Clem Crosby

CC: I was painting on primed MDF – there were no tricks and I kept the idea of craft or expertise to a minimum and simply focused on the process in an almost perfunctory way. These monochromes were not particularly seductive optically, most were sludgy greens or almost black and they didn’t have an all-over shiny surface – at best I would say they were muted. I pressed newspaper on them to absorb the oil because I wanted the paint to dry quickly so I could repaint. They would then have these registration lines from the edges of the newspaper appearing. I realise now that I was engaged with paintings that were about being made and unmade in real time, in the sense that I was not interested in the speed and gloss of other work being made at that period, so I kind of went against that. I noticed a lot of painters, like yourself for example, were using house paint which had quite a fast, sophisticated, industrial finish but I wanted something more handmade and deliberately analogue.

 

ID: Yes my paintings appeared to have a veneer of sophistication but in fact I was more like a caveman who had just discovered gloss paint! (laughter)

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CC: Well, it could be argued that, like a caveman, you were starting with something untried and something new, which was relevant to me at the time considering the prevalence of figurative painting. It was refreshing to see your first show at Waddington’s which seemed to be about the paint as much as anything. I remember later on, during our show together at Southampton City Art Gallery (1995), we were installing and they wanted to talk to us about our work in the museum. I told them in great detail about mine and then you just added, “Yeah, I go to the builders’ merchants and get some gloss paints...”

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ID: (laughter)

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CC: And they waited with their pens and thought you were going to say loads more! And that was it! People did want more, but that was not my concern. For example, I was writing on the side of the paintings, so I would know which ones I’d worked on last and what I was thinking at the time, a kind of aide-memoire. Of course people then began writing about the text and the text became the central purchase, a way into the painting, and the sides became more interesting than the front!  

 

ID: I notice that your current titles could be from a book or something that you were particularly fond of?

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CC: My titles come from what you might call high and low culture. The last work I finished in this show (Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 2015) is called The Big Bounce which is a title from Elmore Leonard’s first novel that wasn’t a Western. He was writing Westerns right up until the 60s, and then he started with the LA crime scene. Although his Westerns were great, The Big Bounce was the first book that defined him as a writer of the underworld and the gangster genre. I thought how fantastic that he did his day job and wrote in his basement all those years, doing Pulp Fiction Westerns, and then turning a corner. Leonard’s story presents itself as a kind of positive trajectory and it was a good fit for the painting which although is modest in size, feels rather expansive. I also like the throwaway alliteration of pulp titles; it seems a suitable counterpoint to the inherent reverence attached to painting.  

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ID: Then after your monochromes the looping line and drawing start to open up. Barry Schwabsky in his ArtForum interview in 2011 has a lovely way of describing it – he talks about the single tightly woven mesh of colours resolving into a single all-over colour complex being untied.

 

CC: Prior to that was a decisive moment in wanting to break through the monochrome. I decided to achieve that through drawing – drawing with paint. Perhaps what Barry is referring to is the line (and colour) unravelling.  

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ID: That looseness is maybe best illustrated in the permanent commission of paintings you made for the exterior of the Young Vic theatre in London.

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CC: Those paintings signalled a plateau for me. I found the concentrated time frame of the commission incredibly tense. It forced me to take everything back to the bare bones, like drawing itself and the volition of drawing, but the incidentals of drawing with paint dictate that everything is amplified and fleshed-out, so to speak.

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ID: It is evident that you touch on Modernism. How is Modernism interpreted in your work?

 

CC: One of the things I recognised was that artists have created this great lexicon of painterly language and I want to dip in and out and use that language. Although personally I think it’s important that, at the end of my research or exploration, I recognise the finished piece as my own. I may be liberated by certain artists rather than influenced directly. So, yes, without doubt I’m working in the shadow of Modernism although perhaps it’s what you might call meta-Modernism. What I am suggesting is perhaps a kind of theoretical Modernist grid superimposed over one’s work.