In 2016, the Scottish artist Caroline Walker was commissioned to paint a series of artworks in response to the refugee crisis for a show at Kettle’s Yard, in Cambridge. Caroline chose to focus on the theme of home capturing how her sitters ‘made a sense of home,’ when they were so far from their own, and had so few belongings. Both tender and objective, the paintings (now held in public collections such as Yale’s University Art Gallery and the Hepworth, Wakefield) offer private glimpses of the women in different settings. One, granted refugee status, has an apartment of her own. Another has been put up in the basement of church. Walker’s paintbrush lingers over telling details: the colourful embroidered quilt and smooth tablecloth; the stacked cardboard boxes filled with belongings, a red chair. The interiors are as compelling as the sitter.
Caroline, whose work also features in The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at The Pallant Gallery in Chichester (until 20th October) is part of a new generation of artists focussing on the four-walled intimacy of home. Interiors have been a theme of western art since antiquity. But in the 21st century, when social media allows us access to the private lives of millions of strangers, our fascination with what lies behind closed doors has intensified.
-2.jpg)
Artists like Caroline (represented by the Stephen Friedman Gallery), are responding to this by harnessing the interior to examine searching themes. Pierre Bergian’s capriccios with their half-open doors and peeling plaster walls invite meditations on memory. In the US, Andy Dixon’s colour-steeped ‘My Patron’s Homes’ examines the relationship between artist and collector. The room has never been more resonant.
In the past we found meaning in religious paintings. In today’s largely secular age says Lottie Cole, an interiors-focussed artist whose solo show, A Commonplace Collector at Long and Ryle opens 3rd July, that has changed. ‘We used to be able to decode the iconography of religious paintings. Now most of us can’t. But we all love to read a painting. Perhaps the desire to find meaning has transposed itself to interiors. We can all relate to them. But they also offer up hidden messages.’
When a friend gave Lottie their collection of Modern British art auction catalogues amassed over 30 years (‘It took me, my mother and two Ubers to collect them all’) it sparked an idea. Intrigued by where the artworks might have ended up, she began to paint a series of imaginary collector’s homes. The settings were filled with objects – a Kathleen Guthrie painting, Chinese antiquities, a lurid carpet – that invited us to imagine the absent owner’s personalities.
For her forthcoming show, Lottie uses poetry to amplify meaning. Lines from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets accompany one painting which explores ideas about travel and escape: both real and psychological. ‘While I was painting it, my husband was planning to go on a sabbatical to Japan. In the end his plans changed and he never went, but it was the idea and the planning he liked,’ says Lottie. The painting is deliberately open-ended. A window frames the view of a path – or could it be river – which meanders mysteriously towards the horizon. A map and notebooks cover the table suggesting a trip that might, or might not happen. Everything reminds us, as TS Eliot put it that: ‘we shall not cease from exploration/ and at the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ and know the place for the first time.’
This personal approach can be traced to the turn of the 20th century. The writings of Freud and the dawn of psychoanalysis prompted a change in the way in which artists portrayed domesticity. ‘In Victorian paintings, the interior often serves as an impersonal, status-orientated backdrop. By the 1900s, and the start of Modernism, that begins to change,’ says Lucy Davies, co-curator of an exhibition of paintings at The Grange, Rottingdean (20th July – 26th August) by the Edwardian artist Mabel Pryde Nicholson.
A successful artist in her lifetime, Mabel’s legacy was eclipsed by that of her husband, William Nicholson. But like her other more famous male peers – Walter Sickert or William Orpen – Mabel was ahead of her time. ‘She was a keen theatre goer, and there’s a sense of drama in her settings: the passages of dark, the views through half open doors,’ says Lucy, whose book about Mabel is published by Eiderdown Books in July. ‘The interiors feel modern and light-washed. In her works the figures are not interacting, but absorbed in their own activities. There’s a strong psychological element to them.’
Artist Phoebe Dickinson has a postcard of Mabel’s work on the noticeboard in her studio, in Gloucestershire. Although Phoebe specialises in portraiture, the interior plays an active role in her art. For a series depicting the owners of Britain’s grandest country houses, including Houghton and Belvoir, Phoebe painted her sitters in casual, private moments absorbed in books, sunk in armchairs or sprawled across sofas, slippers dangling. The settings are equally telling. ‘I will often choose the room that has the most creativity,’ says Phoebe, citing the drawing room at Biddick Hall with its rich green walls. ‘So in a way I am capturing the centuries of collaboration which lie behind the house. The relationship between the owner, architect and the craftspeople who have worked on the interiors. It’s all about story telling.’
Historic houses feature in Belgian artist Pierre Bergian’s work, but they are not real. Pierre, based in Ghent, draws on the Italian tradition of capriccios – imaginary architecture – for his dream-like settings. Memories of Italian palazzi, Cy Twombly’s studio, stately English homes mingle in the exaggeratedly lofty spaces. The rooms are empty of furniture: the Rothko-esque painting or a lone classical bust adding to their ethereal atmosphere. A show of Pierre’s work opens in October at the Purdey Hicks Gallery, in London.
As a teenager in 1970s Bruges, Pierre would climb through the windows of empty buildings with his friends. The economy was stagnant, many residents had left the city. He recalls the frisson – by turns enjoyable and terrifying – of exploring the abandoned interiors with their suggestive half-open doors and shutters. He also also dug for treasure on the weed-strewn courtyards unearthing broken pottery, coins, shards of glass. This lifelong in archaeology is captured in the technique he uses – delicate pencil sketches, overlaid with translucent layers of oil are scraped back to reveal the layers beneath, like a palimpsest. An air of ‘historic mystery’ pervades: ‘It’s much more than architecture… I’m fascinated by the metaphysical aspect of buildings. How even your own house at night – lit by moonlight can take on a completely different atmosphere.’ One client, a psychiatrist, has hung Pierre’s work in her consulting room. ‘She told me that as soon as her patients see the paintings, they start talking about themselves. It’s if they see their own lives in the paintings.’
In the US, Andy Dixon uses the interior to explore a different preoccupation. When a patron invited him to their home to see his work in situ it planted an idea; ‘My Patron’s Homes’ a series of Pop Art-bright paintings capturing his work in client’s rooms across the world followed. ‘There’s something taboo-breaking my paintings because people don’t talk about the way money works in the art world. But I’ve always been curious about where my art ends up,’ he says. His works also nod to 17th-century Vanitas paintings; depictions of symbolic objects painted to remind the viewer of their mortality – and the ultimate worthlessness of worldly possessions.
For Andy, being able to paint his clients’ homes marks another cultural shift. ‘In the past galleries kept artists at arm lengths from buyers.’ Through social media ‘we can make connections anywhere.’ A former musician who also designed album covers. Andy compares his career to a Venn diagram. His art, with its flattened cartoonish hues (‘I watched a lot of Loony Tunes as a child) and distinct forms sits neatly between his music and ‘indie design’ work. ‘I never set out to paint interiors: but I’ve realised that there are a lot of stories you can tell through them.’
Caroline Walker, whose interest in interiors was sparked by the work of the Scottish Colourists, agrees. ‘They will always be an important source of ideas for artists. Interiors are the spaces in which life happens… They make us think about our own interiority – and they offer a wealth of themes to explore. I cannot ever imagine getting bored with them.’
