Michael Dempsey Head of Exhibitions, Dublin City Gallery-Hugh Lane
Interview with Mark Joyce
MD; If I understand you correctly, this is a set of drawings from a scientific theme?
MJ; Yes, these are drawings of light, physical light as it reaches surfaces and is reflected, refracted and scattered, I work with ink markers on paper which seems to get closest to light in motion, but they are abstract works.
MD; How do you arrive at the compositions, when these works relate to actual light?
MJ; Its an optical thing, we know the light around us originated in the sun about eight minutes ago, we cant see it, only its effect, its strange anomalous stuff, the photons-the other bits they are discovering behave in mysterious ways, when things don't match up it can be a fruitful area for an artist to work in.
MD; But the compositions, the work references light, is it to do with frequencies or lyrical plastic form?
MJ; I am working with representations of light, drawings of physical light. I look at a lot of the schematic representations of phenomena such as convergence, refraction, the ping-pong of particles in a field. I am imagining the zip of mass and mass-less things in motion, interacting. I make a coloured line, then another, I work from the facts out into a rhythmic scheme.
MD; So these are spontaneous?
MJ; Yes, while I admire the lens grinders and natural philosophers who literally expanded our human optical knowledge, and these drawings come from that analytic inspiration, the drawings have an aesthetic order rather than illustrative function.
MD; You have talked about lines in music and nature before.
MJ; When you work with lines, or “designo”, you have to think about the action of drawing an implement across a surface, of time, how long do you make a line, and what is it that occurs when one line intersects another? The Cartesian Grid is lurking there, the measuring, making sense of the world, and its hidden harmonics, I want the work to be a part of that, the striving for a synthesis of aspects of our experience, its a lot to be sure, but when you shoot for the bigger questions, interesting stuff falls out.
MD; To what extent do you plan the colours in your work?
MJ; Colour is what artists have, spectral Colour, the gamut of direct light, then there are the other colours, earth colours, tertiaries, certain mixes, or so called broken and local colour. There is the basic anomaly of pursuing coloured light using coloured pigment, that aside, I work with the three values in colour, the actual hue, the saturation, and the tonality, the rhythm I mentioned comes from using these values in contrast, and the stepping down from spectral to the other mixed or broken colours. Those drawings were made on a kitchen table at night. You set up the circumstances by which colour rhythms emerge, it’s sometimes at the end of a very long night when you get a few pieces that stand up on their own.
MD; Looking at the spectral aspect, one colour next to another, creating this dialogue-the lines-aspire to a scientific meaning. But as you have said you are an artist, working with a degree of unconscious methods, how do these come together in this work?
MJ; There is a big place in colour phenomena where art and science meets, I know there are the corny versions of this, but really, when you meet a scientist, they are pitching into the unknown with their instruments, ok.. they have come to some conclusion, I think artists can take this road very far, but enjoy the haptic fizz and harmonics. There is also a huge common history of working intuitively, what I understand as, that rapid analytical thought which gets you to new knowledge-I think artists and scientists do that, everything is pointing from the present into the unknown. You know that thing Albert Einstein said ‘Learn from yesterday, live for today. Hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.’
MD; Could you talk about the book on spectroscopy framed in the exhibition?
MJ; That book was published the month I was born in July 1966, it's a classic optimistic book of popular science for the layman, which they don't seem to make anymore. I used the book to make homemade boxes with lens and diffraction gratings, toilet rolls painted black. The basis for all of this is the spectroscope, which analyses the spectra given off by any substance. You can tell what a material is, whether its an atomic material that's too small to see, or stars that are galactic distances away. The spectroscope is the prodigal unknown cousin of the microscope and the telescope, it's had a massive impact on what we know. I wanted to ground the images in the exhibition.
MD: I was talking to my daughter about the show, she is doing a school project, and she was saying there is no such thing as colour, just wavelengths, its all just belief systems, the European scientific one –with seven colours prevalent, but artists have worked well with symbolic views and just three pigment primaries before that system havent they?
MJ; It's a very slow development, Isaac Newton split white solar light into its constituents, and then put it back again using two prisms when he was back home in Lincolnshire in 1667, and its 1810 before the Romantic movement start unweaving the rainbow. But you are right, Titian and Poussin with their symbolic systems made exquisite art. It strikes me that it's a slow burner, right now it's the big corporations working on extending colour resolution in images. Artists can work well in the dark, with bits of the jig saw, I mean this also about colour, the missing bits of the visible spectrum, Fraunhofer Lines, there are thousands at this stage, colour waves absorbed on the journey from the sun, so, yes artists can work very well within cultural or physical limitations.
MD; The show is called The Newtonians?
MJ; Yes I think we still live in a Newtonian world, in terms of colour, Newton took a linear section of the electromagnetic spectrum, the visible bit from 400nm to 700nm, curled it into a Colour Wheel, divided it into seven sections because there are seven notes in a musical octave, so we have Indigo for musical reasons. I am working with colour, physical light and its relationships, I find a lot to do around the simultaeneous and sequential aspects of looking at colours, hence the newtonians.
MD; Many of these works are monochromatic, is this De Stijl or Physics?
MJ; I don't know, probably more like that film of Mondrians last studio, slabs of colour floating in rooms, on walls and doors. When you make work with one colour, what you leave out is the composition, most art operates from the differences within it, the contrasts, so where is the contrast in this work? I think it begins when you hit the wall, My interest in doing this is to explore simultaeneous and sequential colour, and to create an experience for the viewer, to look again at colour, I mean, when was the last time you looked at Yellow? Really looked at it unflinchingly-You know, maybe in a waiting room, maybe you have been forced sometime, but most of the time we skip lightly across the whole experience of colour, we have to, can we even physically think about one colour? I think there is some value in looking again at colour and to do that you have to unhook it from contrast, and unhook it from reference.
MD; How can you do that?
MJ;It is difficult, there is always resemblance and reference in abstraction, I have been placing monochrome colours outdoors in environments, forests, shopfronts, you get a very sharp fall off from the colour to the organic or urban environment, people are a bit puzzled, look at it afresh, it has no function or sequence.
MD; This is an art gallery….
MJ; Yes..this is the first time I have tried it in a gallery, you have to push and pull the colour relationships, the gaps between, there are no corners in this gallery. You work with all of these things to create dynamic composition and contrast, I don't tend to make a plan with a model of the space, I just bring in more than I need and pare it back.
MD; If I took that Yellow one away, would it still work on its own somewhere else?
MJ; Yes, they are made individually by hand at different times, so they have an autonomy and make sense on their own.
MD; If the intention is to get the audience to look again at Yellow for instance, why the easel painting format, why not just use the wall?
MJ; Paintings still have the potential to be speculative and reflective objects for an audience, there is an mutability and mobility which can make a set of paintings different in a variety of contexts, there is an opportunity to discover something new about colour in this way.
MD; But, with the traditional materials of oil paint on canvas? Cannot this area of interest be better served and explored with those scientific approaches and tools and methods you have spoken about?
MJ; I come at this as an artist, artistically, my province is aesthetic, this is what I practice, I work with colour as a material and a surface , and at the heart of painting is that oldest challenge of all, painting the light .
End
MJ; Yes, these are drawings of light, physical light as it reaches surfaces and is reflected, refracted and scattered, I work with ink markers on paper which seems to get closest to light in motion, but they are abstract works.
MD; How do you arrive at the compositions, when these works relate to actual light?
MJ; Its an optical thing, we know the light around us originated in the sun about eight minutes ago, we cant see it, only its effect, its strange anomalous stuff, the photons-the other bits they are discovering behave in mysterious ways, when things don't match up it can be a fruitful area for an artist to work in.
MD; But the compositions, the work references light, is it to do with frequencies or lyrical plastic form?
MJ; I am working with representations of light, drawings of physical light. I look at a lot of the schematic representations of phenomena such as convergence, refraction, the ping-pong of particles in a field. I am imagining the zip of mass and mass-less things in motion, interacting. I make a coloured line, then another, I work from the facts out into a rhythmic scheme.
MD; So these are spontaneous?
MJ; Yes, while I admire the lens grinders and natural philosophers who literally expanded our human optical knowledge, and these drawings come from that analytic inspiration, the drawings have an aesthetic order rather than illustrative function.
MD; You have talked about lines in music and nature before.
MJ; When you work with lines, or “designo”, you have to think about the action of drawing an implement across a surface, of time, how long do you make a line, and what is it that occurs when one line intersects another? The Cartesian Grid is lurking there, the measuring, making sense of the world, and its hidden harmonics, I want the work to be a part of that, the striving for a synthesis of aspects of our experience, its a lot to be sure, but when you shoot for the bigger questions, interesting stuff falls out.
MD; To what extent do you plan the colours in your work?
MJ; Colour is what artists have, spectral Colour, the gamut of direct light, then there are the other colours, earth colours, tertiaries, certain mixes, or so called broken and local colour. There is the basic anomaly of pursuing coloured light using coloured pigment, that aside, I work with the three values in colour, the actual hue, the saturation, and the tonality, the rhythm I mentioned comes from using these values in contrast, and the stepping down from spectral to the other mixed or broken colours. Those drawings were made on a kitchen table at night. You set up the circumstances by which colour rhythms emerge, it’s sometimes at the end of a very long night when you get a few pieces that stand up on their own.
MD; Looking at the spectral aspect, one colour next to another, creating this dialogue-the lines-aspire to a scientific meaning. But as you have said you are an artist, working with a degree of unconscious methods, how do these come together in this work?
MJ; There is a big place in colour phenomena where art and science meets, I know there are the corny versions of this, but really, when you meet a scientist, they are pitching into the unknown with their instruments, ok.. they have come to some conclusion, I think artists can take this road very far, but enjoy the haptic fizz and harmonics. There is also a huge common history of working intuitively, what I understand as, that rapid analytical thought which gets you to new knowledge-I think artists and scientists do that, everything is pointing from the present into the unknown. You know that thing Albert Einstein said ‘Learn from yesterday, live for today. Hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.’
MD; Could you talk about the book on spectroscopy framed in the exhibition?
MJ; That book was published the month I was born in July 1966, it's a classic optimistic book of popular science for the layman, which they don't seem to make anymore. I used the book to make homemade boxes with lens and diffraction gratings, toilet rolls painted black. The basis for all of this is the spectroscope, which analyses the spectra given off by any substance. You can tell what a material is, whether its an atomic material that's too small to see, or stars that are galactic distances away. The spectroscope is the prodigal unknown cousin of the microscope and the telescope, it's had a massive impact on what we know. I wanted to ground the images in the exhibition.
MD: I was talking to my daughter about the show, she is doing a school project, and she was saying there is no such thing as colour, just wavelengths, its all just belief systems, the European scientific one –with seven colours prevalent, but artists have worked well with symbolic views and just three pigment primaries before that system havent they?
MJ; It's a very slow development, Isaac Newton split white solar light into its constituents, and then put it back again using two prisms when he was back home in Lincolnshire in 1667, and its 1810 before the Romantic movement start unweaving the rainbow. But you are right, Titian and Poussin with their symbolic systems made exquisite art. It strikes me that it's a slow burner, right now it's the big corporations working on extending colour resolution in images. Artists can work well in the dark, with bits of the jig saw, I mean this also about colour, the missing bits of the visible spectrum, Fraunhofer Lines, there are thousands at this stage, colour waves absorbed on the journey from the sun, so, yes artists can work very well within cultural or physical limitations.
MD; The show is called The Newtonians?
MJ; Yes I think we still live in a Newtonian world, in terms of colour, Newton took a linear section of the electromagnetic spectrum, the visible bit from 400nm to 700nm, curled it into a Colour Wheel, divided it into seven sections because there are seven notes in a musical octave, so we have Indigo for musical reasons. I am working with colour, physical light and its relationships, I find a lot to do around the simultaeneous and sequential aspects of looking at colours, hence the newtonians.
MD; Many of these works are monochromatic, is this De Stijl or Physics?
MJ; I don't know, probably more like that film of Mondrians last studio, slabs of colour floating in rooms, on walls and doors. When you make work with one colour, what you leave out is the composition, most art operates from the differences within it, the contrasts, so where is the contrast in this work? I think it begins when you hit the wall, My interest in doing this is to explore simultaeneous and sequential colour, and to create an experience for the viewer, to look again at colour, I mean, when was the last time you looked at Yellow? Really looked at it unflinchingly-You know, maybe in a waiting room, maybe you have been forced sometime, but most of the time we skip lightly across the whole experience of colour, we have to, can we even physically think about one colour? I think there is some value in looking again at colour and to do that you have to unhook it from contrast, and unhook it from reference.
MD; How can you do that?
MJ;It is difficult, there is always resemblance and reference in abstraction, I have been placing monochrome colours outdoors in environments, forests, shopfronts, you get a very sharp fall off from the colour to the organic or urban environment, people are a bit puzzled, look at it afresh, it has no function or sequence.
MD; This is an art gallery….
MJ; Yes..this is the first time I have tried it in a gallery, you have to push and pull the colour relationships, the gaps between, there are no corners in this gallery. You work with all of these things to create dynamic composition and contrast, I don't tend to make a plan with a model of the space, I just bring in more than I need and pare it back.
MD; If I took that Yellow one away, would it still work on its own somewhere else?
MJ; Yes, they are made individually by hand at different times, so they have an autonomy and make sense on their own.
MD; If the intention is to get the audience to look again at Yellow for instance, why the easel painting format, why not just use the wall?
MJ; Paintings still have the potential to be speculative and reflective objects for an audience, there is an mutability and mobility which can make a set of paintings different in a variety of contexts, there is an opportunity to discover something new about colour in this way.
MD; But, with the traditional materials of oil paint on canvas? Cannot this area of interest be better served and explored with those scientific approaches and tools and methods you have spoken about?
MJ; I come at this as an artist, artistically, my province is aesthetic, this is what I practice, I work with colour as a material and a surface , and at the heart of painting is that oldest challenge of all, painting the light .
End
