What Artists Like #7

With Guest Curator Charlotte Brisland

Welcome to the 7th edition of What Artists Like. This week, I’m excited to present atmospheric painter Charlotte Brisland as our Guest Curator, who was nominated by Orlanda Broom. Charlotte answers a few questions about her work, plus selects 8 pieces from the New Blood Art collection. Enjoy!

NW – My first impressions are that your paintings inhabit a world that is nearly like ours, but disjointed. There is often a solitary house that sits dwarfed by vast, remote landscapes, but the way you paint this changes significantly over the past decade. In 2016 you paint in black and white, showing industrial buildings that belong to edgelands. The streets begin melting away until the buildings are domestic and alone. By 2024, you’re giving us full, luscious paintings that are almost delirious with colour. What does your work mean to you?

CB – I see the houses as portraits, like cultural identifiers. The motif of a house is one of the most familiar recognisable forms and every child draws them. A house with two windows, a door, a chimney and maybe a garden, it’s a strong symbol of home and all that carries with it. Disrupting that, displacing it, playing with it in scale and placement has become a repetitive thing for me to explore. Recently, I’ve begun designing my own buildings as I struggle to find what I want in reality. They have to be ordinary and reflect an ’idea’ of a house, rather than an actual house.

In terms of colour, it’s been central to the work for a long time and it’s always fascinating to read when someone else sees this journey as it has unfolded, chronologically. Initially I removed it to see what would happen, and then I missed it, so it has gradually returned. I wanted to figure out what would happen in full colour, or hyper colour. It’s difficult to buy colour and not go over the top with what I end up with in my basket. Every time I find a new colour that I’m curious about, until I convince myself that I can’t live without it. Once I have it, it’s a challenge to place it in my colour palette. Whole paintings will hang on this occasionally. The new blue paintings I made for New Blood are about a light blue I recently bought, old holland blue grey. It makes everything feel like it’s underwater. I had to play with it for a few weeks before the penny dropped on how to use it as I wanted.

NW – Your paintings are abundant with visual appeal and generous storytelling, but colour and light are also important. I read that your paintings are often inspired by the colour of light, for example the artificial street lighting seen during a morning run. How important is colour and light to your paintings. How do you find inspiration?

CB – A lot of the initial ideas for each painting begin with early morning light. ‘After the event’ which is a large painting in mauves and pinks, began with driving to work early, as the sun was just emerging. This purple light bathed everything, and I kept trying to remember how it changed each colour as I was driving along. The painting emerged from the memory of it and one or two photos I managed to take. As I was painting it, I was pouring and sloshing this colour around, trying to find the right tones and hues. I am always looking for how light changes the colour of everything, often into monochrome, but even in monochrome, there are so many variants in tone and hue and the painting will quickly look odd if the balance isn’t quite right. ‘Lucazade Bungalow’ came from finding a lucazade street lamp, just one, as most have been upgraded to white light. Lucazade street lights were everywhere as I was growing up, and back then I just found it fascinating and otherworldly. Watching the orange lights move past from the back of the car, walking through it from a tipsy night out with friends in my teens etc. Finding this one on my run was great, I really wanted to get it down in paint.

In terms of composing a painting, the drama of colour and light sets a stage. I want the paintings to be attractive, to lure in the viewer and get my message across about something more unsettling. It’s that double sidedness of beauty and storytelling.

NW – Congratulations on having your work featured in Blue Shop Gallery’s next exhibition ‘In Absentia’. The exhibition “gathers work depicting inhabited spaces absent of the human figure”. This feels like a perfect description of your work. Does this resonate with you at all? (In retrospect, or perhaps something you’ve been consciously striving for.)

CB – The absence of figures is an absolute constant in my work and this exhibition really gives the painting gravity and clarity. I’m utterly thrilled to be part of it and alongside such a brilliant line up of painters. We all explore this sense of quiet isolation in different ways through paint, it’s really inspiring. Each painting I make is exploring isolation through colour and composition, which are really traditional roots of painting, and each one is different, engaging slightly differently with the same concept and starting point. Being part of a whole exhibition exploring this theme makes me feel very understood and well placed.

NW – There’s a real magical element to your work. Trees tower over the little house in ‘Smoke Dream’ like giant mushrooms and huge feathers seem to stutter the landscape in ‘Looming Bluets’. It feels like you are constantly making references that I don’t understand. Is it sci-fi, or fairy tales, or simply the way you see the world?

CB – This is actually a really interesting question because, yes, where does sci fi fit in serious contemporary painting? Painting and contemporary art generally, is endlessly building up taboos in order to break them down again. Sci fi, folk art, superstition etc, aren’t necessarily considered serious, and contemporary painting seldom explores it. It’s precisely this reason that makes me want to try and introduce it. These things are part of the ‘otherworldly’, exploring trauma and a collective conscience. My thoughts are that, if the series ‘The Last of Us’ can explore a zombie apocalypse in an emotionally real and sensitive way, then so can painting.

The painting is emerging into more complex narratives more recently because I’m just craving that kind of play in the work. Folklore and folk art is having a bit of a moment in contemporary practice, and in general, and I’m intrigued about how to arrange that into my compositions and painting approach. I recently went to a talk by Jeremy Deller for his most recent book ‘Art is Magic’, where he outlines previous cultural fascination with ‘folk’. It reemerges when society needs change and will happen just before the change, so I’m fascinated to know what that will look like. These motifs for me serve as disturbances of reality. They are the otherworldly and there’s a truth to those motifs which I want to explore.

I totally fell for Charlotte’s work after this interview! She’s highlighted some really interesting pieces from the website too. It’s so fascinating to see the New Blood Art Collection from different perspectives.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Nicola Wiltshire

(Editor and New Blood Art artist)

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