Phoebe Cope discusses her recent work with Dorothy Feaver…

6 Windmill Row is Phoebe’s home as well as her exhibition space, and this switch between public/private space suits her recent paintings – interior landscapes. Inside, canvases stretch from floor to ceiling (interspersed with new sculptures of heads, as if they’ve tumbled down from a nave, besides mirrors, coat hooks, a dining table, sofa and kitchen). They picture a defiant, baroque jumble of curiosities and experiences. The family drawing room might be a starting point, or a courtyard in Kensington Palace, or an Indian mountainside, but these are superimposed with other things…

King Mausol and Anna in KP, 2010

Oil on canvas

Image courtesy of the artist

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Dorothy Feaver Do you imagine a final picture at the outset of a painting? How do you get to that point – through preliminary sketches or do you work straight onto canvas?

Phoebe Cope Of course I know the subject I want to envisage. I know when I want to have a large internal space with Victorian features, and definitely not a vase of daffodils. Halfway through the painting however I might suddenly think to add that very thing I didn’t want and so my intention is liable to fundamentally change throughout a painting. It is a strange thing to pull images out of your head as there is never an end to what you find. And yet at the same time it is always the same, i.e. my marks and my idiom are purely me and no-one else and it always has had that same character, which was essentially formed in my early teens. I paint directly onto the canvas after having collected many drawings. Decisions about composition are arrived at in a bombastic process of surprise, a guerrilla style attack – precariously, accidentally and without sanctioning.

DF So from drawing to painting, and then to sculpture, do you see these as sequential stepping stones? You seem to be messing up the order, i.e. your new sculptures are reappearing in paintings. It’s as if the drawings and sculpture both act as models for the paintings, as if you are working around an idea in 3d before committing it to a 2d painting….

PC I don’t think it has to be sequential. It is all just under that one umbrella of disegno, measuring with the eye to delineate planes and forms on any given surface. I am amazed at how much longer it takes to realize something in 3d. Otherwise I would do a lot more. Painting is the quickest and easiest for me – using large blocks of colour which have an instantly emotive result. Drawing, especially in pencil, can be tricky and hard work. Yet without it you can’t manage the other two disciplines. I use anything near to me in my work; heads are significant things to have in a painting as we always try to read or recognize them. So it is a just a simple device. I would use any sculpture of heads at hand – my own as well as ones in museums.

DF And the way you wrangle with perspective is a particularly muscly kind of measuring with the eye, but also recently it’s been making room for fantastical combinations of things seen and experienced. Is it the original view that triggers off those associations?

PC I am responding to a place usually to show my elation or exaltation at being there. Painting by its nature though is a pretense and illusion. My particular way is to grasp the things that occur to me first and foremost and run with it. Like a flight of fancy, with as much nonsense and free association as I find plausible.

DF You have a notoriously hardy approach to painting en plein air…this same attitude seems to be applied back to your interiors. There is nothing sheltered or cosy or refined about them – it is as if you were turning the indoors outdoors. In King Mausol and Anna in KP the interior courtyard has the play on outdoor/indoor exaggerated by the dramatic way that plush museum walls suddenly twist against themselves into a set of rooves… In Lothario Leaning Over a Verandah there’s a hallucinatory drawing room bedded into the gargantuan landscape.

PC Yes I do like to do that. As I said in the beginning I often change my intention to subvert any notion that the painting is set at one time in one place. Being lodged in one time and place is the unreal. It is actually more real to be in several times and places at a given moment. I want to make a snapshot of this reality instead, truer to how it really is to exist. Sure, we don’t always think of the things I am proposing, these museums and mountains, but I just thought they are the kinds of quintessential places where one might take a snapshot of if one had a camera, so those are the places I chose.

DF Those paintings are very layered – at what point do you stop adding times and places?

PC I would keep adding until I realize the image is apparent and any more might undo its clarity.

DF Your pictures feature lots of other pictures, such as the National Gallery greats along the wall of the KP picture, or your mothers’ work on the walls of The Drawing Room Shankill 2007. Are these pieces noted especially, as some people might collect stamps in a passport?

PC It’s a combination of gathering souvenirs, like a tourist on holiday, and also using what’s in proximity, such as my mother’s work, a close and easy target. Essentially, a rendition of mine is going to be critical, it is going to say: hey look at this, isn’t it funny, irksome or amazing? I cannot comment in words alone because basically I can only respond to those images and life in general with the same ammunition – with images and some life, chat and exuberance of my own.

Dorothy | July 25th, 2010 | Featured in The Issue: Rites of Passage | See more from Notice Board

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