PAUL HUXLEY. An Interview with Mary Dinaburg, 2009.

Mary Dinaburg (MD). You did a series of works incorporating Chinese slogans. What about these slogans interested you and how did you use them in your work? Was the color and/or structure modified to take into account the symbolism of these Chinese characters or the fact that they were Chinese?

Paul Huxley (PH). I first went to mainland China as a guest of the Red Mansion Foundation and we had a reciprocal agreement that I would make some work that responded to my experience. I was very uncertain that I could do that but on my arrival it was the impact of the public signs, the lettering in posters and street signs, that really hit me and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. As an outsider, to me, the bold characters were abstract configurations that in some cases seemed already to come out of my paintings. I think what engaged me was their geometry, their semaphore like configuration and their kind of humanoid structure that equated with my long standing affair with cubism.

Working somewhat in unknown territory I felt I could justify my incorporation of a foreign language by taking the position of an outsider picking up fragments, rather in the way you might catch the odd word or phrase out of context spoken behind you on a bus. But I was encouraged to go further by a Chinese visitor to my studio who pointed out that several paintings in sequence spelt out a rather poetic sentence. So we devised the series together and that is what I first exhibited. That was the only instance of what you could call a slogan. Since then I have continued to use single Chinese words as the bases for paintings and, yes, I do modify the paintings and their colours to take account of their meaning. Equally I take quite radical geometric liberties with the characters to modify them to my own construct. There is an ongoing series based on the names of colours which I started with red, yellow and blue. You can guess the intended irony in this since, of course, these are the iconic colours of western modernism, whereas Chinese classical painting uses no colour at all, just black ink on white paper.

MD. Many of your paintings create an ambiguity between figure and ground (which does contradict the pure Greenbergian notion of abstraction). Do you see your work as totally abstract? If not, what are your references or meanings? What in the play of ambiguity attracts you? Are your forms, at this point, symbolic (meaning do they have a narrative or represent something more figurative or psychological?

PH. Certainly there is that element of figure ground ambiguity in some of my paintings but there is also quite range of subterfuge and contradiction, which I see as being at the core of my language. Elements of this already existed in my early work when I was in New York in the sixties. Greenberg, as you well know, was a forceful mind at work then and an elegant and persuasive writer. But whereas he was a great champion of the artists of the New York School, he later became something of an authoritarian figure. I knew him a bit and he was generous enough to visit my studio and shows and comment on my work. In those days he was into “cropping”. I think it was his creative frustration that made him want to encourage artists to paint loosely and expansively which gave him the opportunity to take part in the editing process. He didn’t take kindly to my view that it reminded me of photography, like framing a piece of nature. He seemed to want to persuade me away from the evident control he recognised I had over my images.

The concept of the totally abstract is quite a tease. It’s like striving for the impossible. Our mechanism of perception demands that the process of seeing is inseparable from trying to make sense of what we see. And in making sense of what we see we can’t escape providing explanations. There’s a story of Picasso and Braque finding a parrot in one their cubist paintings that wasn’t meant to be there and they could never get rid of it. The minimalists got as close as you can to the purely abstract but I think one has to play the game of embracing our innate perceptual restlessness by utilising suggestion and contradiction.

MD. The China series opened up a new way in thinking about making a painting for you, By taking a ‘pictogram’ as a given form and creating a dialectic within the work by pairing it with pure abstract forms, do you think your new work has created a new methodology of making paintings for you?

PH. Well yes and no. I have been using the construct of a divided canvas for many years now in order to exploit what is described in literature as a meta-language; that is to say, a second or internal dialogue that comments on the whole. My intention is to make an abstract art that by definition may not be about something else but nevertheless has a subject matter. This I have developed in many other series of paintings but, you are right, the China series does a new thing. In particular the Chinese characters mean something in a specific language. And here I’m taking a huge risk because I don’t speak or read that language. My interaction with it is purely theoretical and not innate. So I have imported as you say, ‘a given form’, which I can manipulate on my own terms as abstract pattern but which also has meaning outside of my control. Being something of a control freak and somebody who wants to be a better authority on my work than anyone else, it is the first time I have wilfully risked making works that I know half the people in world would see differently from me.

MD. As an artist, do you think you are an observer and gatherer who then uses the given forms to create an interpretation that asks the viewer to question the real and the unreal, or are you more interested in using these particular forms to create a whole new set of conditions and narrative for the viewer to perceive in total?

PH. I think I lean towards your second example. When I borrow external material it is usually for the purpose of finding a tool towards another result rather than to comment on its origin. My conscious strategy is more insular, a process of ideas where one work grows from the last in a continuing chain of development and variation. I aim for a work that is self-contained, that has within it its own rules, that invite the viewer in and then suspends them there in an unfamiliar condition.

MD. How important is colour in the work?

PH. Inescapably. Unlike some artists who are described as colourists I don’t turn up the volume uniformly. I want to get the most out of colour and to do that I feel drawn to skewing the tonal value as well as the chromatic pitch. I have an inclination when putting, say, red and green next to each other, rather than exploiting the strongest high pitched buzz, to push down the red to a sombre plumb colour and then to wind up the green to a high pitched chlorophyll toothpaste colour. I am a great believer in recognising that paintings might be seen under many conditions. A built in secret in my paintings is that they take on a different life at dusk. I spend more time mixing paint than putting it on.

MD. You utilise drawing all throughout the process of the making of the painting- form its inception to its completion- do you feel that the structure is the key element to a painting?

PH. Yes I do, in the sense that structure is the vehicle for the idea. This doesn’t exclude the possibility that a painting can have a colour structure. I see making art akin to having an invention. (Hogarth, who initiated the idea that artists should hold copyright, put at the bottom of his engravings “Invented and printed by William Hogarth”) As you correctly say I utilise a drawing process from the beginning. They’re really more working diagrams which enable me to explore the configuration of shapes and their relative positions in the structure through mutation and modification. Successive drawings arranged in sequence resemble a storyboard of ideas. The drawings lead to small paintings on paper where the full manifestation of the idea is developed in colour, they are nearly always painted as a concept for a larger work on canvas in the same way that a sculptor’s maquette is a model for the final work.

MD. Do you think your work contains a psychological element? Do you consider them formal ‘abstract’ works or symbolic works?

PH. You’ve suggest three possible interpretations of my work here so I’ll try to steer my way through them backwards. I shy away from the term ‘symbolic’ because it means they would be standing for something else more important, which in a way is inevitable, but a painting’s materiality is integral with that; the experience of being with it, of feeling its presence and its size in relation to your own and therefore the nature of your interaction with it, is an essential aspect. We’ve touched on whether they can be abstract; purely abstract, no, ‘formally abstract’, well their execution is usually formal but I would hope that wouldn’t mean they are inhuman because I want them to carry elements of many human faculties and thought. You also propose the term ‘psychological’ and I have to admit that although it would not have been my chosen description it seems to fit because with my persistent use of dualism and internal dialogue it is inevitable that mind games are evoked; both on an intimate level such as being invited to mediate in a relationship and to compare and contrast between two protagonists, and then on a higher level because with dualities there are inevitable associations with intellectual concepts such as the dualism of Apollo and Dionysus, Yin and Yang and the Id and the Ego.

MD What role do you think a painting has?

PH. I’ve done a lot of teaching and for twelve years headed up London’s leading graduate school in painting. This was at a time when painting was being constantly challenged by practitioners of other media and deemed obsolete so I fought that tenaciously. Painting is the most adaptable, flexible and wide ranging mediator for human thought but also the most exposing, challenging and transparent platform; there are no hiding places. I think that in spite of the very relevant arguments that painting is old fashioned it still sets the pace and the standards. No end of young artists who worked under me and departed into other art forms have come back to me later in life and said, “Look, I’ve gone back to painting.”

MD. Why do you paint? Why are you an artist?

PH. When I was young other people thought I was talented at one thing and a dunce at others. I don’t happen to think they were right but having been encouraged along the road I refused to compromise. Put it down to teenage rebellion if you like. To be an artist was an unpopular, dangerous, rebellious and almost self-destructive thing to do, now sadly it’s fashionable and feels commonplace. Within the field of art I think lie the greatest human achievements, things that I passionately love and admire, I’m not putting my work up there but I am happy to have that as something to strive for and to feel somewhere in that domain even if on the fringe. And, incidentally, I’m not contrasting art with science, I think in some ways they are similar.

MD. Is the process behind the painting important, more important than the painting itself? Or is the process a way to make the painting and the finished work the important aspect of it?

PH. The finished work is the thing and the process the means by which one gets there. I don’t agree with making a virtue out of struggle, it’s difficult enough to get things right. But I don’t deny the importance and value of devising methodologies and even weaving them into the subject of the painting.

MD. Is making work agonisingly hard or your escape or your expression?

PH. I have to admit that it is agonizingly hard and I even resist doing it. Having said that, there is nothing I find more exciting and rewarding when it goes well. It’s not an escape; I have plenty of other tempting diversions. A means of expression? Well yes, but I am not an expressionist, I don’t delude myself that mood is interesting or necessary to convey. I’m more interested in being a constructor, an inventor, an architect, a conjurer a deceiver, I don’t expect or want my personal exhilaration or depression to affect my performance or to come through in the work.

MD. How important to you are the notions of the absurd or humour in your work?

PH. I think you must be on my wavelength.