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Gary Hume
Gary Hume
DAVID BARRETT: To understand your work it’s useful to take
a look at your painting technique – could you talk me through the process?
GARY HUME: Well, first of all I have to find an image. So it’s trips to second-hand bookshops to buy material on whatever takes my fancy at the time – for instance, I’ve been buying lots of books on flowers recently. And then I sit down and trawl through those until I see a painting of mine.
DB: An image that looks like it could be one of your paintings?
GH: Yeah, I can tell straight away if I can use an image. I trace what I want of the image onto an acetate sheet with a marker pen. And then I put the drawing on a projector and project it onto the wall. Using the projector is a bit like doing photographic enlarging; you’re zooming in and out with the scale all the time, rotating the drawing a bit, flipping it over, until you find the image that you’re happy with. Then I’ll measure where the drawing ends and order an aluminium panel to fit, or I may already have a panel that size. And although the drawing is only a part of the original image, I often end up cropping it a bit more when I’m projecting it. Usually I prefer the image to go off the edges of the panel –
for it to be larger than the space I can capture it in.
DB: You originally painted on canvas rather than aluminium panels – why did you change?
GH: First off it no longer seemed conceptually important to work on canvas. For my initial door paintings I really felt it was necessary that they should be painted on a traditional painting support rather than something more door-like. But having done this for a period of time, I questioned how rigorous I needed to be. Also, the smooth gloss surface – which was extremely laborious to achieve on canvas – proved to be terribly fragile.
DB: Were you drawn to gloss paint because you were doing paintings of doors?
GH: Initially yes: actual doors are painted with gloss paint so I should use it too. But only when I started using it did I realize how beautiful gloss paint is; the nature of it is so perfect. It’s funny because I was doing painting and decorating at the time and got sacked for being too slow – when I was actually painting doors [laughs]. I said, ‘I can’t believe you’re sacking me when I’m making paintings of doors in college as well!’ But gloss paint has its own unique qualities; it’s very different to oil paint, which can mimic different surfaces. For example, with an oil painting of a vase, you’re aware the image is constructed out of paint but you feel that you know the material of the vase – you can tell that it is a clay vase. Whereas with gloss paint you are always aware that the picture is just a thin film of solidified liquid. And I like that as some sort of analogy of the way you think of an image, picturing it in your mind’s eye: coloured liquids pooling against each other.
DB: Is it right that you asked other people to choose the colours for the door paintings?
GH: Later on, yeah. There were other artists making colour abstracts, and I didn’t want to be an abstract artist. Obviously my paintings had to have colours, but if I chose them I would end up investing them with an aesthetic – and that was never my purpose. Actually, I originally thought that I could just paint magnolia door paintings for the rest of my life, but I didn’t have the tenacity to carry on indefinitely.
DB: One of the first sets of paintings you made after the door series came out of your stay in Rome.
GH: I was in Rome for a few months and was drawn to these ridiculously erotic, macho sculptures of athletes outside Mussolini’s Olympic Stadium. I made some collages with silhouettes of these sculptures stuck onto gift-wrapping paper, and later made some paintings. When it came to choosing the colours… for such a decorative painting it seemed right to take them from a packet of Wine Gums, where the colour signifies nothing other than personal preference.
DB: No-one else was doing decorative paintings like that at the time, how did you feel about that?
GH: It was nerve-racking. Decorative arts were treated with disdain in contemporary art at the time. But I was interested in the embarrassment, working within it. It seemed that without embarrassment I wouldn’t move forward.
DB: The style that you began to develop with the Rome works has informed all of your later pictures. One feature of this is the lack of foreground or background.
GH: I really don’t think of foregrounds and backgrounds at all – it’s just a plane. If I think about a background then I’ve suddenly entered into a landscape, and I don’t paint landscapes and I don’t paint pictorial space. If I do choose a blue for a background then it might be a schematic for a particular kind of weather or a particular time of day, but I put no effort into making it recede because I have no purpose for doing that. It has to work on the plane for the painting to be successful.
DB: So the colours function like colours on a map: declarative rather than naturalistic?
GH: Yeah. I used to think of the paintings as topographies. There’s no illusion of three-dimensional space in the works, but there is plenty of time: light time, because they change throughout the day. I never paint light, but I wanted to be able to have light in the pictures. And because the gloss reflects the light that we have – the sun and the artificial light – it can hold the light by reflecting it.
DB: So they’re not representations of other spaces, they are objects in themselves?
GH: Well, that’s what I try to do. They’re not supposed to be allegories for anything. They’re like you sat there, as far as I’m concerned.
Extract from a longer interview featured in:
Gary Hume (New Art Up-Close 1), Royal Jelly Factory, 2004
Interview text © Royal Jelly Factory 2004
Additional interview material can be found at www.royaljellyfactory.com
The link address for the book is http://www.royaljellyfactory.com/newartupclose/hume.htm
More on Gary Hume
 | Related Texts |
| CV | |
| Bibliography | |
| Behind the Face of the Door by Adrian Searle | |
| Text by Anne Prenzler | |
| Exhibitions | |
| American Tan 5 Sep—6 Oct 2007 | |
| Cave Paintings 26 May—1 Jul 2006 | |
| New Work 27 Sep—26 Oct 2002 | |
| New Paintings 7 Apr—13 May 1995 | |
 | Related Links |
| http://www.illuminationsmed... Eye Series of films by Illuminations | |
| http://www.tate.org.uk/serv... Tate Online | |
| http://www.matthewmarks.com... Matthew Marks Gallery, New York | |
| http://www.tate.org.uk/brit... Tate Online | |
| http://www.imma.ie/en/page_... Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin | |
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