In Conversation with Sherman Mern Tat Sam

Robert Spragg: I won't ask you to begin at the beginning, but maybe it would be interesting to begin describing your studio, could you describe your working environment and perhaps your working method? 

 

Sherman Mern Tat Sam: Oh that's a good question, it's an easy question to start off with. As you can see, it is all open plan here. Kitchen becomes office becomes dining becomes studio. I wonder whether that’s changed a lot now, whether artists don't live where they work anymore. Most of my friends have their studios outside of their homes, so I frequently describe myself as an ‘old-fashioned living room painter’. I imagine that in another era artists would have lived where they work. When I was looking for my place, what I really wanted was an L.A. style loft, as I went to art school in L.A. and this house is a kind of very nice combination of being a house and a loft… 

 

*At this point Sam walks to the kitchen to check on the rice he is preparing as part of lunch. 

 

...so I can cook lunch and work simultaneously! Frequently I watch Television whilst I am working, but the reason it works for me, is that I'm not a person who can go to an office and labour for hours. I have friends who need to go somewhere, and work eight hours like going to an office. I'm very disorganised so no two days are actually the same, every day I do the same things, but these things never happen at the same time. So there's a kind of fluidity to how things work. Maybe we can say that there is sense of fluidity to my work too. What was the second part of your question? 

 

 

 

RS: The part about your general method, which is a broad question I know. 

 

SMTS: Well, they are oil paintings on panel, I make the panels in the summer, and what determines the shape of the panel is what happened the previous year. So, for instance, three or four years ago the panels started to get narrower and taller.

 

When I showed with Annka Kultys gallery (in 2016), they were sort of what you think of as my work, ‘small to tiny’. At that point I thought ‘wait a minute’, is it possible to make larger things? I had some bigger works that I was wrestling with for some years, and I knew the next show would be in a larger space. So I tried to think about making/finishing bigger things.

 

The funny thing is about all that, is that it takes so long for me to make my work, even though I made bigger panels, those panels never went to that show. And after I showed in that bigger space, Ceysson Beneitere (in 2018), I realised I didn’t need to make bigger work. So the summer after that I made smaller panels. I was dreaming of a show of small paintings again. In truth, the time it takes to finish the work is so long that what gets shown is often a mix in terms of time frames.

 

So I start with the panels, I saw the wood down, make stretchers, prime them. I guess you can say that how a painting begins is with the shape of the panel.  How I start a painting is usually with a gesture of some sort, and that’s different with every group of works. When I was first starting to make this work they were turpentine washes, usually ochre. These washes followed certain gestures or patterns. They would sort of dribble or merge over the surface, and that would be the beginning point of the painting. More recently, it’s just paint applied directly to a flat white surface.

 

So two paintings in the gallery Must have it painted black (2019) and Ne regrette rien (2020) have these orange corners. These were literally the beginning of this group of paintings. As you can see there are still a few hanging around in the studio with those corners…err progress is slow! Ha!

 

Every group has a different beginning point, and eventually the next action that comes about is inspired or a response to the first action. Sometimes they even lead to moves in earlier paintings, so there’s a kind of fluidity between different groups of works. There are a couple of paintings where there are accumulations of different beginning points. A friend of mine was saying to me that one of the things that he liked about my work, is that each group looks so different, but they all look like my work. I said that the reason is that I don’t know what I’m doing. I was sort of kidding but what I mean is that I don’t have a programme. There isn’t an end point I have in mind when I start, and I don’t necessarily have a fixed method.

 

RS: Which funnily leads onto the next question, as we are talking on the occasion of your inclusion in the exhibition after image at MAMOTH, which explores contemporary notions around the production of images as such, often inspired by source material taken from digital sources, but actually what I like about your inclusion, which was key for me, is how there is a resistance with your inclusion, with previous conversations we've had, you’ve talked at length about how you never consider the image in a formal sense, but also more generally you don't have images in mind before, during or after making a painting, could you expand on this? 

 

SMTS: Well to me an image is like a picture, and I think of English painting as picture making. Barry Schwabsky will say 'Oh picture making’ as if like, Sherman you're making this up, but there are distinctly painters who make pictures. So everything within the rectangle is within its own pictorial logic, whereas I like to think I am making paintings. The painting is an object. And I’m not saying they are not images, but they are not intentional. And they are not discernible things, or at most suggestive. But you know, lets say in that painting there [points to a painting in progress in the studio] you do see blue shapes, orange shapes and you do start to make interpretations of the shapes, lets say the number seven or noses, orange fruits, blah blah blah, so a trace of an image happens, but I’m interested in making objects that are paintings, rather than making pictures. As a distinct difference to 99% of what’s going on today. We are in a very narrative, image-making moment. Consider this a resistance. 

 

RS: Yeah, I mean perhaps resistance is too strong a word, perhaps it more something about it simply being in dialogue with. Less of a contended position.

 

SMTS: Well, its not like I am saying "stop making images", or "stop painting picture, you idiots!" 

 

RS: Well, exactly, as for me its part of the same conversation. 

 

SMTS: It's a very slippery ground, but coming back to that idea of 'after image' it is possible to say that some abstraction looks like other abstraction. I believe today it’s very difficult for a painter to make an original painting, and this is why I like painting. The moment that you put paint on a surface, it automatically has history. Or carries history. My problem is that a lot of painters seem to think they are doing something original, and seem to think they are painting without history, which is almost impossible. The beauty of painting is that it has history, a lot of art making today seems to work in a kind of continual present as if its history-less and just documents or comments on the present. but in the sense of ‘after image’, I guess you could say that there is an after image of other abstraction. I say this with a question mark. 

 

RS: I mean a kind of the play on it, without labouring the point, It’s not ‘post pictorial’, but ‘post’ something, coming about as the result of something that has come before, a type of painting that acknowledges art history and its lineage, but it can also talk about an individual's source material, as much as it can talk about motifs coming through in the work, and that following on as you say in a legacy of art history generally, or your own vocabulary. 

 

SMTS: Well that's a good distinction, as there are artists who work with source material, and there are artists who work with inspirations, so the idea of source material to me is quotation [in the case of after image], and I don’t think I quote people. I do have jokes in them, sometimes, but they’re very obscure. The point is that if you quoting someone, we, the viewer, are supposed to recognise it.

 

RS: It’s a citation. 

 

SMTS: Exactly, and that is very post modern, although the idea of reference or quotation have existed for much longer, think of Manet’s references to Velazquez for example. When I was a student Post Modernism was the big movement in its broadest sense. I don’t think I’m a Post Modern artist, in the sense that I don’t think I'm quoting people, but as I have said before if you're a painter, I don't think you can paint without history, there are always connections and references, rather than quotations. But if you look at a painter like Jonathan Lasker it’s not quite a quotation, but he does step back, or step sideways, so that you see his abstraction as abstract, but also as something else. Which is what makes his painting very interesting in that moment of time. 

 

RS: This is more of an observation by way of question, because people have written about the idea of elements from outside the frame, coming into the frame of your work, symbols, shapes etc. But I was thinking that in the reverse there is something nice or a question to be asked, about elements of the painting coming out of the frame and falling onto other paintings, a sort of reciprocated relationship between the paintings, what do you think about that? 

 

SMTS: Well, it’s like what I was saying about cross-pollination.  I think there’s a kind of a cross pollination over time in my work. What I mean is that elements from different points in time spur on, or inspire, fresh actions in older works. I tend to think of the paintings as sealed within themselves, but other people have said to me that they see them as if there’s more space, more going on, outside. Like the painting just captures a certain thing. It goes back to this same idea about how you “read” a painting. Is that what you’re talking about? 

 

RS: Of course, and the second part of that question again is more of an observation, about how a form in one of your paintings can be cut off, like a photocopy, so sometimes it looks like there’s action that could be continuing outside of the frame, as if its resistant to the surface. 

 

SMTS: It’s possible. Is this part of your after image idea? I don't see them that way, but I also don't object to you seeing that in them. Partly how I talk about my work, is to resist the idea, or an idea, that to say that you are open to interpret my work as you like. We live in a time when artists will say 'this is what my work does' and that’s it. I mean it’s work, right? The joy of art is that it can be many, many different things. In my mind all of them [the paintings] end at the edge of the frame, there’s nothing beyond that, but in my mind, they're also all bits of paint stuck on a surface. They might stick on that line between being bits of paint, being gestures, and being something else, whatever that is. That is part of their joy. 

 

*Sam again rushes off to stir lunch. 

 

 

RS: Is it interesting to consider the time between each brushstroke as constructive time in your practice? A time of observation, attentiveness, slowness, a time for a real engagement with the senses, it feels like a constant dialogue between this pronounced contemplative time and the condensed time which marks when you paint? 

 

SMTS: Yes and no, but it’s not as scholarly, or studious, or workmanly as you think. Mostly my brain is trying to not concentrate on those things. I see a painting and a problem, I see something and I wanted to move it on, but I don't know how to move it on, so instead I watch a football match, read the newspaper, television, etc.… it’s like a 'not focusing’, let’s call it a ‘non focused, focus'. I probably could work faster, but one of the things I realised about moving slowly, is that my hands and my mind have minds of their own. Whatever I'm thinking or imagining, and whatever my hand paints are never the same thing. It never comes out like my mind imagines it.  I guess I could go and repaint it as my mind sees it, err… That would maybe be 20 takes before I get it right, but instead I just wait, and the waiting allows me to, 1. Imagine other possibilities, and 2. Get used to what my hand actually did. Most of the time it’s actually in getting used to what my hand did that opens up other possibilities for the painting. I will put it in a much more prosaic way, say I am a painting a still life, or I’m painting a hand, and I imagine how the hand should be painted. I get it wrong, so I fix it, instead of getting used to how I painted the hand in the first place. Something like that happens, I get used to the action that occurred and then maybe some other possibility that I had not thought of in the first place can happen. Maybe I was thinking of it entirely incorrectly, so there is now a new opening, a new possibility, and that’s the advantage of not rushing for me. 

 

RS: You mentioned something which I wish to press against, we've always talked about the idea of you listening to music and watching television, which having just read the most recent Warhol biography is so interesting as that’s such a key and constant thing in his painting practice, and I know that you talk about a sort of emptying out your mind, but at the same time I wonder if there is an allowance for the idea of what I think has an equivalence when a jogger starts running faster when there’s a key change in the music they are listening to, could you consciously think of a time when you have had that? Where music or television has had some kind of influence on your work? Whether formally or emotionally triggering? 

 

SMTS: You mean something on television spurs me on? 

 

RS: Or music, as I know we have talked about how music works to title you work... 

 

SMTS: Well actually, it is the other way round; I listen to music to find the titles. So, the use of music is very, very obtuse, sometimes I hear a piece of music on a commercial on TV, and I think 'oh that’s quite nice, and I will listen to the whole piece, and that will then bring me to the singer, but titling is a very, very weird thing. Like the smallest painting in the show, had been in my studio at least since 2007, and I remember as it was going to a show in Chicago, at the Suburban gallery, and when I finally came to finishing it, and titling it I used Chicago as the point of departure, so I was looking up Chicago music. I mean that was an unusual way, but they’re all unusual ways because they are all dependent on what that condition is, but that’s one that comes to mind. There are a few that have Lou Reed titles, but that happened to be the summer that Lou Reed died, so happened to be a time I was listening to Lou Reed music. 

 

RS: Perhaps time stamping is too strong a word, but you can tie something to a time frame, of a given moment? 

 

SMTS: Yes, but the timing is to do with a moment of naming, rather than a moment to do with painting. Because, there are still a few unnamed works in my studio, as they have never left for a show, or the image has never been sent to anyone. There are not many, just a couple, but that does happen. I’ll get round to them one day! 

 

RS: I suppose, with that kind of question, there could be a risk of romanticising. 

 

SMTS: Or over-interpreting? 

 

RS; There is that, but at the same time do you think, as I used the word staccato in the text for the show, I think of that in terms of your mark making. 

 

SMTS: That’s correct. There are “juddery” marks. 

 

RS: Which lends itself to musicality, could you talk about that a little bit? And I’m talking in the basic terms of applying a brush or paint to a surface. 

SMTS: Are you saying I'm a non-lyrical painter? [Laughs], I don't think of my paintings as being very lyrical. I suppose before we start, we should define what lyrical is, which to me would be sweeping but gentle, I suppose staccato could be right. There are abrupt transitions, is that right? 

 

 

RS: Yes, well staccato also affords a gap between, so again, around the note itself, so I’m also thinking how that relates more generally to your studio practice, so there will be times of dormancy around a painting, and then you will go back to it, so its also a metaphor for the way you paint? 

 

SMTS: Yes, that's correct, I think there’s a lot of starting and stopping, and then there’s abandoning. For example that 2007 painting we discussed earlier Got my mojo working (2020) and And after all that's been said and done (2020). It had been abandoned for many years, as I couldn’t work out a way to move it forward. So jumping around, starting and stopping is part of how the work comes to be. I sometimes think that’s also how we live our lives these days. We go to work, and we live our home lives, you know there’s a lot of starting and stopping, constantly interrupted by our telephones. On the other hand we could just see our lives as a state of constant fluidity, constantly changing from one role to another. 

 

RS: Which is a nice way to lead onto how Martin Herbert describes your practice “a steady accommodation to inevitable imperfection” 

 

SMTS: We’re very old friends so he knows me very well, I think that’s a nice way of putting it… “Inevitable imperfection” is a great phrase. Maybe even a slow slide into inevitable imperfection. As I said earlier it’s an idea of getting used to the mark my head makes, rather than imposing the idea in my mind, or the image in my mind on the mark making. I think a good artist recognises their own inabilities, and either works with them or works against them in the right way. I’m never going to be a beautiful figurative painter, I don't have it in me, so I paint this way, but painting this way is the result of many, many years of figuring it out, changing, evolving. The paintings are evolving. I think they're sparer, they might be faster as well. 

 

RS: I wanted to ask you about that, because you have touched upon how in some cases the paintings are becoming narrower, maybe you could talk about that? And where your practice currently is with its focus? And for me the visible, I suppose, development of your work? There’s a couple of questions in there...maybe first start with this point about the shape...? 

 

SMTS: Well, I think that’s changing too, as they’re going to get less narrow and I think become squatter again. Let me show you the new children... * Sam stands up and moves towards a suite of new panels. The reason for this shape is because of this painting [gestures to a work on the wall, in which he just hung on the studio wall]. It’s been in the studio for a while. Maybe the other shapes were a bit taller so, with this piece, I was a bit stuck. It is the most square-ish panel I have made. This year I started to see a way to move this painting forward, so then I got all excited about these squarish shapes. So I made a few more, [pointing to two new panels], these are the same proportions as that one. So I think the panels may be becoming squatter. I don't think of the work as a linear progression. Let’s say there are ebbs and flows. I don't even know if my work is progressing, I think some people prefer some periods in my work, but for me the work determines the work. I can’t say 'oh you know I want to paint like ten years ago' I don't even know how I did that. I did say somewhere that, when my paintings started to get narrower, the squatter ones began to look very strange to me - the ones in progress not the finished pieces. Partly, that’s what led to the solution of that 2007 painting [in ‘after image’], Got my mojo working, (2020), because I just cut it in half, which moved it on, very very quickly. I don't often cut my paintings, it’s a pain in the ass, but the narrowness of the more recent work meant that I started to see the other paintings in progress quite differently. Now they are becoming squatter again, so I wonder if in a years time I will look at all these narrow canvases and think they should be wide… [Laughs]  

 

 

RS: Could you talk a little bit about these examples? [Pointing to two works in progress] 

 

SMTS: I call them the “blue noses” [points at the blue shapes]. 

 

RS: They markedly stand out. 

 

SMTS: Well, you know, its a joke about/with my friend Clive.  I have two groups of works that started with little jokes inspired by him, he has paintings where he writes numbers. Last summer, for example, he wrote the number 1, then a slash or line, then the number 2. So I asked why they can’t start with a number 3, or why does it have to be sequential. So then I thought for this painting… 'Two bananas, three bananas, four’ and so on...[This is a lyric from the Banana Splits song.. for those of you old enough to remember…] These half circular orange coloured shapes could be construed as oranges, hence the silly song. The bottom [pointing to two red forms and one grey shape] was meant to be four red drops, but I got to two and I thought, 'oh well, I will think about it' 

 

*Sam goes off to get more paintings to use as examples. 

 

So, the “noses” came from this painting. I had painted these shapes, which I think of as ‘7’s [number sevens], which I then to filled in. They kind of suggest this nose-like shape. The other person I think of in this context is Rene Daniels.  There’s a repetition of shapes or forms in his work. The paintings have nothing to do with him, but his idea of repeating the same image brings him to my mind.  

 

* Sam goes to fry some broccoli. 

 

RS: [shouted to Sam who is in the kitchen] I wanted to ask you about the idea of ‘pentimento’ in relation to your painting, where you can see a form or image underneath the top surface, traditionally where there’s say an arm or head, which has been painted over. 

 

SMTS: My friend Tom says that all painting has history, you can’t erase the history of a painting, it always returns. I think that’s true, and I allow it to happen. I like to think that every thing that happens in the making of my painting is visible. From the panel to the priming, you can see the structure from the side. The history of actions across its surface is another part of this process. 

 

RS: You actively encourage it, rather than discourage? 

 

SMTS: Well, yes, whatever happens, happens... the paint was thicker in the past, so the pentimento was more obvious. Today the paint is thinner, but there are more glaze-like layers. 

 

RS: Can you talk a little bit more about your relationship to when a painting is finished, and to how you appraise something as complete? Have you had to work on that, or is that something you have always felt comfortable with? 

SMTS: The answer I always give is 'when it has the right amount of rightness, and right amount of wrongness' I suppose you're going to ask me what I mean by right and wrong? 

 

RS: No… [Both laugh at the same time] but you can answer anyway...what were you going to say? 

 

SMTS: I would have to think about it. But then we’d have to discuss right and wrong... and that moral discussion would most certainly lead us astray.. [Laughs]

 

RS: You’ll utilise technology when it can be of use, you're not making painting that’s commentating on the circulation of imagery... 

 

SMTS: Exactly! I am not a post internet artist, in that, I don't make work about the internet, or after the internet. But I do use the internet as a tool for research. But I think in 100 years, people might look at my work and go 'oh yeah, well, that’s so obviously about the internet, the ear painting is about Jesus... that much I know’ [laughs], but in a 100 years, if a Christian says 'that’s so Christian' fine, that’s his or her opinion. 

 

RS: I wanted to ask you, to what degree if any, does the digital condition influence your work? 

 

SMTS: Let’s go back one step to the question about finishing a work, sometimes I don't know if I finish a work, I just take it to a point where I can’t move it further. What I do is set it aside, and come back to it, look at it over a period of time, let it go out to a show, and then see how I feel. It sounds a very arbitrary thing, in comparison to, say, my friend Will who says he starts at the top left hand corner and when he gets to the bottom right hand corner he's done. There are those types of artists, I’m not that kind of artist, where there’s a point. I think, ok, it has, as I say 'the right amount of rightness, and the right amount of wrongness’ then it can go into the world.  Regarding the digital - I don't think of it being a direct influence. There’s isn't a quotation, take the staccato marks, or the squarish dot, which is basically the shape of the paint brush, when I started making those, they made me think of two things, Lego and you know when an image on the internet is coming into focus, when it’s pixelated. I like pixelated images, it’s like an out of focus photograph, they are the polaroids of today. Maybe that’s why I like my old Nokia. And that’s what it made me think of, but I can’t say I do those marks because of those two things, the thinking of them came about at the same time. Like most people today, I have a digital life. I have email, I don't do social media so I don't know what that means, or what that says about my work. I know I exist on social media. What I frequently say is that we live in a very speedy world, the internet is part of that speed, what I make is very slow painting. So when you need to digitally detox you need my paintings. So they could be construed as ‘anti’, but ‘anti’ assumes the existence of the other. I don't use the internet directly for making painting, but it is a good research tool. Recently I discovered a Japanese 1950's painter, from an email and then via the internet. Its not like just because I use 15th century technology, doesn't mean I’m an anti-technology person, like a luddite. I just don't want technology on me all the time. I'll do internet dating, so that’s 21st century, right? 

 

RS: What a way to end![laughs], no, I have a simple question to end on, what do you see next for your work? Moving forward? 

 

SMTS: I don’t know, but I don't know even on a day-to-day basis what will happen next with the work. It is always open, there are always many many possibilities in each work, you should address the question to the paintings not to me, because it’s the paintings that take me there, I don't take it there. 

 

*And with that, lunch is ready and they begin eating.  

 

A selection of paintings by Sherman Mern Tat Sam was on display as part of after image at MAMOTH. The exhibition brought together twelve UK based artists, whose work is informed by and in some cases visually examines the circulation of images in painting. To view the exhibition, click  ➞  after image  

 

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