This week, John Brown generously talked with me on Skype about his solo show opening at Olga Korper Gallery. It’s been a tough year for John with the passing of his partner Herb and his sister. He told me that these losses effected the making of his latest group of paintings. We also spoke about thinking through painting, politics and colour. He’s made some big shifts in the past year, reverting back to more figurative subject matter and building paint up on the surface rather than his signature scraping of the surface. Despite a difficult year personally, the work in the exhibit is powerful and accomplished. I really enjoyed John’s thoughtful answers and open responses. —Rachel MacFarlane
Rachel MacFarlane:
Hi John! I’m excited for your solo show at Olga Korper Gallery. How was it painting this new body of work?
John Brown:
It was really fun. I never think of painting as fun but it was almost enjoyable. I’ve been making full-figured paintings [that depict the figure’s full form head-to-toe]. I wanted to paint like that for a number of years, but I’m the kind of artist where I have to wait and let it happen. I couldn’t force that change.
I started off as a figurative painter. I never once thought of myself as an abstract painter, even when it was difficult not to! I always thought the relationship to figure and ground wasn’t an abstract thing. It was never about flatness of the surface or any of those things. They were always composed like a figure painting. I got to a certain point with figure painting and I needed to find another way to do it that wasn’t so literal and narrative. I can’t remember what show it was in, but there was a big single full figure painting. [My late partner]Herb said, ‘You should do ten of those!’ So I finally started to do them. This show at Olga Korper Gallery has three and I’m finishing four more that will be shown in Montreal.
RM:
Where will you be showing?
JB:
RM:
That’s interesting about the figure ground relationships. I’ve known your work for long time—since I was a kid. I’ve always looked at them as if they were figurative, even the most abstract ones. The figure ground relationships seems to have shifted in these newer works. I wonder if, now that you’re working on more paintings for the show at Division, if that’s continuing to move in and out between the physical object of the painting, and the actual imagery that you are using? If figure ground relationships are starting to move to be more physical? There always seems to be this conflation between the surface object of the painting versus the imagery. It seems less to be about scraping away and more about building up. I wonder what you’ve been thinking about and how the newer ones are changing.
JB:
The imagery is pretty similar to what I’ve been doing the last 3-4 years. There are architectural things going on—vehicular and military references. I’m not sure where this is going or what is means yet It’s all too soon. As far as the object thing, one of the reasons I frame my paintings is that I don’t want them to be objects. I want them to be a window, I want them to be a world. I’ve always liked framing them to be a window but it’s only recently I realized that I also wanted to take away from their objectness. I wanted them to be a picture.
The other complication is that I am using a lot more colour. I haven’t used this much colour since I was a student. If ever!
Imaginary Portrait of Roy Orbison Singing Crying
RM:
I’ve got the images up as I’m talking to you. I saw them in person before the show was installed. They have a lot more colour!
JB:
It wasn’t conscious at all. Except for the ‘Imaginary Portrait of Roy Orbison Singing Crying,’ I wanted to make a painting with a lot of blue in it. Herb, in the last few months of his life, well always, was obsessed with books. Books were the things he loved the most which made the fact that he had semantic dementia really awful for him. One of the things he was carrying around a lot was a Susan Rothenberg book. You know those Mondrian dancing paintings? They were just blue and white. I love those paintings. I thought I want to make a blue painting. I always wanted to try and work with blue but I always had trouble working with it. With reds I could mix them almost brown, all the way up to pink. I could put the paint wet on wet with small brush strokes and build it up.
With blue it always just went sideways. It went too pale too quick but now there’s tons of blue in the painting. I don’t know why it became comfortable for me to work with. All of a sudden it just did. I started painting things edge to edge. At one point I wasn’t going to scrape away at all, and then that thought just ridiculous I have to remove paint to do things, and why would I give myself any rules at all!
For all these years I have been thinking of making paintings that weren’t just scraped to the ground. It just came to the surface and I’ve started to make these paintings a different way. Scraping the paintings down, the utility of it seemed to lessen. The last show seemed to me that they were almost drawings. That was as far as I wanted to go with it. I don’t know what the difference is about making a painting by more or less destroying it and making a painting by building it up. There’s a difference obviously. That scraping had a lot of meaning for me. It was kind of like erasing your traces and hiding yourself. I really don’t know why it changed except that there was a desire for it to change. I really haven’t figured out what it means exactly. I’ve been too busy making the paintings. Now that the show is finished I need to think about what it means and that will help me going forward.
RM:
In the paintings I’m making right now, I could be repeating the same mistake over and over again but I am also in a transition and I just have to see it through. Thinking for me in painting is often not literal, it’s process-oriented. It makes perfect sense that you can’t have reflection on this shift in your approach until much later. It seems to me that for you, personal circumstance have added to it, but also these challenges you’ve undertaken. You decided you wanted to address making full figure paintings and take on simply painting with blue. It’s all probably any of us have when making decisions are these little sparks.
JB:
It’s what I love about painting. Lots of other art forms are not planned out either. I guess lots of paintings are planned but I like working without a plan. I was trying to think of Dana Schutz’s name this morning. I was thinking of going to Montreal to see her show.
RM:
She just had a big show in Chelsea at Petzel Gallery. Do you like her paintings?
JB:
I really like her paintings in books. I’ve only ever seen one of them in life.
RM:
They’re good. Especially in person. She paints quite thin. I paint quite thin so I respond to it.
JB:
The first one I saw was quite thin. The thing with reproductions is that they collapse everything and make everything more graphic and dense. One thing I have been doing is photographing and printing out my paintings in progress. From ten years back even. I often look back and think why didn’t I stop there? This is really interesting but then I had to remember that the quality of paint maybe wasn’t there. And Also that the photograph composes the painting in a different way. It flat in a very different way than a painting. The photograph makes it look more graphic. So it looks better than it actually did in real life.
RM:
You obviously have to make those decisions physically in front of the painting.
JB:
Like what you were saying before, working on the painting is thinking about it.
RM:
I always think of paintings as a series of small decisions. That you are recalculating, making compromises and building it up. It’s constant problem solving and very analytical
Green Figure
Yellow Head
JB:
People always ask me how I know when the painting is finished and I always say it’s when I remember it. All the marks are little mnemonic devices to lead me to the image I knew was there in the first place. Which is kind of ambiguous but seems to make sense to me. In some sense you kind of know what kind of painting you want to make but you don’t know quite how to get there.
RM:
I think of painting and memory a lot. As far as how you choose your images how do you make those decisions? I find that when something reminds you of the residual or the breaking apart of something makes you think of painting. I always thought memory was part of your work but it was always a suspicion.
JB:
I always think about the time of painting and labour of painting The time of making a painting is different than making a film or making a photograph. It’s pretty instantaneous in some ways but with painting sometimes it can take up to a year to make one. Over the life of a painting your ideas are changing. I think memory works into it a lot. My favourite quote is Falkner, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Like I said I have been trying to remember things.
All that inside of the body imagery, if I think about it a lot it had a lot to do with being gay and the memory of hitting puberty and going “Uh oh.” What’s going on? I think a lot of that works into it. Also while you’re making a new painting you are a remembering the last painting.
RM:
It makes sense that painting is a better vehicle to talk about memory and how it’s really engaged. The instability of memory, and the back and forth sort of quality that it has—
JB:
Most people think that photographic processes are better at that because it captures a time. I would agree that painting is a better vehicle because I think it is more complex. It’s not so dependant on what you see. Digital stuff is changing that with photograph but it’s still a very complicated form of cut and paste in a way.
RM:
Photography can be viewed as a record of an instant. Memory is a mnemonic function, it’s a brain process. It makes sense for it to be the result of an activity, like painting. An activity and a record being two different things. So they’re good at different things.
JB:
I’m sure people would argue this!
RM:
I’m sure they would!
JB:
You were asking where the imagery comes from. I have all kinds of stuff stuck up in the studio, including all sorts of photographs. I actually studied photography before I started painting. I like photography an awful lot. That sort of stuff works into it.
All those paintings that for me have to do with the militarisation, and an attempt to make our national culture based in a valorization of the military. After Stephen Harper became our Prime Minister you couldn’t have a baseball game without the army or the police. That’s got nothing to do with the individual soldiers. So I would gather photography of military stuff and convert them into a high contrast black and white photographs and I would paint on top of them. That would be used as a starting point, but it was only used in a very rough way. I guess that’s just kind of part of my process, having these up on the wall. But anything goes, I have a piece of a muffin wrapper up there that I thought looked like a maltese cross. It’s a homage to a piece by Louis Bourgeois I saw. This fantastic piece, sort of a male figure made out of a navel orange. It was on this beautiful robin’s egg background.
RM:
So these painted photographs are really just a launching pad into the painting?
JB:
Yes. It seems to me that I get more work done on the paintings that are in my periphery than the one I was actively working on. Not having full concentration is sometimes better for me than having it.
Windsor
RM:
It depends on what kind of painter you are but I definitely relate to that mode of working. Oh, I wanted to ask about the painting ‘Windsor’? The title is more specific than others so I was wondering if there was a specific story there?
JB:
It is very specific. It came out of a friend of mine who works at the University of Windsor who sent me a video clip of the Windsor police driving around in their new military vehicle. So that’s why it’s called ‘Windsor’ and is sort of this armoured car. The chief justified it as less money than a squad car. He said if we ever get into a cross fire than we can drive it in and get the civilians in. We weren’t citizens we were civilians. Why the hell would we ever get into a cross fire in Windsor? The chances of being in a crossfire are probably less than the Detroit river swelling up and flooding the place. It’s also scary that they are driving around in these things and think of themselves as a sort of adjunct to the military. They aren’t. There’s no reason for the police forces to have bazookas and rocket launchers etc. It’s just the militarization of the culture. This all picked up real steam after 9/11 everywhere.
RM:
Harper was a big proliferation of that…
JB:
This idea of creating this idea of the hero. In Ferguson, they shut down the airspace over the city. The over reaction is about creating fear. All this stuff is in the paintings, and it’s what they are about.
RM:
That’s interesting,the terror of images. I participated in the Black Lives Matter marches in New York over the last year. It was sort of the same thing. Really it wasn’t meant to be in anyway a destructive march, it was supposed to be a peaceful march. But the way that the police approached it was antagonistic. It was all about reseting these power structures and undermining the voice of the people. If you treat people like criminals the world will interpret them as criminals. I think it’s a really important subject.
JB:
The G20 was like that too. They provoked everybody. The police were occupying the city. It was a really scary naked use of power. I think the police are out of control. I digress but these are the things I’m thinking about while I am painting.
John Brown: New Paintings 2015
Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto
November 13 – December 19, 2015
Opening Saturday, November 14th 2pm-5pm
