JM: John McLean
WC: Wang Chuan
PD: Philip Dodd
PD: I want to begin with a phrase that John has used to me: that before you begin a painting, you have to have a plan of campaign.
JM: If I have no plan of campaign, invariably I end in a mess. But as I follow my plan of campaign – which makes it sound very pre-planned – in detail, I recognise that it isn’t – it’s just a general vague idea of the direction in which I’m going to move the painting. Even“ direction” sounds too definite a term. But in the process of the painting’s development, the plan invariably gets forgotten in the excitement of the development of the painting.
WC: When I used to paint, or even just hold the paintbrush, there used to be a storm inside me. I was always in a rush, but then I realised I did not have to be. I gradually slowed down. For me life is a container and what it contains are emotions – which are a two-faced sword; they can be your friend or your enemy. If you use them in a positive way, they are an accelerator for creativity. But on the other hand they can act like an enemy, with negative effects on the painting.
PD: This immediately suggests how different Chinese art speech can be from European art speech. Wang Chuan immediately addresses the issue of the kind of life that permits painting. It starts from the general and then moves to the particular, whereas the European starts inductively, as the philosophers call it, starting from the detailed and going to the general.
JM: I empathise entirely with what Wang Chuan said about the different emotions in play when you’re working – either detached or involved, excited, or whatever you call it. In the past, if I felt I was losing touch with a work in progress, I tended to abandon it because I set such store by the alla prima. Then I found ways of layering paint while still keeping the surface fresh and exciting. My greatest reward is seeing one of my paintings and thinking how lucky I was to pull it off. It’s important to acknowledge luck because one earns the luck through hard work
PD: When you get up in the morning, do you know what you are going to paint?
WC: No, I don’t really have an idea of what I’m going to paint. Each day when I get up and pick up the paintbrush, I have to face a canvas, often one that I have worked on, because in recent years I have been painting on top of the existing works. I have been making changes, mostly working over old works dated from 2005 to 2006, instead of creating new ones. Recently I have been working with lines, and it’s getting complicated because there’s so much intricate detail – some of the lines are part of the original old painting.
PD: So, Wang Chuan, you now literally take a painting, an established painting, and work over it – so the painting becomes some kind of palimpsest. John, I think for you shapes are what lines are to Wang Chuan. But you didn’t always paint with shape. When was it that you began to think and feel and touch, in terms of shapes?
JM: It’s quite comical in a way, how it started. There I was painting anything but what you would say were shapes, when I was invited, along with several other Scottish painters, to provide an image to be used in son et lumière [a light and music spectacle] in celebration of some Scottish queen. It might have been someone called Margaret – a medieval queen – but I’m not sure. Anyway, I thought along the obvious lines of a St Andrew’s cross and a crown shape [the St Andrew’s cross is the flag of Scotland]. The emphatic diagonals of the cross appealed to me, and as soon as I got going on the crown shape I found infinite possibilities there. I was discovering the full force of shapes in all their complexity. In the course of doing this son et lumière image I thought, this is good fun, and the more I thought about it and explored it, the more complex it seemed – well, the more complex it was. It seemed a very rich hunting ground for me. I’m still very aware that I don’t want to see things exclusively in terms of shape. I like to mess it all up. I’ve being doing some prints involving lines and shape.
PD: What about line with you, Wang Chuan? Why has it been so important to you?
WC: It’s very interesting. When I first started painting, back in 1978, I studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy. I studied traditional Chinese painting. The compulsory subjects you needed to study for two years were pencil line drawing and Chinese calligraphy. But with calligraphy, you did not sit down and learn to write. Everybody must practise xuanzhou for two years, ie, standing to write calligraphy for a long time in order to test your strength. I didn’t fully appreciate why our teacher emphasised it so much then. The whole idea is – it translates into – the‘ chi’ of movement within the body.
PD: The spirit. The energy.
WC: It almost doesn’t matter if later you move into oil painting; the movement of the lines is fundamental. It wasn’t until 1981 that, for the first time, I went to the Beijing National Art Museum to see a touring exhibition from Boston Museum, where I saw original works by Jackson Pollock, Cy Twombly and many other contemporary painters. I realised then that there are many different ways of expressing yourself. The lines may be similar, but it’s the way you express yourself that is different, and ultimately that’s the most important thing to us.
PD: If Wang Chuan was helped to see Chinese art differently by seeing American abstract painting, I remember that you told me, John, that Korean ceramics helped you.
JM: It was in the British Museum. There were quite a few good examples. I liked their simplicity and fairly neutral colour – browns on coloured clay, I think, with a glaze on it. There would be a bluish colour brushed on. And the immediacy – no reworking – I realised immediately that it was done with full confidence. Not slavishly at all, but a movement of the spirit through the hand to the brush to the surface. And that I found deeply empathetic.
PD: Do you remember when you first saw these?
JM: Maybe 1977 or 78.
PD: Wang Chuan, what did you see in Twombly?
WC: I was in Sichuan – 1983 or 84 – when one of my best childhood friend’s wife, who is American, was working in Sichuan. She had an issue of Artforum, which featured the American artist Cy Twombly and the great Chinese ink painter Qi Baishi. She explained to me that the article was making a comparison of the relationship between the shrimp paintings by Qi and the graffiti works by Twombly. From then on, I begin to notice Twombly’s graffiti work. It looked as if he painted care-lessly but I noticed he was in control.
PD: Earlier, I quoted you, John, to Wang Chuan. I now want to quote Wang Chuan to you“: Abstraction can be many terrible things. It can be decorative, it can be empty, it can be just so and so…” What is it that has kept you an abstract painter, John?
JM: Working abstractly is so exciting. I confront myself with something I’ve never seen before, rather than recording something I’ve clapped eyes on. But it has to be remembered that in successfully recording, you might structure the work in ways that transcend the difference between abstract and figurative.
PD: What is so exciting?
JM: It opens up endless vistas of possibilities. What if I did this? What if I did that? It seems boundless. I feel completely free when I’m working. It’s not that I don’t feel free when I’m trying to capture a landscape, for example. I recently tried to do a drawing from a train of Lake Geneva, looking stunning with hovering mist and the Alps soaring above, but somehow the urgency there was to get down that experience. When I’m working abstractly I don’t know the experience until the painting is finished, and it seems an entirely different way of making art.
I think that’s fair enough because when you’re trying to record something you want the final thing to actually click with the thing that first set off this, and that’s something you’ve already seen. In abstraction you really are discovering something – there’s more of a venture into the unknown.
On the other hand, I wonder if you can really claim that a recording – something done in a figurative way – can’t be something completely new? It’s arguable, but I’m not expressing myself at all… When I’m thinking about the difference between abstract and figurative I keep remembering the Brancacci Chapel frescoes in Florence [Santa Maria del Carmine] by Masaccio and Masolino. They have the same power. Abstract painting seems to me more architectural in its impact, but then paintings like the Brancacci Chapel frescoes, it wouldn’t be true of something as good as that – they have an architectural impact. This is getting far too pernickety – better to leave it bald and simple: abstract paintings are not scenic, there’s no invitation to enter into the pictorial space. The space in abstract painting is much more lateral – up and down and across from side to side. That gives it a different relation to the wall than figurative painting.
Painters like Masaccio and Masolino, in, for example, the Brancacci frescoes, they found a way of relating the human figure to pictorial space using fictive architecture. I’ve seen this in antique Roman frescoes. I think it may be a very old Mediterranean tradition. The architecture and the scenic so to speak give a backdrop to the figures – or the space the figures inhabit. In Masaccio and Masolino – I don’t know how to express it – the cityscapes, townscapes, that these quattrocento figures inhabit are so pared down, simplified, that you are constantly reminded of the edge of each bit of fresco – let’s call it a vignette – constantly reminded of the edge of it. I’m about to say something crass about Mondrian, but Masaccio’s more exciting than Mondrian.
I wonder if another way of coming at it would be to say that the picture plane – literally the flat surface – becomes much more sensitive in abstract painting than in figurative painting, but that in really good figurative painting, like Masaccio and Masolino, I don’t think that’s true, that’s the trouble. I think I should just shut up!
WC: I understand and agree with John, in terms of the kind of freedom enjoyed if you paint abstractly. For me, the process is so important. The process of making abstraction also implies different possibilities in terms of creating something that allows me to use my imagination, to allow others to use their imagination to engage. This kind of engagement and interaction is liberating. There isn’t a limit in terms of how it’s supposed to be. It allows me to be free to express myself through the painting.
For me, the final painting isn’t important any more. For a commercial gallery, it is – what’s the ultimate outcome? Whereas for a painter, at least me, it’s about the way you express yourself – the process rather than the result.
JM: It makes sense to me. It could be illustrated by the exasperation people have expressed with me when I’ve tinkered with – altered – a painting that they thought was finished. And I’ve every right to. Sometimes the painting is 20 years old. How dare I touch a 20-year-old painting? But no doubt Wang Chuan does exactly the same thing.
PD: Of course, of all the arts, the one that is most boundless, because it’s not representational at all, is music. And I know actually music has been important to both of you. Is it important to your art as well as your life, John?
JM: I’m too ignorant of music to show in detail real parallels. But I just know it’s there. I have listened to a lot of music – from a superb mezzo singing a 17th-century hunting song by a very important composer, whose name I can’t remember, to the City of Glasgow Police Pipe Band. The range is great. I’ve got rhythm and blues and classical, everything. Often I don’t want to hear anything at all. I have to concentrate purely on the painting, and at that point may complain that I can hear a noise from elsewhere in the building.
WC: When I paint – because it’s quite delicate work – I don’t tend to listen to symphonic music. Listening to an orchestra is too grand for me to concentrate on the painting; perhaps a piano concerto, or lighter music.
PD: One last question: what has kept you being a painter across 55, 50 years, John? The English artist Dennis Creffield has said: “I hate painting, but it’s the only thing that makes me real.”
JM: I find that quite a sympathetic response. It is like I don’t exist without painting; I feel that I couldn’t, otherwise I’d be nobody. That’s the wrong way of phrasing it. I would be nothing. I don’t mean cutting a figure by that, I just mean I wouldn’t exist. That’s the way Creffield put it. I can’t find another way of putting it. I realise if I look at it and try and be objective, I’ve painted myself into that corner, but I’m happy there. It’s great fun, that’s the other thing – huge fun.
WC: I remember something from a poet. It’s from T.S. Eliot: Music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. For me life is art, art is life. So there isn’t a separation. Hence I’ll always continue to be a painter.
