William Coldstream: I’ve often thought more recently that the marks are rather mannered and have, you know, thought I would try to suppress them more. But they seem to come back like that. And I suppose I’m like most artists: once you start painting, you really haven’t a lot of choice. I don’t know if this is really true. But it seems to me that once your embarked on a piece of work you haven’t a lot of choice. I mean the picture – I don’t think it’s a mystical thing to say in a way, I think there are rational explanations – but the picture does seem to dictate what has to be done. I’ve often been aware that my painting is naturally extremely inhibited and that sort of thing, and I’ve made constant efforts to paint more freely or paint in a way which is foreign to me, though I tend always to be driven back somehow or other to the same way of painting.
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WC: Well, the pleasure has increased in the marks. I mean, at a period of time when I was making every effort simply to try and make the thing look like what it does – and of course there are a great many qualifications for that – but I found it so terribly difficult, as I still do, and I was completely sort of absorbed in simply trying to get a thing in what I called the right place, whatever that might be. Well, I still take a lot of trouble about that, though I know that rationally speaking it seems a rather ridiculous occupation.
….I sat down and said, “Well, how do you make the configuration on the canvas or piece of paper appear to what is called “look like”?”. And, if I reduce it to its very simplest terms, I’ve got arms and I must be able to stretch my arm out and put a series of marks which will do that. And that took me enormous trouble, so that it is enormous trouble for me to represent anything.
But I am terribly interested in measurement, and no doubt there’s a perfectly simple psychological explanation which could nowadays be entirely cleared up. But I am interested in measurement. I mean, if I walk down a street I often say, ‘Now, how far is it to that lamp-post?’….
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David Sylvester: And when representing you always measure?
WC: Well I try very hard not to. But I’m always driven back to it because it seems to me to be extremely interesting to what I call ascertain something….the idea of making sure about the thing, within the limits of the game, it means a lot to me.
DS: Do you mean that you might for a while, during the course of a session paint quite freely, then after a time find you have to measure and check?
WC: Yes, yes, yes.
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| Sir William Coldstream, Reclining Nude, 1974-6, Oil on Canvas, 116x270cm |
WC: Well, the technique of measuring is quite simple. It’s the old idea: you look at what your painting and you hold your pencil or brush out in the plane – in the picture plane, you see – and I say you hold your arm straight out and hold the brush up vertically and you mark off with one eye shut – as if you were shooting – a little bit. Of course it doesn’t make sense, because any ordinary projection you can’t really trust that you can’t use central perspective, for instance, in measuring like that. I mean, if your sitting seven or eight feet away from the model you have a different picture plane when your looking at the forehead from that in which your looking at the knee. Because you look up or down, you don’t look straight forward, so the thing doesn’t really join up. It doesn’t really make any sense. But what I mean by measuring is quite literally holding a pencil up with one eye shut and marking a bit off on it.
DS: when your measuring you’re using one eye, when your painting without measuring your using two eyes. Now, how can you reconcile the results of what you do by measurement with what you do by looking two-eyed at the object?
WC: You can’t.
DS: What happens as a result?
WC: Well you get something on the canvas and that gives you something to bite on. All this process, I suppose, in a way is to get something on the canvas which you can believe in – to get some knot of life or something going which will have some kind of power of generating itself, you see. It seems less willed if your measuring it. If your trying to get something going by your own will power, without reference to something that seems impersonal, it gives me a sense of distaste. I’m afraid this is very obscure. But if you have this rather sort of arbitrary thing, you feel the problem that’s coming out is not the one you’ve been too much consciously associated with and therefore has that attraction. But I think this is all a very grand way of describing what hundreds of painters have often done.
DS: Would it be possible to do a painting altogether one-eyed and altogether as a complete system of measurement?
WC: Yes. I don’t think it really matters whether you’re painting with one eye or two eyes, you know. I don’t think that makes a lot of difference. But if one supposes there is any aesthetic context in one’s work then I suppose you can say that all these processes, under the guise of being fairly rational, aren’t really very reasonable; are simply rituals and methods of somehow getting one going. But of course any kind of making something in the artistic field can’t be rationally described, at any rate by the maker. At least I don’t know if it’s ever been done. But I don’t think so. The most aware painter, I think, isn’t quite certain of what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.
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