a studio photo file by paul williams: 2012

Solo exhibition

UNTITLED FUN @ MOP Projects

23rd August - 9th September 2012

Install shot

Fudge 2012 oil on canvas 225 x 195cm

Blink 2012 oil on canvas 91.5 x 91.5cm

Mixing motifs 2012 oil on clayboard 36 x 28cm

Lattice sunsets 2012 oil on canvas 25 x 60cm

Midnight statuette 2012 oil on canvas 76.5 x 56cm

Photography by Susannah Wimberley

www.SusannahWimberley.com

Paul Williams interviewed by Giselle Stanborough

Untitled Fun is a very intriguing title. Where did it come from?

I wanted an open title that expressed both the uncertainty and delight at the core of my work right now and introduced the broader abstraction that I seem to be grappling with. I find titling troublesome and so my lack of convention in a tradition centuries old is probably what lead me to choose such a title. I explore ideas and processes in a very intuitive and physical way. I crave spontaneity and chance, which in my opinion are difficult things to place parameters on.

I think what I am trying to say is that ‘fun’ belies and changes the game of painting for me and lead my creativity to a new place where I can explore the gestural and spatial play of abstraction. Last year I cut up a lot of my old paintings into confetti. It became a gigantic abstraction. By doing this I was able to possess and resolve my failures in a way that wasn’t possible by simply looking at them. It felt like a rite of passage for me as a painter to make objects out of my paintings and opened up a new paradigm for painting in my practice. I still see that work as a painting and the process had an impact on my practice that I could not have foreseen. It took me more that a decade to ‘create’ that work, but the most fun was in the work’s ‘ending’, which was a new beginning for me. I tend to come down hard on myself and so ‘fun’ really is a contradiction, yet I think it is more important as an ideal for me. It’s hope.

How do you begin, develop and finish your painting? What is the process by which you create your compositions?

I see it as a continuation or a building process. I might have something unresolved from the previous body. The paintings in this exhibition were triggered by a series of ice-cream paintings I made over the last few years, which were a very late development in my last body of work and so there were seeds of ideas in those paintings that I wanted to explore on a larger scale. What I found in those works was that I was able to embrace a playful side of my personality as a painter and that toppings, cream, or chocolate sprinkles had a direct relation to ideas of surface, matter, gesture and colour field painting, yet the lightness of what I was portraying made all those elements new again, and I felt that I had achieved a small existential freedom or victory.

I don’t clean my studio and so it’s a horrid mess most of the time, but I feed off that too. It relaxes me and so this becomes part of the creative process and I’ll do the same to my work. I leave them on the floor, forget about them, use them as palettes and drop sheets and then when I least expect it they become interesting paintings again, only now I’m dealing with this immeasurable history that makes me approach the work in a way that is unique from anything else I can think of. I still don’t understand it. Creating the compositions is intuitive, serendipitous and responsive; one step in front of the other.

It seems like your painting practice is becoming less pictorial. What is the appeal of these more abstract patterns, shapes and colours?

I guess it has a lot to do with how I absorb and expel information. My brain joggles things together in a random and abstract way. I see things floating in layers. I am still involved with figuration, but I often add information and then remove or obscure that information depending on the level of ‘noise’ that fits. It is a plane where things are recovered and then lost again - a kind of floating sphere of forms, motifs, marks and puzzling hieroglyphics. This process allows me to sift and look longer as my eye moves across the canvas rather than fixing on a certain point or form. I have always had an interest in paint related effects like patina, aging, ambiguity and discord and linking that with drawing and sculpture so the more abstract path enables me to push those areas further.

Can you say a little bit more about how this is manifest in the paintings of “Untitled Fun”?

They are a select range of works that have been extracted from the chaos of the studio that represent a cross-section of my painting practice at this point in time. They are autobiographical. I guess they are self-portraits; the pastiches, the wandering, the patterns, the garden statuettes, the dog barking next door and the lattice that is outside on the back porch are all rather shallow, banal or quirky views, objects and sounds, but they are the things I am digging up right now and that get me into the studio each day as I know there’s a picture beneath it all.

a studio photo file by paul williams

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