The following is a transcript of a presentation, written by Colin Rhodes, and delivered by him on 13 March 2002 by way of introduction to the exhibtition of works by both artists at the England & Co. gallery, London.

Colin Rhodes has written and lectured extensively on modern and contemporary art. His best known books are 'Primitivism and Modern Art' (1994) and 'Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives' (2000). He also makes art and occasionally exhibits his work.

Chris Hipkiss and James Lancaster

Colin Rhodes

It’s a great pleasure to be here in the presence of the work of two tremendously interesting artists.
I want to spend some time this evening exploring some of the processes which underlie these images we see around us.

I want to try to get under the skin, as it were, of some of this; to find ways in which we might arrive at a context in which we, the audience, can approach the work in a spirit of properly receptive openness. On the face of it we’re faced here with two very different practices:
The work of Chris Hipkiss is often very large in scale; his landscapes panoramic – often seemingly presenting infinite vistas; his spaces inhabited by multiple figures – whole populations even. James Lancaster’s pictures, on the other hand, are invariably small in scale; his landscapes (for I still want to call them that) have the feeling of a filled void; the picture spaces are repositories for a single figural element.

The works are also separated by the level of representational detail they contain. Hipkiss’ drawings are characterised by a minute attention to this kind of detail – when we look at any of these images, we are easily seduced into believing that we can see every hair on each head; each brick of a building; the very veins of every leaf and plant.

Lancaster’s drawings give us none of this. They resist this kind of detail. They resist this kind of revelation of the visible. Yet, they are not vague or slipshod works. They are the result of exactly the same attention to the production of a work; the same level of intense concentration. In fact, each image contains a breathtaking level of subtle mark-making and painterly detail (if I can use that word of a drawing). Their focus, though, is on arriving at a different kind of wholeness. A different order of resolution.

So, is there anything that suggests a reason for these two being here in the same space at the same time, beyond happenstance? I would like to argue that there is. For besides the obvious pictorial differences, I think there are a number of important factors which actually join these two artists together as, in certain respects, fellow travellers.

At its simplest level, they are both absolutely wedded to the practice of drawing. The pencil and pen are perfectly suited to achieving their pictorial goals and they have single-mindedly trusted in the confirmatory messages these media send. The medium does not let them down. In return, they are free to explore their creation through its agency. This is a powerful point, I think, that is too often overlooked these days.

They both stick to black and white in their work. Hipkiss uses gold and silver inks at times. There is often a subtle blue or yellowish tint in Lancaster’s work. But the ‘colour’ of the universes they conjure forth is always left to the viewer to infer.

Hipkiss’ reaction to questions of whether he has been tempted to use colour or other media is emphatic: ‘Ah, the horror, the horror. I have a mental block about the use of colour. I love the precision of drawing and the very nature of colour makes precision harder to achieve.’

Lancaster also prefers the control black-and-white brings with it. Interestingly, colour, where it arises in his work, comes out of the physical properties of the material – through the operation of chance – rather than through any conscious application of pigment. For example, his use of white oil pastel (and only ever white) originally utilised as a way of blocking out overworked areas, resulted in the appearance of the subtlest blue tonalities because of chemical reactions between the inks and the pastel. The paper itself often provides a range of yellowish tones which, though immensely subtle in isolation, operate fairly stridently in the context of the picture.

The most profound similarities, though, relate to their vision, so to speak. Neither Hipkiss nor Lancaster attempt to reproduce ordinary visual experience. They do not copy nature. Rather, they produce realities through the very act of drawing.

The work of both artists is profoundly psychological. Not in the sense of proffering explanations of mental states – the work is neither didactic nor clumsily symbolist. But it is psychological in the sense that the work is not only imbued with its creators’ experience, but that this experience also forms the content.

In the catalogue for Hipkiss’ England & Co. show in October 2000 he described his work as a ‘visual diary of landscapes, ideas and events that have inspired me to draw over the years.’ This was interesting to me partly because it left the aspect of his ‘experience’ nicely vaguely defined. But I asked him recently if the viewer was not, therefore, supposed to read this as pointing to the pictures as being places and events actually experienced in some way? Are some of these landscapes evocations of more mundane places encountered in his life and travels? Are they products pure and simple of his imagination? He replied:

As far as I see it, every detail attempts to make the landscape, whether it be people, buildings, text, etc. Some works are directly based on a place, especially after 1994 when I wanted to draw less in a doodling fashion. Doddington [in Kent], the largest in the show, is an obvious example. But Our Transamerica is too. Sometimes, I can’t draw an item until I’ve seen it with my own eyes; I know I’ll love big cacti but I’ve yet to see them in a true setting …. Perhaps including events as such as part of the visual diary is a little too vague. I suppose it depends on what an event actually is. I see it as the changes and experiences that I've shared with my partner and wife, Alpha, since we were 18. This is definitely where the underlying sensuality and sexual politics have come from. … I adore the feel of certain landscapes, being in them, experiencing their true meaning, to me, and I use parts of them, but I’m acutely aware of the difference in meaning between a drawn picture and a real scape for me; the former is not an attempt to express the latter.

There are very real connections here, I think with Hipkiss’ world-view and that of much Romantic thought. It is tempting here to quote William Blake:

Men think they can copy Nature as Correctly as I copy Imagination; this they will find Impossible, & all the Copies or Pretended Copies of Nature, from Rembrandt to Reynolds, Prove that Nature becomes to its Victim nothing but Blots and Blurs. … Copiers of Nature [are] Incorrect, while Copiers of Imagination are Correct. (Public Address, c.1810)

Thinking of the many years he had spent in Kent with his wife, I asked him whether this countryside was present in his pictorial places. Whether, like Blake or Samuel Palmer, who were both moved to translate the life spirit they found in everything in that landscape into pictures, he encountered such wonder. He said:

I love the Kent landscape so much; we both grew to adore the typical Englishness of living on chalk. When we lived in Doddington (for thirteen or so years), our lives were intertwined with the village and its environs. We knew every footpath; it’s etched on my memory, so it’s bound to have made me draw the biology in a certain way.

These drawings suggest a wholly animate universe, in which buildings and natural forms participate in the life process, often through the literal flowing of fluids from mouths, chimneys, and ground, in and out of it all. They are believable as actual and particular place; compelling because of the living organicism of the whole. But they also produce in us that feeling of the uncanny that results from the collision between the familiar and the unexpected.

Yet, for him, the actual experience of place is often the most transforming experience:

I could tell you how moving some landscapes are to me. I’m sure you know that I don’t mean mountains and waterfalls (I love them, but they don’t move me to include them [in drawings]); I mean, for example, the true nature of The River Thames (which I know intimately through childhood) and its relationship with culture and environment, or the enclosed feeling in a huge wheat field in high summer, or barbed wire running down canal embankments, etc. Mundane is not the word I’d use for the everyday places we exist in; in some ways, they are far more fantastic than my scribbles on paper, even if they have to stay in my mind.

Lancaster is also moved by a sense of place. But in this case, perhaps we should describe it as more of an ‘interior’ space. He sees his pictures as a kind of window onto an other landscape; like a small square to look through. We could think, perhaps, of the accumulation of images as multiple views – that is, views onto the same ‘landscape’. But he prefers for them to be seen on their own. Much of their impact is in attending to them singly, ‘so that they don’t interfere with each other’. They are privileged entries onto an other perceptual plane; an other image of the universe; visions of the connection made between one sentient being and the physical world.

When making pictures Lancaster uses imagination in a more focussed way. Sometimes figures have black lines around them, but this makes them look flat. He says: ‘I love the mystery of the swirling white vortex around them. It makes them look more real and less like a drawing. I want to erase all signs of them being a drawing.’ The desire is to render not a copy, but the real.

He was influenced a lot by photography – by his own photographic activity in the past. Photos in Scotland using infrared photography. ‘Trees glow white,’ he says, ‘if you take a photo with infrared film in bright sunlight. I like to think that the glow is there, but that we just can’t quite see it in normal light.’

Again, there is a belief in the profundity of nature: ‘Everything in imagination,’ he says ‘is based on something that exists in nature already. It all comes from natural phenomena, but exists in a way that we don’t recognise it. Animals, for example, see a totally different world to humans.’

His images, therefore, are not perceptual – they are in some way beyond perception.

This brings to mind a particularly apposite statement by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. He urged artists to: ‘Shut your corporeal eye so that you see first your picture with your spiritual eye. Then bring to light that which you saw in the darkness, that it may reflect on others from the outside to the inside.’ (Bekenntnisse - quoted in Wiedmann, 1979, p.53)

Blake is even more forthright:

This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Temporal. There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.
(A Vision of the Last Judgement, 1810)

I don’t want to imply that Hipkiss and Lancaster are somehow divorced from ‘everyday’ reality, however. Far from it. If their work is imbued with aspects of the visionary, it is also the product of their very connectedness to the world and to culture.

Hipkiss’ work deals with a personal, mythical realm, but one that is based on things actually experienced. He does, though, he says, have ‘a little obsession with geopolitics. I like the poetical power of political styled text and grand geographical theories, but [in the end] … they’re just tools to make a beautiful landscape.’

In spite of the fact that Hipkiss’ pictures teem with people, plants and buildings, they are never claustrophobic. Always there is a very real sense of infinite space. His working process contributes to this. As he says:

when I draw something, even if it’s a huge work, I’ll spend 10-30 minutes putting down some rough lines and then I’ll more or less stick to the rough outline even if I’m on it for a year or more. It’s a question a lot of the time of filling in white space, but I hope not just for the sake of it..... and I hope that I leave enough to the viewer’s imagination in the process.

Perhaps ironically, the endless repetition of motifs in pictures contributes to the sense of space. This is a significant feature in his work: ‘If I like drawing one thing,’ he says, ‘then I repeat it until the boredom threshold is reached.’ Out of this comes a real feeling of populated place – not just the feminine androgynes (represented as powerful, controlling figures), also the plants, architecture, birds, pipes and wires. For Hipkiss, all of these exist in the same register.

The use of text perhaps disrupts the spatial construction at times, but it also serves an important function. ‘Although I ostensibly hate poetry,’ he says, ‘I secretly like it. The compromise is lovely words stuck together to sound and look good.’

In Lancaster’s work the human body - most often the female form - is the central motif. In both his drawings and video work Lancaster often takes representations of the body so far that it is no longer recognisable, yet still alive and imbued with a tangible presence.

The scale of the pictures draws the viewer in. Intimacy is an essential part. When he’s making a picture, he doesn’t stand back too much. He likes working in close (though the images are designed to work when you step back from them as well as close to). If they were bigger they would lose their intensity. Bigger scale would make it harder to create the strange world you’re drawn into. He is literally working close and covering the area is, he finds, difficult enough even on an A5 sheet: ‘Even that seems like a lot of space.’

He works on at least ten pieces at a time, typically pulled out of sheaf of about 20-30 works in progress. He sifts through to see if something suggests itself, but usually gets locked onto one particular piece in a session. He often has to wait days or even weeks before he has an idea of what to do with an image in progress; where to take a piece. If he works on regardless, he loses contact and the thing becomes more contrived. ‘Its like discovering something that’s in you, or growing in your mind.’ It’s not in the mind’s eye as such, but has to attain some kind of substance.
So, what are they? He calls them ‘Chimera’ – to suggest impossible beings; something that isn’t supposed to exist, but does. Manifestations, perhaps, of unknown figures from the unconscious.

Here we have two singular artists. They are joined by the joy of creation and by the need, like any other artist worthy of the name, to work; to make a statement through the visual image. They are joined also by their individuality and by belonging to no school or movement. But then, as Blake said of his own, most singular work: ‘I know my Execution is not like Any Body Else. I do not intend it should be so; none but Blockheads Copy one another.’ (Public Address, c.1810)

Hipkiss also puts down his ability to work intensely and with unbroken concentration not to some mythical disengagement from the world and from relationships, but the opposite. ‘What permits me to draw?’ he asks rhetorically:

It is popular I think, to deduce that the artist has to create, whatever the situation; his/her work separate from changes in life or fortune. For me, this is rubbish. I am very fortunate to be in a relationship of mental growth and stimulation, and also one in which my partner offers me the freedom to spend large parts of the day with my posterior stuck in the air drawing wheat seed after wheat seed on a scroll that takes over the room. I would find it very difficult now, after all this time, to draw alone, without the regular interaction. So most of my work is made with Alpha in the same room working too. I simply wouldn’t draw if I hadn’t this physical and mental stability.

These pictures, inseparable from the artists throughout the time that they were working on them, are now set free to find their place in the world. This is not an idle metaphor on my part. Pictures really do take on a kind of life of their own; their identities are changed through circumstance and the context of viewing. I think Mark Rothko summed up this process perfectly. And I’d like to end with his words before we go and do what I know you all really want to do, which is LOOK at the work:

The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. ... The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.
(The Romantics were prompted, 1947)

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