In conversation with Judith King
Paramour, exhibition catalogue, April 2012

Judith King: Is it important to you that the traces of the story, the beginnings of each painting, are not present in the final piece?
 
David Wightman: Not necessarily, but I like the idea of presenting preparatory drawings (cartoons) alongside finished pieces in Paramour. The finished pieces don't attest to the laborious nature of the process of making them, and the preparatory drawing (cartoon)s can only hint at part of the process. So much of what I do involves drawing, and re-drawing, along with intricately cutting every single piece of wallpaper used to make up the painting by hand – like traditional marquetry. I like the illusion created in the finished pieces – their opacity, in a sense. I still don’t like revealing source images, however, as I don’t want people to think of my paintings as variations on an 'original' image.

JK: It sounds as though you are nervous about that?
 
DW: Only because I don’t want viewers to obsess about the location of a source for a painting. I see the paintings as vehicles for colour and form and texture. I'm interested in the tradition of landscape, but I feel my paintings have more in common with the work of Bridget Riley than John Constable.

JK: That's an interesting area to explore: you’re hovering between formal aspects of painting and nostalgic representation. The spatial aspect of the work is intriguing, recalling colour-field abstraction and romantic landscape.
 
DW: In some ways the spaces represented in my landscapes are quite 'prop-like', they almost suggest two-dimensional spaces, rather than three-dimensional spaces. Elements of the composition sit in front of each other as flat planes. The represented space doesn't quite make sense, nor does the colour – skies are dark and lakes are bright. There is something eerie in my use of colour, but the pieces still have to be convincing as landscapes. I don’t want them to veer into sci-fi or fantasy. Some pieces show recognisable mountain ranges, but, despite similarities to actual places, the paintings represent fictional destinations.

JK: People have suggested to me that they recognise a mountain range in one of your idealised landscapes. What would you reply to that?
 
DW: I try to be honest and say my work is based on found images (photographs, paintings, postcards etc.) of real places. But the source image has been changed and reworked, so the final piece becomes fiction. Especially as I use different images for the same painting – the paintings are collaged materially and representationally. I see my paintings as depicting idealised archetypes rather than specific places.

JK: [indicating a preparatory drawing in the studio] Making preparatory drawings is a very traditional way of creating paintings.
 
DW: I like that – I use all of these old terms: preparatory drawing (cartoon), modello, ricordo – it's evidence of my sentimentality. Despite using digital software, I still use a sketch book to work out and record colour, and I use preparatory drawing (cartoon)s rather than a projector to scale up drawings. I also have colour swatches for every finished piece.

JK: How long is it since you stopped making target paintings?
 
DW: I don’t feel that I have stopped. To me they are an endless series that I can go back to at any time.

JK: You hover between structured, strong abstraction and this liminal dreamlike place of emotional attachment, recognisable but not specific. There is a see-saw effect going on in your work, for the paintings are one thing and then the other. They come together as powerful works, each in their own right. Do you not see the landscapes as abstract?
 
DW: In one sense they are, but there is still a definite element of representation in my work. I see them as abstract in the sense that many of the concerns I had in my earliest abstract paintings – to do with colour, line, form – have carried over. Yet, I still want my landscape paintings to read as actual landscapes – I want the fiction they represent to be believed. We have a river that is a bright, acidic green in this piece [Teton, 2012] but, nonetheless, I want it to read as a river – I am not letting go of the representative aspect.

JK: Do you think having a starting point like a landscape helps to explore formal ideas that are normally more easily recognised in abstract paintings? Do you see a distinction between abstraction and representation?
 
DW: To me the distinction has become less important, and I like the idea of my paintings moving closer to abstraction. When I first began to explore making landscape paintings it was in a similar way to how I approached my abstract works. I was also interested in approaching a genre of painting that had fallen out of favour in contemporary discourse. I noted that no-one talked about landscape, even though it has such a long tradition.

JK: The visual language you use and the things that are important to you demonstrate to me that you are a painter and a draughtsman first, before being labelled as any particular kind of painter or draughtsman. Can you see where the work will go in the future?
 
DW: I want it to progress naturally. Landscape and abstraction have been present in my work for some time – I like the tension between representing something and simply wanting to experiment with colour and other formal aspects. I look at colour and form and composition, and, to me, it isn’t important whether I'm painting landscapes or abstract paintings.

JK: I think you're describing the formal side of painting excellently. I totally agree with you about abstraction and representation. Whether we're looking at a Riley or a Turner painting, they are both about surface. We haven’t mentioned the wallpaper, which I am sure a lot of people notice. Tell me why you use wallpaper.
 
DW: When I started making abstract paintings, I liked the idea of re-working abstract motifs – getting beyond the seriousness of abstraction by using wallpaper. I used wallpaper similar to the wallpaper my childhood home was decorated in. I wanted to reclaim abstraction and make it personal, almost biographical.

JK: The wallpaper helps you to accentuate movement on the canvas, and I think you're using it as a drawing device as well as employing it for personal reasons. I'd like to talk about wallpaper as a thing in itself, because I am interested in your attachment to wallpaper as evocative of memory. There is something here about emotion, place, time, and the past. You're the youngest in your family?
 
DW: The youngest of six.

JK: That must have been a busy house.
 
DW: When people hear I’m the youngest of six they imagine a busy house, but in fact it was relatively quiet and I had a lot of time on my own. Being the youngest I didn’t feel any pressure, so I spent all of my time drawing and painting, and it was easy to hide away and not be disturbed.

JK: What are your earliest memories about looking at paintings?
 
DW: I remember being taken to Manchester Art Gallery as a child, and it was the first time that I had seen any art. The collection had a heavy focus on the Pre-Raphaelites; I had an obsession with fantasy art as a child, so it was easy to appreciate John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs.

JK: You display a self-consciousness in liking those paintings [the work of the Pre-Raphaelites]. They're fantastic and gorgeous because they're illusionistic. They make the viewer believe something, taking one into a world that is emotional and nostalgic. I see the same appeal in your work too. I want to touch on your time in Berwick [Wightman was awarded a six-month fellowship by English Heritage in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland in 2010]. How much do you feel the place influenced your work?
 
DW: The beauty of the place and the absence of distractions [Berwick-upon-Tweed is a small coastal town on the border between Scotland and England in Northumberland] was disarming. I could feel myself being affected by the winter, the darkness, and the cold. The atmosphere of isolation and aloneness was bleak and a little depressing. Before going to Berwick I think I was trying to capture a feeling in my work but didn’t really know what that feeling was. I experienced it first-hand in Berwick though. A strange sense of melancholy and silence.

JK: It occurs to me that there is a certain mournfulness in your work.
 
DW: I think that's the right word. 'Mournfulness' was the feeling I was interested in capturing in my work before Berwick. Not something dramatic like despair or tragedy. In Berwick I occasionally walked to Spittal Beach on my way home late at night. I would hear the waves roaring against the promenade, and feel a romantic sense of being a painter and being alone there. I've tried to capture this feeling in my work.

JK: Is there a sense of nostalgia for that place and time?
 
DW: Definitely. It is only now that I'm back in London that I can appreciate the impact the residency had on the way I approach my work.

JK: With the Royal Academy showing David Hockney's landscape paintings, this is an exciting time for you to be exhibiting landscapes too. There is a particular luminosity in Hockney’s art that relates to yours.

Judith King and David Wightman

Judith King is curator of English Heritage’s contemporary art programme