The Beechwood Airship Interviews

Did you feel detachment or absolute presence in the moment?

‘I think I shifted between those things constantly. I remember thinking, “Look at that, Jenny; you’ve got to take that in, you’ve got to hold and watch that, that’s amazing. Look at the colours in that!” At the same time my aunt’s holding my daughter and I was asking, “Is she alright? Is she okay?” You know, “That’s my daughter! Isn’t she beautiful!”

I have noticed in life that I’ve had times where I’ve had a conscious feeling of trying to hold a moment, visually, because I’ve known it was important; even at a very young age.

I remember riding on a merry-go-round and seeing another little girl who’d cut her legs open because she’d fallen off her horse and I was going round – sitting with my dad on one of those golden horses that go up and down – getting snippets, coming round again and getting another snippet.’

With a jolly pipe organ soundtrack.

‘Exactly. I remember thinking, “That’s really powerful,” because everyone was looking and then you couldn’t see. I wanted to get round and see again. That’s very much the kind of animal/human – wanting to see something but being worried at the same time or repulsed. I remember the scene so vividly. I was obviously tuned-in to that way of thinking even then because I knew that it was important, visually important to me, and I understood the mechanics of it and I must only have been four or five.’

I remember slamming my fingers in a car door when I was very young and my dad – in the way dads do – bought me a Crunchie chocolate bar to make it better. So now, every time I see a Crunchie I have that memory and a slight twinge, a feeling of pins and needles. I remember looking down at the dent in my fingers, squished right down … that moment before the pain hits. You get a split second of perfect clarity.

‘Yes, exactly, and I think that sometimes I paint with that in mind. That moment.’

• • • • •

Normally, of course, these are just the sort of conversations that might make you change seats, carriages or trains if it came unbidden from the lady next to you – unless she’d introduced herself as a surgeon or a butcher, say, and you’d kicked off with ‘So … evisceration and the films of Nicolas Roeg, eh?’

Yet I’m fascinated in Jenny’s company and engaged to an extent where any weirdness, macabre connotations or squeamishness could not be further from my mind.

The incredible intensity of the few hours I spend with her will remain with me and, looking back, there was a saturation about that morning – the colours and the images, the source texts and the photographs … yet, at the heart of it all was this quiet, contained lady in painty tracksuit bottoms, hair held back by an elastic band … ‘But she was so bloody normal,’ I’ll later recall, then, almost in the same breath, ‘She was one of the most brilliant, uncanny people I’ve met.’*

We break for tea and I ask about Jenny’s childhood, how she came to be here, when she discovered who and what she wanted to be, her formative years.

Did you spend a lot of time in your bedroom?

‘I would say so, yeah. I lived in lots of different houses and went to lots of different schools and so art became something that was a constant for me. I just always remember making paintings or building things and I read a lot about other artists. I visited Cézanne’s house when I was sixteen because I had an obsession with Cézanne and I knew pretty early on what it took to be an artist – reading about the life of Van Gogh when I was about twelve, things like that. My uncle was an art historian and he ran courses in Venice and Florence so I’d spend summers there and would join in all the art history courses. In the Frari in Venice, there’s an enormous Titian altarpiece of the assumption of the Virgin and I can remember sitting in front of that and saying, “One day I’m going to make paintings as big as that.” It wasn’t a joke. I was absolutely serious. I didn’t really know who Titian was but I learnt about him and Tintoretto and eventually I owned it through that knowledge. I knew that was going to be my life. I didn’t even consider that that wasn’t a thing that women had done. It wasn’t even on my radar. It was absolutely my life – there was my life: I was going to be in dialogue with these people who had done this stuff. I think the naivety of my desire helped me. That’s just what I did and my mother was a teacher – she was my teacher actually, when I was very little – so the classroom, when all the kids left, was mine; so she’d be doing whatever she did and I’d just be making things or drawing and that continued. It was my language from a very early age.’*

Your vocabulary to communicate with the world.

‘Absolutely. I mean, I admire writers greatly. I don’t find the precision in words that I do in paint. I find paint’s the way I can hold all the contradictions of life. I can’t begin to use words that way.’

Interesting then that a lot of your catalogue essays are very cerebral and penetrating in that way – John Gray, for example, one of the most acute and steely writers I know.

‘I love his writing. Straw Dogs in one of the best books written in the last twenty years because it’s incredibly precise; to be able to go through that amount of information … the relationship that he’s got with humans as animals is something that I’ve had in my work, that I’ve felt, since I was much younger. I give it to everybody, that book.*

‘I’m interested in fictional, constructed ideas of the self – ‘If I had this procedure, I’d be more myself’ – that’s just a myth, a mythical thing. You have this fictional idea of what you want to look like or could look like, need to look like, to be more wholly you. It’s an artificial construct and I found that very interesting when talking to patients in New York; they felt that they were inhabiting their body more by having this artifice … and that’s not a modern phenomenon but the idea that you can re-sculpt your flesh, I thought that thrilling.

I wasn’t making a moral judgement with the work, which a lot of people thought I was; I was fascinated with the need to do it and what the mechanisms of that were because I’ve often been interested in the space between things. I’d say the biggest thread that runs through my work is “the in-between”.

If it’s a transvestite or a transsexual, you’re in-between – a floating gender. You aren’t fixed – and that movable boundary I found an interesting place to operate. A free space.’

That’s the word, I suppose, operation. A surgical gaze.

‘Yes, I would say so, and I’ve painted quite a few things where you’re not quite sure whether the body is alive or dead. I’ve often tried to find images that have that – one eye left open or a face that’s completely mauled. When I paint it, I want it so you have to work to piece the head back together again, so you’ve got a moment of crisis, as a viewer.’

There are very few things more arresting or off-putting than to have your gaze met by something ‘other’ – familiar yet alien.

‘I suppose so, but by the time I’ve done them I’m so involved with them that I don’t see them with fresh eyes because I’ve done the journey … I think I’ve developed the withdrawal of personality, the opposite of what portraits have been aiming to do for centuries. I try to show the personality of whatever trauma or alteration is of the body.’

The crash site. The aftermath.

‘That’s it, I’m not trying to show the personality of the human being in the way of “the eyes being the gateway to the soul” – it’s not that.’

But I think you can have both together. I remember John Hurt talking about how he cried reading the script of The Elephant Man because of that feeling, the glint and purchase of recognition – the body, the man behind the trauma.

‘That’s the thing: when you get people that work well – even an artist like Velázquez, his Pope painting in Rome, he doesn’t illustrate. Velázquez isn’t like Caravaggio. Caravaggio, however great he is, for me, he’s a bit of an illustrator. Velázquez doesn’t illustrate. He builds in paint. He’s in that moment where it’s more real than real because he uses paint so well, and people like David Lynch do the same thing, I think. Something like The Elephant Man, it’s not you but it’s the hyperbolic you, but he has enough realism in it that it brings it to you; so it’s in you and out of you at the same time, and that’s quite thrilling because it unlocks sensations that you know you’ve got but don’t often have the facility in life to think about or experience.’

• • • • •

Jenny leads the way into the larger room beyond, pushing through the plastic sheets,* revealing a space dominated by multiple versions of the painting Stare. The faces gaze out, each with a dazed expression somewhere between “Have I left the gas on?” and “I’ve just cut off my thumb.” The expression lives in the moment of a child’s confusion – the split second between the fall and the tears, the crash and the blood.

I tell Jenny I’m amazed she’s able to redraw and repaint the same image over and over – each individual yet retaining an essence.

‘I know that mouth back to front now. Each one; but I’m quite pleased that I’m finishing them because I’ve painted this head an awful lot of times now.’

The textures here are really meaty.

‘They’re all going to be shown together. I became interested in video phones a few years ago and early MSN messaging; you’d see somebody break apart and pixellate, leave part of their flesh over there and you’d try with your eye to get the head to come back together again.’

Where did the source material for Stare come from?

‘It’s from a medical book that I had a long time ago. I use Photoshop a lot to shift the colours around so I did a blues and greens version and I did drawings of it – it had everything I needed. It had a mouth that I love, a landscape map-face, one ear that almost holds up the painting so you can shift the head.’

The ellipse of the shirt is great.

‘Exactly, it’s a good rocker at the bottom. So it’s got a lot of elements to it – the shadow of the nose – a lot of things where you can get good shapes going, so really it was an indulgence being able to concentrate on the paint, being allowed to make these landscape figures.’

When you’re preparing a show, do you arrive with some paintings or do people know what’s coming?

‘I don’t have a lot of people coming into the studio because I like to get the work the way I want it before I show it.

I have the link to the gallery, the person who looks after my work, and I talk to them regularly – a few times a week – but I’ve tended not to have somebody coming in to say, “I’d like to show that and I’d like to show that.” There’s nothing like that. They say, “Are you going to be ready in September?” and I always push it. I’ll say, “I don’t know, I’ll tell you in March.” And then, in March, I’ll say, “Can we go for Spring next year?” They’re used to me and I know that there is an elastic level that I can get to but, once I’ve made the commitment to that show date and said, “Okay, let’s do that,” they book the trucks and then I know I’ve got to get it done.’

I saw a film of trucks coming to take the panels of David Hockney’s Bigger Trees Near Warter at Tate Britain recently.

‘I’ve had guys have to have cups of tea in my kitchen because I’ve said, “I’m not ready, you’ll have to wait a bit.”’

Hours or days?

‘I get them to take the paintings piecemeal so, say it’s eight paintings, they’ll take three first and then they’ll come and get another two and then another two and it goes like that for about six weeks.’

Is that to get them out of the space or so you won’t fiddle with them?

‘So I can’t fiddle. I can’t juggle them all at the same time, but in one case the last truck was coming to pick up the last two and I only let them take one. I said, “The other one’s not done,” but the whole show was pivoted around that piece and I didn’t have a lot of work so it wasn’t as if you could leave anything out. The person at the gallery had to find a military airbase in Scotland to fly the last painting to New York.

I had a taxi outside my studio door and then I went, covered in paint, to Heathrow and got changed at the airport and the painting went to the airbase.’

Was it on a military flight?

‘It was a cargo flight that went out of a military base. It was the only flight that was going – the other ones had to go to Frankfurt first because they were too big to go in a regular cargo plane. I know what the biggest size you can get on a cargo plane is because I’ve pushed for the canvas stretcher to be as big as it could go … but I’m not so dramatic as that any more. I used to love the drama of that, you know (mad staring eyes), “I need more time! Arrrgh!”’

I’m an artist!

‘Exactly. “I’m not ready! You can’t have it!” The gallery person is freaking out because they’re going to get killed for not getting that painting on the truck, and they are also tied by “But we need to respect you because you’re an artist …” so you’ve got this bit of elastic where you’re pulling “Arrgh! I can spend another night on the nose …” Then you get to New York and everything arrives, or you get there and they’re still locked in customs and you’re going, “What the fuck!? Where the fuck are they!?” It tends to always work out in the end … but I don’t know if that’s really the best way to make art. It’s okay when you’re in your twenties and you’ve got tons of energy and don’t sleep for two weeks at a time but I think, once you get a bit older, it’s much better to let the work generate itself together. But I know of people who, I mean, Giacometti couldn’t let anything out of his studio – for years he wouldn’t let anything go.’

• • • • •

I think of Rothko exhibiting in his Bowery studio and then to the book Jenny published with Rizzoli whose pages were filled with images of her own workspace – glimpses of mirrors, ladders and platforms. Is Jenny still up and down scaffolds? I wonder.

‘I am but I haven’t worked on anything huge for a while. In Palermo I built a second floor on wheels. It had a palette table, the whole thing at different levels, but what I really want is to buy a studio and have a hole dug in the floor so I can let the painting down and up because I find that when I paint on a scaffolding I don’t paint as well because I can’t walk back to look. I like being on the ground. I want an inspection pit!

I’ve tried painting sideways but you get a slightly wonky head, so now I make the effort to go up and down a ladder. It’s a lot, though, up and down for every single mark.’

Do you have to think more in terms of landscapes when you’re painting sideways?

‘Yes, or an abstract painting. Thinking of space and the ways things work in space. I’ve tried multiple ways of working – collapsible scaffolding, second floors, ladders … ladders in the end are the things that I like but I don’t have the same desire to make enormous paintings. I’ll make paintings the scale of that wall, but it’s an enormous emotional job to make a painting on that scale, getting it to work. I suppose my equivalent of that is having seven or eight heads on the go at the same time, which is what I’ve got going on with these Stares. I’ll probably come back round to large work again but, you know, I’ve got two babies now so …’

You’re busy.

‘Yeah. To do that was pretty gruelling, physically. Maybe I’ll do another one in a couple of years but I like this current scale. It’s a good scale for me.’

It’s still relatively massive, you know! (Laughter)

‘I do get kinda shocked. I saw a painting I did called Hyphen – my sister and myself, heads, and I loved making that painting, I really flew. I was at the top of my game and had a great studio in London – I’d forgotten the paint was so thick, you know? I was trowelling it on. Everything is quite precise, I get the paint in the right place, but I don’t think I could make that painting now; not in the same way. I remember the studio had fantastic lino floor tiles from the sixties and I pulled them up, they were bendy. You could get the paint on and literally go like that with it (mimes smearing paint up and over with a lino squeegee) – sort of like plastering but it gave the same feeling as when a plastic surgeon pulls the flesh, so I was getting a tension and able to use the paint in a sculptural sense on the surface.

I’d ripped up all the floor tiles in that studio by the end.’

• • • • •

I heard on the radio the other day that Philip Glass was still driving a taxi at forty-one. You had your break quite early on – no time spent in the wilderness working up your practice. How has that shaped your development?

‘Well, it wasn’t the great easy ride that people sometimes imagine.

It’s seen that I’ve always had money but I was making shows in New York absolutely broke – eating an orange in five days, scraping out paint from old tubes – because everything I earned went on studio rent. You work for two and a half years on six pieces, and you’re not selling. The money just goes. It’s draining to work like that.

It’s nice to make a complete story “from Saatchi Gallery to Gagosian in New York” – a very singular ladder, but it’s not actually like that.

‘I made this very big painting called Fulcrum and that I nicknamed “The Bitch”. I couldn’t get it working. I spent more than eighteen months trying to get the figures together and the paint the way I wanted. It was a gruelling act of faith to keep at it because I should have probably trashed it but I’m a bit stubborn like that, I keep going but, yes, I suppose I don’t know what it’s like to have years in the wilderness, that’s for sure. I’ve been extremely lucky like that. I came out of art school and had a commission to make work for the Saatchi Gallery; that was the lottery ticket that I got.’

But you also had the pressure of being a high-profile and recognised artist from the very beginning. Lots of pressure. A very steep learning curve.

‘But when you’re young, I mean; I had no fear. As soon as Charles said, “Okay, do whatever you want with the space,” I just knew “I want this 21-foot triptych, I’m going to make it in three panels and it’s going to be like this.” My God! You know? Who else is going to buy that kind of scale of work? The dream that you’ve got of making such pieces; most people don’t have the finance to follow that through because they’ve got to do the nitty-gritty stuff of selling drawings or whatever, and I was extremely lucky in that sense: I wanted to make those big works and I could do it. And I did.

I was very quiet about it, though. I mean, I left art school with a lot of friends and a lot of people were getting really broke and having to get part-time jobs. Hardly anybody knew that I was going to show at the Saatchi Gallery, I didn’t tell anyone. I just worked in my studio for two years. Every day. Trying to get the work the way I wanted it, and then I was quite shocked by the level of press that was generated by the Saatchi Gallery. I left to go and work in America a few weeks later.’

Was that exposure one of the reasons for that?

‘I was very relieved to do that, yeah, because it’s never sat too well with me, being known. I don’t know how actors can live like that because their persona and their body is known, whereas I work very quietly in my studio. I was lucky that it happened when I was very young so that I could understand the mechanism of it and realise that, when you go back in the studio, it means jack shit. It doesn’t make you a better painter. The investment by other people – to show at different galleries, have exhibitions with amazing artists – that does help because it raises your game. I’ve just done a show with Picasso, Bacon and de Kooning in America and you’re there, accepted as part of this canon of art. That makes you … you lift yourself.’

I can see Jenny beginning to itch to get back to work, so I thank her for her time and am about to switch the tape off when I recall something else I wanted to cover related to her Rizzoli book, which featured shots of scrapbooks, lists and notes for her work. Is that an ongoing process? I ask.

In response, Jenny walks over to the back room, footsteps echoing around the space, and shows me an A4 sheet pinned to the wall: ‘Heads’, ‘Burns’, ‘Bodies’, ‘Babies’, ‘Blown Up Mouth’ …

‘I’ve had a third of those for about ten years. They’ll come up again or I’ll look through a scrapbook and find some other ones.

“Botched Suicide” – I like the tragedy of that.’

She gestures to a row of what look like crime scene shots of, well, botched suicides; although most of them look pretty successful to me. It’s hard to imagine people getting up and walking away with no intestines or only half their head. Dead people who got that way in violent hurry.

‘“Black Teeth” – I’ve had “Black Teeth” on there for years. “Albino” – I’ve got lots of albino photographs, I’ve just never got round to making the painting. “Patch Head” – patches of shadow on top of a head. I photograph lots of people all of the time and I’ve been doing these photographs recently of women in baths of water with shadows on the water. You know when you fly and you look down over the sea and you see the shadows of clouds on the sea? It’s got that sort of sense.

I have images that I collect and images that I create – where I get the model and I set it up and do a photographic session. I have that stream of my work and I have images that I just find. This is quite a barren studio for me at the moment. If you come here in two years it’ll probably be absolutely loaded with images.’

We’re stood by a back window now. Photographs of people in baths hang from a dado rail. I walk back to look again at the pictures of violent death but am intercepted by shots of burns victims and babies without legs.

‘I keep them in here because I don’t really want my children to see, so I keep them away. I’ve got a lot of images of babies like this. Depleted uranium. It’s having a huge effect on people who’ve been in Iraq. It’s on the outside of weapon shells and it affects the gene pool for generations; people who’ve been in Iraq, servicemen, have gone back to America and their wife or girlfriend who’s never even been to the area – it’s affected their child.’

I point to the violent deaths further on.

And these?

(Peering closer) These people have really gone for it, haven’t they?

‘She (pointing to a girl with half a head), that was from a love affair. I started to research what cultures had more suicides than others and discovered that suicides rise in countries where there are more high-rise properties built. Japan didn’t have a huge suicide rate until they built high-rise buildings and then a lot of death by high-rise occurred.

(Pointing to another)

That is someone whose stomach was driven over in Brazil.

(Man in a pool of scrambled egg entrails)

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