Adrian Wiszniewski

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Alba No 8, 1988
Interview conducted in a bar near Cork Street, just before Adrian Wiszniewski’s exhibition opening at Nicola Jacobs Gallery

Adrian Wiszniewski

Peter Hill: Earlier today you used the phrase "Success before satisfaction - in relation to the years following art school graduation. Can you expand on that?

Adrian Wiszniewski: When I had my show at Nicola Jacobs I was only two years out of art school and under tremendous pressure to produce work. I had already been in The British Art Show and the Air Gallery, my work was in the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in my postgraduate year I had been reviewed in Artscribe and Studio International. Things were happening very fast. The residency at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool was tremendously important for me, as was my move to Almouth. It allowed me to distance myself from the hype surrounding the Glasgow phenomenon and to see things in perspective. It was all new territory.
When I was a student at Glasgow School of Art you never really got the impression that you could be a professional artist without also having to teach. There were no models for this in Scotland at that time.
The end result was that I decided to work "behind closed doors", and this show at Nigel Greenwood's is the first in London for two and a half years. In Liverpool nobody could see what I was doing in a public way. Alex Kidson and the staff there were great, so I never felt isolated.

PH: Will you be showing new work at the Glasgow Print Studio during Mayfest?

AW: Yes, I am going to be staying in Glasgow for several weeks working non-stop on it - paintings and prints. It is going to be great showing in Glasgow again because I haven't had a show there since the Compass.

AW: Drawing is absolutely no problem with me, but there have been difficulties with painting. I've always drawn but I didn't start painting until my post-graduate year. I always had so much trouble with grants, having changed courses. I used to draw on newsprint with bits of charcoal, make prints, film, video and performance. When I did start painting all I could afford was distemper on paper - so a painting cost 20p. Everything was economy.
When I changed from my architecture course to painting I went in to the mixed media department.
When I left college I won the Cargill Scholarship and was able to buy paint. The first painting I did was called My Jewish Brother, after which everyone thought, wrongly, that I was Jewish. I spent eight weeks on that and submitted it to the Society of Scottish Artists annual exhibition. It got rejected. The Scottish Arts Council later bought it from the Compass Gallery.

AW: Yes, I spent a long time solidly painting and analysing what I was doing. I was working on canvases and layering on paint. So as to control the paint I had to schematise the whole painting. To get the energy I used swirls and the swirls became layering of thick paint. When you are working with pastels and you don't like something you can rub it out and leave a ghost, and when you work over it again it becomes very rich in colour.
The problem with paint is opacity.

PH: I very much enjoy the painting you call Landscape. It is painted in acrylic and is so large it suffers in reproduction, as do Jackson Pollock's paintings because the passages full of air and space are reduced away to nothing and one is left with what looks like obsessive mark-picking on the surface, giving a totally wrong impression.

AW: It was painted in acrylic but I tried to treat it like a giant watercolour allowing the white canvas to come through as ground. This was bought by the Walker Art Gallery at the end of what was a very beneficial year. I painted at least a dozen large canvases in that year with which I felt satisfied.

AW: The people are great but there is a feeling of them being down-trodden. It is as if they have just lost a battle. Whereas in Glasgow it is so different, so full of optimism and energy. Nobody has time to be down, they are out there fighting for everything. The difference between Glasgow now and Glasgow ten years ago is immense, and there are so many good painters around. Even in Liverpool the feeling about the Tate of the North was that an alien world was being created inside their own. Not a Liverpool thing, but pure veneer.
What I really liked was being able to work in a huge studio inside the gallery, put my brushes down and go for a coffee, then go upstairs and walk around the collection which spanned everything from early Renaissance to contemporary work. Where else can you do that?

AW: A lot of the paintings I do come about automatically. They start with an eye and then I decide on which side I am going to put the nose. Then you get the hair and the ears and things start working. Arcadian Landscape, which is on the cover of the catalogue is a good example of the whole process, including the references. In this case to Ian Hamilton Finlay, his rates war, and his Temple. It is a little homage to his pre-occupations with the Arcadian landscape. There is a Panzer tank emerging from the bottom left hand corner of the painting. Again I started with that eye, put in a bit of contrapposto, then a hand colour. Composition and narrative advance together. At one time this figure had a long thin hat and you can see traces of it above the short round hat that it became.
It was great working with Alex Kidson because he chronicled and analysed my work over a whole year, more thoroughly than I could myself. He noticed things about me and my working habits which I wasn't aware of - because I was doing them. It was great getting the catalogue to read about what I had been doing over the previous year, seen by an outsider.

PH: I believe you have been working on a whole range of activities in addition to the book of prints for your young son Max.

AW: I want to make some bronzes. I've always wanted to be a sculptor. That was my main reason for going to art school. I studied architecture for four years and then changed courses. I had a brain-storm one day and filled in the forms. I only had two months to get a portfolio together which was not long enough for the sculpture department. I also wanted to miss first year. So the easiest way was to get in to Drawing and Painting, by tracing collages and squaring them up, then transferring them to canvas. I thought I'd leave the sculpture until I got in to art school. Eventually I got in to the mixed media department and became more involved with film.
I came to terms with my painting by not painting. By doing ceramics, by making prints, lithography and mono-prints. This was better than looking at the brick wall and not being able to do anything. So I went round the brick wall and got to the other side by other means. Then I found I could paint. Also, I hate to be bored. I think that is the gravest sin. Some people keep churning out the same work all their lives.

AW: Yes, exactly, that sort of thing. They find it lucrative and keep doing it. I can't imagine anything more boring. Look at Francis Bacon, great artist though he is, his work hasn't changed in the last forty years.
If I am bored with my work, then everybody will be, and there will be a banality about it.

AW: I've done some pieces in private, just to see what it is like. But I always find it irresistible to put in a face. What I am fascinated by is different processes that go to make up the image. A painting like Blast is very different from Toying with Religion. But they were made simultaneously.

AW: Steven Campbell and myself were planning a film. We wrote a screenplay and STV and Channel 4 bought up the option on it. It is a Jacobite tragedy that starts at the end of the Battle of Culloden and is about an entomologist, Darwinian Theory, and the church. We wrote the whole story over some drinks one afternoon. It will be full of famous people and puns.

PH: Finally, I have always wondered what disillusioned you with architecture?

AW: I was doing what they call Part 1, working in an architect's office, and I thought the whole system was terrible. You can put seven years in to studying and can be working for twenty years before you get a project off the ground. Even then you are in such a compromised position. I don't think there are more than three or four good architects in Britain. Most lose faith and lose their way completely. To get things done you need to have your own office early on, like James Stirling. The exciting ones are the eclectic ones.
So, I went in to a dark alley called "art" not knowing if I would come out the other end.
In architecture, at one end, you have the class system, it is still a very middle class profession and at the other end the result is pre-fabricated units being hung on to a re-enforced concrete frame. It is an outright disgrace. Nihilistic. Money always comes first and people last.