Charlotte Brisland
“Painting is central and entwined in the meaning behind my work.”
Interview by Charlie Hawksfield
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I did my postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Art in the early noughties. After that, I chose to spend a lot of time living in other cultures to inform what I do in the paintings. A sense of never quite being part of things is both a state of being an artist on the outside and a state of being displaced. I became a mother in Berlin and stayed there for five years. Berlin was an important place for me in terms of becoming a mother in such a magical city. I initially went there for the history. At the end of the nineties and through the first decade of the new millennia, the city was like this rejuvenating animal, something just breathing again. The century of trauma and oppression was still evident in the architecture, there were bullet holes from the second world war which hadn’t been patched up yet, and the Berlin wall was still stacked up in Potsdamer platz.
The first thing that strikes me while looking through your painting practice is the change from a monochrome pallet in 2016-19 to the more recent colourful works. I was interested in the fact that recent paintings referenced their colours in the titles (Pink and Violet Grey 2021, Violet and Distant Peach 2022) whereas earlier works tend to reference the figurative objects. (for instance the earlier monochrome Fence 2018.) How do you see this change from referencing the objects to referencing the colour? Was this change a conscious choice or just the way the work progressed?
I suppose there are a few factors that have prompted those changes, my own focus and interest in colour connected to a sense of the Uncanny is probably primary. The idea of witches handing out sweets in Roald Dahl’s ‘The Witches’ for example. There’s something wrong but it’s all so nice. Sweets are a good example of what I’m looking for with colour. There is a dark history in sugar, and then there’s the association to childhood and innocence.
In David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’; the hyper colour of the grass, roses, blue sky, and the white picket fence, the colour is just too intense; it’s an indicator that something is wrong.
I took the primary pigments out in the monochrome series to test what would happen, and the emphasis always goes to the figurative. Colour kind of dazzles and it’s really complex. David Batchelor’s ‘Chromophobia’ really goes into detail about colour, it’s one of my favourite books. So, the work has gone through phases of hyper colour and then to monochrome and then back to colour. I think there is also a psychological influence in the colour shifts, something that I’ve reasoned in theory, but which actually centers on something more personal.
Violet and Distant Peach.. Photograph credit Ellie West 2022
Fence, 2018
Party Nights
You have mentioned the importance of “the uncanny” in your work. I think Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and the Uncanny bought a lot more people into this idea, but I was interested in the reference you also made to Turner and “the sublime” in painting. I feel these ideas- the uncanny and the sublime- share a common root, although the uncanny is typically associated with horror and the sublime with beauty. I can see that you skilfully deploy both in your work. Could you talk a bit about the sublime and the uncanny in relation to your paining, whether one is more important than the other and what the relation between them is for you?
The Uncanny has been an ongoing focus in the work since I was at the RCA and John Stezaker suggested it to me. Stezaker was my critical theory lecturer at the time and directed me to this theory. It began with Freud’s work of 1919 ‘Das Unheimliche’ and, yes, since the early noughties, or even late nineties, it’s re-emerged in different ways. A sense of unease in the world is relatable for a lot of people, especially as current politics are around the environment, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, Covid, it’s all really apocalyptic, destabilising, and disempowering.
I do think the Uncanny has more pathos and is about a sense of unease within, while the Sublime is something larger than life and apocalyptic, something happening without.
As for Turner, who couldn’t love this work? There’s a handling of paint which sits just beyond my reach. Without him, how could Modernism in painting have happened? Turner was painting at a time when the sublime was dominant in Romanticism and the landscape of the New World was central. His work focused on a more immediate landscape, expressed through a physicality and application which hadn’t yet been handled in any serious way. I think that, for him, both the mood of the sea, the shadows, its depths, were as important as the bodily application of the paint.
Painting is central and entwined in the meaning behind my work. My initial steps in my own work were a challenge to create something hyper-realistic with the biggest brushes I dare use. Turner was really throwing the paint around at a time when that had never happened before, so he’s certainly an influence on me. As the painting has evolved though, it has slowed down and I like to play with different kinds of applications of paint which are borrowed from a variety of historical painting. Dutch renaissance landscapes built up in layers from black or Breughel’s landscapes, collaged up from Italian mountains and the flat terrain of the Netherlands. Borrowing from that and then putting them together with the punkiness of abstract expressionism or taking from anywhere else in paintings history I like, means it’s all to play for. I can continually test what happens when one thing is placed with something else.
Burnt Snow
LED Twilight, photograph credit Ellie West
Yellow Ochre Sun, photograph credit Ellie West
In your interview with Jackson Art you listed a number of filmmakers as influences including Goddard, Von Trier, Paul McCathy and Rachel McClean. It seems like you gravitate to artists who associate with a specific mood. How do you think painting can capture the mood you would like your work to be associated with?
There are deep connections between film and painting in the visual language they both use. The mood I’m looking for is about a shadowy wrongness beneath a candy floss surface. Rachel Maclean does that really well and looks to fairytales, folklore, and occasionally scrambled politics, for her narration. Paul McCarthy plays with childhood narratives in ‘Alpine stories and other dystopias’. Painters who play with similar language might be Neo Rauch, Giorgio de Chirico, Salmon Toor, or Mamma Andersson. They have all developed their own language and metaphors in paint. Rauch plays with a lot of movement and a rich narrative of his own making, while de Chirico clears the decks and shifts unsettling colour and shadows around. Painting is such an autonomous creature, you have to learn to listen and wait, like sitting by a stream with a fishing rod. It sort of morphs into the thing you want as you go along, it can’t be forced. That ‘mood’ I’m connecting with, which might be a sense of the uncanny, or something else, has been developed out of that waiting, doing while waiting, repeating, and listening.
Some of your sketches are of houses in Los Alamos, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. There is an obvious narrative referencing the atomic bomb here, this series is more explicit than in your other work, even those that reference post-apocalyptic scenes. Do you think that architecture can tell a story? Are you interested in narrative or are you more interested in the immediate psychological impact of abandoned and isolated houses?
This series of drawings were about the everyday suburban architecture left behind from a volatile moment in history. I spent hours perusing those streets on google maps. The similarities between the spaces rested in the architecture; the placement of house, garden and street as a familiar and repeated space around the world. Oak ridge in Tennessee and Los Alamos in New Mexico were both secret cities in the Manhattan Project which made the initial atom bomb that fell on Hiroshima. Both Oak Ridge and Los Alamos were taken off the map during the second world war.
I was interested in how the calm and tranquil modern suburbs of this triangle of places could be discussed. The drawings were made to become paintings but remained as drawings and finished pieces in themselves. The drawings became sweet little things, household scale and domestic with this awful and incredibly traumatic history. They did everything I wanted, so the paintings never happened.
The Atom Bomb sketches, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
The Atom Bomb sketches, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
My studio is mainly full of paintings, paint, turps, brushes, tea and files for teaching. I’ve got paintings on the walls I bought through the Artist Support Pledge movement during lockdown. It’s good for the students to see how painting lives and breathes in Contemporary practice.
Painting will emerge alongside spoken books or music, rarely in silence. It’s a concentrated window and like an airplane taking off, there can’t be any distractions without diluting the process or delaying the journey, often re-routing the direction. The painting unfurls best when I know I’m entirely alone, either late at night or early in the morning, on the weekends or holidays.
The gathering of images, cultural references, colour swatches etc happens all throughout the day, it’s a constant way of seeing the world. The translation of the real into the unreality of paint is constantly fascinating and creates changes and shifts in the progression of the work.
Seeing the students negotiate their own paths in painting is inspiring. The creative process is a maddening, frustrating, rewarding, and endless journey. It feels really lonely most of the time, especially when trying to connect to people in the world, so watching these brave humans take all the risks and make art, persevere and triumph, is really heartening.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I'm currently with New Blood Art, an online platform for contemporary painters. I'm also taking part in the artist support pledge, a platform initiated by Matthew Burrows during lockdown on Instagram. This project has been a great focus for my work as it had to become a kitchen table scale, and that meant finding new approaches. The smaller works opened a door to quicker progression because ideas could be tested rapidly. The connection to colour really took off with this work. Asp is ongoing, so it means I can keep playing with these ideas at this speed while also investing in the larger pieces at a slower rate.
I've been invited to take part in a silent auction, Art on a Postcard (AOAP) to fundraise for War Child UK. The auction will include approximately 100 invited artists and will run from 18 April to 4 May 2023. The money raised will be for War Child’s work with children living in conflict zones around the world.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 03/11/22
