Paul Lemmon
Interviewed by Matthew Macaulay
Can you share how you navigate the transition from digital disruptions to physical paintings in your work? What draws you to this process?
I think that the urge to paint is something that is just in you, similar to singing or dancing, or writing in fact. So I want to keep painting at the centre of what I’m doing and I’m always looking for ways and things to paint. So on seeing some of the incredible imagery and abstraction that is thrown up by digital videos that have been disrupted, the immediate thought was how can I make PAINTINGS out of these, rather than prints or more videos. And it seems like an extremely relevant subject given that we are all interacting with screens and video on an almost hourly basis nowadays. It’s a way to highlight and comment on that, but OUTSIDE of the digital arena.
I spend a lot of time sifting through frames of disrupted videos looking for areas that I want to use in a painting, or even just whole frames that work on their own. Once I have a collection of those, I bring them together in photoshop to create one final composition. I then draw over it to work out where all the hard edges are going to be to create a sort of map and this is used to cut up all the masking film that I use on the painting.
Once I’ve defined what goes where, I can start painting with layers of free-flowing, fluid paint - underpaying they call it - which will show through in the final picture. Once that’s dry, the masking film goes on and I work over that in blocks of oil paint, interpreting the colours as I go. So the first stage is very mechanical, but once it hits the painting surface it becomes very human and it’s about my eye and interpretation.
Your work engages with the fleeting nature of digital imagery-what inspired this focus, and how does it influence your approach to creating physical art?
I think aside from the mesmerising effect of the broken video, what also inspired me to work this way was to create a work that is still, that you can stand in front of and contemplate. There are no updates on a painting or notifications. The battery doesn’t run down and it doesn’t stop. It’s a ‘slow’ medium, it takes time to create and it lasts. As a painter, I find video and digital work can be frustrating because it has to be seen in a certain way using other technology and it can be switched off. Paintings, I think, have become a very strong counterpoint to the general disaffection that people can feel today towards screen technology. Looking at a painting can be like a walk in nature and that’s something I want to give to people.
What role does experimentation play in your practice, especially when working between the digital and physical realms?
There’s always experimentation to a degree with paint, just because of it’s very nature: it’s unpredictable and chemical. So mixing colour, applying layers, seeing what marks occur accidentally all have something experimental about them. And certainly, I’m always looking to news ways I might apply the paint to achieve a new look, freshness and dynamism.
But there’s also a lot of experimenting when disrupting the videos in the first place. The whole idea of that is the accidental breakdown of the way the computer shows the movie. And there are various ways I can make that happen and I mix and match and go through trial and error to see what works best - often arriving at something I’ve never seen before. It’s partly all about using technology in a way it’s not intended to be used, or at least, making use of mistakes that manufacturers would want to iron out. The happy accident as its’ known.