How and why did you start your artistic career?

My mother and grandfather are both artists, so I grew up drawing and painting. Particularly drawing; I think a specific, linear mapping and exploration of the world is fundamental to how I see things and try to understand them.

When I left school in 2008 I couldn’t decide whether to apply to study art history at university, or go to art school. The transitionary art foundation courses offered at the time seemed too simplistic and superficial in their explorations of either option, and very expensive – so I planned my own foundation year for 2009, charting a journey around the Mediterranean and Middle East, drawing and photographing ancient classical archeological sites. I took out a loan from my parents and spent several months hitchhiking through Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, and Italy, eventually completing a full loop in Sicily, only a miles from ancient Carthage, where the trip began. When I returned home, I held my first exhibition in London, which retrospectively paid for the trip. The Arab Spring began a year later, permanently changing or erasing almost all of the places I had visited, and forever changing my way of looking at the world around me.

I decided to apply to Oxford to study History of Art and, after finishing my BA, to City and Guilds for my Fine Art MA. There’s no doubt that it took me a while to shake off the weight of both degrees, but the ways of looking and approaches to actually seeing and engaging with art that I learnt and developed during my time at Oxford have been instrumental to how I began my career proper in 2016, with my show Razed, and to how it continues today.

How did you discover your medium and why did you choose it?

After my time in travelling through the Middle East in 2009, I developed a deep mistrust of photography. The medium is used universally to convey truth, and it became evidently clear – looking at my own pictures – that a photo can lie better and more easily than almost any other medium. Within a year the images that I took in Syria, for example, represented a different country, another time, an unrecognisable social context.

This chronological and spatial distortion became a fascination, and has led to a growing sense of pre-mourning as I take photographs. I always shoot on film, which exacerbates this sense of a moment captured and only later revealed, especially when using the very literal denial of a Single-Lens-Reflex camera, where the mirror and shutter conspire to rob you of that “decisive moment” for the duration of time you have set.

Later, I will develop and scan the negative. I arrange and desaturate the pictures digitally in the studio, creating double exposures. Two or more images are placed on top of each other, each negating and doubling the other, frequently creating tonal inversions in the process. The result is an image that speaks to its own fallibility and chronological unsteadiness, especially as the images chosen are frequently taken mere seconds apart.

As mentioned above, drawing is the key to the rest of my work. There is a way that making a drawing imprints something indelibly in your mind, as you make the lines concurrently on the page. So, even if a photograph is often the starting point, I will draw that photograph with charcoal onto a large sheet of paper, taped over the canvas, in order to translate that moment into something my own. This process of drawing the double exposure also serves to ‘flatten’ the two images into an indistinguishable series of lines and squiggles. The picture plane is universal.

I then take this large format drawing – somewhat similar to a Renaissance ‘cartoon’ – and cut it out. This is perhaps the most labourious process, as the whole stencil has to remain as one conjoined sheet, in order to preserve the scale and proportions of the overall composition. The cutout is laid on stretched and primed hessian, stuck down with magnets and masking tape, and sprayed with gouache; after which the stencil its moved fractionally, and resprayed, creating another kind of double exposure.

Once that first layer has dried, I pour acrylic paint of varying viscosity over the image, letting that begin to dry before scrubbing it in places back with water, sponges and paper towel. Eventually, I begin painting in oil, fleshing out the tonal depths of the image, while allowing fragments of the first sprayed layer (and white primer) to show through in the finished painting.

The resulting compositions mirror my own understanding of memory as something that isn’t linear, and cannot be relied upon. My understanding of the past is fragmented; certain elements appear with absolute clarity, while others remain almost unreachable, in a kind of colourless, blurry fog.

Can you talk about your creative process? 

There are so many stages of creativity, and it can undermine the result to be too analytical or cognisant of each; things quickly become overwrought if the process is too contrived. To combat this, I try to break the painting up into different steps, always presenting yourself with the possibility of undoing what you did previously.

As established, the works hinge around memories of specific places, people, and moments. So before any kind of tool is used, there is some kind of decision process: to observe, and to record. Drawing and taking photographs are the modes I most frequently turn to, but sometimes something calls for a written word or a microphone/recorder.

The studio is a place for me to unpack and reassemble the things that I’ve captured from the outside world. It’s a place for me to examine my own biases and prejudices in those moments of spontaneity.

It helps me to think of creativity as a Jenga tower. Building the big tower is the easy part; it’s pushing and pulling the bones out of that tower that really puts your idea or work under stress.
And if your tower doesn’t collapse under the strain of that pressure every now and then, you’re not risking enough.

How does your work come to life?

I mentioned the idea of pre-mourning something, and that is really at the heart of it, for me. There is a certain kind of sentimental melancholy that comes from seeing yourself in an old photograph; the knowledge of everything that is to come, good and bad, and the sympathy you have for this unreachably distant, past person. I have the urge to tell that person it will all be okay, and you don’t need to worry so much.

The works are already alive from the moment I start looking through my photo archive, and creating that double exposure. There is an urgency in working with those images, because they punch through everything else – all the noise of the world – and speak to a simple truth we all know: the quickness of time, the inevitability of the future.

THE ARTIST

Name: Arthur Laidlaw
Residence: United Kingdom
Occupation: Painter

FEATURED WORKS