SUBMERSION, 2020-2021. Edward Povey. Oil and Conté crayon on Belgian linen, 76.3 X 76.3 cm / 30 X 30 ins. In a private collection in Santa Fe, USA.
From the way Edward has offered to answer my questions I am sure that he is a beautiful soul from whom I can learn a lot about the complexity of the human experience. For this reason, my questions will have another focus, beyond the purely artistic: 1.- How did you manage to transform pain into such incredible beauty?
Clearly there are different types of pain visible in my paintings, but showing pain was never my primary intention. The beauty emerges from the pure humanity that I find in my models, perhaps, and also the honesty of their state.
2.- You say you don't see your art as narrative at all, is this because your paintings represent a single, unrepeatable and timeless instant?
These paintings certainly began with a desire to avoid narrative paintings, stories whose proper home is literature. I began to explore “liminal“ figures in my paintings in 2013 in an attempt to capture the threshold between events rather than the events themselves. So none of my paintings portray a specific memory, event, story, or even a specific metaphor. They balance between specifics, and because of this I wish to show a human being with the possibility of all emotions at the same time: longing, loss, ecstasy, contentment, grief, suspicion. The “wash” of complicated emotion that surges through all human beings. At one time I gave many lectures in the United States and England to audiences of art collectors, speaking about the psychology of my work. During those lectures different individuals and couples would come up to me and tell me their interpretation of the painting that I was standing beside. Some people would find happiness in the painting, others would find sadness, some would find anger, and it varied enormously from viewer to viewer, leaving me with the awareness that people see themselves in paintings, and only peripherally see the actual paintings. 3.- How are you present in your creations?
In one sense I never seek to make a self portrait, or any particular reflection of myself, but in fact all aspects of my paintings come through me, so my entire body of paintings could be regarded as a self-portrait.
4.- For me, your paintings go beyond intimate feelings to the point of reviving emotions from own experiences. Are you aware of what your paintings do to your viewers?
From the reactions that I hear, I think that my current paintings have a different type of impact on my viewers than my previous work. Some are a little shocked by my paintings, but I begin to think that the paintings require time and familiarity before they can become understandable.
I hear a lot of extreme emotions expressed around my works, but it is hard for me to know whether that is a consensus, and hard to know how that will play out in the long term.
5.- I love when you describe the process of construction of your paintings, your enthusiasm makes me think that for you the process is as important as the result, is that right?
In a sense, my only experience of these paintings is in fact the process of making them. That truly fascinates and obsesses me, and is an ongoing challenge.
At all times I am adjusting my process, for example, at the moment I am slightly changing my approach to the darkest and lightest areas of the paintings. They are made with a surprisingly narrow tonal range, the “blacks“ being dark brown in fact, and the “whites“ being peppermint grey. In the same way as the “black“ areas consume information much like an under-exposed photograph, I am going to attempt the same thing with the “white“ areas: giving the impression that they are bleaching out from over-exposure. This will place all the detail and realism into the mid tones of the paintings, making a stronger overall construction, I hope. My painting of the flesh is very complex, and requires a “Verdaccio” undercoat borrowed from Raphael (1400), over which I put many other coats of solid and translucent paint. In the past year I have been working superficial textures and details into the base coat, but I am currently experimenting with a more solid and less detailed Raphael base, which will be subsequently overlaid with detail and information, so that at the heart of the limbs and faces of my figures, is an architecturally stronger construction. I am also beginning to generally limit the amount of fine detail in my paintings, so that it occurs only in patches, bringing relief to the paintings, like the "in-breaths and out-breaths" of detailed areas, separated by beautiful meadows of curving paint.
NIGHTBIRDS, 2020-2021. Edward Povey. Oil, graphite and Conté crayon on Belgian linen, 40.3 X 40.3 cm / 15.87 X 15.87 ins. In a private collection in Wales.
6.- You accompany your paintings with deep reflections that enhance them even more if possible, I would like you to tell me about one of those that has impacted me the most: “Judgment holds the scalpel, knowledge is the pale cousin of understanding, and modest presence is their attentive grandfather”. I often place prose poetry or commentaries beside my paintings, not as narratives, which would tend to turn the paintings into illustrations, but as a literary sibling to the paintings themselves. The writing is not composed to explore or explain the painting but simply to dance with it in the world of metaphor, and to provide an atmospheric ‘context’. This quote of mine is a superficially complex idea, but with a solid foundation. My meaning is this:
The act of making paintings is composed of a multitude of judgements which separate good choices from bad choices (hence the scalpel), and the entire construction of a painting is the result of those judgements. The judgements are entirely founded on knowledge, for example, an artist may intuitively sense that a painting is “overloaded“, but may not know how to solve it. If they possessed the knowledge that 'the more tonal range a painting has, the less colour it must have, and vice versa'; they would know how to “unload“ the painting. Knowledge entirely directs all judgements. But knowledge comes in the form of laws, formulas and facts, whereas its very civilised cousin: “understanding“ brings a wealth of experience in applying those laws, formulas and facts. Knowledge is only a hard tool, whereas understanding is the deft craftsman. “Presence“ is more precisely, the phenomenon of the artist being truly present and attentive to all aspects of the artwork. It is the overseer of all judgement, knowledge and understanding, because that intense sense of being ’there’, ready, fully engaged and emotionally available brings those other qualities to bear through on every brush mark, every aspect of design, every layer of paint, and does so with enormous care, attention, authenticity, self honesty, and never with a concern about the time required.
This sounds self-evident, but in my view many artworks suffer from a lack of ’the presence of the artist’, and this may simply be that they are distracted by a lack of knowledge, confidence or at worst, care. Finally, modesty is the most important quality which inspires “presence“. This is because pomposity and self-importance corrupt the presence of the artist by making self-aggrandisement the goal, rather than being effectively “invisible“ and humble, allowing the requirements of the painting to be the master of the situation, rather than an opportunity to look clever or impressive. Pomposity and self importance only function in relation to an audience, and art should never be made with the awareness of an audience, whether that is in the moment, or even in the future of the painting. Only 'isolated modesty and humility' allow the sense of being present to create “critical attention“. To be exact, there is nothing in the artist's mind but the artwork, neither his own importance, nor the effect of the artwork on any audience. In that state, critical judgements are made using hard knowledge empowered by understanding born of experience.
Since I was a child, I have adored dioramas. You might think I'm crazy, but sometimes I see them when walking through some cities, like Lisbon, in which, when looking down a narrow street, endless colours appear in chaotic harmony uphill. You use this word to define your paintings. Do you believe in synchronicities? I do believe, I am sure that this meeting has made me grow. Thanks a lot.