Gabe Knowles

Paul Davies is technically a house painter. A highly proficient house painter that visits the world’s finest modernist homes and photographs them before sketching, stencilling and finally painting them. It probably takes longer to do than actually painting a house. His long-standing exploration of the interaction between the stylised, built environment and its natural surrounds is a testament not only to his technique, but his patience. I caught up with Paul ahead of his latest show Pentimento at Tim Olsen Gallery in Sydney to discuss why he’s dabbling in bronzing if he’s actually a wannabe architect à la George Costanza.

Gabriel Knowles: So tell us about the your new show. You’ve been experimenting with some new processes haven’t you?

Paul Davies: The show’s called Pentimento, it’s usually related to Renaissance paintings where after time or if the work has been restored, the underpainting or the original drafting marks are exposed. So where a hand may be visible in one spot it has actually changed in the final execution of the work. So that exposed underpainting is called pentimento. The backgrounds are laid down in different colours over a period of a couple of weeks using the stencils. That forms a complex background over which I paint the final figurative element. So the show’s about the process rather than the subject. That’s why I’m exhibiting the stencils and some bronzes as well.

GK: Was that a conscious decision or did you arrive there in a more natural manner?

PD: It was just experimentation. I’m back at COFA studying a Masters of Fine Art by research and when I was working with the backgrounds in the past I would usually do acrylic washes or scrapes of paint and they were quite abstract, they didn’t mean anything other than the materiality of the paint itself. What I found then is was that I was covering up backgrounds that I really liked and I was losing a lot of intonation that I’d painted earlier on in the final picture. So this time I wanted to expose that because I thought it was interesting. I started trying trial-and-error with tie-dye backgrounds and patterns and things, I was looking at the previous stencils I’d cut and I have piles and piles of them so I looked at them as a whole I thought I could use them and develop the layering process that way. It’s more about saying how you got to that point.

GK: So in essence you’ve added even more layers to show that process.

PD: I thought that way would be more interesting for people familiar with the work because they’d be able to see remnants of previous paintings in the newer works. I didn’t way to abandon ship and change subjects, I wanted to keep with the same architectural, built environment and natural environment combination but look at it more closely with the process. And that’s when things for me started to get really interesting because I started to look at the material of the stencils more closely and that’s when I started with the bronzes.

GK: How important is that long-term narrative within your work?

PD: I think it’s important because it means that you’re spent a lot of time with that subject and that you understand it. I think if I changed subject it wouldn’t be convincing to myself and therefore I’d say the work in the exhibition wouldn’t be convincing. So for me it was important to stay with the subject but in a slightly varied way. I think if you chop and change it shows, and for me if I don’t fully investigate the subject then it becomes a bit bland. Once you have a general idea like that you can take it in a different direction and it will still like one of your works, you can explore it further and still use what you’ve learnt.

It gets more and more interesting for me the more I look at it because you start looking at what the process is, the materials you use, the ideas behind why you’re doing it. I wouldn’t have explored any of those had I just changed subjects, I wouldn’t have done the bronzes or exhibited the stencils. I had the option to exhibit the stencils five or six years ago but I didn’t do it because I wasn’t sure how they’d relate to the paintings themselves and I didn’t see them as finished works I just saw them as part of the process. Picking out parts of the process is important, it steered me into future works. So I think it’s important to look at what your subjects are and not change ships so quickly. It opens up options, I don’t find it confining I actually find it opens up opportunities.

GK: How did you come to including bronzes in this show?

PD: I studied sculpture as an undergrad ten years ago, which I only did because I’d not got the marks to get into painting and I almost wanted to leave at the time but it actually turned out to be really interesting and pushed me into a direction I wouldn’t have thought of before. I think that had something to do with why I paint architecturally now, because of the three dimensional quality of sculpture.

GK: Will that be a technique you’ll continue with in the long-term?

PD: Definitely. Once you’ve got that bronze, because it’s quite a flat plain you can run it through a printing press and put paint on it and run that through a printing press with paper. There’s all these different options you can do which has made it much more interesting for me.

GK: Is it fair to say you’re a patient person?

PD: I think so, well in the studio I am. The stencils can sometimes take two weeks to cut and they take a long time because they’re all done by hand. I choose to do it that way because it gives me time to think about other work, it gives me time to think about the show as a whole, it’s contemplative and it’s therapeutic in a way too. In that regard I’m pretty patient but it’s the other stuff like sending emails or with exhibitions and stuff like that I can get a little bit impatient with. I think in the studio it’s important to be patient and take your time.

I’ve had people say I should get the stencils cut via computer. I’ve had that suggested to me many, many times. To me the whole excitement and the interesting part of the work is doing it by hand.

GK: You need that human interaction, the character it imparts and those imperfections.

PD: Exactly, you make mistakes when you cut the stencil and when you’re painting and I find that those are the most important parts of the work. As you said, they give it character.

GK: How has working at the Heights impacted on your process?

PD: Fortunately the studio we work in has a lot of people and I know a lot of people would prefer to be on their own and that happens often at China Heights but when there’s a group of us that keeps me at the studio sometimes too. It can be distracting but most of the time I find you feed off their energy too.

It’s made it more interesting for me because there’s ways of doing things and then there’s completely different ways of doing things. If you look at Chronicles of Never who are next door and you see what they’re doing with their clothes, which is completely different to painting, but they have their aesthetic that you notice within what they’re doing so you bounce off that and it’s never competitive. I’ve heard that can happen in some studios and become a negative environment, it’s very positive and I think part of that reason is because people are coming from different disciplines.

GK: Do you ever see yourself living in a house like the ones you portray?

PD: I used to but not now. The apartment is a reality now! I do like the simplicity of the design but I think sometimes when they’re built and meant to be lived in a certain way it asks too much of the occupant. You really have to stick to a strict set of guidelines, there are no decorative elements, it’s all functional. That could get a little stifling after a while. If it can be an integration of the two then that would be great.

Le Corbusier was commissioned to design a set of apartment blocks for some workers and the block he designed was very close to the building they were working in, so they worked in a blank box and then went home to a blank box. Of course they got sick of it and started to adorn it with their own gnomes and weird curtains to make it homely. It’s a shame if there’s a certain way to live prescribed by the architects and that’s all you can do, I like the idea that you can make it your own.

GK: Do you ever think that maybe you were meant to be an architect?

PD: No, I’m really shit with numbers! I’m hopeless with formulas, they go in one ear and out the other.

Pentimento
Tim Olsen Gallery
63 Jersey Road Woollahra Sydney NSW 2025
Tuesday-Friday 10am-6pm
Saturday 10am-5pm
Sunday 12pm-5pm
February 22, 2012 – March 11, 2012

There’s a little holiday action happening every Saturday at Ching-a-lings from 3pm with the Hole In The Sky guys, Steele and Shunji.

Tonight at Utopian Slumps. Falling Down with Dan Moynihan, Ry Haskings and James Lynch – grouped together around themes of the cinematic, the theatrical and the absurd. Continues until March 3, 2012.

Image: Dan Moynihan, Bed and Breakfast, 2011

The man Fazwon from Kind Of – Gallery just worded me up about this Calligraffiti exhibition that opens on Thursday night at the gallery in Sydney. Pioneered by the Dutchman Niels Shoe Meulman, who started out in the graff scene as Shoe before working as Creative Director for MTV in Europe, calligraffiti is described as “Abstract Expressionism with a Calligraphic origin.” I’m not so sure about the name but I’m feeling the Japanese style handwork.



Calligraffiti
January 25 – 30
Kind Of — Gallery
72 Oxford St
Darlinghurst, Sydney
Australia