Solo exhibition
UNTITLED FUN @ MOP Projects
23rd August - 9th September 2012
Install shot
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.
