Alice Macdonald
Alice Macdonald and Jessica Jane Charleston have been drawing together since 2016 when they first met at The Royal Drawing School in London. In our current exhibition Looking Glass, we see them deepen this connection, by spending time exploring the self-portrait and the intimacy of really looking at another person.
To continue in the spirit of their collaboration, we asked Jessica to interview Alice for this special edition of ‘In Conversation’ - enjoy!
Jessica - Having drawn alongside you since 2016 (Royal Drawing School era) I know you draw a lot! You’ll draw someone whilst you’re having a conversation with them. This requires a level of confidence about drawing, how have you reached this relaxed way of drawing?
I think feeling relaxed while drawing mainly comes down to practice – I’ve drawn in a sketchbook since I was at school. It’s about multi-tasking, when you draw a lot it maybe it becomes kind of automatic, like driving, kind of like muscle memory. In fact usually if I think too much it ends up being a bad drawing. I love drawing people and talking to them. For some reason it makes a very intimate space, I think this might be about me concentrating on the person I am drawing, your attention being really focussed. I don’t know how you found it… but other friends have told me they like the sensation they are really being seen and looked at.
You lent me Paula Modersohn-Becker’s letters to read. I know how much you love her work. Is there a quote from that book or something about her work that you could share that’s inspired / encouraged you?
Oh I think about Paula Modersohn-Becker a lot. I love her work. It's amazing to be able to read her letters and journals and hear her thoughts. I love her attitude to life, she’s so positive and excited to experience the world. I think about how much pleasure she seemed to derive from small things - an orange, or some violets bought from a market stall. And she was so adventurous, leaving her husband and moving to Paris on her own to be a painter. There’s one quote in particular I think about a lot – in her journal she says ‘I must learn how to express the gentle vibration of things’ I always wonder if she had any knowledge of physics and the concept that the world is made up of vibrating atoms and molecules. Even without the science, I love the idea of everything vibrating in gentle harmony and the vibrations being the fizzing of the alive-ness of the natural world. I hope I can express some of that sometimes in my work too.
Jessica - We’ve spoken a lot about working across different mediums, - paint, print, clay. & now embroidery. Can you talk about how this works for you and why you don’t just stick to one?
I think the main reason that I use different mediums is that I enjoy it. I think using different materials helps you to think in different ways, for example in print I think about the image in layers, and in clay I am thinking in 3-d.. These different perspectives on making allow the work to move in different directions… it keeps things fresh, and they feed each other, opening up different possibilities. It’s been really fun to work on the embroideries with you. I’ve enjoyed how sewing is very portable and clean, easy to do anywhere. For some reason I’ve felt more free with the picture plane in textiles – its feels ok to let things float around and not make too much sense spatially. It’s also been nice to work more from the imagination, because I am usually working from sketchbook drawings based in observation.
Jessica - You recently received a distinction at City & Guilds MA Fine Art. What did you learn about your practice during this time?
Well, On my BA I studied Illustration and a few years later, I studied (with you) at the Royal Drawing School. The Drawing School was an amazing course but it’s very practical, it’s all about drawing and making, and not so much about thinking why. I decided I wanted to return to study to dedicate time to researching and thinking about the conceptual side of my practice. I really loved writing a dissertation, and I think I learnt a lot in the process. I wrote it in a diary format and in it I explored the diaristic quality of my work. Virginia Woolf put it well when she said a diary is like a large hold-all or spacious drawer which is ‘so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind’. I’ve begun to see my practice as a similar space in which I can explore any thing that interests me. I work largely from images made from observation in my sketch book, which is also a sort of visual diary. I was really lucky to have some funding from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation that paid for my MA. This allowed me to stop working for the year and focus completely on the course, and I think having that time completely immersed in my practice was the most important thing I got from studying. Painting every day really pushed my work forward and my work did change a lot. I developed the way that I use collage and my materials have shifted a bit - I’ve started to mainly use pigments with glue (distemper) and canvas collage instead of oil.
Alice Macdonald, Nancy Looking Through Binoculars (What We Saw) Distemper, canvas and paper on canvas.
Jessica - You have a very arty family. All three of your brothers are artists / musicians/ poets. Were you encouraged early on to be creative? What was your earliest memory of creative play / art making?
It’s true, I do have a very creative family! I think my parents are slightly confused about how this happened. (Neither of them are artists). My parents are both encouraging, but I would say that my artistic talents were nurtured most by paternal grandmother, Grandma Jane, who is an excellent watercolourist. When we lived in London she often looked after me and we did painting together. Grandma smokes a lot, and my memories are of the smell of cigarettes mingling with food cooking, radio three playing and I would be set up painting a still life with some onions or flowers. She also took me to see art - we often went to the Tate Britain and to the V and A. She’s still someone I like to ask for advice from if I get stuck on a painting.
Jessica - There are recurring themes in your work - windows, trees, tables. Is symbolism important to your practice?
Yes those are all motifs that re-occur… but I wouldn’t think of them as symbolic exactly, I don’t think they have a different symbolic meaning… but they are images that I am interested in and that I am compelled to paint again and again.. Windows I find very interesting because they give the opportunity for two images in one painting, and I just really enjoy the fun you can have with that. Inside and outside coexisting. I’ve been thinking a lot about looking, and how if your attention is out of the window - because you are looking out of it, then you are not seeing the inside as much, because you only really see one thing at a time. How to paint that, seeing and not seeing? The trees I have been painting are mainly in my maternal grandmother, Grandma Vicky’s garden, which is next to my parent’s house. I've been drawing the garden a lot since she died a few years ago. She was an amazing gardener, and I’ve loved how the garden continues to grow, and flourish, even though Grandma is gone. It has been a way to think about life cycles, the seasons, time passing. And the tables – well at home I love to sit around the kitchen table. I like long breakfasts and dinners. At a party, I like being in the kitchen. I like the table as a place that you meet and talk, and also it’s a place where you work – cooking and chopping at the kitchen table or painting at a studio table. A whole story could take place at a table. I also just enjoy painting wood grain and table cloth patterns. They’re things I enjoy.
Jessica - Can you tell us about a recent artwork / exhibition you encountered that you loved?
Recently I fulfilled a long-held ambition to go to Paris to see the lady and the unicorn tapestries in the Musée de Cluney. There are six of them and they are huge, maybe around three by four meters each and they were hung in a room making a space a bit like a tent. I think this is how they were intended to be, to make a draughty room more cosy by having wall to wall tapestries. I’m interested in how they create this kind of theatrical space, that’s something I’d love to explore more. I also love how although the imagery is very stylised and flattened, there is also a kind of realism, or sincerity in the portrayals of the plants and animals, which are depicted with careful attention and accuracy and are all real and identifiable species. They follow their own logic.
Alice Macdonald, Illeana In Paris (New Begginings), Distemper and canvas on canvas
Jessica - Your paintings can be very playful. Especially with the recent collaging effect of cutting up the canvas. You seem to be able to do this magical thing where you can draw / paint from life but bring a quality that tells us so much about your imagination. How do you achieve this? / do you enjoy portrait painting?
I do really enjoy painting people from life when I get a chance. I think of it like doing a puzzle, trying to fit the pieces together, sometimes it’s just one small thing that you change and then suddenly, you have found something that looks like the person in front of you. I find that very satisfying.
I don’t know about the other part of the question. I think if anything magical happens it sort of happens by accident- In fact I kind of feel like it has to happen by accident. Sometimes it feels like you are searching for a surprise, for the work to do something by itself. Perhaps with the collage I am really looking for that, a collaged shape can disrupt the image and it allows for things to happen without my hand or brush marks present?
Jessica - I’ve really enjoyed making double portraits with you. Us both looking in the mirror and drawing each other at the same time. Quadruple portraits! What’s your relationship with self-portraiture?
I’ve really enjoyed drawing with you too. There’s something very relaxing about it. And exhilarating! And intimate. It has been good to get to know your face so well, at first I found it quite a challenge to draw you… but as time went on I feel like I got better. I’ve enjoyed the theme of drawings of us drawing - as artists, perhaps it is important that we are female artists, and in the double portraits we are both the subject and the artist - like that - it feels quite democratic? I’ve always enjoyed making self-portraits. For me they are usually a way to practice painting, I am always my most available model. And working directly from observation is always a good thing for me to do if I get stuck in the studio. To just think about the way to paint, instead of what to paint.
Jessica - We both inherited embroidery threads from our Grandmothers leading to two large embroideries for this exhibition. Tell me about your Grandma, were you close?
I think I am so lucky to have been very close to both of my grandmothers. I’ve said about how I used to paint with my Grandma Jane. The Grandma who’s threads I have been using was my mum’s mum, Grandma Vicky. From the age of 11 we lived next door to her in rural Oxfordshire. I would say we were very close, she was really like my third parent. Often I’d go to her house for the evening, and she regularly drove me to the bus stop and picked me up from school. She was an extraordinary woman. Famous for giving extremely backhanded compliments and being very hardy, never having the heating on, never admitting to being ill, never admitting food was mouldy! She wasn’t an artist but she was a great gardener and she did a lot of embroidery. There were lots of cushions she embroidered in her house, some that she made as a child and some that she made in her old age. In Longworth church there are lots of kneeling cushions she made after her husband died. They all have different images but they all say ‘In memory of David Faulkner’ along the sides. She wasn’t really someone who talked about her emotions or feelings, so imagining her sewing all these cushions, the slow and meditative process, while she must have been grieving, I’ve always found very moving. But she was a great one for getting on with things. I miss her a lot. I’m sure if she could read this she’d think I was being overly sentimental, and say ‘don’t be so ridiculous’, but I think she’d be very interested in our embroideries. And I’m sure she’d have plenty of (constructive) criticisms.
Alice Macdonald, Self Portrait, Distemper and hessian on canvas
Jessica - I love the use of collage in your paintings and how you describe your use of it. ‘The collage is clumsy and imprecise, it distorts and disrupts the image – confusing our perception of space, creating unexpected depth and a simultaneous feeling of flatness.’ How did you come about working in this way?
I think the collage started from a collage-like way of working I developed in printmaking using Tetrapack (juice cartons) in small pieces and collaging them together in a print. From thinking about layers and collage in the print I started to think about them in the paintings too. I started collaging over bits of a painting I didn’t like. Then it just kind of spiralled. I like the idea that the collage shows it’s working – it is clumsy, and there is a feeling that you could move it around again, that the image is unstable – and this is like the instability of a memory, of an image.
Jessica - What’s next?
What’s next! Lots more drawing and painting hopefully. I have some exhibitions coming up in June in London with Oliver Projects, Manchester at Contemporary 6 Gallery, and in China with EY Gallery. I’m looking forward to the summer, and hopefully a little holiday at some point. And then in November I will have a two person show with our good friend Joana Galego at Soho Revue. I feel really lucky to have been able to work on two exhibitions this year with good friends, it’s been a really special way to make work and I feel like I’ve been learning a lot in the process.
Top 5 Studio Soundtrack? ……
I don't normally listen to music in the studio, usually I listen to audio books. Music is often too distracting, maybe too emotional? I find listening to audio books works because I get so into the book that the painting kind of goes on autopilot, part of my brain is occupied with the book and another part is doing the painting and thinking less, if that makes any sense at all? I like a variety of fiction and non fiction here are some I listened to in the last couple of months -
On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
All That I Am by Anne Funder
A Room With A View by EM Forster
I listen to music normally as a break to bring myself back to reality or on the way to the studio here are some tracks that I keep coming back to:
Life's A Gas T rex
I often listen to this song on the cycle home from the studio.
Souverian by Andrew Bird
I'm really enjoying the whole album this is on- Nobel Beast by Andrew Bird.
The Best Is Yet To Come by This Is The Deep
This is The Deep is my brother Ranny’s band, and my two brothers Angus and Hector are in it too. So I am a bit biased but really think they’re so good, Ranny is an incredible song writer and musician, well they all are actually. I recently started singing with them (just the backing vocals) I find it terrifying but also very uplifting to sing with the bank, being an artist is often so solitary so it’s nice to do something in a kind of team effort.
Ropa Vieja by Family Time
A band I recently discovered but really like!
Run That Body Down by Paul Simon
Paul Simon is one of my favourites, love his lyrics, hard to choose one but I think this is a great one.
Looking Glass is open now and runs until 7 June
The Mill Studio
New House Farm Barns,
Ford Lane,
Arundel
BN18 0EF
Current opening times:
Thursday-Saturday
10am-3pm
Sunday 10am-1pm
Other times possible by appointment