Clive Hodgson in Conversation with Sherman Sam

Clive Hodgson: Have you seen these before? 

 

Sherman Sam: No. Actually, I think you made these while I was away. I was thinking about your work earlier, and you know how you always say that sometimes you add, and other times you subtract. It occurred to me that maybe a better way to speak about it is that some are more organised and others more chaotic. Like that one seems organised, tidier, and these are wilder. 

 

CH: Well, something else that comes into it is that some of the paintings are more ‘allover’ and some of them have a more obvious central structure or a structure or at least. [points to the large 2014 painting] That’s an example of one extreme, with a sort of ‘pseudo’ image, but the other extreme will be an even more ‘allover’ than those over there are. They [points to the three smaller 2020-2021 paintings] are a bit hybrid. In a way, they've got quite a lot of drawing in but I think I was wanting it to be a bit more painting as well. But actually, the phase after these is more painting and less drawing (if we can speak in these terms). 

 

SS: Another way your paintings are organised is that if I was to divide up a work, there's a name, a date, usually a central element, then finally there's some painting effect. 

 

 

 

CH: A central element? You mean, like diagonals. [points to the large 2017 painting] 

 

SS: Yes, or in this case, there's geometry. [points to the large 2014 painting] 

 

CH: If you're working with rectangles, as you know, there's a kind of invitation to symmetry all the time with a painting. And because there's diagonals across the middle, they create sort of cardinal points in a rectangle. I think that sometimes I go with that, and then, maybe, with the more allover ones I avoid that specific symmetry. So, these [points to the three smaller 2021 paintings] may also be a bit hybrid, they want a bit of both. I mean, these follow the series of paintings where I was just working with a very plain composition. There aren't any here except that one, which is 1,2,3. They were basically quite flat paintings just with numbers in. One, two, with a division. And, as I tend to work in sort of groups more or less, after a while of doing empty paintings, I felt like doing something where there was more business going on. So, these ones were with more ‘business’. [points again to the three 2021 paintings] 

 

SS: Out of curiosity, do you expect me to see the numbers from the top down, 1,2,3? Or look from left to right, that's the implication isn't it from the top down, left to right? 

 

CH: There's a kind of mixture in it because there's divided in the middle as well. So, symmetrical up and down but then there is…you know, there's a reference to three things rather than two things. It's not very coherence strategically. I mean, that's classic awkwardness. 

 

SS: Ha... Classic Clive! 

 

CH: There are mixed messages, but there was something about having the numbers in there that don’t really do anything, which is a little bit equivalent to the way that nothing else is specifically doing anything, including the name. I think just the act of having numbers in the painting is attractive to me.  I'm looking for an excuse to have them in, but I don't have a very good reason to put them in. Really, it's kind of arbitrary. That one has got 14 in it, which is quite a nice kind of number, and it echoes the date. [points to the large 2014 painting]  

 

SS: On that 2014 painting are there also other 14s, say like 14 brushstrokes. 

 

 

CH: No, it's not logical like that. I don't remember counting anything. I just put 14. I mean, the date is arbitrary “14” of 2014. 

SS: Well, for all we know, those dates could be false. I mean we assume it's the true, but you could be making dates up. 

 

CH: That’s my right to make up everything.Do you want to go and look in the other space? [They move to the next room] Yes, this is a very beautiful thing! [points to large 2017 painting] 

 

SS: Agreed. It's very good. 

 

CH: I think that's a compliment. Is that because they are not so garish as you thought they are, it’s a bit like Piero della Francesca? Is that what you mean?

 

SS: I've heard of him. He does straight lines. Do you think about color? if you make a choice like in this painting. Green, pink, blue, yellow, do you think about it first? [Gestures to another 2017 painting] 

 

 

 

 

CH: Well, I sit in my studio looking at the empty canvases, and I kind of project at them some idea of what I want. But when it comes to it, in the end, I often get up and act quite impulsively. It’s because I'm so hesitant, I have to overcome it with some kind of urgent action. So, I've thought about it and planned it in my head, but acting is different. In this case, probably I started with a blue square, and then did another blue square-rectangle. Then, and you know this very well, each action that you take in a painting requires you to think more, even more carefully about the next action. The options are closing down very, very rapidly. 

 

SS: Particularly in your case. 

 

CH: Well, yeah. I think that, no matter how you're working, the more things you do, the more dangerous it is that it's just a kind of crusty, overcrowded, cluttered mess. So, it's very high stakes. You know, the first action is very, very high stakes. I mean, I'm serious! I prepare the canvases with quite fastidious care, you do with your boards as well, I want them to be already a thing and then all the first things I put on, I want to enhance this very beautiful thing that's already there, which is the white of the canvas. There's a need to add something which is not going to be a horrible mess. It could so very easily spiral out of control. Although it looks as though it's done quickly, it might have taken, for example, several different days where I've left it alone. You think that's extremely fast, don’t you? That's 10 years for you to figure, because your brain works more slowly... [laughs] 

 

SS: It's possible. I mean, there are lots of things to do in a day. And that’s before you can get around to painting.. [laughs] 

 

CH: Yeah, so.. there is a timescale involved, even though it looks as though it was kind of instantaneous. We've talked about it being like a game of chess, when you make a move; you have to consider very carefully what the next move is, because there are consequences. Say, there are two things going on. The third thing has much more complex relationships to deal with than the second thing, you know, it becomes very, very critical. Then even the point of writing the name on it is quite challenging. At some point. I do that not necessarily, but often towards the end. Even that is very, very high risk because once I put it on, I can't get it off without consequences. If you want to take it off or move it, you leave a mess or a mark. 

SS: Have you ever done that? 

 

CH: Yeah, many, many times. You try to paint it out with white, but then the white shows that you've been fussing over it. And you know, it's just a real problem. 

 

SS: That one looks like, you made the mess, but you master it with the splatters before you paint your name. [Again, refers to 2017 painting] 

 

 CH: Yeah, exactly. Well, the thing is also that I don't really like my work to smell of labor or look like there's too much labor. Even if things have taken quite a long time, I don't want to look as though the painting is claiming any virtue for being done with a lot of hard work. 

 

SS: Those two look like pictures within pictures, or a picture within a painting. It looks like it's cut out a hole. [pointing to two smaller paintings from 2017 and 2016.] 

 

CH: Yeah, I can see that more with that one and that one. But then what?

 

SS: Well, it's different from your other work. Or at least different from all the other paintings here. The way they are laid out.

 

CH: Well, I don't know. I mean, when I painted the black square on that, it was a similar kind of action in terms of painting as the first blue rectangle in the ‘loose’ one, it’s just I used masking tape at the edge, so it comes out kind of crispy and neat. But there's a similar kind of problem with having made a black square there which is already quite a commanding presence. I was tempted to leave it. Yeah. But then the question is, what else could I do which doesn't completely detract from or negate the black square. That next act has to marry it, marry up with it, or somehow relate to it... So, the stuff in a way around it is a bit like marginalia on a text. It is not completely invading the black square. What this signifies is not clear to me!

 

SS: Well, instead of it being signification, maybe it's more compositional reflex.  Can I say that?

 

CH: Yes, I think that it's like that. Also in that particular painting, if you if you look at it through the lens of a sort of figuration, you can easily get a sense of illusion. There's a hint of cross hatching, like the red, almost as if there's a shadow. The black square could be seen as casting a shadow. There's almost an idea with those white speckles of a kind of light that's affecting the black square. So, the black square then has a kind of slight aura, and also a slight shadow. And there's also a little smear-mark on the top right corner, which is like a tonal gradation. So, there's a hint of reference to certain things that are present in figurative painting, but it is disassembled and dispersed and doesn’t function any more as figurative.

 

SS: Well, that's what I've always thought about your work is that it speaks about the language of painting, but it isolates the elements. Then you’re just left with, what I call, effects.

 

CH: Yeah, they can still exist as effects. They don't properly fulfil that expected function. I mean, that perspectival thing, which I don't do very often, creates a slightly illusionistic and familiar situation. [points at the 2017 painting with a “brick”-like rectangle ] There is also what people used to call shading, you know, tonal change through a three-dimensional object. It maybe has a sort of suggestion of sky or atmosphere, as a counterpoint to a solid object. That is also a slightly figurative play... But clearly, it's not a picture of anything. I know that you will say it is a bungalow in the sky. [laughs]But it's not. You have to just take it.

 

 SS: This, this one makes me think of Chinese paintings. 

 

 

 

CH: Does it? How? Why? 

 

SS: Don’t those black gestures on the bottom right suggest nature to you? Black lines like tress or branches... 

 

CH: I don't think of it as a tree.Actually, what that thing that comes from is that, ages ago, I saw a manuscript by Fra Angelico, illustrated on a page of parchment in a text. The image was very beautiful, but the text was also very beautiful. Outside of the image and the text on the sheet, there were marks on the side where he'd tried out the brush and tried out the colours. There was a kind of line of little marks down the side. And they were incredibly beautiful, these little marks where he was just trying out the brush and trying the consistency of the paint. It was like a completely non-functional, parallel, no, not a parallel but a sort of appendix to the text, outside of the text. I found it very, very interesting. So, there's a bit of that here in the sense of it being like marginalia or even out beyond the marginalia, just a trying out of elements. 

 

SS: Were there others paintings like with a blank square in the middle? ….Sometimes you work in groups. 

 

CH: I wonder in what sense is that square in the middle blank? It is also full up. There are other paintings using a ‘flat’ area and also the idea of trying out a mark, just to see what it looks like, that's definitely repeated. A lot of it ultimately has to be impulsive, as I said, and is rather unpredictable. I have the brush loaded with paint and I think you know what’s going to happen, but actually it turns out different. I have to try it out and I want it to look great and beautiful, but a lot of the it is merely stupid and doesn’t have that kind of instant effect. No pleasure. 

 

SS: So, one action leads to another, one action determines the next or suggests the next action. 

 

CH: I think so, yes, like a game in which the situation changes and demands a new move.   The next move requires reflection, and usually, as I said there are quite long gaps between the moves… I don't do them all in a flurry.  That is your strategy too, but more extreme – you wait for ages. I’m relatively impatient.

 

 

 

Sherman Sam: we talked about the “how” up in the gallery. Maybe let's try to talk about the “why.” the question I want to ask you earlier is do you find your painting pleasurable? 

 

Clive Hodgson: Do I find them pleasurable? yes, when I've done them and I like them I do get pleasure from them. But when I’m doing it, I find it quite painful because I'm never completely sure what I’m doing and also they go wrong in horrible ways so I have to try to rescue them and start again. 

 

SS: So, when you say ‘it goes wrong’, does it mean that you have a picture in your mind about what goes right? 

 

CH: I have ideas, more or less picture like, concerning structure or the process, the method; but ideas are very hard to pin down. They're at once rather fluid, and also precise and aiming at something. I can tell when I’m working whether it’s what I want. I try to be faithful to the idea. It’s just that I can't easily make it clear. So, it's a very amorphous thing, an idea for a painting and the process of making it apparent. I think I’m quite rigorous in trying to find a way of dealing with the vague idea. 

 

SS: Let's talk a bit more about that... do paintings have ideas? Do you think paintings are better when they don't have ideas? 

 

CH: Oh God, it depends what we mean by ideas. You can't make something without having some kind of strategy or aim, so I spend a large amount of time trying to figure out what the next painting or paintings might be like. And it's normally that I begin to feel that I've explored a certain territory enough and I need to change something...Or I've got a different kind of idea bubbling up but I can't quite pin down what it is. So, in a very stupid crude way, if I'd been painting black and white paintings for a few months, I guess it's likely that I would want to paint some coloured paintings. If I’m painting coloured shapes that were quite sharply defined I might want to paint some fluffy paintings.  I mean it's absurd and kind of silly sounding but if it's something along those lines... 

 

SS: Well, it's relational, maybe what I mean is that it’s related. It's a response to what had gone on before. 

 

CH: Exactly. Yes. Having a vague idea of another possible structure or action, let's say, and then trying to find a way of making that appear. That's not straightforward in fact. As you know as a painter.  Does that say anything? 

 

SS: Did we talk about pleasure already? 

 

CH: Yeah, I said that I get pleasure from when I've done them and I like them. When I have made a group of paintings, I keep them on the wall for quite a long time as a way of bouncing ideas around in my head. I look at them a lot. During that process if it turns out that I don't like them or I'm not sure about them, then I'll go back and try to sort them out. That can be disastrous. When they can go well, and stay well, I do keep them around and look at them and in a way, that is also sort of savouring of what what's there. I think it’s probably true that you never really do exactly what you want, but they more or less represent a certain position satisfactorily, and then I'm bound to find a slightly different position, or a reprise of a previous notion. 

 

SS: Upstairs there's a big span of time between those paintings, 2008 to 2021. In your mind, do you think your work has changed? 

 

CH:  I think there was a point at which I felt I'd become slightly more conscious of what I was doing – an illusion maybe, from ages ago. But the things from 2014, or thereabouts, are still part of the stuff I'm thinking about. Those ideas haven't gone in the bin. It is not a moment that has passed, or faded away. I can look at them now and it makes me think, well, there are still possibilities that I could work with in those paintings. They still seem ‘live’ to me, not dead. The ‘issues’ seem to be closely related, but constantly changing in relation to each other over quite a period of time. 

 

SS: I'm not saying that they're dead. I'm just wondering if you think your approach or your thinking has changed since the earliest work in that show? 

 

CH: No, I think it’s just looking at things from a different point of view. You know, there's a good image in Proust of a church in a village. He sees this church from very many different angles as he's riding through the countryside. It's as if there's no specific version of this thing. It echoes that for me, there's a central area, which I think is sort of defined that I am moving around, in, or at the edges of... 

 

SS: And what do we call that area of painting? 

 

CH: What painting is for me, I guess. But I wouldn't call it painting for everybody else. It is quite a specific personal thing that has to respond to some very mysterious urges or needs, certainly for me it is related to the pleasure in the visual, the pleasure of sight and seeing. And you can't get to the bottom of what that is, that's too deep and too strange. 

 

SS: How do you see your painting in the context of other painting that's going on at the moment? And I mean, when I say at the moment, let's think of it in a broad way, rather than in this specific moment, which is trending towards a figurative, wibbly wobbly, figuration. 

 

CH: That's a very difficult question. I don't know, I don't feel sufficiently well informed about what painting is going on today. I mean, I know I look at it a lot, I even look at it a lot with you.When I look at paintings, other people’s paintings, I look at them in terms of what I can take from them, rather than thinking of them as being something to accept or reject. So, I might accept a small part of a painting that I think is horrible, because there might be something in it for me. I'm sort of absorbing whatever I can from whatever I'm looking at. And I think that generally speaking, one has the feeling that there is a territory that we want to explore and not exactly to defend, but to make apparent.I might be so contrary that if there was lots of painting like mine around, I would not want to do that kind of painting any more. It is hard to tell to what extent we work in opposition to something or in agreement with something. 

 

SS: What you’re saying always makes me think that serious, serious painters are quite contrary types. 

 

CH: Yeah, it's a worrying thought that one is motivated by something negative. I think at the base, there is something to do with making paintings shine with something quite deep that comes from pleasure or other things that you have an instinct for. There are also things that tend to fall into my mind without necessarily being prompted by current painting. I mean, it might be in my case ...numbers on a wall or something. There's a lot of things out in the world!... It's difficult to know whether I see them because I’m thinking about something that is like that, in terms of painting, or whether I see them and then I think, oh, that's interesting. I could use it in painting. I suspect it's more that I’m thinking about ideas in painting. And because of what I’m thinking about, my eyes are picking out things in the world that resonate. So, that was not strictly an answer to the question, but we can gloss over that. 

 

SS: Well, I'll rewrite the question so that it sounds like you answered it very well. Finally, Just going to ask you about being English. 

 

CH: English? 

 

SS: Yes, whether being from here informs you as an artist. So not an idea of Englishness, but maybe upbringing or when you studied in the time you studied.

 

CH: It's very difficult to answer because you can't pitch up in another place to find out what it’s like coming from that place, you'd have to have some kind of position outside of it. I don't know. I was encouraged by my mother - she could see the point of it.  My father didn't like it very much at all. He thought I was odd, and difficult, neurotic. Actually, he feared (because of art?) that I was neurotic, gay, on drugs and a communist. None of those things he liked. 

 

SS: Because you wanted to go to the art school? 

 

CH: Yeah, I think it worried him that I would be a flaky character... going into a flakey world. But you know, that doesn't explain anything about why I was interested in it, it's really difficult and whether that's got anything to do with the Englishness. When I think about painting, when I talk to you and other people about painting, it seems more that there's a kind of solidarity of people who are interested in painting that is trans-national. And to what extent one's own disposition is conditioned by some kind of national psyche - that's very difficult to know. You know, I don't know whether you are typical Singaporean, or whether that affects your work. It is really difficult to determine.  I think it is true, strangely enough, that American painting has a slightly different character to French painting.  Maybe German painting as well, and so probably English painting does too...I can’t demonstrate it. It's hard for me to see what those characteristics are. And I would be very hard pressed to say really what it is that is characteristic of French painting. Or even American painting.  I mean, people have put those things into words better than I could. 

 

SS: I think the idea of English painting is harder to find, I think the French school and the German schools have been around, have more apparent characteristics.

 

CH: If you were thinking in terms of schools of thought, there is such a thing as English skepticism...I believe. I would identify with that as a person who has interest in challenging, questioning my own assumptions about something, in so far as I can.  I'd like to be, and I am, skeptical about quite a lot of things.

 

SS: You're even skeptical about your own painting... sometimes. 

 

CH: Well, that's a real problem. That's a real crisis. And it's a constant crisis. Whether I feel as though I’m able to make a statement… It’s a big question.

 

SS: Well, I think it's very hard to make a statement and make a splash of painting. No pun intended. 

 

CH: Well, even if you don't want to make a splash if you just want to make an utterance, you find that you're presupposing quite a lot of things. Like, should it be a rectangle? Why work on Canvas? You know, I mean, there are countless little things that in total add up to a sort of assumed position. For a skeptical person, my work is extremely monotonous... and maybe repetitive.

 

SS: But actually, you make other things besides abstract painting, I mean you make bread. You also make objects, and you paint still lifes.

 

CH: I have done some still life is true. That's Yeah. What does that signify?

 

SS: Skepticism. Monotony.

 

CH: I see. I mean, there have been moments where I found it's so difficult to make the next painting that I'm so stuck and so despairing that I felt as though I needed to give myself a task.  I sat glumly looking at my coffee cup for hours, and not having a thought about what to do, so I did start to make these still lives, often of coffee cups. They were a response to a kind of void, needing something to try to hit against, fight against, or with. And I mean, it's true that there's something about the still lifes that I find interesting, but I've not really succeeded in figuring out what it is. And I don't know whether I should or shouldn't do that. I mean, that's definitely a territory where I experience fear and dread and skepticism.

 

SS: horror.

 

CH: horror. Yeah. And a lot of them have been so horrible. You can't believe. They've gone and nobody will see them, Oh, my God, as they say.  BUT some of them I find interesting. I liked painting them. I have a sort of romantic idea that I should be able to sit there calmly, and take some pleasure in the process of looking at these objects, and make a painting that was quite joyful and pleasant, nicely coloured and well crafted, and not all screwed up and neurotic. These things would be ‘alive’ and out there in the world for people to like and enjoy. But then the crisis kicks in again, because they go wrong, I fuss over things, it becomes very constipated. I hate them, it's like some kind of tedious pseudo - realism, it’s just appalling. But there's still a fantasy there, of something a bit like I might dream of being an impressionist or something, where I’m in the sunshine, making pleasant objects. That's something that's quite tempting. I can't settle down into working in a way that gives me that degree of pleasure. There's too much crisis. And maybe my dad was right, maybe I was neurotic, I am neurotic.

 

SS: Maybe that's why you have to paint.

 

CH: Therapy? That's a horrible thought. Yeah, I don't think it's therapy. I can't tell because I don't know about that.

 

SS: Maybe if you stopped painting, you would know become more neurotic.

 

CH: You know, I might become a murderer or something, probably better for everybody that I like to paint.

 

SS: On that note , time for a drink.