I met Conrad and got to see his beautiful work when I went to JSS in Civita in 2017. You can learn more about him and see more of his paintings on his website at www.conradfrankel.com
Laura Vahlberg: Hi Conrad! Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview! How have you been doing?
Conrad Frankel: I’m doing well, thank you. I’m thinking a lot about painting, but waiting till next month to get going!
Btw, top tip, new Adam Curtis documentary called can’t get You out of my head
It’s six part, and best to watch it over six days, as it’s very dense! It’s on YouTube now....it’s about how the world situation got to be where it is.. a bit heavy, but with great footage..
LV: Thanks for the tip, I'll check it out!
My first question is, how is it going being an artist and a parent? Also, what kinds of thoughts are you having about painting?
CF: It’s going great being a dad and a painter! Siegfried was born when I was 40 and it’s brought alot of joy into my life. I was ready at last to be a dad. My wife Lily is his primary minder and I”m the grey person in the background… as most parents know it’s a deep deep joy to have a child and I’m really grateful it has happened to me. It has changed me as a painter, but I don’t think I can say how yet! Only to say, everything I do now seems more vital.
As for thoughts about painting
Well, I look at paintings on the walls, in books and almost shut my eyes looking for their essence...the dream behind them, the lump
I think of nature, ( I walk through a forest every day with my three dogs), of what life means to Siegfried and of the dreamy world of painting... and I think way back to my first interest in it, way back when I was 4, the blue sky on top and the sunshine sun, lolypop trees, I knew the lumps well back then...
I’m thinking about it more than I do it, but it’s winter in Ireland and my thumbs are numb with the cold, (I have no central heating system)and I’m busy spring cleaning! I’m waiting to get into the sunlight, in Greece, hopefully in April, and paint a gnarled olive tree, or a panorama of the island...
Of course I think of Morandi’s soft snow print creamy cement paint... and of William Nicholson’s harsh yet oh so beautiful simplicity. But less and less. I think of mixing all the colours and forms together and building an image of muddy oneness, well digested, yet still fresh..fed by ochre, greens and blues along the way...
Unity is my main driver, visual unity, harmony. I think of painting two objects and the energy between them being the secret subject...
But I also think of the world I’m painting for, and I’m still confused as to what to feed people these days... so it’s a long inactive winter meditation.... covid has suited these ponderings very well...as has playing with my beautiful baby boy...who now walks like a drunkard! He turns one in six days..
The Italy Corot painted is still there.... and the countryside of Europe is where I love to paint from spring to autumn... I’m always looking at the sky and the way it grades, from a colder violet blue on top, through light blue, green blue, yellow duck egg greens down to a grey pink...that’s my primary focus as a landscape painter. I want to feel the bubble of our atmosphere
The landscape below the sky is a wonderful detail...I tend to be happy when I’m out painting... I love the solitude and the focus of the practise, and I always start with the sky
I’m thinking of still life too...but that’s a very different practice... I’ve been collecting trash from the roadsides on my way back from landscape painting, plastic bottles and paper coffee cups, grey tennis balls, bricks of styrofoam. I assemble them and think about them. This year I plan to paint a lot of rubbish! But I don’t know why I’m doing that... it sort of feels relevant.
They are a few meandering thoughts, next question please...!
LV: Okay, great. What is your relationship to memory painting? Do you paint mostly on site or in the studio?
These rubbish paintings sound very exciting!
CF: Yes, thanks Laura!
Lots of rubbish paintings a comin’ up!
As for memory....well, I believe all consciousness is a memory, we are always following it (the Buddhists wisely speak of following the breath).
The world is a story...I always work from life, in front of the subject, and it’s all story based, if that makes any sense?
thinking thinks and painting paints, so it’s a visual narrative but a narrative none the less.
I have worked from photography and from my mind alone but I’ve never broken through enough to develop anything I could take seriously..
my improvisation comes from external stimuli and mostly from the body of the paint itself... plump paint pulled by hog hairs...generally no medium added. And from the painting knife, a Holbein series A no. 6S... that knife makes marks that constantly lead me on...the loose and the tight is a big part of the my visual painting narrative
As for where I paint, it could be anywhere! I have a studio, I have three tables at three heights, one is quite low, an old green baize card table, and the other two are a beige velvet covered display tables from a jewellers that closed down, one is waist height, and the other is just below my eye level! I prefer the eye level platform... and I like things front lit, but for the last few years I’ve been working with side lit objects. That’s changing now.
LV: Now that you’ve told me about your studio I would be curious to see a picture of it. You mentioned earlier something about feeding people with paintings in today’s climate- can you talk a bit about that? How would you say paintings feed people? I think I know what you mean, but I’m curious.
CF: Paintings need to feed the eye and the heart with visual nourishment, both. They should never be made to prove a point.
I guess some confusion comes from knowing there’s an “art world” that’s self conscious, and always with a desire for the new...I pay no attention to the art world anymore and I don’t subscribe to any magazine,I have no idea what’s going on. But I also know that’s it’s there as a zeitgeist backdrop and as a perceptual painter I am in danger of being sidelined into the conservative camp... another pretty landscapist. It’s an old story for so many painters by now, but it does exert some influence on all painters, and quite often a healthy one. Nothing is worse than boring paintings...
Creating paintings is a delicate process, and it can take years of work to get to something with a meaningful visual essence. I don’t want to be interrupted in my pursuit of this... it’s become a practice of making private poetry with an audience of one, me, and then, every so often, a show manifests...I need a lot of time, I exist almost continuously in failure, one after another I rub down, sand back, go again. It’s quite dispassionate for me...but it’s also a long distance process with real struggles along the way. Ultimately it’s a meeting of this private activity with my projections of what people want to see, and also a projection of what a bigger audience will appreciate. So it’s not always a clear path to follow. But I am defined by the future i project and then live into, even if it’s not what I expected it to be when it arrives, and sometimes it’s not so bad a surprise!
I have nothing to prove to anyone, I see that humanity is one person deep and none of it is bigger than me. I don’t even want to share what I do with anyone. I paint basically just for me. C.S.Lewis spoke of “the gluttony of delicacy” and to some extent I see all art as a sort of mistake, until it’s not... it’s all bad, until it’s great... and I’m that glutton, seeking out something that’s satisfying, presenting the problem accurately for others to appreciate. It’s certainly pointless, wonderfully so. But it gets meaningful for me on very rare occasions when I feel there’s beauty standing naked in the mud. And that’s the food I’m seeking out.
LV: Okay, I had to really think on this one. So are you saying that a clear presentation of a problem that is a lump or dream is the nourishment that can happen from painting? And when one paints to prove a point, to you, that is not nourishing? How is proving a point and presenting a problem different?
CF: Thanks Laura, I appreciate the feedback and your thoughts and questions. I’ll attempt a reply but I’m aware it may only add to the confusion, which can’t be a bad thing, right...!?
Well, let’s start with the lump! For me, it’s something like the question: what’s the big simple thing happening in this painting. Say, if an old statue gets eroded by time or acid rain it can sometimes reveal a form that is very evocative, perhaps of nothing in particular, but evocative none the less. And the initial intention of the sculptor may be more apparent without all the finishing touches.
And that’s what I meant when I said I look at paintings with my eyes almost closed, in soft focus, to see what’s the big simplicity of the painting. What is the large distillation before the perfumery finishes were added. That’s the “clear presentation of the problem” I was talking about. All good paintings have clarity in them, and yes, they change in seconds as they get made, but they also have a very important initial set up phase which is where all images must necessarily be generated from. The clarity will always be linked with a knowledgeable handling of paint, as well as a healthy appetite for composition!
Paintings nourish when they delight... there’s a quote I read that goes something like this: art is that which when seen pleases. Now paintings, like books, cannot defend themselves against fools. And I have learned to appreciate different painters along the way and I go in and out of love with different artists and I’ll be a fool until I die...but one who loves Corot’s Italian paintings... and Morandi’s late work.
As for proving points with a painting, let me quote the singer Morrissey! In the opening track of his latest album he says “If you’re going to sing then sing, just don’t talk about it”. It’s the same with painting. Paint to paint. I remember listening to a Gerhard Richter interview where he was saying that painting had died in the 1960s and he had to paint his photorealistic paintings to prove it was still alive, and I thought, what rubbish. Paint or sing because you like to do it. There’s nothing for anyone to prove to anyone. We must all find out for ourselves, and if we achieve authenticity our works may attract a following, or not.
I don’t think painters need to make points with their art. All art is quite useless, to quote Oscar Wilde. Of course many many people do want to make points about many things with their artworks, I just don’t want to be around or think about that sort of thing. Another quote I love is a zen Buddhist one: people with opinions just go around bothering other people. I know you might say, but you hold strong views and opinions, and yes, I have my views, and I am sharing them here, but it’s not something I’d usually want to discuss or talk about. For me it’s clear that paintings are like unimportant dreams, made by unimportant beings, that can evoke eternity or be charged in such a way, that the stimulation feels like it adds to life. It takes a lot of work to get to a simplicity that impacts.
Presenting a problem is another way of describing the motif. We all have strategy somehow, be it of a more ordered sober nature or a more chaotic bravado approach. But wherever on the spectrum it lies, as painters we skid around a liquid puzzle and that is our destiny, and no matter what we paint, it’s going to be quite demanding if it’s going to get good. Presenting the problem is really saying two things. First we have a chosen motif, or problem,(that’s always fictional) that we take on, and secondly there is the painting process. The process ultimately is the product, so the process itself is both the subject and the means of delineation that brings whatever we want to present into existence.
When I paint I want to have an authentic experience, even if it’s all made up. And for me, painting is a problem and one I want to work at so I can produce something simple that is somehow charged with life. It’s a mystic process and perhaps one I am incapable of describing
I’ve always loved to look, and I’ve painted since I could paint. Finally to quote Leonard Cohen from his posthumous album Thanks for the dance : no one to follow, and nothing to teach, except that the goal falls short of the reach”
That about sums it up! I hope it’s clearer now.... but I fear it may be a muddied puddle
LV: I just reread all you said-- so much good food for thought! I like how you grapple with the mysterious with words.
Thank you for the photo of your studio!
You mentioned earlier that the loose and the tight are a big part of your painting narrative. Can you tell me a little more about that?
CF: Thanks Laura, yes I write with a certain looseness or gesture of thought mixed in with forthright beliefs, perhaps akin to how I paint. I guess it’s best to take everything I say as a sort of nonsense that may evoke my meaning and method of painting. It’s not necessarily going to be organized but if I can nudge something off a shelf for someone then that’s good enough for me.
Ah yes, the loose and the tight, putting the blade into the smoke! The traffic jam between the skyscrapers...Printing and scraping with the edge of the painting knife...a razor straight mark does so much, and it’s very a complex event to describe in words... razor blade consciousness! Something cut off, a part of something, a fragment. A pressed knife mark can suggest a layer, or a hidden layer in a painting… an obstruction. It has a different intention to brushed paint. It’s somehow a more autonomous presence. It’s a good answer to the complexity of light and the tiny hard events we can witness if we look very carefully.
In all paintings there is some sort of background and some sort of thing, and the thing is in the middle of the background and made out of it. Like the world and the sky; the world is in the middle of the sky, rotating through it, so really, we’re in heaven! I remember Israel Hershberg saying “the sky is light, the world is a shadow”. A wonderful teaching for all perceptual painters, a key insight. Half close the eyes and look at the big event before doing any painting outsides and ask, what’s the big event happening here. Fill all the landscape with the colours of the sky, but don’t forget to put the worlds colours up into the sky as well. It goes both ways. Real sky blue has plenty of the world it. Blue blue is for making amateur skies.
And that leads me back to the drama of razor blade consciousness! Once atmosphere exists on a canvas, it can be inhabited if you want it to be.The thin and the loose. I think Morandi is the greatest master of this in modern times. He paints soft worlds, where plains shift, under and overlap and interrupt our assumptions all the time. There are these two wonderful Naples yellow bottles, or white and orange cuboids and between them a bottle neck of traffic-jam shadowy forms, overtaking and undertaking as they follow the most human of brush marks on the daily journey. The earthly grind is always present in these pictures. Touch and Presence, with capital T. and P. But it’s best not to look at him too much... one can discard many influences but if he gets into your head...
I love to create atmosphere in a landscape or a still life, and I also love to people this with events, be it water reflecting from within a plastic bottle or the shine on a cars roof. Something tight to articulate the rest. Something that says, I am happening now! Something that makes the mess seem right! The loose and the tight is simply melodrama. All painting has it, by its nature, even a Rothko has it in those loose but very organized elemental forms. I think it’s how we get satisfaction from art. If we are going to put one thing behind the other we need some sort of line, some tightness to articulate the space, and we love to look at a stacked painting.
I’m not sure if I’m making sense with this one Laura... it’s one thing to write about it, and another to push some paint about... let me know if it’s too nonsensical and I’ll see if I can put it clearer...
LV: A couple more questions come to mind. Once you start a painting, when do you start in on the little details? And then, how much time do you typically spend on a painting?
CF: Thanks for the questions Laura,
How soon do I start in on the details... reminds me of a cartoon I saw once
Here it is!
I tend to leave details out and build and break down bigger areas first.
Details that are at junctions, or crossroads, as opposed to purely decorative or incidental details, get put in and removed many times along the way...as they are markers. I have a tendency to mash my first attempt together with a back and forth action with the palette knife rather than a scrape back, though I do scrape back.
So some details are markers in the painting, and they come and go as I establish the painting, while incidental details, like a line of windows or some flowers, may appear right at the end, or never even appear. I’m even quite hesitant to put highlights onto things now a days, as they can be a distraction from the greater challenge of generating a real presence in an object.
As for how long I spend on a painting... about two to four hours. I work small, I’m not into big problems these days, call me lazy, I am.
LV: So are all of your paintings made in one sitting?
Also, what are reading these days? Anything you would recommend?
CF: No, they’re not all made in one sitting, but a lot of them are 95% complete after the first go, so in a way they are one hitters that I tinker with a bit...
I do find it very difficult to re enter a painting once it has dried, and if you have any tips on how to do this, I’m all ears...
So I have this rubbing out (side to side with a painting knife)mashing down method which is much as it sounds, I use the knife to drag the image across itself many many times throughout the painting process, sort of ageing it, and also establishing it. Blurring and fixing it simultaneously
Thus in a relatively short time I can make an image that looks like an old worn out pair of boots! Tones get set at very specific pitches. If I leave the painting after one session,I find they can have a ‘sunken’ feeling and do need some propping up later, usually with tiny adjustments in the darker areas... one great danger is having one colour running throughout a painting if it’s done in one go. It cheapens it.
As for what I am reading...I just finished a riveting book on William Nicholson by Sanford Schwartz which I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s one of those rare biographies where the subject has been taken so personally that one can’t help being swept deeply into its reality... I know it’s one I need to read twice... and I’ve been reading a series of articles called Morandi’s influence in British art which is jam packed with insights about him by different artists. I’ve also been reading a great book called The old ways by Robert Macfarlane, which is a series of wonderfully poetic descriptions of walks, mostly around England.
LV: Last question, I’m curious about what you do as a landscape painter when the weather changes- for example when it’s a sunny day and then a rainstorm comes when you are halfway through your painting.
CF: When the weather changes I usually just plough on regardless, tilting the canvas towards me to avoid direct rain
Weather is a concern in Ireland.... living under the grey sponge has its challenges
I tend to paint in changes along the way, and then reduce things back to the main earth sky image..so all the changes I register along the way usually get knocked back, and all their colours add into the body of the landscape, somehow, in my mind at least, adding to the ‘presence of the practice’. In the end, the changes that come back the most often are the ones that remain in the painting when I stop.
LV: That’s beautiful. Thanks so much for your time Conrad, your thoughts are very rich!
LV: I did think of one more question for you-- I remember in 2017 you said you got to spend some time painting with amazing painter Clare Haward and in years since you painted alongside artists Lena Chermoshniuk and Kurt Knoblesdorf. Can you talk a little bit about how it was painting with those people and how they might have impacted your work?
CF: In 2014 I went to paint with Israel Hershberg in Italy for two weeks. It was my first actual experience of any painting teaching, and at 34 I’d left it somewhat late. I’d had this feeling of annoyance in me for many years, and frequently, as a painting went wrong, I’d mutter ‘but i haven’t been taught’. I went to Italy for five summers, painting closely with Clare for a month in 2017, and for a month with Lena and Kurt in 2018.
It’s a hard thing to say what I learnt from anyone. The Jerusalem Studio School is quite free in many ways. One is encouraged to go out and paint around the town and then there’s a weekly critique.
I painted with Clare in 2017, long morning and shorter evening sessions 5 days a week for four weeks. That’s quite a lot of regular painting, and more than I’d ever done before, a lot more! While out at the motif she would always offer a useful comment, towards the end, that helped me to open things up or unify the painting with one big shadow or something like that. She is more knowledgeable of colour mixing than I am, and has a great sensitivity as a teacher and I benefited from painting by her side. Often I’d look over at some beautiful painting she had made and when I looked over again it would be gone! No hostages were taken! It was great to see someone rugged and determined with the painting process.
Next year painting with Lena and Kurt was somewhat of a rollercoaster ride. Lena painted some beautiful landscapes and helped me a few times by coming over to what I was doing and mixing up a special grey for me and daubing it in the perfect place, activating my painting for me. It felt like cheating but I didn’t care, it made the dying painting alive again, and I was thankful to see her thorough mixing capabilities. And it showed me how a little bit of authenticity can make a whole lot of difference in a painting. Small is big.
Kurt is a one off... the first time we painted together I noticed he was painting through a peephole from a door and using huge amounts of wax. And he only had four colours on his palette (Zorn) and those in huge quantities. He used tiny cheap brushes and held his easil box and painting up in his left arm while he painted, a very difficult thing to do. Once he took a photo and painted from his iPhone and from nature on site. Every day it was something new... I remember seeing him painting a field and when I came over to take a peek he said the painting was like a bald man combing his head until it was bleeding! Often he was joking and cartoonist in his manner and suddenly, deadly serious. A very strong character. He really opened things up for me as far as warm and cold sensibilities go. Warm colours like yellow ochre and cold colours like violet became more apparent to me after watching him paint. He often embodied the joker archetype and brought a lightness to what is a tough and tradition laden activity. I enjoyed witnessing that and that freedom has stayed with me.
Overall it’s hats off to Israel Hershberg for organizing the whole project for so many of us. I see Israel as the hunter archetype. He is patient and discerning and has found many wonders and generosity shared them with many people. He has brought very special artists to his summer school to guide the students. And his teaching style is wonderfully hands off. He allows people to become the painters they already are and just knocks them into shape in the weekly crit, which are not for the faint hearted. He guides with firmness. And always stresses that what is there to be learnt is from getting out and doing it with ones fellow painters. Id been in complete artistic isolation before I went to Italy for those five summers, and while I feel I’ve had my fill for the moment, I can certainly recommend getting out with other painters in a landscape to widen and heighten ones view of the process.
On a slightly related topic, I left all social media about a year ago, and lost sight of all the work that many friends are making! Sounds bad right... however I can report that’s it’s actually been better for me not to ‘post’ anything anymore and wait for likes, and also not to see anything anymore. What stayed with me is meeting people and painting with them, and growing together. And I hope to do this in the future from time to time, as well as just enjoy what is essentially the singular, private life of a painter.