GRAB OUR FEED
by
Aldrin Valdez
16-Aug-10
Exchanging a few words with Simon English about his art is like diving into a rose-colored dream of flesh and song. You emerge with the thought that breakups are as sexy and visceral as they are deeply painful and tangled. In fact, looking at his work, you become entangled, caught up in the acrobatics of love and the falling leaps it can take you through. When I look at Simon’s work I feel naked and want to paint, or get tangled in some beautiful man’s limbs and lose myself in the pink of his mouth - and then put on some Rufus Wainwright.
Simon photographed for EVB by Justin Westover
Aldrin Valdez: Your work has been described as very… English, with one review tying it in to orgies and gay cruising. What are your thoughts on that?
Simon English: I grew up with a quintessentially English background. I was sent to boarding school at the age of eight where we listened to Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten and learned the poetry of Edward Lear and John Betjeman. We stretched our growing limbs in the ghost suits of the past. The lark was not the only thing ascending. I knew in my soul of souls that part of my poetic imagination went under the title “Dirty Fucker”. It was only a matter of time before my childhood libido (fueled by fantasies of rampant sex with Mr. Rutter, the Games Master) found its way to the killing fields and dark rooms of adult life in the late 80s and early 90s. Though both myself and my old friend Tim are no longer climbing into rose gardens at two in the morning, the field of drawing is open to a heady mix of unlikely encounters. “Englishness” is something I can work with and against… both as an affectionate terrain and as an agent provocateur.
Aldrin: Your surfaces are rife with tangled limbs and orifices in various combinations. What does the orifice motif mean to you?
Simon: I work both from the blank page and the blank canvas with no external visual references to determine a precise direction. The process of drawing and painting activates the subject matter and to an extent remains in a state of flux and metamorphosis for as long as possible. There is a very primal hand at work both guiding and being guided by an abstract language. As you say, quite often a series of tangled limbs and orifices struggle to compose a new hybrid form. On a freshly built snowman, buttons and carrots are all you need to set the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears, the nipples, the naval, the erect or limp penis, the testicles, the vagina and the arsehole in place. It’s all up for grabs and very little goes a long way. In random drawing, those “carrots and buttons” can sprout in abundance and at any scale, in any place and at any given moment. Be it desecration, addition, transformation or deletion, the extended limbs and orifices attempt to Identikit the human forms.
Aldrin: Is there one that you find appearing more frequently in your work than others?
Simon: I refer again and again to the eyes, (the tear ducts), the mouth, the (sometimes lactating) nipples, the penis and the arsehole. Eyes stare back at you and follow you round the room, they hold your voyeuristic gaze to account and seek contact. The mouth smiles, frowns, sucks, screams, sticks it’s tongue out or grimaces. But the sweetest of all, like a valued trophy from [Lucio] Fontana’s ‘Spatial Concept Drawings’ is that soft and vulnerable anus at the heart of the worshipful bottom. I think Cubism has a lot to answer for. It gave us many new ways to eat the cake.
Aldrin: Hair and fur are also ongoing motifs and textures in your work.
Simon: Hair and fur provide a linear way into describing form and equally slow down the process of drawing to provide a platform for meditation. I am interested in all things hairy. I must tell you that in the late 60s we had soap that grew hair. My sisters and I ran down each morning to see if our soap bears and bunnies were in need of a haircut, never realizing that the more we washed away the soap, the sooner we got to the hairy protruding sculpture within.
Aldrin: How do fetish object meanings play out in your work?
Simon: There are no fixed canons of “meaning”. Everything changes within the context and language of drawing and I quite often use text to direct or misdirect the meaning. It is fascinating for me that an object can constantly change it’s meaning. A rock can be a doorstop at one moment and a murder weapon the next. In the abstract, objects are great shape-sharers. An upturned lampshade can look like the base of a cupcake or stretched can become a shuttlecock.
I’m less drawn to the rows and rows of fetish objects that adorn the shelves of the Soho sex shops and find metamorphosis of the everyday more radical and stimulating. That the artist Robert Gober can so convincingly give us the portrait of an arsehole in the form of a doughnut on a plinth, I find truly magical. There are no limits to my drawing imagination, my knees can turn to jelly, my heart can melt and the chosen object can become a fetish at anytime.
Aldrin: What other objects come attached with sexual meanings for you?
Simon: A sea of possibilities: A R(o)SE (an arse) by any other name… rose petals lovingly placed around the anus… a rosette, first prize, second prize, third prize, runner-up… “Who killed the carrot?”… “I can’t believe it’s not butter!”… a teddy bear with a face like a bottom… an erect owl with the facial features of a pair of underpants… “Is there any jam for tea?” … Army boots (the father)… a stiff candle placed on the seat of Gauguin’s chair by a lost and lonely Van Gogh… Beatrix Potter’s black prick-eared gentleman in the form of Mr. Fox… a boiling kettle hums a song of lust… ‘Forbidden Fruit, 2008′… talks of unrequited love… buttons are a chapter in themselves.
Aldrin: Most of the tension in your work comes from the conflict between sex and religion. Can you elaborate on their co-existence?
Simon: It’s really more of a conflict between sex and death rather than sex and religion. Crosses, ghost-nuns (I partly grew up in an old convent) and the occasional son of a preacher man lead the way. I’m fascinated by loss and death. As with Keats’ poem The Grecian Urn, I love the two-sidedness of the eternal embrace and the desolate street. My Father was killed in a car crash when I was two and a half so I established a relationship with death at a very early age, misguidedly spending hours as a child waiting for the clouds to part and bring him to me, (I guess religious paintings have a lot to answer for too). I’m sure my search for the Father played a strong role in my early fear and fascination with men. “Coming out”, meant debunking the Ghost Father as well as flying in the face of orthodox patriarchal religion. I have lost many friends over the years and still catch myself talking to them as if they were still here.
Aldrin: I’m also fascinated with loss and death, especially with the notion of losing loss, as in forgetting or somehow being unable to know that something has been lost or is missing. And in turn, how loss creates this pattern inside of us that informs how we interact with lovers, friends, and family. Going back to the Ghost Father, when you were growing up were there any particular gay men that you looked up to as a sort of substitute?
Simon: In the early years, I don’t remember a single “Gay Icon” other than Kenneth Williams or Frankie Howard. England had a great penchant for keeping its queers on the stage so everyone knew where they were. I think Quentin Crisp was incredibly brave in the way he took his sexuality into the streets during that unforgiving time. As a child, I remember the “Pansies” as they were referred to then, being released from jail. That in Iran, one faces either the rope or a sex change is just beyond my wildest comprehension. Times over here are thankfully changing as we move towards the acceptable “gay next door” syndrome. My “hero of the day” is Gareth Thomas who recently took his enormous burly head out of the Welsh rugby scrum to pronounce to the world that he was gay.
Aldrin: When I look at your paintings and drawings, there’s this addicting pull to let the eye follow the splatter of looping objects and characters. It seems like I’m reliving your process of thinking, seeing and remembering. What kind of memories surface as you work?
Simon: I’m so happy if the work maintains it’s live residue on the page. A writer friend of mine once told me that the drawings instantly entered her subconscious as if they were made that way. I’m happier still if my stories and my memories can become yours.
Approaching memory requires a circuitous route. One has to follow the Orpheus mantra “don’t look back” to paradoxically retrieve memory into the light of day. Opening up the gates of the imagination is often a key to allowing the distant past in. Each drawing day is different and can activate different points of departure and habitation. Some days, the entire gambit of memory and the imagination get thrown in with the simultaneous incidents of life in the street (a builder on a ladder opposite, stripped to the waist painting Enterprise House peppermint green), set to a unique reading on Radio 4’s ‘Poetry Hour’ of Ursula Fanthorpe’s Titania and Bottom. It’s the head and the heart that attempts to unravel and connect. In 2006, I spent nine months of “post-relationship drawing” to discover that in the plight of misery, all roads led to Rome, culminating in three large works, ‘Love’, ‘Love Comes to an End’ and ‘The Good Die Young’.
Aldrin: I’m particularly drawn to images of DeKooning and Pollock wearing these very American jeans as they work, accompanied by a white tee with the sleeves rolled up. What do you like to wear when you paint?
Simon: I fear to disappoint you. Paint spattered cords and boot sale jerseys in the winter and raggedy jeans and worn out shirts in the summer. Bare feet and flip flops always - I love my feet to breathe and be naked in my soul.
Aldrin: I think “raggedy jeans and worn out shirts in the summer” is pretty hot. I’ve kept a pair of gnawed and holed-up jeans until I could no longer wear it because my arse, as you say, was hanging out.
Simon: It sounds like you would fit in perfectly on the streets of Hackney or standing outside Enterprise House in its new peppermint green coat.
Aldrin: Could you speak about the titles of your work? Their ambiguity plays well with the blurred intuitiveness of the imagery. They’re like love song titles.
Simon: I always title the work so that I can remember the piece from the text. I tend to merge two to four disparate elements clearly visible in the work to construct a curious dada (as you say) song or painting title. It’s functional in that it has to work. Many years ago, I numbered a series of work under the umbrella title of ‘Double and Twist’, for example ‘Double and Twist 1, 23, 32′, etc, and it was hell trying to recall the painting when the gallery phoned and said they had sold ‘Double and Twist 14′.
I love titling, it really is like christening a baby and setting it free into the living world. It’s great to know where ‘Marie Strange’ or ‘Wayne Bronte’ reside and who has ‘Lullaby for Let-Go, Marie Strange and Rabbit’.
Aldrin: Speaking of love songs, what are your favorites? What’s on your playlist lately?
Simon: At the start of a new series of work, the studio is eerily silent for many months. As the work develops momentum, and long before I know it’s a girl, boy or twins, the music creeps in an affects it’s growth.
Each year, specific musicians hold court and repeat again and again to a point of madness. I’m going to plug my beautiful friend Barbara Carlotti and also the handsome Vincent Madame whose music I’m listening to from across the English Channel, France (the home of my four-year love). When this interview is over, I’ll play a little Dusty Springfield, Moby and Marie-France Visite Bardot.
Aldrin: Why those?
Simon: I’m assembling some new large drawings at the moment. Dusty Springfield touches me, Moby is giving me adrenalin and Marie-France “est tres chic” which adds a little “joie de vivre” to the whole proceedings.
