Public faces, private dreams

Across the studio, Marilyn, dewy-lipped, heavy-eyelashed and dot-screened to a huge soft-focus, dreams on, tragic and sexy. Splashes of paint and floating discs of colour dance across her monochrome face that is cropped on one side by a stack of coloured rectangles, and framed by words in bold capitals: IT WAS ONLY FOR LOVE... Something else is going on too, only just discernible at this distance, a visual interference like the scratches on an old record that make a moody tune seem so poignant. But hold it - at first you are simply smacked in the eye and the heart by these big canvases with their daring mix of elements: almost outrageous, naughty but defiantly beautiful, streetwise yet starry-eyed, poetic and funky. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOUR WRONG...YOUR RIGHT.
From back here, they are something like the size of an old cinema screen - as it would appear relative to the audience, that is. Long before the days of cinemascope, smaller and squarer, the movie screen brought actors suddenly close, and could be filled with a kiss before fizzling out in a sequence of white numbers and exploding splotches of light. So I remember it, as I try to describe the effect of David Spiller's images, many of them lifted from that early magical world of Saturday morning 'flicks' and spattered with paint-light. It's interesting to notice, too, how one's eyes, looking at the paintings, flick between the randomly placed dots, each playing its own colour note, with a movement that is musically suggestive.
Like the movies, these pictures are immediately legible; you seem to understand them at once 'across a crowded room', hearing perhaps a subliminal snatch of melody as you read the words. Skilful, complex, even painstaking in their facture they may be, and an eclectic mix of quotation and artistic styles - but for all that the heart is on the sleeve and more than anything they are fun.
The words, oddly enough, do not interfere with this immediacy. Mostly song lyrics, they have the same kind of popular and emotional currency as many of the dominant, iconic images. Call them 'texts', not exactly biblical, but evangelising love for certain, and echoing with some plangency, as well as humour, against the image. WE ALL NEED SOMEONE TO LEAN ON...LEAN ON ME is strapped below a picture of the Thompson Twins, bowler hats wedged down over their beetling brows, stiff black moustaches, walking sticks over black-overcoated arms. AND TEARS FALL LIKE RAIN alongside Marilyn, smiling through spangles.
Irresistible. And we are still at a distance, only now homing in, fascinated, on what may turn out to be the 'real life' of the painting. Close up it's easy to forget the larger dynamic in discovering and deciphering a cast of little graffiti characters along with proliferating texts pencilled or scratched onto the surface. More of the same: 'only you can make this world seem right', 'summer days that are not forgotten', 'my weariness amazes me'. The little goggle-eyed graffiti people spread their arms as if to say 'Here I am. Love me'. They stand on the neck of Rembrandt's Elephant or the curve of a call girl's bum with the scruffy appeal of tiny clowns, agog and needy and real in a world of larger-than-life fantasies and myths.
The public hoarding with its iconic dream attracts a cryptic record of private dreams and memories. Anon - or Mole, or Len, or Dave - 'wuz yer', and left his sign or handprint like any caveman.

These are the real people, says David Spiller. They're you and me, I hope. The others - those giants - well, this is the world we're living in, and these - the little guys - are the people who are living in this world.

In this world, this mish-mash of cultures, clash of money and beggary, brutality and fashion, bombardment of wonders and bombs, of slogan and soundbyte, post-Pop, postmodern, eclectic, electronic, slick or seedy, Spiller might come across as aware, canny, playful, and certainly of his moment for all he harks back to an earlier pop ethos. And he can manage this world quite beautifully (artfully, you might say, but for some other strain of feeling bringing beauty to bear). Here is a meeting of styles and painterly languages playing off each other, and bouncing the viewer's responses through a series of shifting gestalts. Now it's Pop, now it's abstraction, now Art Brut, now a collage of found poetry, now Twomblyesque scribbles, now Hirstean bubbles (though Spiller's use of dots considerably pre-dates Damien Hirst's cool arrangements). Put like that, it sounds ironic, very clever - but what's this? 'The skylarks I heard fly in a summer sky echo in my heart.' Strange words (his own this time) to be found in an urban art. Or 'For dear friends. Please keep them from the howling wind, for they were once true friends of mine' (Bob Dylan). And wait - he means it. For these are love letters, loaded with associations and messages across time and distance, borrowing perennial lyrics which invite the viewer to bring his or her own history to the reading.

My god, all the people I knew as a student. What happened to them? In your heart you say, I hope my friends had a good life, like the John Lennon song, 'I hope it's a good one without any tears'. I really hate people to cry. I know in our lives we hurt people, but it's as if it's really important to say, I love you still, I miss you. Like the song that goes, 'one last kiss before I say goodbye'.

Spiller has a song for everything, and though many carry a nostalgic date stamp (my mother sang all these songs - music has always been a part of my life) they come from a recognisable vernacular, even if we don't actually know them. But for many of us, to see the words is still to hear the tune. The complete lyrics of the Beatles is a well-thumbed source book on his studio table; together with Bob Dylan - what a poet! - the little guys already have a richly evocative language with which to voice their loves and longings. And of course there are many more: Dean Martin, Buddy Holly, Sting...

Touching Base

It may seem to a British audience that David Spiller sprang fully-formed onto the 90s art scene in London, confident and at the height of his powers. He is in fact better known abroad, in New York, but particularly in Germany, where he lived in Berlin and received encouragement, acclaim and, importantly, a living, during crucial years of the maturing of his talent. But where does he come from?
He was born in 1942 in Dartford, north-west Kent - in the same year that the first British traditional jazz band, George Webb's Dixielanders, played their first gig from a coal cart along Bexley Heath Broadway. Coincidentally, that Thameside area, with its Rhythm Clubs and later trad jazz connections with the London art school scene, played a leading role in the birth of post-war English pop culture . Peter Blake, a Pop Art pioneer at the Royal College of Art in the 50s, was also born in working-class Dartford ten years earlier. 'Pop culture was the life I actually led', Blake said. For David Spiller it must have been as close to home.
His mother was sixteen when she had her first child. David, the third, didn't meet his father until he was four, because of the war. Three more children followed, making a total of six. Home life?

I guess it was hard in a certain way, but my memory is my father holding me up to find a bird's nest. Not to destroy it, but to see how beautiful it was.

And David was always drawing - in the blank pages at the back of books bought in jumble sales with his mum.

Something I always loved doing in those books was making a path with a crayon through the words. I wonder whether I'm still doing that really, still looking around words, trying to find a path.

There's romance in tracing it back to that, I remark. But he's anti-romantic, the very notion. It's reality he's talking about: a reality in which the beauty of the bird's nest, the first touch of a girl's breast, means more than the memory of hunger. It's the realisation of the important things - human feeling the ground of them.
But 'magic' he remembers too, in connection with his childhood drawings.

The thing that I drew, that was magic for me, was the cinema - was Mickey Mouse, was Felix, was Donald Duck ... seeing those films and knowing that they were those huge big drawings!

And then:

I could draw him and he was mine. My Mickey Mouse. That was the power of doing it. With a cruddy little bit of chalk you could draw this figure.

So he 'wanted to do art'. Loving words, lettering, typography, at sixteen he started a graphics course at Sidcup art school. One afternoon a week Frank Auerbach, who had just finished at the Royal College, came in to teach painting. Spiller liked that kind of intensity, went on to do fine art at the Slade.
It was the early 60s. Before the era of student revolt later in the decade, and the flower children of the 70s, British Pop had already meant a generational shift of focus away from the authority of 'high' culture. The 'mass media' seemed more relevant and more vital than 'fine art', particularly at the RCA in the 50s. Aestheticism, romanticism and high modernism paled beside the hybrid energies of urban life and the ad-men. Which is one distinctly potted version of the advent of Pop Art in England, with its appropriation of pop imagery and artefacts, and a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia for the signs and symbols of an ephemeral culture. (Much of it had taken on the feeling of dusty bygones in the Royal Academy's 1991 retrospective.)
We all know what it is, yet no two artists associated with Pop back then would later give the same account of it. Pop was not born with the term (first credited to Lawrence Alloway of the Independent Group in 1958), but shades backwards and forwards into collage and painterly abstraction on the one hand; on the other to Duchamp's 'ready-mades' and so, oddly, to Conceptualism and the gratuitous confusion of much contemporary imagery. All the same those were heady times, as the Beatles hit the scene, and call girls toppled governments.
How relevant to this artist, Pop with abstract connections in the 90s? Not more so than a bird's nest or Felix the Cat.
But there is a sweet-and-wicked mixture of reverence and irreverence in Spiller that has some ghostly pertinence to Pop's mythology. His reverence is for the 'holiness of the heart's affections' and whatever they attach ('low' or 'high'), and such reverence generates irreverence: for pretension, intellection and the pious atmosphere of boredom in many galleries (often inseparable now from much supposedly 'sensational' contemporary work and its analysis). Épater not so much the bourgeois but Art in its temples. 'Walk onward with your heart', he scratches across his own art, defacing that too, and delightfully giving the lie, with all those popular lyrics, to the tedium of much Art Discourse. He sees his imagery as cheeky and childlike, not childish.

I always knew you should love children, but I knew you should love that little bit of child in you.

There's a certain theme where we all touch base together. I'm voicing what happened to me, what happened to you.

Influences? Well, Picasso - he almost apologises Ð in whom the child, always inventive, prolifically creative, never failed. And Goya. And Rembrandt - the reality in the portraits of time passing; those wonderful drawings; Michelangelo's too; Leonardo's. It's no irreverence to paste in words from the Beatles beside Leonardo's horse - quite the reverse, it accentuates its timelessness. WHISPER WORDS OF WISDOM...LET IT BE.

Body and soul

As with a life, so with one of Spiller's paintings. It has a sense of life, of something physical, grown. Improvisation, change, chance, becoming, an eye for the exploit - exploring it, you can piece the elements together, following the history of its making.
What comes first? In Marilyn's case, it's her face, each dot-screen dot hand-painted onto canvas washed with a thin coat of colour. Often he creates a rudimentary colour field, sometimes in blocks, to work as a formal beginning (as behind Leonardo's horse in Let it be). Next comes the main image.
Though Spiller's work has been characterised by those classic icons of early animation, his sources are becoming ever more various: from the telephone cards of call girls to Leonardo, to a robot from a toy catalogue, to the huge words of a John Lennon poster: WAR IS OVER... The diversity is likely to grow: he would like to be more erotic; he is also drawn to those hauntingly sylvan landscapes of the early Italian masters. Such disparity reflects the world we negotiate every day. In Everybody loves somebody, Leonardo's anatomical drawing of a naked man faces us alongside a call girl seen teasingly from behind, her feet likewise braced apart, straight-legged too, in stilettos, seamed stockings and suspenders, one hand dangling a rose like a whip. We see both 'man' and 'woman' midriff down, cropped of their torsos. All kinds of seriousness and fun is implied - a feminist reading just for a start would be a scorcher.
He does not alter any of these found images. Wouldn't tamper with the Silly girl, though he loves her bottom and dislikes her face; but sets her against a beautiful deep blue-movie blue in all her silliness, as true to the call girl's image on her card as he is to Rembrandt's drawing. For none of these images is his own line. They are taken up to the size he wants, often magnified hugely, on the computer, then to be transposed by brush onto canvas. Many problems can be solved, short-cuts taken, with a computer, he explains. Colour testing, for example, can be accomplished without building up layers and layers of paint. And the ability to play with images from books, the sheer availability of images - he's excited by the possibilities, and intends to explore them much further.
At this stage the large image may be built up on several pieces of canvas, and then sewn together. Other elements can be added in this way too, swatches of earlier canvases, or a purely abstract column of coloured blocks. The robot (Whose going to hold your hand?) acquires a strip of canvas dabbed with experimental colours and shapes Ð once a test piece, but now pasted in like a visual equivalent of robot-speak. This is something else you see only close to: the flawless joins of the painting's growth, contributing to its very physical sense of something built - and evolved, scored, abraded, loved by the hand. He rasps his palm across the surface. 'Incredibly neat', I remark of the long, straight, machine-sewn seams.

Oh yes! It has to be, otherwise it wouldn't work. This splash of paint - in another context that's all it is. Unless you put it into the right context, it remains just that. Like a pebble on a beach, until a child picks it up and says, Oh, isn't that beautiful!

For none of these splotches, spatters, or any other mark, is accidental, however organic and anarchic the process of their happening. Each is subject to an abstract painterly intuition, and considered. Even the graffiti characters may be drawn and re-drawn until they have that 'beauty of the thing badly done' (that William Scott spoke of): it's taken Spiller years to perfect his idiosyncratic drawing style. The large, usually black, image now serves as a scaffolding for inventive abstraction and colour relationships - an order overturned and an arena to play in. The geometric colour-shapes must reinforce the abstract life of the canvas, as one colour makes another come alive, and as the dots enliven the whole surface.
Incidentally, the dots provide the only illusion which disrupts the overall flatness of the work. In their different sizes and colours they can seem to be at different distances from the viewer, some receding while others almost float out into the room. The resultant subliminal perspective imparts an extraordinary airy lightness, as if these 'bubbles' or 'planets' are suspended in quite another kind of space from that defined by the 'wall' on which all the other elements are built or marked. I was puzzled at first by Spiller's recurrent use of dots, but now see them as supplying an important dimension - in just that sense - that prompts a shift of focus, a delightful disorientation that is both poetic and visually paradoxical. (Van Gogh: 'The world is probably round'. Gaston Bachelard: 'The world is round around the round being'. William Blake: 'Everybody does not see alike'.)
Then he's on the floor, face down over the canvas where it's spread now at its finished size. This floor's something else. Much travelled over the years between different countries and studios, the sheets of hardboard have built up a pitted skin of old paint, a practically fossilised history of their usage. When he takes a scrubbing brush to his canvases to refine and take back the colour and newness of the acrylics, they tend to pick up some of this texture, which contributes to their 'physical' quality, as if they've been 'distressed', the original image ghosted by time (and its subsequent collection of graffiti).

It's almost like a wall I've built - and then I fall onto it. I lie on it. It becomes just somewhere where somebody can stand (you sometimes find painty sole-prints or, more deliberately, handprints - David was here!) and something else takes place. It becomes maybe a way of trying to make sense of things for myself by remembering souls or fragments of things in your life.

Here's a soul now. Who's this? Straggly hair, rudimentary skirt, arms akimbo. On one palm she balances a heart, in the other holds out a flower. His mum? It could be anybody, that's the point. It could be you. It's Woman. And here's a little man astride a rocket, a firework sketched high up.

We should all fly away on a rocket sometimes.
We should all 'fly up to the moon'.

And so the circular dots can become worlds, criss-crossed with longitudes and latitudes roughly drawn. Or just a football. And this triangle - is Pythagoras! (another hero, trying to make sense of things).

Part of me wants them to be like something you found. Not art, but something you found. And I like the idea that people can say to me, Oh I've found another little bit I didn't see before today.

Something I noticed late in the day was how many of those scratchy characters are engaged in balancing acts: balancing on little moons, or dancing on the edge of something too huge for them to register, or balancing on opposing palms, a heart, a dagger, points down. Seen this way, amongst the fragments of songs, they become a wonderfully engaging troop of Lilliputian performers. They have our sympathy and our selves, as we bring our curiosity and associations into the game, all of us performers in the precarious, heart-stopping, dangerous and joyful circus.

I do believe we all walk this little line and it's very easy to fall off.

Now step back again, watch the large design reinvent itself, and smile.
These are endlessly rewarding canvases by an artist whose exacting practice allows all kinds of invention and warm feeling. He's a good painter, and discipline toughens feeling; wit, too, spikes any charge of sentimentality. Sentimental? Nostalgic? But why not? say Mickey and Marilyn, hamming it up. Who's embarrassed, who's pussy-footing around here? Not Felix, not the artist - no innocent, having made his choices in a hard school. He's a performer too, his confidence thoroughly earned.

This is what I treasure in life. I treasure this Rembrandt. I treasure this paint splattering. It doesn't have to be polite. You can piss on it. You can read what you want into it. It's not media art, it's man's handprint, woman's handprint, it's our handprint.

IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOUR WRONG...YOUR RIGHT (sic!)

Linda Saunders 1999

1 See Alex Seago, Burning the Box of Beautiful Things, Oxford University Press, 1995.
2 For an authoritative account of David Spiller's sources and affinities, see Edward Lucie-Smith's catalogue essay, Beaux Arts, London, 1998, determining the artist's uniqueness within the art-historical maze.

Selected Bibliography

1942 Born in Dartford Kent
1957 Sidcup School of Art
1958-62 Beckenham School of Art
1962-65 Slade School of Art
1988-89 Lived and worked in Berlin and New York

1987 Zeitkunst Gallery, Innsbruck and Cologne (solo show)
Eugene Lendel Gallery, Gras, Austria
(solo show)
Kunstverein, Mannheim, Germany
Woord and Reeld, Museum Hedendaagse Kunst,
Utrecht (travelled to Stadtmuseum, Ratingen)

1988 Twinings Gallery, New York (solo show)
Kana Contemporary Arts Gallery, Berlin
(solo show)
Zeitkunst Gallery, Innsbruck and Cologne
(solo show)

1989 Twinings Gallery, New York (solo show)

1990 Alexander Roussos Gallery, London
(solo show)
Twinings Gallery, New York (solo show)
Ariadne Gallery, Vienna (solo show)

1991 Ariadne Gallery, Vienna (solo show)
Willy Schoots Gallery, Eindhoven Holland (solo show)

1992 Reflex Gallery, Vienna (solo show)
Pop and Artvertising, Museum Van Bommel, Venlo, Holland
Gallery Naviglio, Milan and Venice, Italy
(solo show)

1993 Gallery Naviglio, Milan and Venice, Italy
(solo show)
Gallery Rokoko, Stuttgart, Germany
(solo show)

1994 Gallery Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark (solo show)
Gallery Cotthem, Knokke, Belgium (solo show)

1995 Gallery Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark
Gallery Cotthem, Knokke, Belgium (solo show)

1997 Gallery Cotthem, Barcelona, Spain (solo show)

1998 Take 3, Beaux Arts, London
Rokoko Gallery, Stuttgart, Germany (drawings)
Gallery Cotthem, Knokke, Belgium (solo show)
Beaux Arts, London (solo show)
(Catalogue essay by Edward Lucie Smith)

1999 Cartoons and Comics, Virgin Atlantic
Gallery Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark
Beaux Arts, London (solo show)

Art Fairs
Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, FIAC Paris, Cologne, Basel, Frankfurt, Line Art Belgium, Copenhagen, Bologna, ARCO Madrid, London, Art 98 (solo show), Art 99

Recent reviews
Jonathan Jones, Modern Painters, Autumn 1998
Charles Dee Mitchell, Art in America, May 1998

All works are acrylic and crayon on canvas