‘Explorers’, talk at London Original Print Fair, Somerset House, March 2024

I’m going to talk about my recent prints based on polar exploration and Arctic creatures, showing with Paul Stolper Gallery. So, starting with the new prints of endangered Arctic birds and animals that are part of this series. ARCTIC WOLF 3. These developed out of a show called Sila which I had last year at the Royal Geographical Society with the artists Eleanor Havsteen-Franklin and Naja Abelsen. It was inspired by Greenland, Arctic exploration and Inuit Culture, and its title, Sila, is an Inuit term which can mean air, atmosphere, earth, sky, spirit but mainly the interconnectedness of creation and respect for all living things.

The exhibition therefore focused on sustainability and the environment. And since these bring the topic of animals and their relation to humans to the fore, I decided that my contribution to the show should be a series of Greenlandic creatures painted in acrylic on found cardboard. This cardboard I pulled from local rubbish bins as a small eco-gesture, and incidentally it is a great surface to paint on. So here are new versions of some of these, made as mono-prints. ARCTIC HARE, POLAR BEAR, ARCTIC WOLF 1,  ARCTIC WOLF 2,  SEAL. Each print is of the single creature surviving despite climate change or being hunted to near extinction or simply having to exist in such an extreme setting. And perhaps the most impressive and also monstrous of these creatures, like the Biblical Leviathan, is lurking in the darkest, deepest waters off Greenland. ARCTIC SHARK 1. This is the Arctic Shark, an astonishing thing which Eugene Rae, librarian at the RGS, told me about. It can grow up to 7 metres long, live for over 500 years. So one alive today could have been born before Shakespeare. It reaches sexual maturity at the age of 150 and its pups are in the womb for 8-18 years. It is, as you might expect, extremely sluggish and slow-moving and I have shown it gliding in the gloomy depths with an old crusty body, blind eye and open jaws, slightly grinning, that are ready to strike. It has been known to swallow reindeer, horses and polar bears. Their whole skeletons were found in its belly. And so it could easily swallow a human swimmer, maybe a whole pod of them. ARCTIC SHARK 2.

For me such creatures, including the most dangerous, are a constant source of inspiration and represent a kind of singular and absolute being. Their instinctive self-possession makes them fascinatingly different from us humans who are so full of conflict, concealment, hesitation and self-consciousness. At least I am. It’s a contrast often made by DH Lawrence in his dazzling evocations of non-human creatures, in his novel St Mawr, about a horse, for example. Or it’s like Auden’s poem Their Lonely Betters about the birds in his garden, ‘Not one of them was capable of lying/There was not one which knew that it was dying.’ Wolf and owl and bear cannot help being themselves, no lying or masks or deceit there, while for us this is not so simple. However, I confess that when I’m drawing and painting them I sometimes feel an almost shamanic identification with their spontaneity, alertness, aggressiveness or apprehensiveness. I was interested in Greenland’s shamans and their interaction with animals when researching Inuit culture for our Sila show and though it’s obviously preposterous to claim kinship with real shamans, many artists, Joseph Beuys or Leonora Carrington for example, have drawn on shamanism in different ways. And for me a sense of connection with bird and animal subjects seems compatible with my impulsive and wordless life in the studio away from conversation and polite society. SNOWY OWL 1, SNOWY OWL 2, SNOWY OWL 3.

But on to the human subjects of my work, the main topic of my talk. These are the Arctic and Antarctic explorers, who share the austere and forbidding settings with the animals. BIRDIE 3. LITTLE PROGRESS 7, LITTLE PROGRESS 1. AUGUST 11, AUGUST 5. The groups of explorers and the explorer ‘Birdie’ leading a pony, are based on the story of Scott of the Antarctic and his Terra Nova Expedition of 1912. And the prints of the single explorer (with no pony) are of my father, August Courtauld. I expect you know Scott’s history but you probably don’t know August’s so before going on to talk about my prints, I’ll tell his strange tale. In contrast to Scott’s gruelling story ending in tragedy, August’s verges on the genre of romance—by which I mean a quest in which grave dangers and difficulties are unexpectedly resolved. The man without whom I would not exist was saved in a hairbreadth, eleventh-hour rescue.

August was part of a British expedition of 1930 which set out to explore the possibility of air travel over the Arctic to America by mapping Greenland’s coast and recording its severe weather. After a turbulent sea voyage with howling huskies, a tooth extracted with a hammer and chisel and bursting sacks of blubber rolling around the deck, the team of 15 young men reached the east coast of Greenland. And after the ascent of a punishing glacier they called Buggery Bank and then onwards across the ice cap, they built an ice station 140 miles inland. The centre of this was a small domed tent designed for two to live in at a time and keep each other sane. But it was in this that my father stayed alone for five months during the Arctic winter since there would not have been enough food for two to survive.

The pair who had been at the station during autumn were to be replaced by August and another, but the relief party was held up by exceptionally brutal weather. Tents blew away, huskies were fed their own puppies and the desperate men had to eat supplies meant for the station as they struggled to reach it. To make matters worse the huskies broke into a storage bag and ate 25 pounds of pemmican (dried meat and fat) and the men lost several days’ rations. So, with just enough food for one, my father the ice hermit volunteered to stay at the station alone, with no means of communication since the radio had been dumped on the journey to lighten the load. His job was to go outside every few hours to read weather instruments and record wind force, snow-depth, cloud speed, temperature etc. But it became an almost fatal vigil. Winter brought increasingly fierce blizzards, the ice station was buried under tons of snow so that for six weeks he was trapped in an ultra-claustrophobic space with no way of calling for help. A bit of ventilator pipe remained above the surface but inside, his tent bulged under the weight of snow, icicles hung from its roof, ice formed in his sleeping bag, he had hardly any food or fuel and was lying in the dark with a painfully swollen foot. Meanwhile the temperature outside dropped to minus 64 F, as was discovered later from the thermometer. Yet August had firm religious faith. He had an unwavering belief in his deliverance, that he was being held by what he called ‘the everlasting arms’ and that he was not to die on the ice cap. And of course help did arrive. After several failed attempts to find the smothered ice station in a featureless white desert, a mission was launched by the leader of the group, Gino Watkins, and rescue came on the 150th day of August’s incarceration. Strangely this was on a date which, with most uncanny premonition, August had sensed would be significant. The sledging party had brought a prayer book in case he was dead, but they got there in time, when he was down to his very last crumbs of pemmican and shortly after the paraffin stove, as he wrote in his autobiography, ‘gave its last gasp’. They found a scene of utter desolation with a tattered Union Jack, some spikes of weather gauges and a bit of ventilator pipe poking through the snow. But Gino shouted down the pipe and August answered.

GINO 1. My prints called Gino show this moment, lit by that icy, peppermint brightness that is characteristic of the poles. ‘Ice mast high came floating by as green as emerald’, lines from Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ which I’ve always liked and which may have found their way into my work.This glaring, almost painfully bright light, is a feature of my pictures and polar landscapes not surprisingly inspire me with their sherbet colours and tinted shadows. I have tried to capture this acid glare in other prints with their sharp greens, lemons and pinks. AUGUST 5, AUGUST 16,AUGUST 13.

August died when I was 8 and I hardly remember him. But his life has influenced my work, notably figures in some kind of wilderness or wasteland, both urban and natural, figures who include derelict pensioner shoppers, obese, abandoned women, nocturnal roadsweepers, drunken hen-nighters, Sami reindeer-herders, astronauts, cowboys and of course polar explorers including August.

And the fact that I had very little relationship with my father has shaped the way I depict him both in paintings and prints. Both types of work are based on a photo which was taken just after he was rescued from his ice cell and hauled up into the sun. AUGUST PHOTO. The photo shows his face quite clearly. However I have turned him into something different, a faceless silhouette, presumably because he was so distant and seemed to be an enigma and even a bit of of a threat AUGUST 6.

In some prints, like this one, I’ve also depicted him as not quite human, in keeping with much of my work in which people morph into something Other: an ape, ghost, ass, monster, robot, green man or cyborg AUGUST 17. I like to give humans a layer of pathos, vulnerability, menace or mystery in this way. And in keeping with August’s wild-man image, the shaggy form in these prints recalls the person who was ill at ease with city-life or social convention and preferred the untamed outdoors ‘with the sea roaring and the wind blowing’ to quote from his favourite John Masefield poem from which he also took the title of his autobiography, Man the Ropes.

He was lucky enough to be able to afford to go on these ‘savage pilgrimages’, to use DH Lawrence’s term, sailing in gales, climbing mountains and navigating by the stars, but these were his favourite milieux and in my fantasy there he belongs, in oceans, rivers, hills and ice with walrus, bear, crocodile and wolf, rather than at cocktail parties or committee meetings. And I was reminded of August when reading Lawrence’s essay on the travel writing of Herman Melville: ‘The man who came from the sea to live among men can stand it no longer. He hears the horror of the cracked church bell, and goes back down the shore, back into the ocean again, home, into the salt water.’

This then is one of my Yeti-like interpretations of my father, with perhaps, rather shockingly, a hint of the Monster who Frankenstein chases across the Arctic in Mary Shelley’s novel. And some of my Scott prints also show men turned towards the monstrous—hybrid beings with large, dark, beaked hoods. LITTLE PROGRESS 6. But in other August prints the ragged silhouette is combined with something more human and more vulnerable. AUGUST 12. And this is even more true of prints of doomed Scott and his companions. For these I drew partly on the 1948 film ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ with its dialogue of staccato politeness kept up during increasing horror and hardship. GOOD LUCK SIR 3. All the old-school manners, the ‘good luck sir’ and ‘thank you sir’ and ‘well done Birdie’ and ‘nothing like Antarctic air for sharpening the appetite’ take on a touching, poignant and slightly ridiculous tone in the context of fierce nature and increasingly appalling ordeals. And so I used some of these old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip formalities as titles of my prints, ones in which the explorers are shaking hands in howling blizzards.

So, many of the prints of August and most of Scott and his men show the human afflicted and challenged—challenged by time, by weather, by the body and by paint itself. As I shall discuss.

First of all by time. This all happened a very long time ago and some of my mono-prints look a bit like old stone friezes, degraded and corroded by the years. LITTLE PROGRESS 3. Or they resemble early black and white photos, like the ones I saw in the RGS library when I was researching the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (Scott) and the later expeditions of August. The surfaces of the monochrome prints, especially, have an uneven, striated texture that suggests wear and tear and age and their dense blacks and faded or bleached out patches recall old photographs. Then, also inspired by old photos with their cracks and folds and what is called ‘crazing’, are my prints with ceases and fissures in the surface made with an overlay of crinkled tissue paper and a little roller—prints like LITTLE PROGRESS 5 , BIRDIE 4.

Secondly, the explorers are obviously victims of savage weather FOUR DAYS OUT 2, LITTLE PROGRESS 6, BIRDIE 2, BIRDIE, GOOD LUCK SIR 1 and GOOD LUCK SIR 2 . My flurries and layers of marks and spots show them assailed by sharp, flinty shards of hail and battered by blizzards, while icy blooms and wheels rotate over a figure and eat into its contours. In these last two prints the men are almost eclipsed, fading into the void to become ghostly apparitions. They are then changed further by being fused into one conglomerate mass or turned into shapes that show the human figure radically disfigured and damaged.

And this last effect is because I am not just trying to show the body pounded by outside forces, by snow and gales and ice, I also want to show it breaking down from within. Here in AUGUST 7,AUGUST 15 enlarged cells are covering him and seem to be taking over. And in AUGUST 2  those sharp cracks appear again but with other implications. The crackle-glaze screen of jagged fissures serves several purposes. And here perhaps it looks like patterns of frost and refers to oncoming malaise. August had terrible frost bite during the expedition and much later developed MS, dying relatively young. And it was thought that this may have been triggered by his distant Arctic ordeal. These swirling marks flatten, invade and override the human form with their marbled pattern and crazed textures, textures which I have also given to the figures of Scott and his companions. In GOOD LUCK SIR 3 the cracks are appearing across the bodies, meanwhile the storm of snowy blots covering the man on the left can also be read as human cells, a motif in my Beach, Dining Room and Covid paintings. And cells are vulnerable to frostbite, hypothermia, malnutrition and dehydration all of which led to the death of these Terra Nova explorers.

My explorers are therefore overwhelmed by matter, by indifferent nature and its effects on the body. But they are also challenged by another kind of ‘stuff’ since I foreground their material composition—the paint, ink and solvent with which they are made. And I allow these materials to interrupt my figurative images by being obtrusive.The human figure is as it were struggling to be read as complete and coherent because the substance it is made of is drawing attention to itself. The image of a person is endeavouring to come into being while its wayward media are going in a different direction, emphasising their status as matter.

To be more specific. I paint a human figure on the printing plate but then I interfere with it, I mess it up. I sprinkle on white spirit so that the result will be fractured. Or I apply areas of thick paint which, when printed, will squirt outside figurative boundaries or even outside the borders of the print itself. I use paint with other tools or materials, rolling across the image or putting dust on the roller to make lines on the surface. I wet a patch of the printing paper which will tear from the plate when it goes into the press. As in the Birdie or August prints I lay tissue paper across the paint and use the roller to give it that crinkly texture. Finally I drop white spirit on the printed plate and make a reprint with dark blots which bite into the image of Gino or August.

LITTLE PROGRESS 3, AUGUST 5, LITTLE PROGRESS 1, LITTLE PROGRESS 4, AUGUST 8, AUGUST 17, AUGUST 2, GINO 2, AUGUST 14

Such interventions therefore create these spots, rips and corrosions which damage the appearance of the figure (it ends up looking very dishevelled) and at the same time emphasise its material composition. Areas are pulling away from representation, for instance flat shapes are detached from the rest of the body, or pools of diluted paint are forming patterns with their own chemical agenda.  As in much of my painting I construct human figures but then unmake them by letting paint and other media escape from representation. The materials are not just servants of depiction but assert themselves independently in shapes, lines, patterns—melting, blurring, escaping or invading the image of the figure.

And you might wonder why mistreat an image in this way, drawing attention to what it is made of. It’s like deliberately spoiling a talk with someone shouting out the alphabet. For me, however, this spoiling technique is intended to increase a sense of fragility, especially in this context. It is if you like a metaphor for being unpicked or pulled down by aspects of life and by indifferent, non-human forces. It is as if the physical and material are dethroning the helpless human and is therefore an extension of the ravaging of men by snow and ice and illness. Art media are also destroying them. The human forms are submerged beneath the subversive, upstart visibility of materials.

And although my own prints are obviously very different in appearance, I have been influenced in this by one of my favourite artists, Warhol and especially his Marilyn screen-prints in which a green, puce or orange mask, surrounded by equally lurid edges, turns Monroe’s head and hair into something obviously two-dimensional and artificial. And I love his Marilyn Diptych of 1962, in which the heads on the left have a violet mask and the ones on the right are progressively blackened and then bleached into obscurity. In all these prints it seems that the human face of Marilyn takes second place to the printing process. The actions of ink, paint and squeegee are not just a means to an end, playing second fiddle to representation, but asserted in their own right as if materials and methods are taking over, subjugating and overriding the human.

For me this unmaking activity says something about my subjects’ fragility but it also leads to remaking, to an emergence of new forms. Out of the attack by materials comes something different, abstract, mysterious, especially from ultra-thin dilutions of paint dropped on the metal plate. AUGUST 10. When I unpeel the printed paper I sometimes find, to my delight, complex amoebic frills and bubbles hovering around the figure, enigmatic shapes that have expanded and bloomed from a tiny drop of solvent, like the genie from the lamp, or like the grain of mustard seed, in the Gospels, which grows up and puts out great branches. Such frizzled circles and globules may sometimes suggest aspects of landscape or weather, the huge and distant as well as the tiny or microscopically enlarged. FOUR DAYS OUT 1. These spheres and bursts of light perhaps suggest stars and planets, as well as blown-up snowflakes or ice crystals.

But these strange shapes in AUGUST 10 represent to me something other than stars, ice or cells. They indicate not just the world of the microscopic (cells) nor that of the macroscopic (stars) and nor the irrepressible fact of material used in printmaking. And nor are they just decorative patterns and designs as they might seem to be in purely abstract work.

In figurative art such shapes existing next to a person or an object are conspicuously and suggestively obscure. And I have I think been influenced by a number of works here. I am thinking for example of Magritte’s painting, ‘The Weariness of Life’ with a table, tablecloth and an eccentric shape behind it. And also of many Francis Bacon works in which a mystifying splat, spot or smear coexist with figures: Triptych 1972 or Study for a Bullfight, or two pictures from the 50s in which curious shards surround the Sphinx. And then I love Kitaj’s paintings, The Ohio Gang or Nietzsche’s Moustache or Reflections on Violence in which people bafflingly turn into tangled lines or cryptic notations. Looking at these arresting and peculiar details I think ‘what on earth is that?’

So my attraction to these inexplicable marks and mutations has led me to bring such things into my own work DETAIL OF PRINT, AUGUST 3, AUGUST 4, AUGUST 1 My messing about with materials has changed its aim here since I no longer simply want to undermine or abuse the figure but to create a sense of mystery by accompanying it with these unexplained shapes. I call them ‘the unnameable’, a reference to Samuel Beckett’s novel with the same title. And their appearance, as well as the odd, Delphic shapes in the works of the other artists, suggests to me an aspect of human consciousness but consciousness of what is beyond it and cannot be grasped; what eludes us or can’t be put into words. This might be the Freudian unconscious or the ineffable realm of negative theology according to which nothing can be known or said about the divine. Or there’s Jacques Lacan’s concept of The Real, a world that falls entirely outside language and which he describes as ‘this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail’. And, as I said, such ‘unnameables’ recall Beckett’s novel in which a creature, trapped in its own monologue, can’t say what it means but can’t escape from its mesh of words either. Its incessant chatter that it finds so exasperating is a screen for a wordless, silent existence. For something unnamable.

So, just a few suggestions.

Looking back over my work it seems that I’m always summoning this obscure element and time and again contrasting the familiar, human and named with the unfamiliar, non human and unnamed. I show these first aspects migrating into the second. I turn humans into non-human things, the cyborgs, ghosts and yetis, but also into abstractions and riddling shapes. And I like to oppose two areas, one familiar and the other strange, and show the second, strange one, impinging on the first. This intention is in my Beach paintings in which a dark sky full of cells looms over sands packed with sunbathers. It’s also part of my Dining Rooms with the same cellular backdrop above grand, corporate banquets. And it’s in my Covid works where medics struggle in ICUs full of viral circles or spectral doctors in hoods appear at the patient’s bedside. And this same contrast is happening here in the explorer prints where the boils and bubbles cluster round a trudging procession or round Scott, Oates and Birdie or gather in the sky above August. LITTLE PROGRESS 2, FOUR DAYS OUT 1, AUGUST 8.

These amoebic shapes then represent for me some of the ideas referred to, but if that all sounds a bit esoteric, a bit inflated, they also relate more specifically to the bewildering and frightening experiences of explorers in these unsettling places. I’m thinking of the eerie lines in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land which refer to that ghostly extra presence felt by Shackleton and his men crossing South Georgia: ‘Who is the third who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you’. I also remember men on August’s expedition who were seriously spooked by noises like a flapping flag or the appearance of sun flashing on glass. In these faraway, hostile, empty settings fear is ever-present, maybe inspired by Inuit beliefs in nightmarish beings like the avenging monster Tupilaq or Amaroq, a giant wolf, or maybe just felt as just a nameless terror, nameless because you are not sure what is approaching, what it is you must fear. And so these bubbles are bubbles of nameless dread. ‘The earth hath bubbles, as the water has/And these are of them’ lines from Macbeth about the inscrutable witches come to mind. And then, going back to the idea of landscape, but one which is unbounded, amorphous and also connected with dread or awe, these shapes perhaps touch on the notion of the romantic sublime associated by the 18th century philosophers Burke and Kant with a sense of the uncertain and the unlimited.

I have used negatives a lot in this talk, un this, un that: the unbounded, ineffable, unnameable, unseen, unlimited, unconscious. Etc. And I have outlined the way in which much of my work turns familiar into unfamiliar. And it is print-making, as with the appearance of the blobs and boils, that not only creates for me an endless source of bizarre shapes and therefore helps me in my desire to turn the known into the unknown, it does so by what might be called the negative way or way of negation.

I’m using this term, perhaps rather cheekily or rather presumptuously, from negative theology because making mono-prints means, in its own very small way, going into the dark, the unknown and the unpredictable. And I’d like to draw my talk to an end by saying something about this aspect of mono-printing. I have read a little about different printing methods, their pros and cons etc, and unpredictability is listed as one of mono-printing’s disadvantages. But for me it is its great asset and the most exciting part of the process. As far as I know Magritte didn’t do this sort of printing, he only made lithographs, but I saw one of his statements written on the wall of an exhibition recently and it struck a chord. He said that ‘It is forbidden to predict anything, what I do in all areas of my work is unforeseeable.’ Or imprévisible.

And before saying more about this unforeseeable aspect of mono-printing, a few words about its relationship to some of my methods of painting. As a painter I sometimes like being out of control, at times letting parts of the pictures make themselves. I like Bacon’s remark that ‘I always think of myself not so much as a painter but as a medium for accident and chance.’ A few years ago Paul Stolper gave me a show called ‘Unbound’, another negative, in which some of my paintings were based on the 14th c. anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. And in this poem the Anglo-Saxon concept of wyrd, a stealthy, hidden force meaning fate, operates outside the knowledge or will of Sir Gawain. This idea, which appealed to my Bacon-like taste for losing control, even though secular Bacon wouldn’t have had much time for metaphysical concepts like fate, influenced the way I did these paintings. I made them flat on the floor of the studio and allowed my poured paint to ooze, creep and curdle into the landscape and around the figure of Gawain as he rides out on his journey. Then, having added my acrylic mixtures, I left the paintings on the floor overnight for them to evolve and dry. And this was for me a way of representing the independent process of wyrd impinging on, but outside the influence of, the human. Outside the control of Gawain and me. Even if this interpretation was a bit tongue in cheek and I didn’t literally believe in fate operating behind painting, it was fascinating to see the surreal marks and mixtures brought about by this automatic procedure and I liked the combination of the horseman, painted in a very conscious and deliberate way, with the unbound shapes of the acrylic mixtures.

And so back to the subject of my print-making. The hands-off procedure I just described in making the horizontal paintings is inevitable in mono-printing which is a process whose activity you cannot see and whose results you cannot foresee and where a certain amount of loss of control is inescapable. This may be true of other printing methods as well, it probably is, so when I talk of mono-printing maybe I should be talking about printing in general. However, I don’t know about other techniques as I only use this one and am thrilled by the way the paint is squeezed and altered when  the printing plate goes out of my sight and into the press. Hidden under the blankets and roller, the outcomes of mono-printing are totally unexpected and beyond my direction. They are a print-maker’s equivalent to the Anglo Saxon wyrd. And they produce effects that are odd, or weird, in the modern sense. Our word comes from the Anglo Saxon.

Firstly, in my own work, mono-printing creates those floating, intricate, unnameable, shapes that express something mysterious, something weird: the unusual blisters that hover around the explorers. Secondly, and this may apply to all print-making, the marks seem weird because, as a collaboration of human and machine, they are familiar but unfamiliar. They are mine but not mine. They are therefore uncanny (more negatives) since this Freudian term refers to what was once part of our experience but was then repressed and comes back to us in a different, outlandish form, as something we find uncanny. So my initial painting and sprinkling of white spirit on the plate are, to continue the psychoanalytic conceit, repressed by the press and come back changed. They are translated into machine-made marks which in their hallucinatory, surreal, microscopic detail are to some extent unrecognisable as my own and are certainly far beyond anything I could make just with my own hand.

AUGUST 17, AUGUST 5, AUGUST 15, BIRDIE 4, LITTLE PROGRESS 1.

The concealed and negative way of mono-printing therefore produces an extraordinary menagerie of beguiling shapes and effects. And I find it captivating because it combines spontaneity and speed, that quality that I appreciate in the Arctic birds and animals—the owl and wolf if not the sluggish shark—with results that are incalculable, unforeseeable and go far beyond the first impulsive marks that I make on the plate. After this preparatory stage of painting, when I put the plate through the press, I am going into unknown territory. Terra incognita. We printmakers are explorers too.