Scott McCracken
Scott McCracken Photographed by Benjamin Deakin
You’ve mentioned in the past that placing restrictions on your practice, like avoiding the depiction of people or objects, has helped you create more authentic work. Have these restrictions evolved over time?
Scott - When I said authentic, I maybe should have said unforced. I thought I was trying to find a way of making paintings that I could sustain over a longer period but, with hindsight, I think that was a way of buying myself time. There’s so much freedom and liberation already in making a painting, it’s helpful to place some kind of limitation on yourself and the work. But after a while, a restriction can become a convention or a trope or a formula, so they need to evolve. These initial restrictions have changed organically over time, I’m almost not conscious of it. For a while, the shapes and the spaces within the paintings had to remain flat, but then they started to inflate, so a circle became a sphere and so forth. This allowed the pictorial space to open up much more; it’s continuing to expand now despite the paintings remaining on a smaller scale and the motifs flattening out again. For several years, I exclusively worked on the one format and orientation of support. I needed that continuity. But then I lost interest in that modularity and wanted a new manoeuvrability, even if that meant reducing the canvas size. At present, I’m far more receptive to allowing nameable, or almost-nameable motifs, into the paintings in a way that I would have vehemently rejected before.
Your process involves having multiple paintings in progress simultaneously, I believe it’s often up to 15 or sometimes even 20. How does this approach affect the development of your ideas, and do your feel it allows for or encourages any unexpected connections between pieces?
Scott - I move the paintings around a lot, move them between being upright and lying flat on a table. Elements can find themselves migrating from one painting to another. Working on a small scale has allowed me the opportunity to be able to not only work on multiple paintings at a time, but to quickly move between them and to look at them simultaneously. Simultaneous and comparative looking is important for me in the studio. I occasionally bring out older works and put them up as well. So surprising connections are often discovered not only between current paintings but older ones too. Often, it’s other artist friends who visit the studio who make these connections rather than myself, as I can be too close to what I’m doing. It often feels like my paintings have their own ideas and I’m just trying to keep up with them. People tend to think that by working on so many small pictures, it must mean that one can be less precious than working on bigger canvases. But it’s not really about ‘preciousness’, it’s about giving each painting a certain level of care and attention. I’d like to think I give my paintings that.
Can you talk about how you recognise when a painting has reached the point where it stands alone and is that the same as it being finished?
Scott - I find it’s healthier for the paintings not to be thought of as existing as either finished or unfinished. It becomes too binary, as if the painting is either switched on or switched off. I find that a painting can exist in and as different states of being. It’s more about finding the core, or the essence of it, and that’s when it becomes active. Animated. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s finished but it’s found itself. Or, more accurately, it’s found one version of itself where it can exist in the world independent of me. I never know what a painting is going to do until it’s been made. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how making a painting is the act of searching for something. There is some sense of where you may end up, but only very generally. In making a painting, you’re searching for the specific in the general.
Do you find that working within certain limitations—such as size, form, or colour palette has been a driving force in your work?
Scott - I certainly needed those restrictions around 10 years ago. And because of those limitations, I’m making the paintings I am now. Those restrictions are still deeply felt in the work, even if they can’t be so easily located. It’s definitely been a trajectory, although not necessarily a linear one. For a while, inhibiting the paintings was helpful as it meant I could focus on fewer elements and try to find out what sort of work I should be making. At the moment, I’m feeding them more with what I allow myself to put into them, there’s now a lot more to draw upon. There still aren’t narratives as such, but there could be implied scenarios in some of them. I intermittently flirt with the idea of making bigger paintings, but I don’t think the work as it exists now necessarily wants translated onto a larger scale. Colour has always been tricky for me. The fewer colours I use in a painting, the more important those colours have to become and the more they have to do. I want each painting to feel as if its colour is somehow natural to it rather than having been simply deposited there.
You’ve spoken about your fascination with artists like Giorgio Morandi, Pierre Bonnard and Prunella Clough. How have these influences informed your painting?
Scott - Ernst Wilhelm Nay said “paintings come from paintings, the work of the painter exists within this continuum.” That sentiment resonates with my own experience, as painting comes as much from painting as it comes from life, probably even more so. With Morandi, he’s endlessly fascinating despite his insistence and reliance on such modest objects to paint from. There is a silence embedded within his pictures. And his edges between forms are both assured and hesitant. With Prunella Clough, it’s her attitude as an artist but also how that attitude was reflected within and through the work she made. Something was being broken down and remade anew.
Many of my paintings only appear after being overworked and undone. It takes time for that to happen and can’t be hurried along. Looking at a Bonnard painting is a complete experience where you don’t really want to stop looking at it. To go back to my earlier point, his colour always feels natural and never forced. Even the earlier atypical darker denser paintings from the 1890s I get a lot from. But there are so many artists whose work I look at for lots of different reasons, particularly paintings that have been around for a while and had time to settle, so from around the late 19th century through to the second half of the 20th century. Artists like Francis Picabia, Arthur Dove, Betty Parsons, Serge Charchoune, Lee Lozano, Bruno Goller, Rene Daniels.
Your practice seems to involve a lot of spontaneity, especially in the way you reconfigure motifs. How do you strike a balance between planned structure and improvisation in your paintings?
Spontaneity and improvisation can be quite fundamental components, but there has to be something else that the painting is reaching for. It can’t just be moments of spontaneity, the spontaneity needs to attach itself to something that is more fixed, even if it’s ambiguous. That’s one of the fantastic things about painting, it can contain different and opposing principles or forces. It thrives of them. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what is being pictured in my work. Picture-making is important. For a long time, I was referred to as an abstract painter making abstract paintings. I can understand why but I never thought of myself, or the work, as being ‘abstract’. I was making paintings, and they looked the way they did almost by happenstance rather than coming from any kind of critical position. But then I started to become much more interested in still life and landscape painting. To be clear, I was interested in landscape painting rather than landscape. So, I began to occupy a terrain within painting that I could navigate and part of that was the notion of picturing something. My earlier paintings were highly structured, possibly even over-structured. The work has travelled from structure towards an amorphousness despite there now being specific motifs that can be identified and named. I’ve found there’s more of capacity for improvisation in the nameable than in the unnameable.
Photography by Benjamin Deakin
How does your studio environment affect your creative process, would you change anything if you could?
Scott - I’m very fortunate with the studio I have right now. A few months ago, I finally got myself a studio sofa and that’s meant I’ve spent more time sitting down than I would have done before. It sounds quite trivial but a consequence of that is I probably paint less but look a lot more. Having said that, it’s also difficult not to imagine a potential future studio and what that could be like. I’m probably not alone in saying I’ve thought about a larger studio with more natural light and better storage. But the studio I’m in right now is the best studio I’ve had, and I think that has had a positive impact on the work. The environment affects the routine and the routine affects the making-process. I occasionally go to the studio and don’t do any painting, I just like being there, being in what I consider to be the paintings’ natural habitat. I’ve been reading more in the studio too, so all of this changes the incubation of the paintings.
What are you reading at the moment?
Lately I’ve been re-reading Clement Greenberg’s ‘Homemade Aesthetics’ and Italo Calvino’s ‘Cosmicomics’. I’m also taking my time working through ‘Talking Painting’ edited by David Ryan. I’ve discovered that reading is good way of moving from the outside world to the inside of the painting so that’s been the first thing I tend to do in the morning when I get to the studio. My preference is to read what other artists write about art rather than theorists and historians, especially as I sometimes write about painting myself.
You are one of the Programme Leaders and a mentor at Turps Art School, and a regular contributor of Turps Magazine, I am yet to meet an artist with a bad word to say about the programme! - what makes it so special?
Scott - That’s very good to know! One of the many things that makes Turps so singular is that all the mentors who teach are working painters – everyone involved spends their time thinking about and making paintings. I often say that Turps focuses on what happens inside the studio and not outside of it. It’s about making the bad work along with the good work at Turps, to accept and embrace it as a vital necessity rather than trying to overcome, evade or negate it.
The important thing is the work itself. It always comes first.