Nash Francis, the emerging visual artist selected as the winner of the inaugural Needhams Open Art Competition 2009, talks to Aman Sagoo about, rock n’ roll, truth, politics and the human condition.
“I know that music and art have changed my life. Without them I would still be stacking shelves in Tesco wondering what I should do with my life.”
Nash: Being in a rock
n’ roll band with loud guitars and beautiful pop
melodies was the only thing that was really important to me
just after leaving school- it was the one thing that seemed
to make sense, being in this band with my best-friends. At
school I was always quite alone. I remember looking at my
dads old LP’s and there were these pictures of the
Rolling Stones and I thought they looked like a really cool
gang. I thought that I might like to be in a gang like
that, not a street gang but a gang with an agenda- a
‘rock n’
roll’ gang.
I was always interested in art but I never knew how to
articulate my ideas or even what my ideas were exactly,
music seemed accessible to me, there wasn’t any code
to decipher, and you could find a real truth there. Put on
an Elvis or Johnny Cash record and you believe what
they’re telling you. It is a heightened art form I
think, it just goes straight in, into your head; there are
no visual distractions. Pure.
Aman: You left University where you were studying for your
BA in Fine Art to take up a recording contract in London.
How did you arrive at the point where you felt it was right
for you to start making paintings instead of music?
Nash: It was with the release of our debut album
‘The Violent
Dazzling’.
We had finally found a suitable label to put out our record
and the outlook was really positive. I just knew though
that afterwards when the record was finally released
something would change.
Aman: What was the change?
Nash: I’d just made the thing that said everything I
wanted to say; I didn’t want to say anything more.
Aman: But presumably you felt
you needed to add something more or just find a different
way of speaking? Because almost immediately afterwards you
began working on a series of paintings entitled
‘Human Nature
Painting’.
Nash: It had taken years of
hard work, disappointment and setbacks and yeah, I had been
to Uni’ for a short time to study Fine Art
in-between. And then the ‘thing’ actually
happened- we actually managed to do it, to put our record
into the shops. It was the one thing I had always longed
for- to go into a record store and buy something I’d
made. Before that we’d rent this portakabin on a
dilapidated industrial estate in Barking and rehearse there
all week long. When we weren’t there we’d be
running about trying to get people interested in the band-
our friends, other peoples friends, venues, promoters,
managers and labels. This was better to me than any fine
art education, this was real and the only people that were
gonna make a difference to our lives was us. We were in
complete control. It was that process- the struggle of
trying to get a record made- that I value more than the
recordings. Of course it wasn’t all trauma. We were
shown some incredible generosity and encouragement and had
some great times travelling to places I otherwise
wouldn’t have been able to afford and with rock
n’ roll as a job. Actually, I can’t think of an
uglier thing than to make rock n’ roll a real career.
Ultimately the band gave me an unshakable confidence and
determination that I never had before. I would have
probably turned out something like J. D. Salinger after he
wrote ‘The Catcher in The Rye’, except without
the fame bit first of course. He shut himself in a basement
and just kept writing- all these manuscripts that no-one
was ever going to see just piling up, working by himself,
alone. But I realised that without people you’re
nothing, so you better start working with them and get
things done together. I needed to have an experience first,
before the paintings- the band. Now all I want is for
people to see the things I make just like I wanted people
to listen to my band back then. I’ve become quite
hungry.
Aman: Hungry for recognition?
Aman: Did painting and music ever co-exist in the same place? There are a number of very famous musicians that I can think of that have made paintings, Ronnie Wood, Joni Mitchell even Marilyn Manson. All Artists, I think it can be said, with a limited degree of success in painting. I wonder if such cross discipline brings with it a very different set of problems?
Nash: That’s probably true, I would consider myself a painter though not a musician; at least until such time that I start to make some new music which I hope to do at some point. I’m always playing guitar annoyingly in the studio but it’s always to myself... albeit blasted through a tiny Vox, rocked to distortion! I’ve just got the Martin Scorsese Blues box set, so I’m playing along awfully to that. I liked it when Paul Simonon said that The Clash was a hobby- that’s a great rock n’ roll thing to say, that being in one of Britain’s most influential rock bands and also one of the most sincere was just a hobby to him. But, the point is that these people you mention are musicians making a few paintings, famous ones at that. I’m just a painter making paintings and that’s it.
Aman: So when you began the series ‘Human Nature Painting’, were these the first paintings you made?
Nash: Yes. I’ve been painting for a little over three years now. These are the first paintings I’ve made.
Aman: So you just started to paint? How did you prepare? Were there any paintings that didn’t work?
Nash: No, they all worked.
Aman: I wonder then if you could explain a little about how you go about making a painting or a new piece of work.
Nash: Well, at the moment I’ve been listening to ‘The Clash Live at Shea Stadium’ or I put on Ken Burns ‘American Civil War’ documentary and just listen. Then, I just start to make these paintings. It’s beautifully simple- like when Chadin said that he ‘just applied colour until there was a resemblance’.
Nash: I don’t think so. After all, I always want to paint a reality so I don’t want to feel removed from it. It just helps me concentrate, that’s all.
Aman: Are you thinking about what you are going to do with the paint? How do these external influences in the studio help you focus on painting?
Nash: If I’m listening to Joe Strummer’s lyrics, or, in the Civil War piece, there are some really beautiful anecdotes, some charming human stories that are eloquently brought to life by Shelby Foote’s charisma and amazing southern American drawl. Of course, all this is set amidst the fury of the Somme scale carnage that was the American Civil War. I know what it is I want to do on the canvas, but I don’t want technique to colour my judgements or the picture. I just want it to breathe a life. There’s a group exhibition currently at the South London Gallery and one of the Artists there has written on a construction workers’ safety hat “The source of art is in the life of a people.” I like this very much. I don’t make any kind of preparation, except from at the very start I amassed what I can only call a ‘body of photographic evidence’- photos and, I suppose, some sketches that I’d made of places around Leicester where I studied and then of the East End of London and particularly around my studio in Spitalfields. These were images of things that I already knew such as car parks, bus stops, alleyways, fast food chains, old cinemas or derelict swimming pools. These are images that I just found some form of interest in, such as a fleeting wash of light on broken concrete or a wooden beam flaking to expose a century of over-painted colour. I had these pictures stuck all around my studio like some kind of serial killer dungeon, but eventually most of them fell off and I didn’t bother with them any more. They gave me a reference point, but, as I say, it wasn’t something that I didn’t already know, so I don’t need to refer back to them anymore.
Aman: The paintings look very instinctive and yet, there are formal qualities employed in some of the perspectives used and at times a very graphic nature in the use of flat planes and the treatment of backgrounds.
Nash: Something in the way Francis Bacon used to work seems to work for me also. Bacon said that he knew the kind of thing that he wanted to make but that it could only be realised in the working towards it and not by the actual making of it, or something like that. I like it anyway because it seems to imply that painting then becomes one thing that you can never be disappointed with. Always a surprise. Of course, experience will tell you if something is working or not and if it’s not you just keep doing it until it does.
Aman: You’ve never destroyed canvases as Bacon famously did or thrown anything away?
Nash: Never, in fact the rubbish canvases are the best ones.
Aman: How is that?
Nash: Because the spoilt painting gives you something to go on. Quite often I’ll start a new painting on top of something old, that maybe I’ve left a while because I didn’t like it. I’ll just sand some of the marks flat and paint on top like the bits of old painted door or window that I’ve photographed. I’ll leave the bits of the original painting that I like showing through. Something good can only come out of trying.
Aman: Would you consider that some of these paintings are on an abstract level of interpretation?
Nash: No. I’m not an abstract painter. All the painters I most admire are figurative painters: Anselm Kiefer, Wilhelm Sasnel, Adrien Ghenie, Francis Bacon, John Constable. Cubism was sometimes thought of as abstract. That classification doesn’t work for me- they were trying to present new ways of imagining an object. The very idea was to make a thing more real somehow, not removed from it. In order to do that you can’t just be involved with one plane or surface- you’d be misrepresenting the truth. That’s a form of propaganda. In this same way I don’t just want to show some kind of aesthetic, I want to get down what the thing I’m painting feels, smells and sounds like, but the image is always fixed in reality.
Aman: I wonder if you could talk about your choice of title for the series. It seems to suggest some form of human interaction and yet we are faced with pictures of unpopulated concrete spaces and structures. How did you arrive at the title ‘Human Nature Painting’?
Nash: Yeah, it’s just something that happens- I go to make a face and I get a concrete block instead, a concrete block imbued with all the intimacies of an expression or a visual feeling. I think the most important thing to be doing is to face existence and to make work of the body and of the world in which the body inhabits. I guess the best way to do that would be to actually make some kind of body like a sculpture or in painting as a representation of a body. But a portrait to me is not an image of the real person pictured. A person is complex and contradictory and on the outside can present so many untruths and so ultimately is an unreliable model. So I can’t look to the body for a greater view, but away from it. It highlights a greater truth for me. The space we inhabit and the marks we leave behind cannot be false, they’re there. In millennia to come, especially if the environment is as damaged as some fear, we will be interpreted through our actions and not by our faces, like some Turin shroud image. Our values and our systems will be discovered through the direct inheritance of a condition.
Aman: Truth and authenticity are obviously very important to you. It’s as if you’re concerned with a forensic style of analysis...
Nash: These pictures are a truth- truth about the place I inhabit. I call them nature paintings because pavement, glass and steel are as natural to me as perhaps fields and trees were to the people of a past millennium. They too left marks for us to record through art, text and the found object. We can arrive at a greater understanding through the exposure to these things they left behind.
Aman: Can art change lives?
Nash: I don’t think I’ve made my mind up yet- Picasso never managed to stop the bombing in Guernica. To most people I think art doesn’t make much difference in daily life. But I know it can also be very powerful and persuasive- just look at the history of art as political propaganda. If you can alter people’s perceptions by exposing them to an image then you can alter the way they think and that’s crucial to seeking out and looking at new ways of doing things. One small change can be the catalyst for exploration into other greater directions. Maybe it does change lives, as I know music and art have changed my life. Without them I would still be stacking shelves in Tesco wondering what I should do with my life.
Aman: Is success important?
Nash: No, It’s getting on with it that’s important.
Aman: What sense of the political would you consider is instilled within your own work?
Nash: My paintings are political in the sense that, like most painters, there is a problem and it’s the decisions made in trying to confront or overcome that problem that directly influences the outcome... if that makes any sense. As I have said I think Art has an enormous potential to influence, but I have no great theory or an allegiance to any political concept or ideology. I just know that we must question everything about the ones we already have.
Aman: What is the problem you are trying to overcome, to solve?
Nash: The problem of not knowing what I’m doing. Lucien Freud put it better when he said, “I’m only trying to do what I can’t do.” Meaning that for him it was the excitement and the challenge of attempting the difficult that kept him returning to the canvas.
Aman: Exactly. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the human condition as explored through your spaces and environments?
Nash: I think by the very nature of our souls we are always optimistic- it’s how we have evolved, I am just not sure what the optimism is about. I think it’s where all the desires that make us human stem from though. Our idea of beauty comes from the natural world, not the High Street or the TV advert. If we see an untouched pasture flowering and flourishing with birds and animals we must seek to dominate it because we know that this is the place that will most likely bring about the best chance of survival for ourselves and our families. When you first study art at school they tell you to go out and buy that huge book, Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. There’s one thing that he said that sums up what I’m trying to say and that is “Art is a game with only one rule and that is as long as you think you can do better you must do it. Even if it means starting again.” We always think we can do better, I think it’s necessary for our survival but I also think that in doing it we are, perhaps inadvertently, using the very tools that could bring about our own demise. I read somewhere that man shares his insatiable appetite for willingly seeking the destruction of his own fellow species with only one other animal, the rat. It seems fitting then that I should base my studies and painting on a city densely populated by both in near equal measure...
