In Conversation

Susan Rocklin & Amy Mechowski

Reflecting on her first solo show at 163, Susan Rocklin talks magical thinking, alchemy and taking risks.

Amy Mechowski: The word ‘paeon’ (the title not only of this, your first solo show, but also one of the largest paintings in it) carries a wealth of meaning and is rich in symbolism— from Greek mythology to associations with healing, renewal and sanctuary.  You’ve described painting to me as a solace that enables you to conjure your own distinct spaces and I wonder if ‘paeon’ relates not just to this body of work, but to your artistic practice?

Susan Rocklin: I don’t really know what I’m going to paint when I start painting.  I’m improvising all the time.  The idea of making spaces (both psychologically and physically) relates to my practice because it’s an intuitive longing, a searching for a sense of completeness.  ‘Paeon’ is about trying to find something— solace, balance, healing —and the painting process is a quest. It’s a private performance.  And it’s about ‘creating a refuge’ by making marks and putting colour down.  I’m often led by colour.  It’s how I start.  Sometimes I’ll look at black & white photographs or an image and I’ll do a drawing with no preconception about colour.  It’s a chaotic but compelling way of working.

There’s also a kind of ritual in making— like taking a flower apart to see what’s in the middle of it.  The peony has a very densely packed blossom, but also there’s a connection with the hymn, or hymns of praise— searching for something too idealistic and you never get there.  There’s a line from a book called The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger: “Early this morning when I was still in bed, a swallow flew in, circled the room, saw its error and flew out through the window past the plum trees to alight on the telephone wire.”  I think it makes for a brilliant analogy for thinking and painting.  The bird inscribes its space in flight and I feel that painting is like that— the act of making a fleeting inscription on a canvas, the start of a sequence of possibilities, which is really meaningful to me.  Berger also talks about the spaces between things being inadvertent and spaces having as great a weight and validity as objects.  It makes me think of Alice Oswald’s poetry and the gaps within a stone wall— the way the contacts and spaces between words are as significant as the words themselves.  I’m also fascinated by things like receptacles and vessels, or shoes and hats—they’re like ciphers for me.  I often incorporate them as discrete, safe holding places in my works.

AM: Thinking about ‘paeon’ in classical prosody (the modulation of the voice and the accent or emphasis placed on particular words), it relates to the rhythm or cadence of a voice and its expressiveness.  So, the bird observed flying in the room that you refer to seems analogous to a voice being heard, which seems to have a kind of synergy with your own process?

SR: It does, absolutely.  And it’s about aesthetics.  For instance, I see in that painting behind you, Sage Lemonade in Utah, a lot of light.  It’s an intensely worked canvas, but you wouldn’t know it.  There’s an awful lot of colour on there and that’s all about the modulation.  There are dark areas and light areas, but often the lighter places belie quite a bit of work.  The layers and materiality of paint are really important to me, as well as the colour.  I used to paint using an impasto technique and I still do work that way sometimes, but with this painting, I just thought, ‘it’s got to be soft,’ with delicacies in the layers of paintwork and the lightest touch still meaningful.  Painting is a luminous thing.  The traditional way of oil painting is dark to light, but I use probably more of a watercolourist’s approach and I work from light to dark.  I’m interested in the light coming through because this creates a space within the colour and you get a kind of shimmering effect or oscillation, which again has a vocal equivalent.  A note that is held— one that has power and intensity.  The layering is fundamental, like petals.

I think it’s restorative, there’s a reintegration of everything in your life in creating a place of safety.  It’s Kleinian, about the good object and the bad object and you have to find a space where you can reconcile them.  I’m trying to find places where you might, even momentarily, gain some insight.

AM: That makes me broaden my definition of what a safe space is, because in the way that you describe it, you must presume that there is a lack of safety when you are trying to create somewhere safe.

SR: You have to.  I think it’s analogous to fairy tales— a kind of re-enactment of the things that you find menacing.  And sometimes they can be really quite dark and not give you any sense of safety at all.  But there’s a frisson and I think that’s the case when you look at a painting or you read something and feel unsettled by it.  I like that.  I think that’s what painting and art should do.  You should be left with questions.  Also, as an artist you should have that generosity. I’m not going to close down the image.  I’m going to give you a rendering of what a particular world might be, but you’ll find something completely different.  That’s what makes painting interesting.  There’s no particular interpretation.  And it’s true in the titling of works as well, they have a particular meaning for me, but there is room within them.

AM: In looking at paintings like The Descent, this body of work strikes me as a visualisation of new realms that emerge out of layers— both literally and metaphorically —in which figures, animals and objects share the picture plane with a great deal of negative space remarkably comfortably.  How does this equilibrium relate to the process of painting itself and what meaning do you draw from it in your own work? 

SR: Well, this painting did at one point have a lot more in it.  It’s not how I initially conceived it.  And I just suddenly thought— there are too many characters in here.  Space is about balance and tension.  If you have too many elements in a painting, you can lose that tension and it becomes disparate, full of scattered things that confuse the eye.  Here you have a tension between the figures and the spaces created where they nearly touch.  Also here, you wonder, are they cats or are they tigers?  Are they menacing and sinister or soft and safe?  It can be either really.  The sparseness poses more questions than it answers.  This work and Hushed Velvet are slight departures for me, partly because they are so sparse, but I’ve become more comfortable with paintings that are pared down. 

Another work, A fruit that summerlike/announces its seed, is pivotal between the large expansive (but more decorative) works and the more minimal ones like The Descent.  It’s very layered and I felt instinctive and responsive as I painted it, so for me it represents the idea of a painting ‘painting itself.’  Making this painting was an exploratory act and even though I had a vague idea of how the elements would be composed, I was led by the colour and the mark making.  It’s the same size as The Descent, but is so different and closer to how I paint when I'm relaxed and in tune with everything.

There’s this conversation that goes on between you and the space in a painting.  It’s a very delicate thing— the feeling that certain figures and objects belong in certain places.  It’s only once I’ve made a mark and laid colour down or rubbed something out that it begins to suggest itself.  I’m not frightened of that because you don’t know something’s wrong or that it doesn’t feel right until you’ve done it.  The character or the figure just says to me— ‘I’m not really here, I don’t belong here, get me out.’  They have a kind of presence of somebody or something that only comes out once I’ve started the painting— even if it’s an animal, there’s a spirit there.  Sometimes I run my hand across the surface to feel it.  I can feel the texture with my fingers and realise that the paint needs to come off and I rub it away.  Or I use a soft piece of cotton to take it away and then reapply it with a brush again—it’s almost as though I’m getting a feel for the colour at the same time.  I have a number of different paper palettes all along the floor and it’s a slow process, as I work sometimes on as many as three large scale works at the same time.

I never start at the centre.  And, in saying that, I have to allude to this book called The Great Image Has No Form or On the Nonobject Through Painting by François Jullien.  Essentially space, in Japanese and Chinese painting, is a very powerful concept and relates to Taoist philosophy and the concept of flow—where water can either be a torrent or it can be a gentle stream and that’s about modulation.  I think I have to respect that space.  You and I have spoken about it before and you described it as putting together a jigsaw by working inward from the edges.  I don’t always start on the periphery, but I’m always working towards the centre.  What interests me tends to be those things in the margins.  It relates to the hierarchy of the object and composition and I don’t want you to see my paintings in a traditional way by looking at one figure or object and then moving on to another.  There’s a dynamism about compositions that are off centre, like Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne or Poussin’s landscapes, where you get a view through the centre.  Things that lead you immediately to the centre are closed off to me.  And not giving pre-eminence to one thing so that the composition has a kind of fluidity, I think is really important metaphorically and emotionally.  There’s a reciprocity between the painter and the viewer.

AM: That seems to go back to the idea of layers being in flux that you’ve mentioned before.  Not just in terms of the composition of the work, but also the surface itself?

SR: When I first started painting, I always felt quite leaden when I was focused on objects.  Whereas now, I feel like I have a physical liberty because I’m not trying to capture the thing in the painting.  Really, the painting is painting itself and I’m its agent.  I’m doing it because I’m fascinated by it.  I sit with it and there is a direct connection between me and the colour, which is my guide and the thing that leads me through painting.  Colour has always been formative and powerful— it’s an exciting thing for me.  I can no more divide words from colour than I can narrative from painting.  It’s about relationships, fragments, and storytelling.  I made a note to myself in a diary that I kept a few years ago that still holds true for me: “I have to feel very mixed up before I start painting.  Look at loads of old photos, books— like fragmented stories, shards.  Only then can something go on.  The feeling that you don't know what the hell you are doing is hard to tolerate…  But you have to.  When it's all straightforward, there's no point starting.  Put some music on.  Make some marks.  Things have to be balanced precariously on the table next to me.  Sometimes photos fall, sometimes there's a mass collapse.  In a strange way, it’s necessary— the feeling that it's not going to work, that failure is pressing in all the time.”

AM: Thinking of stories and fragments, there is a strong narrative element to these works in which animals and female figures relate to and engage with one another in fables or as familiars.  What is the role of storytelling in your painting and how does it come about in your reworking of a canvas?

SR: I’m telling myself stories while I’m painting— having a conversation with myself.  I constantly have things that I’m trying to readdress.  It’s a restaging of partial happenings and circumstances in my life that I’ve encountered, experienced or felt and I find painting restorative.  But storytelling is hugely important.  The great painters are narrators— Munch, Bonnard, Gauguin, Goya and, for me, Peter Doig.  They’re always good colourists as well.  Also, Karin ‘Mamma’ Andersson.  Her colour is stupendous and her paintings are full of vignettes.  She leaves a lot for you to fill in— sometimes a hull of a ship or the fretwork of trees.  I also think a lot about the sagas.  My father’s side of the family has Danish ancestry and I’ve travelled to Scandinavia and visited the Munch museum in Oslo many times.  I feel a connectedness with it.  I grew up in the North-East of England and went to a Victorian Gothic school (literally perched on a cliff that overlooks the North Sea), and across the sea is Scandinavia.  There was a sort of romanticism about it, like Caspar David Friedrich’s figure looking out across this chasm.  I think being brought up by water is very important, but so too are myths and oral histories in the community where I grew up.  Stories are layered in my paintings and I think of a poem as comparable in its density.  Narrative is critical. Someone like Georgio Morandi tells tales through still-life.  He’s a master— his bottles and earthenware vessels are characters.  They’re people.  And I think that’s just as significant as his colour, which is so rich and yet subtle at the same time.

AM: Female figures, as characters, have such a strong presence in this body of work. I wonder if you could speak to what agency or force lies with these women and their significance for you.

SR: I come from a matriarchal family and both my grandmother and mother were always very opinionated and quite unorthodox.  They felt that women didn’t adequately express themselves and told me: you need to speak up for yourself— never be silenced.  In my life, going into university and moving into the work place, I found that, sadly, women are frequently muted, being either subjected to constant critique or becoming invisible.  It was through painting that I found myself reanimating and revivifying a potent sense of ‘the feminine’.  Ironically, I discovered my voice in the largely silent act of painting.  Women are tremendous carers and they offer up balance and generosity.  They need a greater share of the world.  Hence, women are active within my painting.   Most of the female protagonists that I feature do not directly face forward and relate obliquely to the surface of the painting.  They turn away from us or are looking down.  I like the idea of women withholding their mystery and their power— there’s  an important tension and strength in that, rather than a passive and objectified portrayal.  Objectification is a very disagreeable form of victimhood.  I want to imbue my female characters with dignity, with a kind of symbolic restraint.  To be judged by how they think and their inner life— what’s going on within that radiates outward —this is what I try to address in my painting.  And, as humans and beings, women need to have their power recognised in a fair way, in a new, re-made world.  I also want to expose men as vulnerable, because I think there is strength in vulnerability too.  I’m intrigued by the tenderness that lies within the figure of the Cowboy, as caretaker of nature.  I think about how all these figures can inhabit an imagined, ideal realm.

AM: The idea of different modes of ‘magical thinking’ and ritual (that can be as particular to individuals as they are circumscribed by social interactions, culture and tradition), seems to hold a significant place in what you’ve described as the paintings ‘painting themselves’.  How does this type of thinking relate to your own role as both artist and conjurer?

SR: The artist makes things appear, but it’s not a one-way process— it’s a response to the way the painting looks.  You invoke and bring things out.  It’s alchemical really, because you’re thinking something and the painting is talking back to you and you’re then exploring further and making more marks.  I think that’s where ‘the unknown’ resides and where ‘magical thinking’ is relevant, because it’s how you get to the mystery that lies beneath the surface of reality.  There are things that are recognisable in the painting, but they’re not always rendered in a realistic way.  It can be partly transparent and you can see figures with something else beneath them, other figures or parts of the landscape that goes back to the idea of layers, both literal and metaphorical.  The making of the painting is both the process and the result of the invocation.  You’re the conduit— in your emotional responses to a colour and a line, for instance, or a shape on the canvas.  It’s really about the ‘unsayability’ of things, which Rainer Maria Rilke talks about in Letters to a Young Poet.  He writes that ultimately when a work of art is made it will speak for itself and it will say things that are unsayable: “Works of art are infinitely solitary... Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.”  So, if, as a painter, you’re responding to a painting on a really visceral level, that’s all you need.  That’s the most important thing coming out of it.  Rilke writes: “What is needed is this, and this alone: solitude, great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours— that is what one must arrive at.”  I’m fundamentally a loner and I think painting is a great and fruitful companion in my solitude. 

AM: That resonates for me in terms of what you’ve said before about hovering and oscillating between two worlds and the mystery that lies behind a surface, or how another image lies beneath another layer.  This seems to come full circle and connect with what you were saying at the start about creating your own safe space.

SR: Yes, what painting does for me, in the process of making, is to create a very familial and absorbing place that enables me to access that safety.  There is darkness out there and darkness inside, but I like my own company.  And you find things out about yourself in solitude.  There’s an amazing pleasure in it or you wouldn’t do it.  It’s just me and the painting and then something happens or is occurring, which is a kind of magic in itself. 

Dr. Amy Mechowski is an independent Curator and Art Historian as well as a Course Leader for The National Gallery and Sotheby’s Institute of Art.