Emma Biggs &
Matthew Collings
English Primitive
7 May- 24 May
A photograph gives a clue to our work. The paintings are about light in dark, and a fuzzy, indistinct property that makes space difficult to place. The photo is taken from Mow Cop in Staffordshire—and all the titles of the paintings relate to spots nearby. There are housing estates down there, populated by former pottery workers from second and third generation immigrant Pakistani families who saw out the last days of the industry that had its heyday in this area in the eighteenth century.
What do our paintings mean? Imagine we had just finished one. We step back and think about it. We realise we achieved what we did through a kind of mimetic form. It didn’t need to refer to any figurative system known from the real world, just simply “the way we see.”
Neither of us necessarily sees more intensely or authentically in this way than the other. And neither of us really needs to see like this at all for the end results to be as they are—we’re not individualist Romantic visionaries who happen to have met. It’s more that we do these paintings in tandem, each contributing our individual sets of skills and acquired knowledge, and when they’re done we’re able to describe what framework or system of seeing they relate to: we comprehend the logic. But as we’re working it’s pretty intuitive. We start out random and then get tighter and clearer and more reduced and strict, but even so the end result is based on unpredictable, or un-calculable, visual relationships.
In practical terms, we both mix the colours but only Collings actually paints. On the other hand only Biggs decides what kinds of colours we’re going to use and where they should go. Between us we think of formats, but these are not very complicated decisions. We sometimes work smaller and more intricate, and sometimes broader and simpler.
On the other hand again the changes from format to format are deliberately giddy. Stretched, compressed, big, small, the same, different—the relationship of shapes and colours within each picture ends up very considered, while from picture to picture there are lurches that we don’t have any answer for. They simply seem like the right response to the note of arbitrariness that painting as a tradition always seems to need.
These jumps point to oddness within the considered stuff too. We set up a balance of muted complementary colours—repetition plus a certain element of difference—but then there’s a surprise or sting. Why is it there—because life is surprising or because art has a life of its own? We only know we like it when we see the same thing in Mughal Indian watercolours, which take their original Persian influence to a much higher abstract level; or Raphael, with his perfect placid visual balance compared to the murderous impulses and mad chaos of the popes whose mental image-world he was hired to make “real”; or charming junk we buy in car boot sales, photos of the Rolling Stones or the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, with their painterly Technicolor flatness—all this great visual art.
When we talk about knowledge and seeing, we’re really talking about accumulated knowledge of the way everyone sees. But not everyone has the job of coming up with a convincing visual metaphor for this experience. To do this you have to look and you have to know what looking is. It has got to be something learned. It’s not natural. You have to look and look and look. This is not big in culture at the moment but we feel it’s incredibly important.
We think of “Englishness” because the paintings are not about a brilliant light—it’s a temperate palette on the whole. And we say “primitive”
for two sets of reasons. First it applies to something innate. Everyone has an innate understanding of colour when it is right—they respond to what they know, what they see—and this could be thought of as a primitive state. Second it applies to a stepping-back of means—“primitive” is the word we use to sum up the explanation of why there’s no realism: no copying of actual sunsets, and so on. We certainly don’t mean “back to basics.” If anything,
It’s back to sophistication. “Basics” is far too everywhere and depressing. This is back to complexity.
Emaa Biggs & Matthew Collings
April 2008-04-17
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Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings 'Mow Cop' 2008
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