Extracts from a conversation with Samantha Carswell @Oriel Q 23rdJune, 2021

I’m self-taught as an artist. My mother was an artist who went to the R.A. the 1930s and I think that, through the whole of my schooldays, I was probably a little intimidated by that so I didn't start drawing at all until I was studying philosophy at the age of  23 or 24 in Bangor University. I started drawing Picasso-esque drawings which come actually very easily to me.  They are the  the most facile means of communication I have actually. It's like my handwriting; they just come out of me. So yes, I started doing line drawings and then at home I started doing paintings because the other influence was the other philosophers whom I learnt from and were very good painters, both abstract and figurative.

I didn't in fact finish my philosophy and in 1970 -71  Probably the reason I didn’t finish my degree was because I was just frustrated that that you know the whole studying philosophy is about regurgitating other people's thoughts and and nitpicking the arguments, and I wanted to realise some of the ideas through my painting. I took a year out and then I Began painting full -time and in 1975 or so the Ballet Rambert came to Bangor to perform in the New Theatre and I was working backstage and there I became fascinated with the work and so I Began drawing the choreography, which I continued  for the next 10 years, going to theatres around the country where I could go and sit in the Auditorium [Leeds Grand and Sadlers Wells] and then I was offered a show in the Roundhouse at Chalk Farm in 1976 where Rambert launched their first full-length ballet based on the life and death of Lorca. [Cruel Garden choreographed by Christopher Bruce in collaboration with Lindsay Kemp] 

After a show in the October gallery in 1984, where my work was described as being ‘figuratively abstract’,  I was offered a place at the Royal College of Art. I had no formal training and the course itself wasn’t a training; you were visited by well known painters. The main influence for me was John Golding, an expert on Cubism. He’d mounted many exhibitions of Picasso and Matisse. I had a long relationship with him which lasted beyond the Royal College. 

 At the Royal College I did a lot of work from the model in the life room. John Goulding and Peter de Francia were big influences there.  

 I started to develop a philosophy From the ground work of  Cubism; from the idea of examining reality on the canvas in three-dimensional form, I began to think about nuclear events, which in terms of the science of the last hundred years is an important ingredient in human thought. So on the blank canvas I started to mark-make. I saw the marks as being particles. It's as though you are in the Hadron Collider in Cerne; particles are raced around in opposite directions; they meet, there is an event and what the physicists are looking for are accidents. It’s the same on my canvas; I am looking for accidents. I build up from marks and gradually progress to seeing this kind of realistic abstraction as a way into music, which I had previously been working with in the dance company.

Some late Synthetic Cubist paintings had made comment on the world in the sense of investigating the material of the world through painting, and that went into the works triggered by 9/11. I was using newspaper as a palette for oils at the end of the day I would make a painting out of that palette on the single sheet I was working on. When the newspapers from September 12th surfaced on that pile, I couldn't just mix my paint on them so I saved them; photocopiying both sides and then the original newsprint I glued down onto board -losing one side, and then made paintings out of  them. 

My motive there was a healing image. I used two things; one was the goddess, an image which goes right back to rock art. The other was the bird which is also something which features in Rock are going back to the Neolithic and further, actually  so I used to bird more as a symbol of of our interconnectedness of mobility all those things and the Gia was definitely a healing thing 

At various stages after that I collected newspapers; redacted them and then added images and words. I collected 117 front pages tracing the history of brexit from its beginning to about March 2019. I had a show shortly after that called Armageddon

 The main thrust of my work became music and in particular in this show the music of two  composers. One is Ysaÿe. A violinist,  he made six sonatas dedicated to his violinist friends six solo sonatas for violin and and a collection of six of those in this show and then I turn to Bartok who is one of my favourite composers and I have recently been working from his six string quartets.

 Although I am a visual artist, I am not a very practical person and I've been self-taught all the way along. I've learnt from from other people how to do things and in particular in this show I looked to the to the Welsh artist Peter Spriggs who was 17 years younger than me at the Royal College of Art but he was a lot wiser than me about the use of materials and so whereas in the early days I was pencilling in a composition and then filling in,he told me just to go just to go straight in with the paint and and realise that the paint is a material in itself which has to sing.

That  kind of philosophy influenced my approach when I started to doing stone sculpture with a Zimbabwean stone carver, Joseph Muzondo  who was wonderful, archetypal stone carver  and the Zimbabweans have a saying that you start from this blank stone and it's not a square block, it's something you find and then you to teach the stone to talk and that kind of is is my attitude to painting too; I wrestle the image out of the canvas

The material side of it has always always been a struggle. It's always a challenge. the line drawings are fine they come naturally just like handwriting

 Gradually I've learnt about the material -if we are making reference just to painting, the material of paint, then it's just got looser and looser; or rather freer and freer and I don't feel tied to an image although sometimes I want to control it more and define space and figures. 

 I think it's worth mentioning  that one painter at the Royal College who I had some dealings with was Chris Fisher. He said to me two things: one was that art is about the juxtaposition of unanticipated elements. The other thing he said to me was that a painter is someone who's brush is a little ahead of themselves  so you get out of the way of yourself and the image talks to you.

Barry Cooper; EVENTS Oriel Q until July 24th 2021