"I aim to present a twilit, hallucinatory world haunted by the presence of the human figure. It’s a place where light and shadow fall across flesh and where bodies coalesce with their surroundings."

Our interview with James Dearlove discusses their process and thoughts behind their work.
Interview by Richard Starbuck.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I currently live and have my studio on the edge of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. I literally live at the very end of one of those tiny little lanes you can end up disappearing down in deepest, darkest Cornwall. I moved down here in 2018 from London where I had a studio in Vauxhall. The reason I chose Cornwall is because I have strong family ties to the area. I had lived in London for thirty years and felt it was time to try a change of scenery and escape high studio rents. I met my husband very soon after moving (we got married in 2021) and then the pandemic happened so Cornwall suddenly became my home and suddenly felt very much like home too. 

My father worked for SIS so much of my upbringing was spent abroad. My very first memories are of living in Czechoslovakia during the seventies when it was under communist rule. A totalitarian socialist regime was a very difficult place to bring up a child and I feel some of the underlying disquietude in my work definitely stems from that time. 

I originally (back in the nineties!) studied at the Slade School of Art In London where I did an MFA. My BA was actually in English Literature at University College London but during my BA I made lots of friends at the Slade (which is part of the UCL campus) and decided that I wanted very much to study there. So I made a portfolio, applied and got in. I had amazing tutors while I was there: Euan Uglow, Jock McFadyen, Bruce McLean and Yolanda Sonnabend to name a few.

After the Slade I got side-tracked by a 15 year career as a TV producer working on shows like Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity Juice and The Brits but there came a point where my desire to paint overrode everything and one day I resigned from my job in TV, found the studio in Vauxhall and just started to paint! 

Most recently I have studied at Turps Art School where I did a few years on their correspondence course and was mentored by  three fantastic painters: Benjamin Senior, Anne Sasoon and Neal Tait. 

Water and sea life, like the figure on the raft and the octopus, appear frequently in your art. What do these aquatic themes mean to you, and how do they connect to the main ideas in your work?

I think of many of my pieces as vortex paintings; especially the larger works. So I’ll paint a figure or several figures on some kind of platform surrounded by some kind of existential swirl. It could be a figure on a raft surrounded by water and sea creatures but it could also be a figure or figures on a bed surrounded by a “sea” of other bodies, bedsheets and tower blocks. We are clearly living through a time of immense global uncertainty and existential dread (about AI, climate change, pandemics etc) and so maybe I paint these vortices to suggest our frailty and vulnerability in this roaring, chaotic universe. 

The ultimate vortex painting that stopped me in may tracks when I first saw it in the Louvre was Theodore Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa”. It’s such  an extraordinary and visceral depiction of desolation but beautiful and sensuous at the same time. As I started to paint figures on beds, rafts and water I realised that the influence of Gericault’s painting was seeping in: the yellows and blues, the twilight, the turbulent skies and the compositions of entwined bodies. 

I think there’s also a little bit of the movie Bed-knobs and Broomsticks in my work especially with the flying chairs and lamps in “Figures Adrift” that create a sense of foreboding and a kind of imaginative release. When I was a child I used to wish with all my heart that my bed would fly to other strange worlds like it does in the movie. When we installed my recent solo show with BWG Gallery  “Tales of the City, Tales of the Sea” I worked with the curator Jack Trodd to summon that feeling with flying chairs and lamps installed throughout the gallery around the paintings as if an Atlantic storm had just blown open the doors! 

I use the sea creatures in my paintings to pin down a moment. The diving birds in “Figure on a Raft with Sea Creatures” and “Figures Adrift with Birds” literally pin down the moment of each painting in time. The octopus unfurling its tentacle towards the figure’s leg in “Figure on a Raft with Sea Creatures” is doing the same thing with a moment of touch. I am a huge Kate Bush fan and there is a pivotal point in “The Ninth Wave” (which is all about being ship-wrecked) where she says three times “I put this moment here” and then all hell breaks loose with an incredible, wild Irish jig!

Your paintings often depict human figures in surreal, dream-like settings. What inspires you to create these fantastical worlds, and what emotions or ideas are you aiming to express through these scenes?

I aim to present a twilit, hallucinatory world haunted by the presence of the human figure. It’s a place where light and shadow fall across flesh and where bodies coalesce with their surroundings. It’s a world of perpetual dawn as painting twilight allows me to create a liminal space where transgressions can occur and chimeras can emerge. My paintings may depict moments that are “beautiful” in some way or other but they are always shot through with an underlying sense of unease. Ultimately my paintings explore both the desire and the disquietude in the human experience through my own memories of childhood and more recently my experiences as a queer person living in the city and now in rural isolation. 

The mix of urban landscapes with intimate human moments in your paintings stands out. How do you use this contrast to explore the connection between city life and personal experiences, and what message are you trying to convey with this blend?

I often use newspaper in my paintings and I think this is at the heart of how and why I blend intimate human moments with cityscapes. I paint onto individual squares of newspaper and then assemble these squares on linen or canvas to create the underlying skeleton of my composition. Then I’ll paint on top of this grid of painted newspaper squares to achieve the finished painting. I love the way the newspaper shatters the painted surface with a cold, mechanical interference. I also enjoy the way the painting floats on an undercurrent of printed matter. I often use the financial pages of a newspaper to paint onto as there is a counterpoint between these bodies seeking intimacy and the indifferent fluctuations of stocks and shares and the relentless anxiety-inducing twenty four hour news cycle in general. The newspaper acts as a cipher for the city.  So I suppose what I’m saying is that the newspaper and the city provide the perfect foil for my depictions of bodies seeking intimacy and meaning. But then when I moved  to Cornwall I discovered that the sea can also provide this infernal, indifferent context to human intimacy… but of course in a different way. 

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?

One of the reasons for moving down to Cornwall was to have a bigger, cheaper space to work in. I was able to covert the garage that adjoins my cottage into a studio that is way bigger than anything I could have found in London and costs me nothing. Another reason for my move was to be able to really focus on my painting without the inevitable distractions of city life and so here in on the edge of Bodmin Moor I can literally get up, make a cup of coffee, wander in to my studio and spend the day painting. This is something I could never do in the city. 

I work on lots of pieces at the same time. My paintings tends to be very layered and have complex compositions and so working on multiple pieces at a time allows me to build up the paintings over time and in an organic way. I’m often waiting for various areas to dry (or just becoming irritated with them!) so this method also allows me to always find an area of a painting I can move on to and work on in a productive way. 

A lot of my references come from images I find on the internet. I like to print these images out rather than stare at them on my phone or computer so my studio is strewn with these print outs. I also have a massive image “bible” in the middle of my studio which is where these print outs eventually come to rest stuck onto A1 size sheets of stiff paper. This gigantic scrap book is becoming so large and heavy it now has its own stand or maybe I should call it a lectern! 

I’m a very keen gardener and love spending time in the garden that surrounds my studio. It’s full of flowers and vegetables and 5 chickens. There’s a little pond full of gold fish too. I like to grow the more rare and interesting plants such as blue Himalayan poppies, white lady slipper orchids and flaming parrot tulips and so I expect these plants will start to appear in my work more and more. 

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

I recently went to see Danica Lundy’s show “Boombox” at the White Cube in Mason’s Yard in London. It was an extraordinary show. It’s difficult to pick a single piece as they were all so astonishing. Each painting is quite a complex composition with an inside out point of view and the artist has employed a myriad of different painting techniques to delineate everything and keep the surface of the canvas alive. If I had to choose one it would be “Quiet Night at the NICU” which depicts the artist’s first child which was delivered prematurely. The child is exquisitely painted safe and sound inside it’s incubator but then as your eye moves outward away from the baby you realise that the composition has sliced through a pair of arms that are reaching in to cradle the infant. It’s shocking and beautiful all at once and having read this interview you will know by now that I relish this kind of duality in my own work. 

Franz Kafka said that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us” and I believe that a painting should be that axe too!

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

Last year I did a month long residency at Colstoun House in the Scottish Borders. It’s a very atmospheric and very large country house (parts of the building date back to the 12th Century) with panoramic, rambling gardens and woodlands. The residency has been going for about 18 months and has a focus on landscape artists. Mackie Sinclair-Parry (the residency director) has now also just opened a gallery at Colstoun where in August he is curating a show of work by all the artists who have attended the residency so far. I’m going back up to Colstoun in July to finish a large landscape (with figures and birds) that I started up there in time for this group show which is called “Resident 1” and opens on August 2nd. The other artists include James Mortimer, Raffael Bader, Lara Cobden, Joe Grieve and Angelique Nagovskaya to name a few and I’m very excited to be showing work alongside them with all of us having drawn inspiration from our time at the house. 

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All images courtesy of the artist
Interview publish date: 04/07/2024