort of colour or shape might determine its arrangement. I tend to use oil on canvas. I like the weight of the paint, the fact that it’s sticky, scratchy and scumbly.
I don’t think I’ve changed very much over the years. I was struck by this when I looked at the retrospective in the Ulster Museum a few years back. You think you’re making new work all the time. What pins you down more is a recognisable image. For example, it’s almost impossible to destroy the idea of the human head being a head, whereas the atmosphere of a garden isn’t pinned down as much as the recognisable image of a head. Maybe now, because of this garden content (Figs 4, 5 &8), it’s more evident. When I was painting heads (Fig 10), I wanted to break down the descriptive aspect, and that aspect of my work has continued.
You referred once to a kind of sourness in my use of colour. The business of choosing colour is ‘felt for’. Maybe the first choice of colour determines what comes next. I like colour to be a little bit offbeat, surprising, to have a particular tonal quality.

B McA: I suppose at the stage of what I might call the interrogation of the painting that is where you begin to finish?
D C: I like that! Yes. You mentioned colour before. Certain harmonies build up and, just to make a change, I’ll think of what the obvious colour would be and then choose another one! Because it’s an oil painting, it’s a long process. I prefer a semi-dry surface to work on, rather than wet in wet.

B McA: I often wonder about your abandonment of sculpture at art college, and also about the effect that your travels in the early 1960s had on your work. On the one hand, in terms of your often large sense of scale, and the weathered, almost low-relief quality of some of your work, as well as your constant division of the canvas into ‘scaffolding’ units, one thinks of the sculptor manqué who admired Armitage and Turnbull and Caro, and visited the first Documenta. On the other hand, one thinks of American Expressionism, de Kooning, Francis Bacon and the tachiste painters of Spain and France. It’s almost as if there were a dialogue between openness, volume and clarity as in traditional sculpture, and the overt, compressed, perceptually uncertain elements of the painters – between what is ‘real’ and what is memory, what is true and what is ‘faked’. Can you elaborate?
D C: You’ve chosen the words for me! So I don’t need to answer the question! Very well put!

B McA: No chance!
D C: When you mention so many influences, yes, that’s part of the baggage. I try to ignore it as far as possible. I’ve used, as you noted, words like ‘sticky’ and ‘scratchy’ and so on, and they are related to working over surfaces, sculptural surfaces if you like. It’s the business of not being so sensitive to a kind of narrative, so that you can pull out essential points, that is close to sculpture .
The great thing about travel is that you see the possibilities. I remember an early visit to London and being amazed at the student work, even down to the amount of paint that people were using. I was aware of Caro, who was working with clay at the time in an expressive manner. One had the sense that anything was possible. I wasn’t making big paintings until 1979! My early experience, the first efforts, were sculptural drawings of people standing at bus-stops, the bus-stops themselves being like plinths.

B McA: I suppose that Caro’s literal use of scaffolding in the 1960s might relate to your use of scaffolding units?
D C: I was attracted to those forms, expressive forms against hard structures, though by the late 1970s I had started to break them down, by pushing paint through them (Fig 6). I think that, more than anything else, it was the physicality of the things I saw that was important: the difference between reproductions and the physical presence of an actual work at a certain scale. Going to Venice in the early 1960s, one of the big exhibitions was that of Francis Bacon in the British Pavilion, with the paintings being shown edge to edge, and this had a massively powerful effect on me.The Americans showed up strongly: Jasper Johns for example; and I coincidentally went into Peggy Guggenheim’s house – I’d never seen anything like an Oldenburg before – this six foot long toothpaste tube! I’d no conception. Before that, art was ‘arty’! When you were telling me earlier about being in Venice and looking at a palazzo wall and seeing it as an abstract painting, I know what you mean, yet one realises that light on a roof, a piece of landscape, a massive piece of colour in the mid-west – these are all based on actual experience, and so are not divorced from actuality and are therefore not totally abstract. Living here in Northern Ireland, you didn’t have that kind of thing. It was more linear and edgy and less fluid.

B McA: If Sickert, perhaps because of his Englishness, is at times a dourer version of Matisse and Bonnard, you at times are a dourer version of Sickert: there’s the same interest in implied psychology, the use of an architectural scaffolding, a palette that is dark but richly coloured, an occasional use of theatricality, and a belief that the real subject of a picture lies in the plastic facts that are expressed. Now I know that you were given a Sickert-style instruction at college and didn’t really appreciate it at the time, so can you trace your interest in Sickert (assuming there is one!) over the course of the years?
D C: I will admit to none of it!! I like Sickert, and some of the challenges in the painting, though not so much in the drawing. There are revisions and he dares to be extremely dark at times. At college no one was teaching me painting, so it’s coincidental. Mind you, I’m sitting here looking at a very dark painting of my own trees on the wall! I like rich dark colours (Figs 1 &3) but I do work in a higher tonal range as well. My interest hasn’t really stayed with one artist, or another and I’m not conscious of any of these things when I paint.

B McA: You’ve often referred to the tension within yourself, when you paint, between the romantic and the rational. Can you explain this and does it increase or decrease as the years go by?
D C: It decreases actually. I think it’s part of the business of setting one thing against another in a piece of work. I would be of the mind that a painting has many different kinds of activities in it. The fact that it’s saying a number of different things at the same time – at least two – is a duality that I like. For example the series of Janus Heads that I did as prints. I had gone to Mexico and got something from those Mexican masks which unveil other images within the one image: human and animal combined in the same head. Now that’s interesting as there isn’t just one thing that you are looking at. My process doesn’t lead to a singularity of thought. Different layers are made at different times. I have to complicate, yet they should be easy enough to look at. It’s a constant problem but the problem is a good thing. It’s intriguing.

B McA: Do you think this has anything to do with your Northern Irish heritage- Calvinism, Lutheranism, the duality between flesh – sensuality – and God?
D C: I don’t know. I’ve tried many times to make a simple statement but I can’t do it. A certain sort of scepticism creeps in when working.

B McA: I remember you referring to yourself in terms of a Northern European tradition and you described your work to me at the time as being ‘not lyrical’. What you wanted was ‘ to find the edge in the work rather than painting something beautiful’. For instance Bacon was heavily into the factuality of paint but, despite his denial of subject matter, his edge was very clearly in the violence of his homo-erotic sensations and in the continual sense of entrapment and containment which he clearly explored. What is it that you think you are exploring?
D C: I think the business of painting leads you to having either a sense of well-being or discomfort. It’s the idea of opposing elements co-existing with a piece. Even if one chooses a piece of landscape that suggests well-being, it can contain a certain discomfort in terms of the competitive elements in the landscape. The same applies to the human figure: it’s the elements of stress existing with the body. It can quite quickly become a sentimental thing. One can sense its vulnerability. I get that kind of feeling from North European painting – I’m thinking more of Renaissance painting – where things are uncertain and edgy. Van Eyck as opposed to Raphael. One is drawn to the less harmonious elements and to the greater degree of uncertainty. I can’t go completely formal. I have to some have some kind of reference. I’m struck by the fact that abstract painters reflect their environment. Abstract painting isn’t that abstract and figurative painting isn’t that figurative….
How the edge comes is in the degree to which I allow the discrepancy between the overall harmony or intention to creep into the work, by making it a little less comfortable, a little less easy on the eye. I don’t know what I’m exploring but I do know that I can’t put the words to it! Why do people paint? It’s because they have seen paintings themselves and they are exciting. Then it becomes complicated. I like doing it but it’s not just having fun. Often it’s extremely annoying. I want to be involved in painting. I want them to be complex and interesting and as enduring as images can be. To use your term, to be images that can be continually interrogated. Really it’s too fundamental a question. I simply don’t know: it’s an activity which acts on its own behalf. Words are inadequate.

B McA: Your earliest paintings were expressionistic versions of landscape that, as Mike Catto put it, were ‘controlled with architectonic walls’. By about 1968 these had developed into a geological vision viewed from an angle of perceptual uncertainty: one was never quite sure what one was looking at. But before long you had become an urban painter though increasingly over the last decade landscape elements have returned. So how important is the sense of place, of locale, to your work?
D C: It’s important because I’m there. If I was very rich I might choose somewhere else to live but I’m here because it is important to me in the sense that I choose it. The decision to move to a rural setting became an opportunity. It is something Deirdre and I had always thought to do: she to work with ceramics and myself to paint. I’m dealing with the situation as it comes to me. I could have a studio in Belfast but I’m at some distance from it now. It’s simple practicalities. [Looking out of his window] What we’re looking at out there is not the horizontal view so much as the physical elements within that – from the trees to the hedges to the lump of grass to individual flowers that I want to pick up on and work at – may be a silhouette against the sky that has a certain feeling to it, aggressive perhaps, or passive. That would be enough. I suppose the characteristics of this landscape emerge but I still haven’t dealt with the drumlin aspect of it yet. Possibly it’s the formal, working against the visible landscape?

B McA: For most painters of a certain age, the arrival of The Troubles meant either ignoring them because their style and subject matter was already fixed (Brian Ballard for example) or else radically searching for a new vocabulary like Jack Pakenham, Graham Gingles or Gerry Gleason. What happened to you?
D C: I simply looked at what was there. I didn’t want to deal directly with the history or the politics. I think that the content, a lot of what I was describing as ‘uncertainty’, crept into the work. With a painting like Up and Down the whole thing started to fracture in light and colour. It was a formal thing for me but Barrie Cooke thought it was like windows shattering after an explosion. When I look back at the debris-laden scenes of streets, it’s the same thing. The Shop Window painting which is in the next room was about the presentation of a shop window, and the reality reflected within it (Fig 11). In another piece, Two, there were two upper body figures which became part of a wall – a life lived within the house.
The work grew in tension – those dark elements that you referred to earlier – but I never intentionally introduced anything overt. It was just that bits of evidence crept in. I suppose, for many people, the North was a major motivation to carry on certain kinds of work, as with Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright. However, what is of concern to me is the human experience.

B McA: Colour, shape and surface are important to you. Yet you have always introduced figurative elements, so why did you never move fully into abstraction?
D C: I’m still on the way! I couldn’t pin abstraction down, though I could see bits of evidence, but any attempt that I made in that direction, I didn’t feel quite comfortable with: I always had to give it a context. There are degrees of this, obviously. It’s part of the business of moving backwards and forwards in the work. It’s quite illogical, although it has its own logic. I just couldn’t make abstraction particular enough to believe in it. With Fautrier for example, there’s that sense of a figurative reading. That’s what I go for! Now Motherwell is supposed to be an abstract artist, but I don’t think he is – he is by degrees. I like to move in that direction because it reflects the handling of the painting.
You mentioned earlier that you thought the figurative elements gave accessibility to an audience. I think they provide it for me! I can get into the relationship (things happening together) because I can sense them. It’s something I can set my ideas against. It allows me to pin things down. I remember seeing an exhibition of the Spanish tachiste painter Manolo Minares and finding it very boring: endless variations on the same thing. I have a sympathy for the stridency of the mark-making and I don’t mean to be disparaging about him, but his work doesn’t engage me. The spirit that lived in one of those paintings carried on continuously….he’s a fine artist, and in control, but it becomes repetitive.

B McA: You attended Annadale Grammar School from 1950-56, and then taught here from 1963-75. During that quarter of a century the school spawned a whole raft of artists including yourself, the sculptors John Aiken and Bob Sloan, painters from Brian Ballard to R J Croft and the jewellery designer and silversmith Brian McClelland. And one of your teachers at Annadale, Kenneth Jamison, was soon to be the director of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland who gave you many shows and awards. What do you think caused this rather unusual efflorescence of the visual arts at this school, and how important was Jamison for your future career?
D C: I really didn’t think about it very much. There was a great atmosphere in the early days of Annadale. I joined in the second year of its inception. It was a very open school and you were encouraged if you showed promise in any area. It was such a good place to work in. The pupils who went there weren’t the ‘first chosen’. It was a new grammar school and so was for people who really didn’t fit in anywhere else. This was after the increased access to grammar schools in the wake of the 1947 Education Act. The staff were a mixture of young fresh faces from college and some who had been serving in the war.
The problem with being a teacher there was that you didn’t get enough time for your own art; whereas at art college your whole attention could be given all day and that was a tremendous asset. I managed to have work shown in group exhibitions such as the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, (which was at the suggestion of Gerry Dillon and George Campbell) Group 63, and a group show at the Hendriks Gallery. There were also one- person shows at the CEMA /Arts council gallery and I was awarded a travel award to see the Venice Biennale and Documenta at Kassel, which was a very important experience for me.

B McA: When I interviewed you, in your studio in November 1990, you remarked that you obviously fell ‘within an English tradition’ and that you ‘couldn’t identify an Irish tradition’ at the time. How far is this still true today?
D C: I don’t see it that way. I live and work in Ireland so I’m Irish, but I don’t see anything ‘Irish’ in my work and that is true of many other artists. The national label is continually used as if it determined something about the work. A lot of the influences come from abroad. If you even start to think that you can determine what nationalism is in art, then it becomes a hopelessly complex situation. When I was growing up post-war, the level of influences, the awareness of contemporary practice, was hardly there – even when I was at art college! The currency of ideas today floats right across the world. At one and the same time you can look at Latin American or Spanish painting and observe that they are more physically painterly.
Obviously, in terms of subject matter, there are vogues – a view of Irish life as the nobility of the rural experience was strong in the late 19th and early 20th century. That kind of material exists now for a market-led view of things. It’s a populist view. Sometimes visiting curators, looking into how, say, artists have reacted to The Troubles seem to have some expectation of obvious imagery: too obvious for those who live through it daily. All of these elements are linked. If I’m saying that what influenced my early art training was an English art-school type system, then there’s a certain inevitability to that. There’s the bit about it that you can’t help, as opposed to the bit of it which is how you see yourself. I’m surprised you got that comment out of me then! Influences may come from one source but the subject material can be from an entirely different arena. Anyway, artists always contradict themselves!

B McA: In your earlier years you clearly looked at, and have been influenced by, the Euston Road School. It strikes me that, apart from the influences on your palette, your attitude to painting was probably determined by, say, Coldstream and Pasmore’s search for ‘objectivity’ in paintings, as well as the movement’s interest in social consciousness and the Cézanne/Degas-inspired approach to realist painting. Do you agree?
D C: I wouldn’t know where to start! I would respond to the artists you have named, especially the tonality of their paintings. I saw the Sickert exhibition at the Ulster Museum and couldn’t believe how dark they were! Sickert was a great example for us at art college. There was this mass of drawings but the paint totally over-rode the ideas in the drawings. I liked the fact of the immediacy of their environment. Coldstream would have gone to a railway station and painted a train. Others of the Euston School would have gone outside and painted nearby. I’ve always done that: I deal with what’s in front of my nose.
That business, when I was looking at people in the street going past my then Belfast studio, as the viewer from the window – I didn’t want to be involved. I was the dispassionate viewer. I wanted to exclude narrative. When painting a figure I wanted it to exist without any sign of activity. Sculpture always seemed to be able to get to this point with the formal elements being strong enough to sustain the piece without having to resort to narrative. The reason I paint different things at different times is that I’m near them (Figs 7&9). The city paintings happened because I had a studio there, and was always walking in the streets. The present paintings are what I see out of the window. I call them ‘objects’ and not subjects.

Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.
David Crone exhibition JOHNMARTINLONDON from 12 May - June 2005
All images ©The Artist