Jessie Makinson

Interview by Fabian Lang

This interview is part of our collaboration with Future Fair to present conversations between international gallerists and artists from the Fair’s inaugural online exhibition. Here, gallerist Fabian Lang, who opened his eponymous gallery last year in Zurich, speaks with London-based painter Jessie Makinson. The two talk at length about Makinson’s creative process, the role of planning versus intuition in her painting and drawing practice, the artist’s thoughts on art-historical context, and more. You can read the interview below, and visit Future Fair’s website to see more of Makinson’s work with Fabian Lang.

Fabian Lang (FL): I have known you for quite some years now. Having been at your graduation show in 2013, I have watched the evolution of your work since. I love how you have found new media too in the process such as the paravent you made for our last solo exhibition Nobody Axed You To. Most notable is the change in the compositional technique. The majority of your paintings nowadays are drawn from prior intuitive abstract shapes. How did that change come about?

Jessie Makinson (JM): You're right to say that that was a big change. It was perhaps about four or five years ago when it first started. It was something that was discovered as a means to try and solve a different problem, which is something that often happens in painting. You try to solve a problem or do something, and surprise yourself in a way that you couldn't have predicted. You can't really plan how to change things in a painting in a way. So it was discovered when I was trying to make messier paintings or to have a sense of movement in the painting, and I thought that a quick way around that would be to create this underpainting underneath with these big abstract shapes with large brushes and bright colors. I thought that would add some movement under the surface, but in fact, it turned out to be this incredibly useful compositional strategy, which allows me to work with chance a lot more and surprise myself and to find imagery within these shapes that I wouldn't necessarily have seen before. Painters will know that it’s often quite difficult to do a sketch and scale up that sketch into a big painting. It often changes so much, or it doesn't quite work, or it can be quite stiff. This way allows the composition to really fit within the parameters and edges of the painting, and to be very true to the proportions of the canvas.

FL: ...almost like a guiding grid?

My fins are sleeping, 2019

Oil and pigment on canvas

210 x 300 cm. (82 3/4 x 118 in.)

Courtesy Fabian Lang and the artist

JM: Yeah, it's kind of the matrix to the world of the paintings where everything is made up of the same substance and it has this patterning mark underneath, which allows me to surprise myself because everything I'm constantly trying to do is to generate scenarios in which I can surprise myself. If you were to sit down with a blank piece of paper and think about a big painting, it's a difficult thing to do. Whereas if you have this surface where you can find images and compositions and arrangements of figures, it allows you to see behind yourself somehow or something.

FL: So it's become a really useful tool to move forward.

JM: Yeah.

FL: As you said, the freeing part of this technique is that it allows you to open up almost infinite paths of possibilities as to what shape your composition will eventually take. Surrealists, most outspokenly Max Ernst, used comparable ideas to free themselves up from anything too premeditated. Strikingly though, the outcome in your work is not developed from pure chance. You combine the open field of the abstract underpainting with apparent clear shapes and scenes and creatures you have stored in your subconscious and which are informed by books and stories you are interested in. You already explained how you found this new technique through a sort of natural evolution of what you wanted to achieve, or why it was important to you . I was just wondering, as the studied and educated artist you are, did you look into such artists and movements when developing your own technique more closely at some point?

JM: I've always been interested in the automatic drawing and the games of Dada and Surrealism I suppose. I wasn't specifically looking to them as a way of solving problems or anything, but I definitely have always been interested in automatic drawing and trying to generate scenarios in which to access my subconscious or find something unpredictable or just generally surprise myself and not be so clichéd I suppose.

FL: I love that expression to access your subconscious in a way. For a normal human being going about their daily ways or somebody who doesn't paint or makes art, that seems to be a very abstract, hard thing to imagine to endeavor or achieve and it's amazing to see this used and maybe even steer almost like a tool...how one achieves to trust it as a source to access for creation....

JM: I'll give you a little drawing lesson if you like (laughter).

"I've always been interested in the automatic drawing and the games of Dada and Surrealism I suppose. I wasn't specifically looking to them as a way of solving problems or anything, but I definitely have always been interested in automatic drawing and trying to generate scenarios in which to access my subconscious or find something unpredictable or just generally surprise myself..."

FL: I'd like to talk a little bit more about your compositions and the evolution of it and your techniques. Because I'm so fascinated by it. I remember also at your graduation show that many of your paintings were of open landscapes with many individual figurative scenarios in them. And I remember quite clearly at the time, maybe not exactly at the time, but in the weeks and months following that when I visited you in the studio, that you said you would love to make the figures larger but that it was a compositional difficulty because they weren’t easily scalable. And then you endeavored to find a solution to that problem.

What came next after some months of experimenting were large figures that overtook the whole canvas at times sometimes spilling beyond the edges of the canvases. And recently for example, not long ago for our show or now with the work that you are going to show at I See You at Victoria Miro, you brought these denser landscapes somehow back with these pockets of individual scenes. The main difference being that the figures were quite clearly more developed, also more layered. Can you explain what happened in those years and how you arrived to where the works are now?

JM: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of painters could tell you that they often want to do something that to an outsider sounds completely ridiculous that one couldn't do. For example I had a friend who at one point couldn't paint people below the waist, he just couldn't get his head around it. And so I was trying to paint figures larger and it seemed ridiculous that I couldn't. And in the end it was through a different way of working and experimenting that I started to be able to.

So I think I started to...I've always worked and used images that I collect and find from old etchings or paintings, film stills, pop imagery, cultural, just any kind of imagery... and I started to make a bunch of paintings from stills from the Dario Argento film Suspiria, which is a very high color intense film. It's a very saturated film. It's mainly women in it. And I started to take film stills from it and change them quite a lot and make them my figures or my characters or a story. And so that was how the figures became larger. That was also how the figures became mainly women. It was around this time that someone said to me, "Oh, but where all the men?" Which I found a funny thing to say, and it obviously did come from a man. But at the same time, I was interested in making paintings that weren't about the relationship between men and women. And I felt that by removing the men it might perhaps generate different discussions other than the relationship between the two.

Listen sweetie, 2019

Oil and pigments on canvas

160 x 200 cm. (63 x 78 3/4 in.)

Courtesy Fabian Lang and the artist

So it developed from there. And we spoke earlier about the underpainting, the underpainting and the drawings that I make which are also very intuitive and developed from splashes of color and built up. This helped me to generate imagery within the paintings, which would then surprise me. So for example, maybe two years ago there was a figure bending down and I was like, "What's she doing? Is she gardening?" Or "She's got something in her hand." And I thought or maybe she should have an antique gun. And it was then that I went away and researched antique guns or historical imagery of women with guns or bows and arrows and things like that. And then that feeds back into the paintings. These new motifs are developed and repeated until almost exhausted. And then the process starts again.

But at the same time as a fully developed motif of a woman with a gun would be there, there would be a new motif starting at the same time. So there's this constant evolving of new imagery and research and stuff like that. And so that led me with the underpainting and the discovery of ideas into these forest scenes that I was painting where I was interested in the relationship between women and nature and women and animals and power play, hierarchies and lack of hierarchy in these courtly arrangements.

And very recently, just after your show Nobody Axed Me To, I managed to develop into making these interior/exterior scenes, which are oddly relevant right now with everybody being indoors and outdoors, seeing in and out of not knowing what's going on in private spaces and what is private and public space right now. So it's very much led by these chance encounters that I have, with myself.

FL: It’s interesting that chance encounters led you to focus on painting women and maybe translating, subconsciously, a certain belief system or maybe values that are important to you anyway and may have wanted to mediate. I find that fascinating to hear and to see how one thing led to another and now, looking back, makes so much sense. Do you think eventually more men will find their way into your paintings?

JM: Well, to be honest, I don't really like the idea that they're just women. I think that is something that's very easy to talk about and is obviously for sure within the paintings and is a subject matter. But often the women are very anthropomorphic or they are slightly genderless and there is a confusing line with some of the figures. And for me, I think the future of my paintings is not necessarily one or the other, as long as the conversation isn't about the relationship between men and women I suppose. I suppose I'll just trust my instinct and go with things in order to progress forward.

Dearest creature, 2019

Oil and pigment on canvas

190 x 165 cm. (74 3/4 x 65 in.)

Courtesy Fabian Lang and the artist

FL: You mentioned the words anthropomorphic and creatures and these beings that you create...I mean they come from an incredible, fascinating place of imagination and you certainly amaze me and many others so much with your complex compositions. In one way they are naturally developed, as you just pointed out, but I know you are also taking inspiration from science fiction and classical mythology. Why are you so fascinated by those sources, and do they operate as a point of entry for you to say something about where we are today?

JM: Yes, in a way they access as a point of entry. To be honest, I'm not actually fascinated with mythology. I'm fascinated with stories and storytelling. And obviously those are some of the oldest stories in the world. But I'm not one of those people that knows about all the mythological stories. If you tested me I would definitely fall very short. But the reality is if you have naked women in a woodland scenario, they look like history painting and that history painting is paintings of the myths and legends, isn't it? That's what those paintings are doing.

So that reference is naturally there. And I spent a lot of time when I was at the Royal Drawing School, painting/drawing from the paintings in the National Gallery. So that's deeply embedded in my understanding of painting and image making. So I think I'm very often referencing the history of painting, not necessarily on purpose, but there's definitely a language that I'm working within. But at the same time these figures, they don't look quite like a mythological painting, they look like something else is going on. Are they in the past? Are they in the future? And when I realized that was happening, I suddenly clicked a load of things together and realized, I've always had an interest in fantasy and speculative fiction and Scifi, and its ability to tell these untold or marginalized stories.

And it's the kind of, I suppose, allegorical ability as well. And so it all fitted together. I think you're often told you need to make work that's very honest. And when I suddenly realized that that was happening in my painting, it was almost a relief because that is something that I am generally interested in. A lot of reading I do is speculative fiction or fantasy, amongst other stuff as well. So I think it just helps me to tell more stories in a different way I suppose. I don't have much grounding in reality.

"I know that when some people see the paintings, they want It unpacked, to understand, why is that happening? What's going on? What's the story? But for me that's not how I make the painting. It grows as it's made."

FL: (Laughing). Well, with that approach you create these incredible worlds so many are fascinated by. And as I said before you have those incredible perspectives and spellbinding depth of a narrative or narrative layers in your works.... and I've asked myself this a lot in the past or sometimes I am being asked, how does one approach an artwork, what do you have or should know to do it justice, I guess? And of course, the first approach for many is often spontaneous... And of course art is completely free to be interpreted by a subjective view. But as you have so much complexity and references in your works, how much do you wish for YOUR narrative to be unraveled by the viewer? I guess what I'm trying to aim at is if there is a clear message that you would like to be transported by your work that you were hoping at least, or maybe even expecting from the viewer to be discovered, or are you quite happy for people’s imagination to piece their own narrative together?

JM: Yeah, I think I am very indecisive and contradictory and strongly opinionated and then I'll change my mind. And I think my paintings are like that. They're evasive. They're not one perspective. They're definitely not a story that I could tell you. I know that when some people see the paintings, they want It unpacked, to understand, why is that happening? What's going on? What's the story? But for me that's not how I make the painting. It grows as it's made. So you'll have a couple of figures and they're interacting and I'll change their faces until I feel they have the right expression.

If it perhaps leans a certain way I'm not keen on - it could be a very capricious reason, I don't think about it too much - I'll change the face. And they build out like this in a way that is a little bit evasive and mischievous. There's definitely not a linear point of view or story that I'm trying to put across that could be said in a sentence, I leave it for people to decide for themselves... obviously sometimes the things they say are uncomfortable but that's fine.

FL: Or funny or humorous or ironic...

JM: Oh, yes I'll find someone who will say, "Oh, well I see this." And it will give me an idea and I'll be like, "Oh, of course that's there and I haven't realized." And it will take me away and I'll research what they've said.

Corner of no, 2019

Wood panel double sided painted with acrylic

6 panels each at 165 x 45 cm. (65 x 17 3/4 in.)

Courtesy Fabian Lang and the artist

FL: There's always a little enigmatic key I feel in your titles of your works. I think you're very good at titling your work. And they offer a little access point to it.

JM: I like titles. It's the same with the painting: if there's a shadow area, it's an opportunity to develop a narrative. It could be completely nonsense, a different shaped shadow which has a huge head rather than a realistic shadow for the figure. And everything has narrative potential, like under a chair what's happening there? Is it empty? Is there an orange peel under there? It's all narrative potential. And the title I don’t like it to describe the painting because I think that's completely pointless. I think a viewer can do that themselves. But I like it to be playful and add and maybe slightly confuse. And I like titles because one title could be really romantic, the next could be really bitchy, the next could be gentle and you can have these different sides in titles.

FL: We are supposed to slowly come to an end, but I'd be curious and or thought the readers might be curious to know whether you could say what you're working on right now. And then what are you going to work towards content wise? And the third question, what would you love to do next?

JM: So right now I'm working on a group show in a museum in Dresden, with two other artists - Urara Tsuchiya and Sanam Khatibi. And I'm working on a bunch of drawings for that and some paintings, and I'm hoping that's all going to work out in time. And I think your question is framed in what I would like for my career in the future, but I think for me what I would really like is to be able to relax (laughter) and to not worry about the virus, to concentrate on my painting and to push it in different ways that I don't expect. I obviously want to be doing things like shows, but I want to make sure that the paintings have time to develop themselves and that they are my priority and for me to relax into that. But it's very difficult right now, obviously.

FL: You mentioned before, how subconsciously at least your paintings have taken a certain turn given the current situation. We hope of course the overall situation is going to change soon and the work progresses is not going to be so affected by it for that much longer. Now, with my question before, I meant a possible new direction or medium you wish to work with. I remember for example, once I was with you in the studio and you had all these little boxes set up like theater stages and you started to do drawings of hem, but you also said you'd like to maybe make something bigger out of it, like an installation. I was just curious because I haven't been in your studio for some time now, obviously, now that we've been in lockdown and we couldn't really travel, so my question was more aiming at whether there is something laying around right now where you feel you would love for this to be realized?

JM: Something brewing!?

FL: Exactly, something brewing.

JM: Yeah. I know. I think I've been so wrapped up with making my last show and the virus and things, so that's what I mean a bit by spending time in the studio to discover these things.... But I'm definitely developing this fabric, a thing that I'm trying to make based with drawings. And the drawings that I'm making are a little bit different from how they used to be. I'm trying to work out for myself new ways of displaying drawing that aren't just drawings in frames and things like that, but how to work with drawing in an installation setting. I suppose that's basically where I am and I just want the time to experiment a little bit and mess around, because you can't make little tiny boxes with a massive deadline coming up...

Fabian Lang

Fabian Lang is the founder and director of his eponymous gallery in his home town of Zurich. The gallery is located in an historic townhouse in the Niederdorf, by the Kunsthaus Zurich, and opened in 2019 with a group show featuring Sara Anstis, Heidi Hahn, Mernet Larsen, Jessie Makinson, Wangechi Mutu, Mira Schor, and Grace Weaver. Going forward, Lang will be presenting four to six original exhibitions annually, including both group and solo presentations. The gallery’s ethos is to promote and represent outstanding and innovative artists, and to nurture the best talent from the new generation of artists around the world. Prior to opening the gallery, Lang was a director at Victoria Miro and Galerie Mitterrand, and co-owned a curatorially-driven project space in the heart of London. (Photo credit: Idris Khan)