Arthur Laidlaw
"Painting allows me to go somewhere new every day."
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
We were lucky to travel a lot as children, living for a stretch of time in the USA, and that sense of wonder about the world has never really left me. Painting allows me to go somewhere new every day.
Ryuichi Sakamoto said “I was born in Japan but I don't think I'm Japanese” before he moved to New York. I feel a little similarly, at the moment, about England.
I only began to understand my identity as European after Brexit. This theme – not knowing what you have until it’s gone – has underpinned my work since the very beginning, pushing my subjects around the map and home again.
I studied History of Art at Oxford, and Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School, but I have learnt more from certain life experiences than institutions.
Can you discuss how your experiences drawing and photographing classical sites in the Middle East prior to the Arab Spring shaped your worldview and artistic practice?
It’s hard to state exactly how naïve I was in 2009, when I made my journey around the Mediterranean. That naïveté is something I’ve come to reflect on with equal parts respect and distrust.
You drive along the coast with the Sahara on your right, and pass a burnt out 16-wheeler in the ditch on your left, like an unhappy beetle on its back. Your bus stops in the middle of a desert and no one else gets off. You give your backpack with all your belongings to a dusty man you’ve just met, to look after for the day while you set off on foot.
Until the events of Arab Spring began, and then those of the Syrian Civil War overtook them, reflections on my time travelling across nearly ten countries were characterised almost entirely by kindness. Each place – whether a remote village or unimaginably ancient city (often both) – met me with encouragement and without judgement. I drew site after site in my sketchbook on the side of the road, and was invited over and over for lunch or coffee or a night’s stay, or simply given a bottle of water in the midday sun. A strange transformation seemed to occur, while drawing; I felt like I could slip the bounds of my role, just for a moment. Briefly, I was there, participating in the physicality of the world around me, recording the built environment – I felt I was not a tourist.
Much later, I read Marwa al-Sabouni’s book The Battle For Home (2016), a poignant exegesis of the specific challenges of Syrian town planning across the decades, laying the literal foundations for subsequent years of suppressed social tension. The town square in Aleppo where I sat and drew commuters walking beneath the clock tower would later be used to stage public hangings.
I only began to understand the specific mixture of innocence and hubris that characterised my journey after returning to England.
The places I visited and people I met encouraged me to begin, as an artist. As time passed, the more painful the reflection on everything I had missed. I had been suspended in the amniotic fluid of my passport, citizenship, Western identity – transient and unmistakably touristic, regardless of my impressions.
For several years I was confused about how to continue. How to accurately depict a place you have somehow failed to see? How then to articulate a memory of a place that you don’t recognise from the descriptions coming through the radio, the newspapers, the television, the politicians, the people leaving their homes and lives behind? It seemed impossible to reconcile the many representations of a place, coming as they were from so many different, often conflicting perspectives, including my own. And yet the photographs and the drawings remained as physical objects, hinting at a methodology and path forward.
After finishing my MA, I began to understand that any subsequent images I made would be necessarily dense, built up of layers of materiality, obscuring and undermining the ‘truth’ of the photographic source material. The works developed as intentional attempts to complicate the picture plane and painted surface, asking the viewer to decide what is real, what is imagined, what is lost, what remains. The resulting exhibition, Razed: Syrian Ruins (2016) at the OXO Tower Gallery, raised over £25,000 for the Syrian Civil Defence (aka White Helmets), a neutral group of rescue workers digging survivors out from the rubble of Russian airstrikes.
This way of seeing and of working has remained the essence of my role as an artist; it is in essence a mistrust of the world around us. Our present is not as stable or secure as it seems.
I wrote an oblique, slightly longer answer to this question for Clementine’s Butler-Gallie’s Distant Divides (2019) research paper, featuring a few reproductions of relevant work from Berlin and Baalbek. Get in touch with her or me if you’d like a copy.
Scottish Bather (1) 2020
Swimmer, 2021 (left), Garda Bathers, 2021 (right)
Doubles, joint show with Fernando Marques Penteado at June, Berlin
Grand Hotel, 2022
Eugene's Record Den, 2021
Your work grapples with the transformation and fading of memory, particularly in the context of political change and upheaval. How do you approach representing these complex and often intangible concepts in your art?
Whether personal or political, every day is fragile. Buildings are never as substantial as they appear, monuments are never as protected as their labels proclaim, and history is never far away. Things came into focus after Razed, in 2016.
First, Brexit. Razed opened during “#refugeeweek”, after some of largest popular marches in London for years, in support of those displaced by Assad’s brutal regime. The vernissage – held on the same date as the EU Referendum – was an evening of optimism about the future, with almost no doubt in attendance. The following day was a strange kind of bad dream; a Scottish stranger walking into the gallery in tears, people on the phone repeating over and over “I can’t believe it”, and a sudden sense of alienation – I don’t recognise this country. Then, Trump.
I knew almost immediately that I would remain in Berlin longer than anticipated. Like many of the places I visited in 2009, the extant physicality of the city’s history encouraged some kind of creative record.
The Neue Synagogue, pictured in my work Tucholskystraße & Oranienburger Straße, was a victim of the November Pogrom on the 9th of November, 1938. The Torah scrolls were desecrated, the furniture smashed, the contents of the synagogue burnt. The building was used to house the uniforms of its Nazi oppressors, and then bombed heavily during the war. The building saw some small renovation efforts during the DDR-era, but it was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that reconstruction of the front section and dome began in full, and it is only in my lifetime that the synagogue has begun to operate as it had before the war. The toll of destruction and reconstruction is frighteningly distant when looking at the synagogue, but it can be seen clearly in the presence of armed police at the building’s entrance.
This is one example, but there are many others throughout Berlin and throughout the world. Whether the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the bullet holes in the ceiling of the Al-Hamidiyah Souk in Damascus, the razing of the Baal Cella at Palmyra, or the burning of Notre-Dame, each of these events has had a profound impact (sometimes positive, often negative, but almost always visceral) on those who inhabit these landscapes – however fleetingly – before, during, and after their occurrence. The scale of that impact speaks to the latent (frequently insidious) ways in which aesthetic symbols can convey and entrench systems of power, hierarchy, and beauty. The anguish caused when these icons are effaced speaks primarily to their continued hold over us, whether we know it or not.
The first images I made of Berlin while resident in the city, between 2017 and 2018, share something, aesthetically, with the earlier paintings of classical sites. The works were produced from a similar vantage point: a visitor, unfamiliar to each place’s deeper fault lines and frailties.
One through line though, from the earliest work to that which I am producing today is a sense of doubt. Doubt in the objects of the composition; doubt in the subject at hand. Despite this scepticism, we continue to have the rug pulled from under us, precisely because the tenets of our life that seem most stable are those we question the least.
Your personal experiences of dislocation and isolation during the pandemic seem to have had a profound impact on your work. Can you speak more about how this has influenced your creative process and the subjects you choose to explore in your art?
Fred Simon wrote a text on Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (1999) not long after I met him in Berlin, but it took another couple of years for his words – and the words of the play – to really sink in. The personal is political.
The pandemic underscored that ideological construct, and its opposite; the political became personal again, living in a world governed by curfews, clandestine meetings, and a constant question: when you would be able to hug the people you love?
You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
I began to look inward for my subject, reevaluating hundreds of old film photographs of friends, family, the people I love, looking through our experiences and memories captured on silver nitrate in perpetuity. These subjects – this new motif – was challenging, untethered as is it was to any recognisable subjects of history. This was a truly new psychogeography, and began a kind of interior archeology of my own personal history, faulty as it is with the brittle tools of memory.
The works today begin with the same sense of distrust in their subject, layers upon layers of photography, pencil, charcoal, etching ink, stencilled paper, collage, gouache, acrylic, and oil, build a blurry picture of a past scene. The figures within are specific, but they do not ‘tell a story’; the images are stuck, in between a past and present, part record, part fiction. As such, the works are harder to ‘justify’, or place within a neat historical narrative. These ‘post-pandemic’ paintings do not wish to subvert large hegemonic power structures as represented by the canonical monuments of antiquity.
They are instead memorials, in the most basic sense – reminders of the past, and all the layers of emotion we heap on top.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
It always starts with coffee. Regardless of the time of day, I put a pot of coffee on when I get in, take off my coat, put on my painting shoes, and sit in my favourite chair with my mug, looking at yesterday’s work.
Things usually go downhill from there. I think the best form creativity in the studio is like Jenga, and a bit self-destructive – you keep pushing the blocks out further, and eventually you go too far and have to start from scratch. It’s only by the end of the day that you really understand the weight of the bricks, and are relaxed enough to remove the really wobbly ones at the bottom. Most of the best decisions are made when you put your coat back on, reach the door, go to switch out the light and take one look over your shoulder, which pulls you right back in for another hour.
My studio is quite small, given the size of the works I’m making – but I’ve designed it to be flexible. Each day might mean a different task: stretching canvases, drawing expressively on the floor, cutting stencils, making frames, spraying gouache, pouring acrylic, or just painting with a brush on a ladder.
Berlin is still more affordable and spacious for artists than London by some margin, but it is becoming more challenging. The buildings housing both of my previous studios were bought by property developers and, despite fierce legal battles by the tenants involved, each sale forced the eviction of dozens of artists in the centre of the city. BBK, the Berlin Artists Association, provides very well-located subsidised studios to Berlin-based artists, but demand far outstrips supply; over 200 people recently applied for one studio in Kreuzberg, I was told by a representative.
Garda Bather, 2022
Backgammon (2) 2022
Clutch, 2021
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
In no particular order:
Monet | Mitchell at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. This was a once in a lifetime show. I travelled to Paris for the last weekend, and still didn’t realise how lucky I was to see it until I walked into that first room. Such a beautiful thing to see a show put together on emotional, aesthetic grounds, and not overthink it too much.
Pam Evelyn at Massimo de Carlo Pièce Unique, Paris. The heir apparent to Joan Mitchell? You decide.
Peter Doig at the newly opened Courtauld, London. I’m still struggling to articulate this one. Somehow Doig manages to make figurative paintings that are enough on their own; they don’t don’t rely on a narrative or story, even though they are of course highly symbolic. That’s what’s lasting about them, I think – as he mentions in the introductory text to the show, they exist in their own world, and don’t try to explain. In that way they resemble abstract paintings, unexplainable and yet so easy to project onto. He is, remarkably, getting even better as a painter. In the context of the Courtauld collection, the work holds its own.
Tom Holmes’s show Razor Blade Candy at Efremidis, Berlin. I’ve been lucky to get to know Tom over the past year and could not be more emphatically a fan. The paintings take the question of figurative painting & AI as their jumping off point, but that doesn’t do them justice. They needs to be seen in person.
Ghislaine Leung’s work Hours, 2022 Score at Galerie Molitor, Berlin. I have kind of fallen in love with this wall painting, and what it represents, after spending some time with it last year. It’s a beautiful, methodologically complex, formally minimal statement on motherhood that will stay with me for years. Leung’s extended title describes it as “a wall painting the size of the artist’s home studio wall divided into all the hours of the week with the portion of studio hours available to the artist marked in black. Thursday 9AM-4PM, Friday 9AM-4PM”.
Louis Bourgeois, The Woven Child, at Gropius Bau. This finished in October last year, but has haunted my memory ever since. An old fashioned romantic show; beautiful and tragic in equal measures. I still can’t believe the texture of the whole exhibition, each material so painfully chosen to give meaning or purpose to an idea.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
Yes!
My painting Family History has been shortlisted by the Jackson’s Painting Prize. There is a “people’s vote”, but I think it will have closed by the time this hits the press, so cross your fingers…
My “weekly” podcast Postcards From Berlin, with longtime musical collaborator and erstwhile Berliner, Viv le Vav, is out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else. Each episode takes a sideways look at creativity and art in Berlin, through a sonic kaleidoscope. We will soon be inviting other artists and musicians as guests – get in touch if you fancy it.
Finally, thank you to Floorr. My painting Grand Hotel has been selected for the EXH 10 online exhibition accompanying this interview. I can’t wait to see how it hangs alongside the other works selected.
I have a few upcoming shows that I can’t quite announce, but stay tuned to my Instagram if you’re interested, or join my mailing list. I’d love to tell you more, but good things come to those who wait.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 20/04/23
