A Fish out of Water

We didn't have much art in my home when I was growing up, other than my uncle's paintings, and I certainly didn't know what what it meant to be an artist. But, from a very young age creativity was a big part of my life, and looking back I see an inevitability about where my life would eventually end up. I think it was always my destiny to become an artist. With that said, my mum was always involving herself in crafts activity and I joined in enthusiastically, and because my parents worked all the time, especially my dad, who worked away from home most of the year, I was passed between grandparents and kept quiet with felt tip pens and rolls of wallpaper. At age 6 I won my first art prize for a Fuzzy Felt rendition of The Battle of Waterloo.

Later, during my school holidays, I was sent to stay with my grandma and my uncle Pete in Scarborough. Uncle Pete was a signalman on the railway. He also had many hobbies, renovating British motorbikes, model train sets, and making paintings of steam trains, mainly set in Rotherham. He was an accomplished and prolific amateur. It was at his Gristhorpe signal box where he taught me to paint. At school I was the “go to” person, for all things creative.

Then, my courage failed me at a critical moment. In my final year careers meeting the old duffer that did my interview said, “What do you want to do after school?”. I replied, “I want to go to art college”. He said, “People from Brinsworth don’t go to art college. What does your father do?”. “He's in construction”, I replied. He said, “I strongly recommended you go and work with your father”, sadly, I did. As I said, my courage failed me. Time passed, money was earned, house and cars were bought, and I met my wife and eventually had kids. But art never left me. I would draw on the backs of the technical drawings I used every day on site, I painted at home, and I involved myself in any opportunity to be creative.

I don't have many regrets in life, but I look back at this moment often and think to myself how different everything would have been if I had gone straight to art college. The thing is, in 1984 I was a very motivated kid and enthusiastic about the art I made at school. If I had followed my dream I would have most certainly ended up in London, and would have been at art school at the same time as the Brit Art guys. That said, had I took this path, I would not have my two wonderful children, nor would I have picked up the skill set and life experience that would serve me so well into the future. So, I guess its not really a regret at all.

The other passion in my life was my hobby, Scuba Diving. As a kid I was obsessed with Jacques Cousteau and Hans and Lotte Has, so with my very first wage packet I joined Rotherham Sub Aqua Club. Diving was my obsession, especially diving on shipwrecks, and I would go diving as often as I could. Then in the late 80s, when the stock market crashed and I found myself struggling to find work, I wound up working aboard a salvage ship in the North Sea and Irish Sea. A career choice which horrified my wife and my mother, mainly through fear for my safety. They were right to be, it was a very risky job. For me though, I was having a great time. Every day was exhilarating, and in the downtime between dives, I got to paint and draw in my cabin. You can imagine, I mostly painted ships, and drew shipwrecks, as well as my crew mates and their families. I also attempted to paint sailing ships, which I found frustrating, as I could never get the perspective right, as well as the colour of the canvas sails - which became an early driving force towards perfection. Anyway, the near-death moments kept piling up and there is only so much the nerves can take. My nerve eventually went. I handed in my notice in late August 1992.

I did two more expeditions before I left the ship, but it was after the first of these that everything changed for me. We had been diving on the wreckage of an 1874 three-masted schooner near the Isle of Man and were returning to Liverpool to stock up on oxygen for the decompression chamber, to drop off our scrap haul, and to get some fuel. The expedition had been relatively uneventful, and the weather was fine. During the return journey Steve 2 and myself were in the hold all day making grappling hooks, cutting bars, bending them, and welding them together. We landed and I drove home with 24 hours of shore leave. That night I woke up screaming in agony! I had "welder’s flash". Which is an extremely painful condition caused by the welding arc drying out the eyes. I ended up in casualty at 2 a.m. getting drops in my eyes.

Anyway, at some point during this palaver my wife pointed out an advert in the local paper for a course called “Access to Art”, at Rotherham College. The next morning, unable to drive to Liverpool, I called the ship to delay sailing, and I called Rotherham College to get an interview. I did my interview for art college with a packet of drawings and paintings on the table in front of me, and with patches on both my eyes. They accepted me and I started my course in October, just a few weeks later.

At this moment it’s safe to say I hadn’t got a clue where all this was heading. I’d gone to college thinking I could go into graphic design, or interior design, essentially to do something vocational. My wife and mum thought I’d soon get bored, or sick of being skint, and go back into construction. How wrong they were. In late October we had our first college outing to London. We did the tour, Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Academy, and finally we went to the National Gallery to see “The Frieze of Life”, an exhibition by Edvard Munch. Standing in that room with all that amazing work, with the artist's soul laid bare, I had tears in my eyes. I had never been so moved by anything in my life before. At that moment I turned to my tutor, Derek Allport, and said “I am going to be an artist”. To which he replied, “It's a lonely path Richard”. In hindsight, there was a lot of truth in that statement, but, despite all of the tribulations that decision brought about, I have never had a moment of regret. And so began my art career and a lifelong struggle to find my muse.

I was very lucky with University, I got to do my BA at Bretton Hall College, which was situated in the middle of what would become the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A sublime, albeit sculpted landscape, peppered with the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. The studios were light and spacious, and the course leader David Walker Barker, was an accomplished and dedicated artist in his own right. Even if he was a grumpy sod at times. The truth was, Dave was happiest in his studio making art, and teaching was a terrible distraction for him. In his own way, it was his dedication that had the biggest impact on me as an artist, and consequently, was the reason I have spent my whole art career avoiding going into teaching.

Steppingstones

Most artists have a moment of realisation, whether it's a mark that opens up a new way of mark making, a piece of written text that opens the door to a new way of thinking, or something said that brings clarity or direction. For me, that moment was accumulative and multifaceted. It’s also a complex story, with many branches of influence, but I will try and tell it so you might better understand what brought me to this point and the work I am making right now. To understand this properly though, we must time travel back to my first year studying art at Bretton Hall and the influences from that time that have carried through my entire career.

Firstly, first assignment, year one, there was the project titled “Culture, Nature, Environment”. Which I guess did exactly what it said on the tin: look at the land, try to understand the truth of it, realise its cultural value and my place within it, make art about it. Me, I looked at the history of where I lived, the ancient land of Thorgeirr and Godric. I made paintings on paper, akin to maps, tore them up, and then made collages from the pieces. What this actually did though was re-awaken in me a love of history and break me away from working figuratively. This was the first moment I began to understand contemporary painting, and paint as a material.

Then came “The Systems Project”. We were given 2 square feet of polythene sheet, 2 ft of dowel, 2 lb of sand, a ball of string, a roll of masking tape, and a copy of Gaston Bachelard’s book “The Poetics of Space”. With this we were told to make structures and draw. Me, I took it into the swimming pool. Still diving at that time, I made weights and buoyancy structures and documented the results with my underwater camera. In my studio I reversed them using the sand as weight, and I drew. From this I learned about process, about working with the constraints of a few elements, and about composition.

Then we were set free. Having come to art college from a career in marine salvage I was automatically drawn to make work about that experience. I fiddled about with little success until one day, talking to a fellow student who was attempting to make work about his climbing experience, I realised that it didn’t work. That you cannot easily make people know the psychology and physicality of your experiences through art. These are subjective experiences, and danger is a lived moment only you can really understand. And so, I began to focus on the material I had worked with in salvage, copper, iron, brass, and bronze, and began to use chemicals to patina them, transforming their surfaces into a myriad of multi colours and textures. Which brings me to the second biggest influence of my career, Ursula Szulakowska, one of my art history tutors. She advised me to look at alchemy.

At first it was about the material, then it became about coding, and finally about process. Alchemy is all about process. Alongside this inquiry we were also studying the postmodern thinkers, Lacan, Baudrillard, Lyotard, as well as Barthes and Berger. But it was Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, J.A Walker, and his view of how technology and mass produced images had influenced the progress of art, and a short story I was advised to read, about a contemporary alchemist who photocopied a Da Vinci drawing, zooming in and copying the resulting print over and over again, 200,000 times, until he revealed a new Da Vinci masterpiece, that changed everything and made me understand what “Base into gold” really meant. Both being metaphors for something less chemical and more rooted in culture, and the self.

The culmination of all of the above resulted in the work I made for the following 8 years. Repetition of media images was everything to me. It was how I began to see the world.  Not only as a commentary on a society full of idealised objects, mostly for marketing purposes, but also the process of dissecting the photocopies hundreds of times became a form of alchemical process, distilling the sign to a maddening intensity, and perfecting that process. Much as the alchemists would distill water 100 times, through process I learned. With that said, I am a painter at heart, and even though the sign and what was signified was the reason the work existed, I placed these objects within landscapes, experimented with paint, creating texture and washes and, using the language of graphic design, created hard edged structures of vibrant colours and flat plains. I was prolific. As one is when one believes in the work.

Through this work I achieved success. I got representation with a London art dealer and eventually was represented by Paton Gallery in Hackney. I sold a lot of work, I had solo shows, and I got a lot of media attention. It was a fun time and, through sevaral monumental sales to a five-star hotel, One Adwych in Covent Garden, I managed to become a full-time artist and quit the part time job that had sustained me to that point.

Life goes on, and on, and on...

In 2004 I attended an MA at Sheffield Hallam University, I began to make installations again, and I dabbled in sculpture. Once again, success came, and I began to exhibit this work. I also received my first Arts Council funding. That said, as a consequence of global politics and the hangups I had nurtured as a young punk with a strong anarchist influence, my work had started to drift down a highly politised path. It wasn’t me. It gnawed at me. Politics had always played a part in the stuff I made, but rather than taking a soap box I had preferred a subtle approach, using aesthetics and the language of marketing to present aesthetically pleasing works with a hidden narrative. Behind the scenes I took steps to change this and I continued to paint.

Then around the time of my studies, in 2005, I went to London to see the exhibition “Turks: a journey of a thousand years” at the Royal Academy. There I encountered the work of 14th century miniature painter and storyteller Mehmet Siyah Kalem. I was blown away! His work wasn’t what I was usually drawn to but there was something within it that I identified with, that was inspiring to me. I decided there and then that I would go to Turkiye, Istanbul in fact, and see what I could make as a result of this influence.

My first trip to Turkiye wasn't to Istanbul though, it was for a holiday in the south. My partner at the time spoke Turkish and had many connections there, so the holiday was spent hanging out with old revolutionary Turks and socialists, and eating food and drinking raki at their homes. However, it was one moment of great good fortune that sealed my fate: It was a very rainy day and wanting to at least contribute something to the conversations I was listening to every day, I sat on the balcony with my phrase book and leaned one simple phrase that I could repeat in company "Ben Richard, sanatçum, ilginç manzara ve socio politics" (which was mostly grammatically wrong but basically said "I Richard, my art, interest, landscape and socio-politics"). Anyway, we had wandered into the market and took shelter from the rain in a local satellite TV shop. My partner was sat inside playing Tavla and drinking tea whilst I sat on the door step sketching the market traders battling against each other and the elements. At that moment a fine looking old gentleman appeared who took interest in what I was doing. He inquired about me to my Turkish friend who turned to me and said "Tell him what you said earlier Richard", I did. In his delight, and with my friend acting as translator, I learned he had had an art gallery once upon a time in Ankara, and that his daughter was a curator and art critic in Istanbul. My second trip to Turkiye was to Istanbul. On the very first night I found myself sat at table in the famous Socialist Party fish restaurant with Aysegul Sonmez (his daughter) the artists of the renown art group Hafriyat, and several other well known artists and critics. I had quite literally parachuted into the middle of the Istanbul art scene.

And so, with Arts Council funding, I attended my first artists residency in Istanbul in 2008, at the prestigious art institution Platform Garanti. For 6 months I wandered the streets with my catalogue of Siyah Kalem’s drawing in my hand, failing utterly to make anything that wasn’t derivative or downright obvious. I came home with little physical to show for my efforts, but I had created a new international network, and the seeds of everything that was to come in the future were well and truly sown.

From this I did further residencies in Turkiye, had work on the fringe of the Istanbul Biennial in 2009, work that went on to be show cased at the Copenhagen and Jihlava film festivals. I was a part of the 2010 Mardin Biennial, and I began to ponder my work and my future in a much deeper way. In 2012 I received my first major solo exhibition at a museum institute in the UK: Deities at the Bottom of the Garden, at 20:21 Gallery in Scunthorpe. The work I made for this was directly influenced by my life in Istanbul. Specifically, the architecture.

Time passed by, I made new work, exhibited, made a few sales, and occasionally thumbed through the Siyah Kalem catalogue that sat on my studio shelf. More time passed by… and then one day it hit me “Don’t think of the characters in Siyah Kalem’s drawings as just renderings of his world, see them as living entities, present in the modern city”, it was a revelation.  From this I began to marry the small maquette sculptures I was making at the time with this new focus. I returned to Istanbul in 2017 to attend a residency at Halka Sanat Projects. The resulting exhibition, whilst not fully resolved, was a series of small sculptures, each representing a different drawing from Siyah Kalem’s social observations, but based on my observations of the contemporary city.

After all this, my attention turned to Siyah Kalem’s wild and imaginative demon Paintings. My second residency at Halka Sanat was all about this. I did try to bring the same 3-dimensional concept to this work, but in the end, it was painting that made the most sense. The resulting works were made using the projected outlines of his demons, which I used as empty vessels in which to create textures and marks based on the city around me, the street art, and the political stencils. I made three manifestations of this project, one where I took the exact measurement of the fragments of his work and scaled them up from millimeters to centimeters, one with decimal point moved over, and the last where I converted millimeters to inches. The exactness of the remaining fragments of Siyah Kalems works was deeply important to me. It was this work that became my second museum level solo exhibition Nomadic Tales, at The Millennium Galleries, Sheffield.

An Aside

I can’t really write a biography without mentioning Bloc Studios. Bloc began in 1996 after art college. I was rooted to Sheffield because of my family, and I didn't want to work alone (I tried it and nearly went insane). So, I set up Bloc with 3 other graduates from Bretton Hall in a disused former cutlery factory in the city center. There were four of us at first, but over the years, as they left, I inherited the business. In 1999 I inherited another 6 studios in another part of the building. It was also in 1999 that I met Fred Gould. We were standing together in the queue at Office World, me to get 100 photocopies of a combined harvester made for a painting, him a photocopy from a photograph of one of his buildings for an advert. By the time we got to the front we were friends. In 2001 Fred contacted me and asked me if I wanted to move Bloc into one of his buildings just over the road, and 10 studios became 24. It was then that Bloc Gallery was born, later becoming Bloc Projects. In 2005 I took on another part of the building and 24 studios became 56.

I love Bloc, its core idea of helping artists to be artists remains as strong today as it was at the beginning. For me it came about because I had a skill-set I could use to create and maintain something communal, a community I could be a part of. I’ve put a lot of my personal money in over the years, spending the proceeds of two big commissions on its expansion, and a lot of time. But why this is an aside? It’s not how I introduce myself. I am an artist. Not a studio manager. I am a tenant in my own creation, even if being always tied that creation can sometimes feel like a bit of a millstone around my neck.

War and Pestilence

So, after my residencies in Istanbul, I ended up renting an apartment there. I had finished with Siyah Kalem and began to paint other things again. In the text above I keep saying “Time passed by, I made new work”. Well, this had a lot to do with what I considered to be my midlife crisis. Which was all about my mortality, and getting fit. Yoga, running, mountaineering, running up mountains. And, under the influence of Haruki Murakami’s book “What I talk about when I talk about running”, which was introduced to me by my good friend Jenny Baines, I began to make work about the rocks at my feet as I ran. At first this was based on the rocks I encountered on the Cornish coast. Later I made similar work about the rocks I was traversing on the Istanbul Bosporus shoreline.

I ran in the Istanbul Marathon in November 2019. By January the following year Covid hit hard. Travel was tough, and I kept getting caught in both country’s lock downs. I had 4 altogether! But it was the war in Ukraine that ended my time there. Istanbul began to fill up with fleeing Russians and Ukrainians, the economy collapsed, inflation went crazy, and my rent went up 400% over night. I left Istanbul.

Home Sweet Home

Life in Istanbul was good, but it was tough at times, lonely, and I was homesick often. Little things sustained me, an occasional homemade curry, a trip to the islands, and British comedy, in particular The Detectorists, which had a connection to the English lanscape that helped me a lot with my feelings of homesickness. So, when I found myself at home again, cut off from my muse and drifting around looking for the next thing to make, finding myself in a Lincolnshire field with a metal detector felt like a natural thing to do, the TV series sparked in me a curiosity. If Mackenzie Crook can do it, so can I. Metal Detecting helped me reengage with my own landscape and its history in a profound way. I have to thank my wonderful friends Jim and Jo Scholey here, not only for supporting me for decades by collecting my work but also letting me camp on their land and wander their fields with my metal detector.

As you have probably already realised, nothing in my life remains apart from my art or my work ethic. Scuba diving becomes salvage diving, a holiday to Turkey becomes a string of residencies, running becomes about representing what’s at my feet, and detecting was inevitably to become something in furtherance of making art. With that said, the moment of realisation wasn’t gradual and certainly not obvious to me. What came about was in an instance of realisation and a coming together of everything in my career so far in a single moment. It happened like this…

There I was, on a cold November morning, wandering through a muddy field, swinging my detector before me as I paced. My thoughts were about the past, the things I’d made, and what from all that I would make again. I’d loved the rock paintings, they were joyous to make, splashing paint around and experimenting all the time with mark making. I’d loved the demons, feeling the texture of the world and recreating it, engaging with the world around me. And I’d really loved how the demons floated on raw canvas. It was a winning formula. I’d sold most of them! But what to paint? And then it hit me, I was standing in a field strewn with flints. I could paint those. Why hadn’t I seen it before? I realised, it was a matter of scale. Zoom in close and a small rock is a big rock. Eureka! Big canvases, small rocks. A macrocosmic view of the microcosmic.

So, I took out my phone and snapped away at my feet again. But something nagged at me. It wasn’t enough! What had always excited me, ever since my exposure to the post-modern thinkers, was meaning, meaning and narrative, told through what “things” signify, and how the meaning of signs can slip as the context of them changes. My detector beeped. Kneeling in the mud, with an Edward III silver penny in my hand it hit me. The penny was a part of a story, it had a grand history, as well as a hidden history that belonged to the person who had lost it many centuries ago. In fact, everything I found was imbued with narrative, of the people and the land, of migration and settlement, and of the cultural melting pot that Britain has always been. Later, I realised too that the oxidization process of the metal objects I was finding had a direct relationship with the work I had done many years ago around alchemy.

From then on it was just a matter of making the work, and detecting became a performative act as a part of that process. Other realisations happened, happy ones. Like realising that Baudrillard’s Simulacra had returned to my work, and that old story “On Exactitude in Science”, the map that's so accurate it can lay over the land was a part of what I was making. I had talked for many years about my work existing on the threshold between the objective and the subjective too, that was back, albeit as the notion of the liminal space, between past and present, abstract and representation, and the imagined and the real.

In more practical terms, my 30 years of perfecting a style of hard-edged paintings and the elimination of bleeding edges, had come to fruition when dealing with working on clean, raw (clear primed) canvas. Likewise, the transformation many years ago from working with cutout images, adhered directly to the canvas, to a highly refined transfer technique, had become a useful tool when working with the patterns of the pieces of broken ceramics I was now using within my work. Finally, the processes I had learned and developed to build up layers of paint, splattering, scraping, pouring, and then sanding back, had all come together within the surfaces of this work. It’s as if everything I had been making over the years had been preparation for this moment and this work.

As a consequence of the above, the next logical step was to immerse myself in the new work and see what, if anything, would arise. This led to a self-initiated artists residency in 2024 in one of the farm buildings on the site where I had been detecting. I applied for Arts Council funding, which funded the work, and started to look for a place to exhibit what I made.

The residency was great, a bit cold, as it was late January, and living in my camper van next to the barn for such a long period made me a bit stir crazy. But life was good. Every morning, I would wander into the fields with my detector to find the things I need for the work, then in the afternoon and evening I would paint. After 4 months I had created 10 new large-scale paintings. I was pleased. Not only with the results, but because I had managed to formulate a stimulating and evolving process with the potential to become self-sustaining. With the work too, it had all the elements I had hoped for, aesthetically pleasing, and full of narrative.

And so, as a consequence of this, I had my first solo exhibition in June that year at Tattershall Castle: Brick & Stone, Iron & Bronze. An exhibition that had over 4000 visitors, and from what I was told, had received a rather positive reception from the public.

Since this time, I have continued this work, slowly working through the countless things I have found (occasionally going out to find more), making works of different assemblages, of different scales, and developing and testing my method. Currently, I am in the process of pushing this even further by working in collaboration with Wessex Archaeology and the things they have found whilst excavating the ruins of Sheffield Castle.

Watch this space for further developments.