![]() I’m always after the perfect exquisite mark. It’s a celebration of the hand and its connection to the brain, just as the larger drawings use the wrist, the arm, and the body to make them. Drawing and handwriting are things a contemporary audience isn’t used to anymore. The human hand is capable of extraordinarily delicate maneuvers. The intimacy one gets when peering at a small drawing and entering the delicate world of the artist is very special. HKIs that something you’ve done on other pictures? On two versions it’s black, the only black in the paintings. HKThere’s a horizontal band in the image. I liked the obsessive nature of the reproduction. I couldn’t say all I wanted in one painting, so I made three. I loved that exhibition-that dialogue with his studio, in his studio. My three paintings did not have the benefit of his expert supervision so things all got a bit strange. My paintings are based on a portrait of Rembrandt, though almost certainly not by Rembrandt-a student of Rembrandt probably made the painting in the studio with Rembrandt’s supervision. GBThese three paintings were made for a show at the Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam in 2017. HKIt looks like sometimes you work on several versions or variations of a single image? GBIt’s good not to be too conscious of all the decisions one’s brain makes, to let the subconscious make some of the decisions and to let the spirit of dead artists flow through me. HKThere has to be something pleasing and surprising about seeing a thing that somehow exceeds the structure you created or your deliberate intentions in making it. In that way I presume it’s a bit like creating a character in one of your novels. One small brushstroke and then it’s immediately clear that the painting has a life of its own. The painting starts to talk back to me to tell me what to do-that’s when it surprises me. There is a point in painting when a work gets a certain attitude, one that is slightly separate from mine-that’s when it comes alive. GBAll I can say is that this painting doesn’t have enough life yet. HKCould you tell me more about how you know a work isn’t finished? Is there a set of procedures that you want to do to that picture in order to finish it, or is it more in the nature of problem solving? ![]() Then maybe I might figure out what’s wrong with them. I like to have paintings fester a bit before coming back to them, sometimes for years. I want to be an eternal student, always learning. I suppose I’m trying to make art for our man-made world, for a deconstructed audience. This world we live in is so man-made, nature has been banished to the land of kitsch, whether we like it or not. I sometimes think of myself as standing behind them whilst working, asking, “Why did you do that?” “What does this work do?” “What would happen if you used a different palette, like this Turner painting, or Kirchner, or Baselitz?” I have a constant chatter of ideas from throughout the history of art. There’s a long tradition of artists sitting in front of a model, a sitter, a landscape, or a still life, and painting or drawing. ![]() I don’t like a blank canvas or a blank sheet of paper, I want context. I’m using the frame as a readymade, and the images I use as a starting point. Glenn BrownYes, I’m using preexisting images to go into preexisting frames. It’s interesting to me that visually you always start with something, like a preexisting frame or source material. ![]() Hari KunzruYour work always has some kind of context or response it jumps off from something else.
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