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| David Spiller |
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Love is all there is By Marco Livingstone Much of the art being made now is meant to be experienced instantly, but the degree of detail in David Spiller's pictures, especially the words, allows viewers to discover aspects of them over a period of time. The handwriting, intimate and personal, is essential to this process and is also a way for the artist to make himself vulnerable. Mistakes are sometimes left uncorrected, while on other occasions he will paint a whole section out, but still allow one to glimpse the history beneath it. As long ago as 1962, for his National Diploma in Design project, he produced a painting on the theme "There's no biz like showbiz", writing the words on it. It seemed a natural thing for him to do, rather than a reference to Cubism or other art, and words proved a persistent featured of his drawings. In works on paper made during the 1980s, he devised a system by which he could cut out a figure and replace it with another one: this bringing together of images is also where he got the idea to sew together the separate elements of his canvases. Using a small pencil drawing as a guide, Spiller paints the individual sections containing the images or large lettering, then machine stitches them together. Over this he creates coloured circles and then smaller splatters of paint where he feels little touches of colour are needed, and finally handwritten phrases. He writes the scribbled messages, and fragments from favourite pop songs, over the surface with pencils only after all the painting is done. The canvases are laid on the floor, stretched, where he can write on them, working in the inside of the stretcher, after which they are cut out and restretched tight on the floor. Having made an impeccable, well-designed painting, Spiller then goes on to desecrate it with the more gestural marks. (He compares his paintings to architect-designed buildings onto whose walls people have written graffiti.) Sometimes he starts with a song in his head that he wants to write down; or he might begin with one element and then decide it needs something else. He does change his mind, overpaint and rework, so it is not just a question of the first thing that enters his mind. It is very deliberate on his part to have a fairly thin surface, to "knock it down as much as possible" so that it looks almost as if it had been printed. Certain sections can be washed out if he decides quickly to change them, as with the drips. But wishing to preserve their freshness and to avoid overworking, he accepts that many of the marks, however spontaneously made, will have to stay. Spiller is well aware that the small handwritten additions cannot be seen from a distance or, to any great extent, in reproductions. He is happy to accept this, judging that in some ways these details are nothing to do with the main structure of the paintings. He lies on the floor and just starts writing over them. The gaps between letters or words become spaces in which to make a mark, or places where a figure can stand. These small marks, like whispered asides, force the viewer to come right up to the surface. He wants the painting to be a very physical thing, very tactile, but also scrubbed down so that it does not necessarily look as though it had been made today. In some of the recent works shown here, made over a period of about a year, Spiller wanted to concentrate more on the graphic side, the structure of the words. That is particularly the case with the works that look most like posters, such as Sweet Gene Vincent (with the optimistic phrase "CHOOSE LIFE" from an old Katherine Hamnett t-shirt) and Peace on earth. A third painting, It's a beautiful day, boldly proclaiming the most banal and over-familiar slogan, "I love NY", is a particular favourite of his. Nothing matters more than love, in his view, and it is at the centre of everything he does. It is expressed through his affection for the characters who people his paintings, in a devotion to the likes of gawky Olive Oyl that even her lifelong companion, Popeye, would be hard-pressed to equal. It is manifested in the gently caressed surfaces of his canvases and in the delicate pastel hues that colour them. And it is absolutely evident in the words he quotes with such reverence from the songs that have been dancing in his head for years. Though they look almost effortless, as though they had just arrived, Spiller's poster-like word paintings are the result of a long and complicated process. Since each section is painted separately, he never quite knows how it is going to work, or precisely where he will have to trim it in order to piece the full painting together. An element of the unexpected thus works in tandem with and against the highly designed look. He says that he sews the pristine plain canvas borders around them all to show that he really means what he says : "I do mean it, I mean it with an intensity in a way. Sometimes they bring tears to my eyes." But he has a need for a physicality, too, partly to counteract the very graphic aspect of the paintings. The scribbling, Spiller acknowledges, is a way of making his mark on something, a primal impulse to announce his existence. He recalls visiting an ancient site in France with his young son, who acted on the urge to leave a muddy handprint behind: "Maybe all we're all doing is leaving our fingerprints, leaving our mark." Because he has relied so much on found images, by writing over them he takes possession of them in another way. (1) A spirit of collaboration is central to his work, most obviously in his use of found images from comic strips and in his appropriation of lyrics from popular songs. These verbal quotations, he insists, are nothing to do with nostalgia. They are just snippets of words and melodies that are stuck in his head, that are there all the time. Some of his favourite lyrics appear as compelling fragments. Sometimes the words Spiller chooses, and the paintings that house them, are letters of love to people he knows, to people he has lost or that he is with. A single work might combine words from songs by disparate musicians, such as U2 and David Gray, or Dylan and Bowie, brought together not in a wilful way but simply because they both floated through the artist's consciousness. According to one's own familiarity with the lyrics, snippets of remembered melodies thus in turn become part of the experience of looking at the painting, extending the experiments with synaesthesia that enthralled the Symbolists in the late 19th century. Spiller does listen to music in the studio, but often he picks things up elsewhere, as when he happens to hear a tune playing in a shop. He has always loved Dennis Potter; when he heard the songs in his television plays, they transported him to another time, because he knew them. Some of the older songs from which Spiller quotes in his paintings are ones he remembers his mother singing, adding a further layer of intimacy to their personal associations. In the upper-right corner of Don't say that later will be better he quotes from the Beatles song "Golden Slumbers". He thinks that he probably wrote down the first two lines from memory, then looked it up in the Beatles songbook. He doesn't worry about misquoting. Sometimes he changes the lyrics deliberately, so that they mean more to him in the context in which he wants to use them, in the same way that he might redraw part of a Picasso. The casualness with which the words are transposed suggests that he has just let his mind wander, in a kind of free association, but his choices are anything but accidental: "It haunts me, the song haunts me: once there was a way to get back home". I saw my friends getting older... But maybe even in your work: to get back to the cartoons and all these things that I love, in the cinema or in art that I've found. And I'm not being sentimental. I remember as a little boy drawing Mickey Mouse. No longer was it distant from me. I could do it. You could make the world yours! It was like learning to write: I'm here!" It seems impossible for Spiller just to take a found image, photograph it and project it. Even when he was younger, he would go to exhibitions by artists whose work he loved, including Picasso, and stand there thinking, "If only he had changed this bit of colour there or..." When he changes images borrowed from other artists, it is not because he thinks he feels superior to them, but that he has to make it work within the terms of his own picture or change the weight of the line. For It's in our hearts Spiller started with a reproduction of a Van Gogh drawing (2), which was scanned in to his computer. He needed to intensify the line, so it is not simply a found image. He redrew parts at the top, and also the tree, as well as changing the weight of the marks. In cases like this he will print out a number of options, from all of which he makes 35mm slides, which he projects to the desired size onto the canvas. This one was first drawn out completely in pencil, a solid day's work in the dark, then painted. "So it's a kind of intensive labour thing you're going through to just get it there. But then you have to ignore it a bit, because really the important thing is to get a rhythm to work with the brush that you're using." What he liked about the pen drawings was their manic quality, so in reconfiguring the image as a painting it was above all that sense of rhythm that he wished to emulate. A few years ago Spiller made some paintings from figures in Leonardo drawings, such as Everybody loves somebody 1999. When he later saw some anatomical diagrams from his son's work at school, he decided to respond to this more graphic representation of the human body and see what would happen. This resulted in such paintings as Let the wind blow back your hair (the title and inscription of which were derived from Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road", off the seminal Born to Run album) and Don't say that later will be better. At this time he was using puddles of paint : "It was beautiful, just paint, poured in pools. You do know what you're doing, but you never know what it's going to do when you scrape through it". He uses a variety of scrubbing brushes and metal scrapers, working on the well-worn studio floor that he has carried with him even to New York and back. At one time he was in the habit of spending prolonged periods in the country, and he used to marvel at how nature would reclaim abandoned houses. In the case of his painting, it was a question of not being afraid to destroy what he had already done. "It's trying to combine a number of things, with a found image that my kid would have, with just bits of paint, and the songs. Trying to make certain formal things work." Whatever his intention, he liked the idea that people would read into the finished paintings as they wished. Almost all of these new paintings are square in format and measure 6 x 6 feet. The dimensions, corresponding roughly to his own height, give him the physicality he needs and a feeling of the constituent parts being life-size."I think I was afraid that if I went smaller, that maybe I would be making pictures. And somehow I needed to say something about the physical feeling for it, and it needed a certain kind of scale to do that. It needed room to be able to do these kinds of things." The images that Spiller borrows tend to be very flat, graphic, diagrammatic ones, such as figures from comic strips. Even when he uses other art as a source, it is a question of a printed reproduction. He does not seem to work much from straight photographs, though he has occasionally mimicked the look of a printed halftone, taking a long time to draw all the dots out separately in different sizes. Once again he seems to put himself through an enormous labour, when he could have employed a much simpler photo-mechanical method to get a similar effect. I wondered if temperamentally he needed to put himself through this long process. He is convinced that that is not the case. "Maybe the idea just hangs in my mind that if you do it by hand you will discover what it is, and understand the weakness and strength of it all." In It's such a perfect day, the background was painted first, in sheets of colour, as a much more physical ground against which to work. Sometimes he has to throw canvases away because the surface becomes too thick or clogged with paint. Such paintings bear comparison with the parodies of Abstract Expressionism that Warhol started to use as grounds in the early 1970s, as a way of establishing a dialogue between their rather arbitrary marks and the screenprinted image on top. Although Spiller admires Warhol's work, remembering the impact of his Tate retrospective in 1971, he prefers to cite as a precedent the example of Fernand Laeger. He especially likes Laeger's use of blocks of colour, with a simple object such as a key drawn over them. Spiller sometimes uses an unchanging motif (as with the head of Mickey Mouse), sometimes a variant (as in his Felix the Cat paintings), but says that it makes no difference to him whether or not he has used a particular form before. He is especially attracted to the early portrayals of Mickey Mouse from the late 1920s and 1930s. In the case of Look on the bright side, he wanted to use a thicker line than before, to simplify it as much as possible. In Who's to say where the wind will take you he made changes to a Laurel and Hardy image derived from an old comic book. He shortened the length of Hardy's arm and redrew other parts of the figure; for example, he added the spats, which were not in the source drawing, but which corresponded to how he remembered him always being dressed. He also wanted to have the figures standing in a defined location, not floating in space, so he invented the pavement with a few sketchy lines. The cinema crops up often in Spiller's conversation. He says that he used to wonder why some artists repeated themselves so much, and admired the way film directors would change idiom from movie to movie, perhaps making a gangster film followed by a romance and then something equally different. He always wanted to find a similar way "to jump these barriers". In a telling aside, he recalls the roots of his affection for that medium, intertwined with the roots of his art, in entertainments he first experienced as a boy: "I loved these things as a child. The cinema I thought was a magic thing. Somehow the scale has to do with that form, it has to do with being up there. My brother had a little machine that he wound by hand and showed me movies on at home. And they were about this big [the size of the canvas in front of us]. I wonder, actually, if this is exactly the size. We'd do it in the front room. There would be Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse. Now and then he'd get a bit of Laurel and Hardy. You had to manually wind them, you could make them go faster if you wanted to or slow them down." That the images in Spiller's paintings not only are frequently drawn from the mythological space of the cinema, but also have to be projected onto the canvas in order to be painted, is revealing in this connection. "There I am in the dark again with these characters. It's quite weird." Perhaps the link to childhood is more direct even than his preferred motifs have suggested, and all his art constitutes a kind of wish-fulfillment, a return to an anxiety-free, joyful, orderly world where nothing will ever change and nobody will ever have to say goodbye. Maybe this mood also contributes to the eternally youthful appearance of Spiller's art and to the sense of well-being that it induces in us as spectators, forever entertained, drunk with optimism, inexplicably happy. Notes (1) On occasion, however, he has used something he has drawn himself as a found image, as in May all your dreams come true (1998), reproduced in David Spiller: New Paintings (exh. cat., Beaux Arts, London, 9 September - 3 October 1998), p. 5. (2) Hayricks, mid-July 1888, pencil, quill and reed pen and brown ink on wove paper, 240 x 315mm, from the collection of the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum, Budapest, reproduced in Vincent van Gogh: Drawings (exh. cat., Rijksmuseum KrÃller-Müller, Otterlo, 30 March - 29 July 1990), p. 268, cat. no. 196.
Marco Livingstone is an art historian and independent curator. His Pop Art: A Continuing History was reissued last year by Thames & Hudson. essay © Marco Livingstone
2001
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Selected Bibliography 1942 Born in
Dartford Kent 1987 Zeitkunst
Gallery, Innsbruck and Cologne (solo show) 1989 Twinings Gallery, New York (solo show) 1990 Alexander
Roussos Gallery, London 1991 Ariadne
Gallery, Vienna (solo show) 1992 Reflex Gallery,
Vienna (solo show) 1993 Gallery
Naviglio, Milan and Venice, Italy 1994 Gallery
Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark (solo show) 1995 Gallery
Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark 1997 Gallery
Cotthem, Barcelona, Spain (solo show) 2000 Gallery Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark (solo show); Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, Florida; Beaux Arts, London
Art Fairs Recent reviews All works are acrylic and crayon on canvas |
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