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| David Spiller |
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All You Need is Love The Art of David Spiller In Noel Coward’s witty comedy Private Lives Elyot and Amanda, both glamorous, divorced and on their respective honeymoons in the South of France, find themselves standing on adjacent hotel balconies appreciating the view. The twist is that they are recently divorced from each other and that it is through what Coward so perceptively calls ‘the potency of cheap music’ that their relationship is rekindled and they are reminded of their shared memories. A popular song is able to articulate what they are not. The words go to the core of their emotions and make them realise that they do, in fact, love one another. Love is at the centre of David Spiller’s work. It is almost impossible to write such a sentence in these hard-boiled times without being amazed at its baldness. But Spiller is a child of the 60s. The Beatles sang All You Need is Love as if it were a mission statement. The world has changed. David Spiller has not. When Spiller went to art school there were Teddy Boys and the Profumo scandal, Lady Chatterley was on trial for obscenity and That Was The Week That Was was bringing the first rays of satire into front rooms in a Britain still emerging from post-war gloom. Spiller’s paintings are a cornucopia of appropriated and remembered images, a smorgasbord of influences from American Pop Art, boyhood comics, TV cartoons and art history. His eclecticism might mark him as a postmodernist but his sensibility is far too good natured. No irony is intended. He wears his heart on his sleeve. Visiting him in his south London studio where he talks nineteen to the dozen it is impossible not to be caught up by his infectious enthusiasm. As a boy he drew endlessly. He thought that art was heroic, that those who were artists stood outside the main thrust of the world. His brothers left school at 14 and 15. His Mum worked in the fields of Kent. He used the end papers of books to draw on not knowing that you could buy sheets of the stuff. He remembers the power of the cinema, being cooped up in the dark, the usherette with her torch and ice cream tray, the Pathé News and a caste of characters that seemed to come from another world. The first art he ever saw was the cardboard cut outs standing in the foyer of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe and Mickey Mouse. Painting was a form of magical transformation. He claims it saved his life. At sixteen he went to Sidcup School of Art and was taught by Frank Auerbach. One day during an outdoor painting exercise it started to snow and the colour began to run. Spiller pointed this out to Auerbach who simply replied “Paint faster.” He brings out his new canvases for me to view one by one. It’s hard not to feel like a parent approving an enthusiastic offspring’s art project. There is a witch, a pair of ghosts, a blue Jack Frost, a bearded villain sharpening his knives. His work is not, he insists, about nostalgia, nor is it even about art. What he does is reclaim populist imagery from the realms of high art and reconnects it with something felt, remembered, treasured. In these paintings he wanted to do something silly, very seriously. The simple is hard. He gives it his all. For him this is a real witch, these are real ghosts. His canvases are palimpsests of both paint and meaning. Drawings that begin on paper are then manipulated on computer and projected onto canvas. He works on the floor and loves the draughtsmanship, the sensuality of his hand moving across the surface and is justifiably proud of the surgical precision with which the separate panels of a number of his canvases are sewn. He lays down the flat areas of paint with great care and then subverts them with scribbles and hand written phrases like some obsessive teenage graffiti artist. Mistakes and chance are part of the whole thing. He loves the fact that when he first saw Matisse’s cut outs he could still see the holes in the paper where they had been pinned to the wall. Snatched lyrics fill the flat fields of colour; resonate through the nervous system like lines from a poem. Spiller pulls a phrase from a painting at random: “‘To make you feel my love’. Bob Dylan, I think?” “Maybe that’s why I am doing it. Maybe I’m an innocent and I’m doing it to be loved.” An innocent he may be, in as much as these works are playful, naughty, outrageous and iconoclastic, but they are also full of accumulated painterly knowledge and experience. As a student he wrote his thesis on Dubuffet and his presence and desire ‘to bring all disparaged values into the limelight’ can be felt running like a theme tune through this work. Léger is there too, in the dark lines that surround the pot of flowers in Stay Forever Young or his jolly Falstaffian Neptune, while the topography of Take A Walk on the Wild Side and Don’t be Afraid to Live owes more than a passing nod to the graphics of Russian Constructivism and the Vorticists. The geometric shapes – coloured cubes and abutted circles – all allude to classic abstraction. You can see that Spiller knows his art historical onions and has looked at everyone from Ben Nicholson to Mondrian. And the ‘Damien Hirst’ dots? Well he claims he was using these long before the bad boy of Britart to create balance and an illusion of depth in his otherwise flat fields of colour. Making his paintings exhausts him. He feels like an actor who has just given a performance. Sometimes it seems pointless in a world where people are dying of AIDS. But painting is what he does and if someone likes his vase of flowers, well maybe that is enough, maybe that can save us. All he can do is do is make the best painting he can. “If I was a tailor I’d make the best bloody suit in the world.” Painting is an act of faith, an act of love. Before we go for lunch he tells me, “I’ve just bought myself a Lotus. I love going to the race track. I know the danger but I love driving as fast as I can. You have to seize the day; you have to do what has to be done.” Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, novelist and poet who writes the weekly Art for Sale column in The Independent. Her first novel Depth of Field is published by Dewi Lewis. Her recent poetry collection Ghost Station is published by Salt.
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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 2002 Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, Florida, USA; (Contemporary Narrative) Museum Espace Belleville, Paris (Courtesy Guy Pieters); (L'humour Dans L'art Contemporian) Galerie Moderne, Silkeborg, Denmark; Summer Show, Beaux Arts, London Beaux Arts, London (solo show) (Catalogue essay by Martin Gayford) 2003 Royal West of England Academy Art Fairs Selected Recent Reviews Jonathan Jones, Modern Painters, Autumn 1998 Charles Dee Mitchell, Art in America, May 1998 James Lawrence, Contemporary Visual Arts, October, 1999 |
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