Interview: Blaise Drummond

What does the title of the exhibition Folk Songs of North America refer to?

It actually refers to a painting that I made last year. It’s just a title that I came across. Yeah, I just liked it, 'cause it seemed to remind me of that innocent type of title like ‘Birds of The Forest’. Looking back I realise it’s probably from a time when my parents were buying books that they thought would be good for children. I grew up with these books about flowers and fields and streams and birds, so I kind of have a real attraction to those things. They seem to belong to a more innocent time; it’s obviously before the idea that nature is going to the bad. In this era nature can be studied and it’s all good. Folk Songs of North America sounded a bit naïve and to be even more awkward some of them aren’t North American buildings, whereas others are.

Blaise Drummond: Folk Songs of North America (installation view), 2010.

What is it with modernist architecture, why are you attracted to that?

I haven’t really thought about it so much, but I think maybe it has to do with the fact that I grew up in a messy old Victorian house. So maybe I have a kind of idealistic longing for some totally unrealistic way of living. I also find something very nostalgically attractive in the thought that it is a past idea of the future. From the time when people still thought the future was going to be brilliant. There is this feeling in our generation - a feeling of disappointment, it’s a post-modern syndrome. We don’t have that idea any more, that things will get better and better. Nobody believes that anymore. But in the post-war era - and even more in the pre-war era - there is this noble ambition. Things will get better and better for everybody. It obviously didn’t turn out that way. Like when Le Corbusier made Villa Savoie for a rich client and all. Of course that is the reality of things, but at least there was an ambition at one point. Now we just can’t imagine that kind of enthusiasm about the potential of the future –it’s too eccentric.

Please tell me about this tree, it doesn’t look like any tree I’ve ever seen before…

It’s made of branches from about 12 different trees from my garden in Ireland. I cut off one and then another one and then joined them all together. I then took them apart again and it was shipped over here. Like a strange jigsaw puzzle, I put it back together. The glue is just a kind of theatrical pretending to be glue, in case anyone didn’t get it - this is not really a tree. The fresh green leaves are a funny bonus. It wasn’t like that when I put it together originally but it was shipped off obviously in the dark. When I opened the crate here it had opened its leaves, poor old thing. A tiny bit of life amongst these dead branches.

Blaise Drummond: Tree (Repaired), 2010. Varible dimensions. Various wood (Horse chestnut, ash, sycamore, spindle, hazel, hawthorn, willow, blackthorn, birch, apple, ivy)and latex.

So it is a collage tree or what was the idea here?

Well, the reason I got the idea to make this piece, was when I made a tree for a museum show in Germany last year. It was a tree in space - I made this installation for the Mies van der Rohe building called Haus Lange in Krefeld. It was a very nice place to make a show and the tree was basically a real tree but it was cut off exactly were it reached the celing, so it seemed like it was growing through. That was actually really hard for me to do, but there were really good technicians. They cut the tree from the park and then they had to cut the tree in pieces to get in the door. Your eye is quite ok that’s a tree and then - what - that’s like the worst tree I ever saw. This one is just called Tree Repaired.

And the book is based on a real book?

Yes, they are based on actual existing books from the sixties. When I am doing this gag it is made exactly to scale. The Observer’s Book of Pond Life was also something I made for the exhibition in Haus Lange.

Blaise Drummond: The Observer's Book of Pond Life, 2009. 14,7 cm x 9,5 cm x 1,8 cm. Oil and gesso on plywood. J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories, cover.

What about the colours you use in your work they struck me as kind of retro colours?

These colours I always use. You’ll see them over and over. You know they are all from a book of J.D. Salinger called ‘Nine Stories’. I’ve got this old American paperback version of it and it’s got these nine squares on the cover in different colours. I’ve always thought it was a really nice design so whenever I need some colours I think “oh I’ll just use those”. These seem to be from another time, but a very particular time. And let me tell you a very cool thing. It has the same squares on the back and the front. When I was using it in the studio to mix these colours, I left it in the sun and went away and when I came back, the front had faded. But the back still had much deeper colours. So whenever I need to do any kind of colour shift for shading and light I use the faded colours. Its really simple, I don’t have to think about it. A very low tech solution really.

Blaise Drummond: Yasnaya Polyana Drawing (No.6), 2010. 80 cm x 110 cm. Watercolour and collage on paper.

How come you use collage in this drawing?

I really like the idea of doing one thing and then doing something completely different in the same piece. I like to use a minimum of paint when possible to say something. I’ll maybe just pour some blue watercolour onto a paper and then your eyes are kind enough to think “oh that’s a lake”. If you are a different kind of painter then you might actually try to paint a lake with reflections. But this is just poured straight on. In the process I kind of think: “maybe this cardboard might read to someone as wood - ok I can believe that”. Those green bits are just drips of watercolour on the floor and people could believe they were trees. Some of the drips here are slightly accidental but seem to energize the rest of the space. I quite like the idea of how to make as much as you can with a minimum effort. This is made from wrapping paper from a butcher’s shop, a piece of an old shirt of mine and the inside of an envelope. The red chequered material is from one of my daughter’s picnic set tablecloths that I stole, the metallic bit is Swiss chocolate wrapping so I suppose I try to use things that are kind of crappy rather than art material. I try to turn rubbish into gold - if you could call it gold.

Blaise Drummond: Stadtwald (installation view), 2010. 250 cm x 150 cm x 110 cm Silicone, metal can, dried plants, plasticine and oil paint.

In The Luminous Ideal of Pastoralism I use sweet wrappers from winegums, you know those rolls with the twisty ends. Most people would assume that was paint. A bit of childish conceit, I suppose. It’s nice though when it sticks out from the canvas as a real leaf would. It becomes almost sculptural. And again I use graph paper primarily because I have an attraction to it that arose when I was a kid in school. When I was doing an MA in London I thought I would make a painting on graph paper and that’s the first time I used it. I kept thinking about this beautiful blue and green coloured paper, but when I went to the shops to buy it, I could never find any that matched my memory of what it was like. In fact, I have a whole collection of different types from whenever I go abroad. I haven’t bought any in Copenhagen yet but maybe I will now. In Germany they’ve only got the brown kind and they think blue is pretty exotic. And then in France you can get this type that’s blue on one side and brown on the other. I often use that one.

Is this one of the Californian houses then?

Yes, it is by a guy called Craig Ellwood. He was a follower of Mies van der Rohe. A funny sort of character in the sense that he wasn’t really an architect, but an engineer. He was very good at creating a myth about himself, he drove sports cars and hung out with beautiful women. His whole stick was being really cool, so people gave him commissions. He would then employ really good architects to do the work. He was more the kind of pop star myth making figure. I have often used his buildings in my paintings because they immediately register to our eye, without really registering what they are, because he is relatively obscure.

There is a contrast between the tree and the ultramodern architecture - is that an intended contrast?

Basically I made this painting with that in mind; that I wanted this combination of trees and architecture. In the initial image there were trees. Often modernist buildings get depicted as if they exist in some kind of ideal world. Because architects have this compulsion presumably as if they want a tabula rasa, they normally don’t want trees to get in the way.

Blaise Drummond: The Luminous Ideal of Pastoralism, 2010. 162 cm x 213 cm Oil, acrylic and collage on canvas.

Isn’t it sometimes a bit refreshing when art is not so complicated but a little more playful and uses things like sweet wrappers and graph paper?

Yeah, I often tell my students that they should enjoy themselves; it should be fun just like when you were a kid. I think that’s why I ended up being an artist. It’s getting back to that kind of childish feeling, remembering that spirit. There’s a real delight in it. There was a minute when I was doing that big painting there in the studio a few months ago where I was putting in those nice Salinger colours and you know there had been a lot of working. And I was just mixing these beautiful colours the sun was shining and I got the paint to exactly the right kind of fluidity and maybe a good record was on the Ipod right? I just thought “It doesn’t get much better than this! Happy days!” Of course it’s not always like this, but I just had this moment where I felt “this is fantastic”.

How do you like the idea of exhibiting your work in these modernist buildings then, in the white cube?

I really like it! It provides a kind of magic charge (maybe it is bourgeois or whatever) but you can bring in anything. You can bring a stick in and suddenly it makes you really look at it like you never have before. Once it is in the white cube, it is brought to life. And from my point of view you know canvases are white, paper is white, it can kind of all leak out where things can relate to each other. I love galleries so I like the white cube.

Thank you.