Alison Turnbull talks to DACS about the starting points of her work, the influence of other artists such as Vija Celmins, and the day-to-day life of being an artist.
What made you become an artist?
I was born in Colombia and had a very peripatetic childhood; my parents worked for an NGO and we lived in developing countries all over the world - wherever we were, I was always painting and drawing. My American grandfather was a painter and one of my earliest memories is of watching him paint in his studio at the National Arts Club in New York. He wore a bow tie and had an enormous kidney-shaped wooden palette.
When I was 17, I moved to Madrid. It was an exhilarating time, culturally and politically, because after a long dictatorship Spain was embracing democracy – and just about anything else that was stimulating or exciting. In Madrid I spent long hours in the Prado looking at the great triumvirate of Spanish painters: El Greco, Velázquez, Goya. What began as a four-month stay extended to four years. By the time I left Spain and came to art school in the UK, I was set on being an artist.
How would you describe your work?
I think I’m working in that contested no man’s land between between figuration and abstraction - it can feel a bit like being on a knife-edge. I make abstract paintings but the vast majority of them have their starting point in something outside the studio. Two-dimensional readymades – maps, plans, diagrams, and charts – are translated into abstract compositions. The found material and the pictorial systems that emerge put pressure on each other in all sorts of ways. Sometimes the resulting work departs almost entirely from its source and the language of painting takes over.
Are there any artists or traditions that have particularly influenced you?
When I was a student in Madrid, Antoni Tàpies was a big influence but his work seems rather locked in time now. At art school in the UK, I was drawn to the work of Eva Hesse and American painters such as Jasper Johns, Brice Marden and Robert Ryman.
Often I’m attracted by an approach or by the spirit of work that might not necessarily have any similarity to what I do. John Cage, for example; I love his openness and the innovative way he used chance and order, something that, I guess, has become almost commonplace for artists now.
At different points in your experience, different things influence you. But there’s also the work that you always go back to – in my case, the Piero della Francesca paintings at the National Gallery or the drawings of Francis Picabia.
A show that made a huge impression on me was an exhibition by Vija Celmins in the 1990s at the ICA. Such intensity compressed into a relatively small area - that had a very powerful impact. Without seeing those paintings, I might not have made the series
Houses into Flats, based on architectural drawings, or even
my current group of paintings, which uses imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope.
What made you start working with found materials? What is it that interests you about them?
I’ve worked a lot with architectural plans - for public projects but, more importantly, as blueprints for paintings. About 20 years ago, I was invited to make a project with architects in Glasgow and I started looking at their plans not just as two-dimensional drawings, but as propositions for creating space in three-dimensions and in time, with a before and an after built into them. I became fascinated by the language of architectural representation. I liked the plans for their abstract qualities but the surface they sit on is completely neutral, whereas I was making paintings that have a coloured and very active surface.
That led to a sea change in my work. I had been making paintings that were more completely abstract – Adrian Searle once described my work as ‘lyrical minimalism’. But now I felt that I could explore all the formal aspects of painting that I was interested in and also connect with things outside of art that I found compelling. And slowly, the two-dimensional source material that I use has expanded.
Recently I’ve made a lot of work using imagery related to astronomy. At the moment I’m working on a big series of small paintings that all refer to an image from the Hubble Space Telescope known as
eXtreme Deep Field. I like the idea of making paintings that reference imagery that is actually pushing at the limits of what photography – and space - might be.
I also make
drawings on found ledgers, graph paper and music notation paper - predominantly things that have lines and grids. Here the printed-paper itself becomes the found material and the drawings respond to that.
What does a typical day in your practice look like for you?
Before I can properly concentrate on my work, I like to clear the decks and get things like answering emails out of the way. Once I can’t procrastinate any longer, I cycle to the studio and work through into the evening. I’m not very good at multi-tasking so try never to work on more than one thing in a day - either I’ll be making drawings or painting or working on an architectural project. By the afternoon I’m only just getting into my stride. Dusk is my favourite time of day; I love being in the studio when the light changes and it gets dark, working for as long as is needed - and only leaving when I know what I’m going to do the following day.
What do you think are the key issues affecting artists at the moment?
Artists are affected by the same important issues that affect all of us - inequality, climate change, survival. I think a lot of artists feel these things very keenly, especially living in a city like London, which is so busy, so cosmopolitan – and so expensive. Just being able to continue and keep one’s work alive is what we all face – as well as finding the time and space to do it in.
What do you think of as DACS’ role in supporting artists?
DACS promotes the notion that once you’ve made a work, you will always have a stake in it. The artist continues to benefit after their work has left the studio - or the gallery - whenever it is used in print, on book covers, in catlogues and so forth. That recognition is really important for artists. My royalties from DACS will never be huge, but they are important as they go back into the daily business of paying for studio rent and materials.
You recently joined our image licensing service, Artimage. What made you sign up?
It seemed like a great idea and I wanted to be part of it, as I’d been planning to organise my images for ages. Having to look back through all my work and select about 100 images to put on the
Artimage website was really useful as it gave me a fresh sense of how things have developed and how one thing led to another. Hopefully there will be other benefits too, but just being able to have my work there and to be able to point people towards it has been a good starting point.
What are you working on at the moment?
I’ve just returned from Colombia where I went on an expedition in the Pacific rainforest with the curator of butterflies from the
Natural History Museum in London. We are making a radio programme for the BBC and working on a book together – it’s too early to say just what form they will take. It was quite an overwhelming experience and I’m still trying to make sense of it all.
Find out more about Alison Turnbull
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Browse Alison's work on Artimage
Image: Alison Turnbull, photographed by Brian Benson for DACS. Photograph © Brian Benson, 2017. www.bbphoto.me.