Sacha Newley: Blessed Curse
Man Protecting Child (detail) 2001 Pastel on paper 24 × 36” 610× 91cm
Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. W H Auden ‘In memory of W B Yeats’
Sacha Newley: Blessed Curse
Sacha Newley talks to artist and writer Harland Miller
HM Shall we talk about The Assassination of Victoria Beckham, which I like? SN The cop is completely marginalized and powerless to do anything. He looks on as Victoria is surrounded by the baying Paparazzi. I modeled for all the Paparazzi. I posed in my studio and photographed myself in various deranged poses – because for me the Paparazzi are like goblins. They’re a kind of hellish, Boschian upwelling of lost souls. HM Like the guys in The Cardplayers. SN Yes. The paps are like the modern equivalent of these guys, these seven sins, who I grouped around a card table playing poker. In fact, I think the two paintings could hang together. They have the same kind of energy: a grotesque, George Grosz, Berlin underworld feeling that I love. HM What about Artist and Model. Is that a follow on from The Sins? SN Absolutely. I painted myself holding hands with my personal shadow, my beast – to show that I’ve come to terms with it. This is a leave-taking picture but it’s also a picture about overcoming fear. The handholding was important because originally I thought my hand would be inside his. And then I decided I didn’t want my hand hidden, so I changed it around and it completely changes the message of the painting. Now the beast is there at my request, and I’m saying to him, ‘It’s alright, don’t be worried, don’t be afraid.’ So you can see he’s trying to get comfortable, but not quite succeeding. HM Maybe because you have the upper hand. What’s happening with his dick? SN It’s semi ‘on’ but it’s stuck, it’s sort of bent. I didn’t want to linger on the dick for too long because I didn’t want it to look too fussy. HM More of a Baconesque arrangement. SN Yes. It gets the attention it deserves – no more. HM What made you go from The Cardplayers to the individual heads of the sins? SN After I finished The Cardplayers I was doing a portrait of the American playwright, Israel Horovitz. He came to the studio for a sitting and saw The Cardplayers and loved it because it’s very theatrical. It was his suggestion to go in and do individual portraits of these guys. Then I really liked the idea of doing a second portrait of an imaginary being. They didn’t end up looking the same in the portraits as they did in the group painting because I wanted to slightly adapt them for effect. HM This one, Gluttony – he’s almost like a Star Trek character. SN Yes. I think this is the sin America is suffering from the most. I indulged my fetish for texture when I was painting him because I thought I should be a glutton. And then there is his mouth, where you can see the lips, but the mouth is torn at the edges. HM I see – the Glasgow smile. So he can cram more into his mouth. Gluttons are never happy are they, because they can never get enough, though your glutton has an imperious look. SN I think I was trying to describe the Glutton’s feeling of being in control. There’s a sense in which he owns the world, that he knows his own power. It’s a regal arrogance. You could argue that the biblical
sins are not really in play anymore and that they’ve been defanged – certainly in the West. We don’t consider lust to be particularly threatening any more. HM Unless you’re a politician I guess. I see you’ve got two versions of Anger. SN For passive and aggressive. The first one has the contempt of a Nazi dentist, with eyes like white dwarf stars, shrunken to little coals. When this one showed up in the studio I was so frightened, I couldn’t do any more; I just left it without color. The second one is more explicit, like road rage. It has a Peter Howson feeling. All these portraits were just channeled – there was no model. HM Sloth. This is the one that always gets to me. SN Yes. He’s really self-explanatory – sort of melting into his hands. And Jealousy. You’re really lucky if you’ve purged yourself of this one – it’s the worst. HM Do you suffer from all of these things like the rest of us do? SN You download it at birth. It’s the collective pain packet, the starter kit of sin we’re all given. Now this one, Guardian Angel, is like the angel trying to separate the man from his demon. And you see the man is possessed and so in love with his disease that he thinks it’s him. HM So have you struggled a fair bit with this – making a distinction between what’s you and what isn’t? SN Yes, a lot. I think just because there are voices in your head doesn’t necessarily mean they are yours. They could have been secreted or put there by somebody else. HM Do you think there’s anything to be said for evil in small doses? SN I think there’s a lot to be said for deformity…there’s a lot of energy in deformity. That’s why I find the Grotesque so fascinating, because it has this energy that was considered a threat to beauty. HM Tell me about Self-Portrait Carrying the Fat Lady. SN Fat Sue. She was from Bristol. Adopted at birth and grew up in terrible poverty in a house just off the railroad tracks with five brothers. When she came to work for us in 1970, I was 5 and my sister was seven. Sue was told that we needed to be brought into line. So she basically did what she was taught to do when growing up, which was to sit on me if I misbehaved. She weighed 240 pounds. HM When I saw the title Self Portrait Carrying the Fat Lady, I thought it was to do with death. You know, It’s not over ‘til the fat lady sings… SN Well it is to do with death and we’re all carrying the fat lady to a greater or lesser extent. The painting expresses the burden of the fat lady. You’ve got to know what’s you and what’s not you, and that the tremendous weight you carry is not necessarily yours. We carry burdens that have been given to us through our culture, relationships and so on and it’s not easy to let go of these, but it’s essential if you want to uncover the good stuff. HM But then – maybe you’d have nothing to paint about. Or is that too simplistic? SN Perhaps. I know artists who say ‘I don’t want to go into therapy because it’ll take my talent away.’ I say, OK then, take the talent away –
Guardian Angel 2008 Oil on wood panel 16 × 20” 41 × 51cm
go towards that fear because there might be something beyond that obsession with artistic creative talent. The Sufis say art is the last place the spirit stalls before enlightenment. HM I guess they mean the spirit mistakes art for enlightenment – I like that. But I was going to ask you what the route from making movies to making paintings was. When we first got to know each other I saw your movie Yvette. It had a waiter in it and there was something Pinteresque about it. SN Cinema needs what painters can bring to it. Look at Schnabel. HM And conversely, I think trying to tell a story through the medium of paint is extremely frustrating… capturing that frozen moment.
HM Hmmm. I like the idea of trying to do both – whether it works or not, I don’t know. Schnabel seemed like he was trying to do both – he was always expressing sentiment in that post-modern way, and for that he was often heavily criticized. SN Another interesting artist in this respect is Francesco Clemente. His world is very florid and emotionally high key. I don’t know how he makes it work but it does. Maybe only an Italian painter could do it. HM I like the sense of humor in Self Portrait with Myself as a Child. I think some of what’s funny about it probably comes from this whole idea of yours about the painting as being like a theatrical space or as you put it earlier – a conceit.
SN Certainly there’s an uneasy relationship between cinema and painting. Cinema has stolen a lot of voltage from painting. What’s the point of trying to do a history painting of a battle, for example? Painters have been left with the iconic, still moment. Even so, I’m always trying to achieve movement in my painting.
SN Well yes, I’ve made it look like the edge of a stage. The curtain’s swept aside and I’m pushing him/me forward. He’s reluctant to come forward but that’s the whole idea.
HM Very successfully I think. Do you think we get more from cinema than it gets from us?
SN Yes. The likeness is based on some photos I found of myself from1970, when I was about six. I’d become an anxious, withdrawn kid after my parent’s divorce. Before, I lived in a world of light – like something out of an F Scott Fitzgerald novel – in a huge house in Beverly Hills, with servants and dogs etc. Then my parents divorced and suddenly boom, I’m in London, in the middle of the garbage strike. So you can imagine going from the land of milk and honey to The Winter of Discontent.
SN Yes, I think that’s true now. But the serious painters have always seen through it. Bacon saw narrative as the great enemy of painting. He wanted the image to assault the nerves directly. HM Yet we relate every image we see to a story – but that’s the first principle of life isn’t it? SN Picasso said it’s not what you do but what you are that counts. With Bacon, the back-story of tortured sexuality is important to us. With Van Gogh, the madness. It’s important for the artist to create the myth to go along with the painting. HM Oh yeah, its hugely important. I mean we wouldn’t be affected by an image… our nerves wouldn’t be affected at all by sunflowers for instance if you didn’t know beforehand the guy who painted them was about to cut his ear off. SN Agreed. You can be technically advanced, but if you don’t have the story, your work is not going to connect. The story is a lens for the work… sometimes a distorting lens. HM What I like about your work – which is also something you don’t often see in accomplished work – is that you don’t at all flinch from trying to portray the sentimentality of a given subject, the romance of it or what’s at the heart of it. It reminds me a little of Dennis Potter in this way. SN I’m careful to avoid too much kitsch or sentiment because I’m from Vaudeville. My dad was a Vaudeville performer, a crowd pleaser. That said, I want to get some of this voltage back into painting that has gone the way of cinema and its tricks: the special effects and grand musical scores. Painting has been left in an arid, antiseptic space as a result and I think we need to add a little syrup. We shouldn’t be afraid of sweetness, and a desire to communicate directly and clarify. HM Hmmm – like nostalgia, like humor – these were always real no-no’s in our world, confirmation that you weren’t serious. And there is a certain amount of both these particular ‘No’s’ in your work. SN Well, yeah, it’s like burlesque, or theatre. You’ve got the proscenium arch, and I like to play with that element of presentation in painting. I like to play with the idea of the canvas as a window. It goes back to that Jackanory thing. HM Where the narrator blurs into the narration and so… the canvas, it isn’t like a physical object for you – is it? SN Absolutely not. I explored that when I was an abstract painter – building up heavy surfaces and seeing the whole painting as an artifact. But then I was drawn back to representation.
HM I had assumed that was you even though I didn’t know you then. Did you need a bit of coaxing out back then?
HM Actually, in my mind that winter didn’t differ that much from all the other winters back then; it’s just that, that year, they’d given it a name. Hockney went through a similar thing, but in reverse. He was brought up in Bradford and then goes to Beverly Hills, and sees it through the prism of Bradford. He sees it better than anyone born there – and, subsequently, I guess can better capture ‘the dream’. SN Now he’s taken that vision and gone back to Yorkshire, and he’s painting the Yorkshire landscape through the prism of Beverly Hills, with that Beverly Hills light. HM Yes. Very interesting. I always thought that all those LA paintings were really about Bradford, simply because it would take someone from Bradford to go to LA and discover that in peoples’ back gardens they had pools. SN Pools with naked men in them. HM An added bonus wasn’t it. But even without them he would be compelled to compare his own backyard back in Bradford with its washing hanging across it, and a broken bicycle in the corner and all that – I mean that would be as common a thing to him as a pool would be to someone from LA and nobody looks to paint that kind of common a garden thing do they – no pun intended. But that brings us on to this picture Boy at a Window. This is really the Jackanory painting isn’t it? SN Yes. I stand accused. HM This concerned me in so far as it did seem to be extremely Jackanory. Looking out through the . . . This would be the arched window, wouldn’t it? I’ve always been fascinated with reflections and surfaces when you see through your own reflection – and keeping the depth of field, you integrate whatever lies beyond. Here it’s the landscape of a beautiful view to the sea. But what adds to the story telling feel is how aspects of it seem very illustrative, less painterly than you usually are. I mean the overall impression IS impressionistic, but there are illustrative passages. The toys for instance. The Spaceman… The gold fish are really great. SN Thanks, and yes there’s the teddy too, and the tank and the dragon. It’s been a problematic painting all the way. It used to be a lot taller,
and he used to have his arms by his side. There was no reflection, and I just couldn’t figure out why it seemed dead. So the reflection in the glass, which I think saved the painting for me, came really late and then the arms were raised to touch it. HM What engages me is the way the reflection doesn’t appear to be so much on the glass but hovering out there somewhere; it looks like a ghost – I’m reminded of The Turn of the Screw. It’s like the child is reaching out for this ghost of himself, but he’s hampered by the physical presence of the glass. As you reach for these things, they recede don’t they? A really sad painting actually. SN Really? That’s interesting you see it that way. HM Is it? Maybe, but then I always take everything that way. But I mean obviously the painting is painted by an adult remembering this specific moment, and as an adult your childhood is receding. So I suppose it is sad in that respect, but then there is a certain amount of wistfulness in ‘sad’ and vice versa, but it seems like about 70 per cent sad. SN Well, we all have our first memory. For some it’s awful, for some it’s wonderful. Mine fortunately was wonderful. HM And the painting is about that? SN Yes. A really beautiful morning in California when I stood at my bedroom window aged three and looked out at the garden ablaze with amber light. I had an out of body experience and saw myself from behind – this little kid with a big head standing in front of this towering window of light. HM Ah!… so I really did get it wrong. SN I think what you’re sensing in the painting is the other window moment I had about three years later, standing at my bedroom window in Sheldon Avenue in England. I didn’t know where my Dad was, or why he was no longer in my life. Instead of looking out over a stand of magnificent eucalyptus trees in the dawn I was looking at a tarmac driveway curving out to a dreary suburban street. It was one of those white days smudged with lead you get in England. I felt alienated and adrift in a cold universe – the opposite of how I felt at the first window. So maybe I was trying to get both moments into the painting. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded. I think I haven’t, which is good – because I’m going to be chasing that one for the rest of my life. HM Your childhood – though it certainly sounds unusual, seems nevertheless to be a very rich seam for you. SN Don’t you think it is for every artist? HM For sure, but people don’t always contemplate the past so directly, so openly. Maybe writers more so – J G Ballard, maybe. SN I recall Norman Mailer said your childhood experiences are your crystals, and you should never use them directly in your work. You pass white light through your crystals and they refract it and give it color. You write about the color but you don’t give your crystals away. I don’t agree with that entirely. HM But I can see where he’s coming from. SN Your childhood is your interpretive prism. HM Self Portrait with Happy Family is obviously a childhood moment. SN Yes, I found this photograph of my parents from 1967. There they are together in this archetypal happy snap. In a sense it predates me as I don’t have a memory of it. I wanted to see if I could transplant myself into it, If I could resolve that as a painting. Initially I thought I would figure in the painting as this brooding, existential type. HM You do look pretty cynical. SN But when I came to do the painting I realised that I really wanted
to celebrate this moment. The painter in me realised it first by choosing a bright palette. So I had to tone that down with my attitude there in the background. It’s a conflict between wanting to bathe the moment in a nostalgic light and wanting to be ironic, detached and angry about it. HM I think you’ve struck that just right. I think the figure in the background is slightly unreadable, in his teenage garb there. SN It’s my painting gear. HM But It could be a post-Nirvana skate kind of dude, and that’s what’s interesting in a jarring way – how that clashes with the manicured look of your parents. SN I like the way Terence Davies frequently puts popular tunes over scenes of pain and disenchantment in his movies. It just works so well. I’m sort of doing the reverse here. Putting painful music over a happy scene. HM In that sense the painting invites you in. It opens this great gulf for you to indulge your own feelings. SN The gulf between the real and the Ideal? HM Yes. If there’s a scene of great beauty set to great music, it’s a done deal, it’s all sewn up. If you have these two disparate elements, you can inhabit the space between. You’re wondering why the artist has done that, and you bring much more to bear on it than could possibly be shown. SN That’s interesting. Irony does invite you to participate. Irony is democratic in a way. But the will to do this painting came from a critical feeling I had that, as an artist, I hadn’t really found my subject matter yet. I knew I could paint and had a certain facility. I’d done a number of shows and I’d been an abstract painter for two years and I could do a nice academic show. I could do still lives, but nothing I was doing was really unique. The thing I kept on returning to was that my story itself is so weird. HM If in doubt, go personal. SN Yes, so this painting is really about exploring that story. Would it be an interesting painting? I think it is. We’ll see. HM I think there’s a lot going on there. I like the way your mother’s feet are slightly lifted off. It seems to be an attitude from a film I might have seen her in. SN Well her film and TV work is another area I thought I might import myself into. There’s actually a painting I’m working on right now called Self Portrait in a Scene from Dynasty. Do you know that famous scene where Alexis and Crystal go at each other in a lily pond? HM I am aware of it. SN Well, I’ve painted it and put myself in – initially as a sort of witness. Then I realised the only way the painting would work is if I got involved. But when I photographed myself in the studio for the new pose, I found myself screaming filth. I was screaming at them to kill each other. That was the only way I could animate myself sufficiently. HM Do you remember what you were screaming? SN There was a lot of ‘Kill the fucking bitch’ going on. HM Hmmm. There’s something quite terminal about that. SN If I can finish that painting in time for the show, I will have it in a side room, behind a curtain. HM I think ‘Kill the Fucking Bitch’ is a good title for it.
The Temptation of St Anthony
Temptation of St Anthony 2005 Oil on canvas 48 × 66” 122 × 168cm
Temptation of St Anthony – drawing study
Darkest before dawn – A moment of uncertainty When desire swings Pulling the Saint to pieces. He clings for strength But the branches unfurl A picture of his trouble. Even Belief holds him back. I trapped him slowly, weaving A web of sin, thinking Of Pollack all over again. After three years, he finally broke through.
2002 Conté and gouache on paper 18 × 20” 46 × 51cm
Sins of the Father
There is a beautiful land Where all your dreams come true; It’s all tied up in a rainbow, All shiny and new;
It’s not on top of a mountain Or beneath the deep blue sea Or in London Zoo or in Timbuktu Or in Timbukthree.
An explorer could not begin To discover its origin For the beautiful land is in your heart.
My Father in the Beautiful Land 2005 Oil on canvas 90 × 44” 229 × 112cm
Farewell to Prospero 2005 Oil on canvas 60 × 60” 152 × 152cm
Two weeks before he died, my father posed for a final set of photographs to show what cancer had done to his body. I kept these photos in my files for years until I felt ready to use them in my painting.
I chose this image of my father with arms raised to show his abdominal scarring – for me, a poignant gesture of farewell.
The Seven Deadly Sins
Beauty is banal if it cannot face its shadow. The Sins contain what Beauty tried to hide. I went to live with them to bring them back to light. Because I see them clearly, they leave me alone.
The Cardplayers (Seven Deadly Sins) 2004 Oil on linen 50 × 39” 127 × 99cm
Lust
Pride
Sloth
2004 Oil on linen 18 × 24” 46 × 61cm
2004 Oil on linen 18 × 24” 46 × 61cm
2004 Oil on linen 18 × 24” 46 × 61cm
Anger 2
Gluttony
2004 Oil on linen 18 × 24” 46 × 61cm
2004 Oil on linen 18 × 24” 46 × 61cm
Jealousy 2004 Oil on linen 18 × 24” 46 × 61cm
Greed 2004 Oil on linen 18 × 24” 46 × 61cm
Self-Portraits
I grew up with theatre. At home and on stage There was all too much of it. Hooked on drama, I want to go beyond it. These are my confessions. Art is the last place the soul struggles Before enlightenment.
Self-Portrait Carrying The Fat lady 2008 Oil on linen 37 × 52” 94 × 132cm
Self-Portrait with Myself as a Child 2008 Oil on linen 49 × 32” 124 × 81cm
Artist and Model 2004 Oil on canvas 60 × 44” 152 × 112cm
Self-Portrait in Kangol Cap 2002 Oil on canvas 18 × 28” 46 × 71cm
Famous Endings
Self-Portrait with Happy Family 2008 Oil on canvas 36 × 50” 91 × 127cm
The Assassination of Victoria Beckham 2008 Oil on canvas 50 × 38” 127 × 96cm
These goblins carry cameras. They feed off unease And a desire for celebrity. Their global Jihad Is a terrifying success.
The boy looks out on a vast expanse. He sees his reflection in the window glass and lifts his hands to touch it – a moment of communion when he finds himself in the world ‘out there’ and knows himself as infinite. The painting evokes a first childhood memory: standing at my window in Summit Drive and looking out on the beautiful dawn. The window was a portal into another world – and became the model for all my subsequent paintings, in whose rectangular ‘window’ I have sought to find myself and recapture that elusive moment of beauty and perfection.
Boy at a Window 2008 Oil on canvas 38 × 50” 95 × 127cm
The Catto Gallery 100 Heath Street, London NW3 1DP Tel: +44 (0) 20 7435 6660 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7431 5620 The Arts Club 40 Dover Street, Mayfair, London W1S 4NP 3–20 July 2008
web: www.catto.co.uk email: art@catto.co.uk Opening times: 10am–6pm Mon–Sat 2.30pm–6pm Sunday and by appointment
Acknowledgements Many thanks to Gill Catto, Iain Barrett and Ben Austen at the Catto Gallery. Special thanks to my project manager Lee Johnson, Harland Miller for his written contribution, and to Akio Morishima for his catalogue design. This exhibition is dedicated to Angela and Ava Grace
Lyrics by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse
Cover: Temptation of St Anthony – Drawing Study 2 (detail)
Print & repro by ranelagh 020 7432 4648
2002 Conté and gouache on paper 16 × 26” 41 × 66cm
Beautiful Land