Ray Atkins in conversation with John Wonnacott

This article is printed in the Catalogue published to coincide with:
RAY ATKINS Paintings 2003 Exhibition.

Painting as you do from direct observation, out there in the fields with your easel and stuff, looking at things and trying to make something with enough presence to look real, I was thinking of how irate Francis Bacon used to get if anyone called him an expressionist. He always said he was a realist who wanted to paint things as raw as the real world. Do you resent being called a ‘romantic’ or an ‘expressionist’ or whatever? Are you a realist?

None of these words fit because it’s impossible to put your finger on precisely what you want to be. What I’m really trying to do is to bridge this gap between my own world of feelings, thoughts and ideas and that world out there. When it works, when one reaches the point of balance between them, it’s a wonderful thing.

Is this what you mean when we were talking about the sense of calm that comes across in the pictures here?

Yes. When it works, that calmness comes because of this balance. It’s that reality out there that one keeps trying to relate to. I’m not trying to make pictures that look real in the sense of some sort of illusion. I’m trying to make something that rings true in terms of thoughts and feelings.

One thing that has always interested me about these enormous spatial pictures is that I remember you saying that you actually liked it when people were forced to go very close to the paintings, that it was almost more important than seeing them from a distance.

Well, the right way to look at any picture is both. You look at the whole thing and then you go up to it to examine the surface. That’s one of the nice things about looking at pictures as opposed to other art forms. You have a physical freedom in relation to it; you can spend as long as you want with it. I like to think that just one square inch of one of my paintings is really worth spending some time with. I like the actual physical shape of the paint, the feel of it, the orchestration of it; all should bear very close examination.

I know that the surface quality of a painting is very important to you but you said ‘the shape of the paint’. Does that mean that when you make a mark that it’s like drawing? It’s not just about making the surface beautiful and voluptuous is it?

‘Drawing’ is another of these words that when you examine it it disappears, but there’s a kind of a process that I call drawing where every mark is an attempt at a fresh discovery, so yes, I think every mark is an act of drawing.

In this picture (Unburnt Bonfire and Gorse ) the paint’s really explosive, it’s terrific with those bits of paint that have kind of taken on a life of their own and all with a natural shape. This is what I was trying to get at earlier. I don’t think you find it in many paintings.

The idea of this painting was a sort of psychological idea; contrasting the gorse bush which is alive and vibrant with the pile of unburnt bonfire which is the old and discarded. I’ve been interested in these two subjects, the gorse bush and the bonfire over the years as you know, and seeing this huge pile of dead stuff, dumped right next to this gorse bush in my own garden, suddenly gave me the idea of painting the two things together. The original idea was to keep it as obvious as possible with just the two elements placed side by side, but when I came to choose my site I realized that between these two great piles was this towering fir tree behind.

So it was a gift?

Yes, it was a gift. There are always gifts like that once you start making decisions and although you have seen it as a phallic symbol I saw it more like death. It just had that feeling of a powerful column going up and up which was very exciting.

I remember a conversation with you years ago when we were talking about that wonderful ‘Whitenights Wood’ painting which had dark, leaf carpet, passages of paint in the foreground scattered with a rhythm of white marks straight from the tin, that had the excitement of Constable, and you said each piece of white looked to you like a skull.

That is true in that particular painting, but I find that idea of hidden imagery, or the imagery that enters a picture unconsciously very fascinating. I’m not always aware that it’s there. Sometimes I’m half aware and sometimes totally unaware until after I’ve finished the painting, but that hidden imagery is what gives added potency to the other image. In a way, it’s this thing we’ve been saying about the inner and the outer; there’s a whole lot of stuff inside one that is trying to get out and it does manifest itself fairly often as hidden traces, very often all sorts of human features.

I think I’m right in saying that you have the same passion for Constable that I have, but looking at these late paintings I would think you were much more closely connected with the real classical tradition of Turner

Well I don’t think about other paintings very much at all. I’ve lived in Cornwall for 25 years or more and there are no decent pictures around there to look at.

You do like being loved don’t you! They’ll adore you down there for saying that.

Look, there isn’t a Poussin or a Titian there. There is absolutely nothing. There might be a really good Ben Nicholson or something, but let’s face it there is nothing from the great tradition of Western European painting of quality to be seen in that part of the world at all. So I have had to change my whole tack. I actually use music. I listen to music and I’ve investigated the great classical traditions and without that I could never have survived in Cornwall.

Do you take it out in the countryside and play it when you’re painting?

The great thing about musical recording is that it’s like the actual thing. A reproduction of a painting, well forget it, it’s got nothing at all to do with the real thing, so music for me is a real essential and a major influence on all the Cornwall work. Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner and so many others. I don’t actually use it to work to but very often it’s a useful inspiration. You have to have some kinds of standards around you, and quite honestly, I don’t want to go on about it too much, but your standards would just go down and down and down unless you could find something like that. The National Gallery is a long long way from Cornwall.

One of the things that most excites me in painting, and I imagine this is why your paintings have stayed with me all through my life, is when you feel your mind has been taken on rich and exciting spatial journeys while your eye is entirely devoted to the surface. You feel yourself swinging through the quarry, swinging up the path. This is something that has always been in your painting and I think it’s getting richer and richer as they go along. But while the space is fantastic, and the colour and tone is tremendous, I’ve only begun to realize recently that there is never any directional light in your painting.

That’s because I work on them throughout the day and it’s partly true that working throughout the day one has to invent an imaginary place based on one’s perceptions.

You say you are inventing spaces, and of course you are, but I believe completely that I can wander down into that quarry. My mind is taking journeys.

That’s the fundamental paradox of painting, isn’t it? It’s the surface versus the space. To me it’s very exciting and you know that when a painting works it’s because, amongst other things, you’ve solved that paradox in a new way.

So, space really for you is independent of light. When you go travelling through your landscapes it doesn’t matter a damn where the light is coming from.

It does. I’m dealing with it all the time. The reality is that you have a brush or a knife in your hand and you make your marks, one mark at a time, as a response to this absolutely specific moment of time when the light is affecting that thing in front of me, and I build up my pictures like that. So yes, probably they are completely phoney as far as the time of the day is concerned, because they are amalgams of all these moments. What I try to do is pull it all together until it has a certain feeling about it; what I call the ring of truth. They’ve got the feeling of a certain time of a day, but it isn’t one particular day.

I know you don’t do preparatory studies for the paintings so presumably you don’t normally know until you’ve worked for a couple of days, or whatever, where things are going to be?

Absolutely not. With a picture like that (Littlejohns Pit II) I’d have thought what a fantastic space, what a dramatic place and I’d have thought out a kind of compositional idea with a 6 x 10ft picture in mind, but until I start to work I have no precise idea what in particular will come into the picture.

You’ve been lucky finding quarry sites and I’ve thought for some time that they are your perfect subject.

Yes they are. I love them, but they’re hard to find. I like ‘working’ places. I don’t like abandoned places as much. I like the feeling that it is active, that things are happening.

Littlejohns pit is the most recent place I’ve found and that’s a heavily worked quarry. They take out hundreds of thousands of tons of material each week, so to work there I have to have on safety gear and a hard hat, which I find extremely difficult to work in, and I didn’t even have a chance of choosing my site. I had to work where I was told. But it was great. It’s a marvellous subject with great swathes of the landscape changing even as you look at it. I worked on it for eight weeks and each day I was dealing with the fact that, not only was the weather and light changing all the time, but also the landscape itself wasn’t the same at the end of the day as it had been at the beginning.

The range of colours in this painting is unusually reduced, but I see what you mean about the light coming out of the picture rather than being directional. At one stage in your career I remember there was a big change in the way you used colour. The colour really lightened didn’t it?

It didn’t just lighten. I made an attempt to use colour in a much more dominant way. Tone remained important but I wanted the structure of the painting to be dominated by colour. It was a shift that I forced on myself. I just felt that I was trying to see the world in terms of dark and light and the more I looked the more I thought that it isn’t really like that.

Lugging these great big boards around the countryside it’s not surprising that the way you work attracts terms like ’heroic’, some of these paintings are huge.

After leaving the Slade I came to the conclusion that paintings should relate to the human scale and I made this six-foot square board for the first of the Millwall series. It seemed right. It had that relationship to my physical self and from then on I’ve had to do big pictures from time to time, and yes, it does present me with enormous practical problems, but it seems to bring out the best in me and I’ve worked out this amazing system where, if I can find the right place, I actually leave them on site.

At the moment I’m working on a six foot by four foot painting that I have to take out and bring back every day and that’s a real pain.

Why can’t you leave it on site?

I’ve heard that the local kids are just as bad as they were a few years ago so there’s no chance of the painting surviving if I leave it out.

You can’t work from drawings?

No. It just wouldn’t make any sense to work on a landscape from drawings. It’s the need for that fresh moment. As you know, working from what’s in front of you there is always something different, always something fresh happening.

With these nude pictures I’ve noticed that you haven’t put the features on the head or the toes on the feet. Don’t these things interest you?

These new paintings are called the ‘yoga series’. It’s a series of yoga positions and those issues of detail are not always relevant. She can only hold that pose for a few seconds (The Bridge), so what I’m trying to do is make some kind of a response to it. It was done very quickly as an impulsive response to that extraordinary pose. Just to see a human being in that position is an extraordinary experience.

But if she is only posing for thirty second or two minute slots then most of the time that you are painting she’s not there, or you are only painting for those two minutes.

This project was very demanding for her and for me because I wanted to do a whole series of these yoga positions. To solve the problem that you’ve just mentioned I prepared eight or nine different surfaces, each one carefully worked out in terms of size and proportion from a series of drawings. When we worked we moved from one to another during the course of a morning or the day, I was actually working on three or four different images, and moving from one to the other to give her a rest. It was a nightmare. I mean just physically moving the boards was bad enough but the psychological problem of chopping and changing from one painting to another was incredibly stressful.

It was great to sit here in the new gallery space and at last see pictures from a sufficient distance. Close to, surface seemed everything, now it will also be possible to respond in full to the spatial grandeur of even the largest pictures.

Recorded at Art Space Gallery 10 July 2003 and subsequently edited