Interview & Studio Visit With Callum Innes

On the occasion of Where to Start, Callum Innes’ first solo exhibition at Berggruen Gallery, the artist sat down with Berggruen Gallery’s Editorial Associate Mary Kate Tankard to discuss his relationship to light and landscape, his painting process, and early artistic influences.

Interview was edited for length and clarity.

Berggruen Gallery: You work between Oslo and Edinburgh. How has the transition to the Oslo studio affected this body of work?

Callum Innes: Where To Start is quite a broad spectrum of the work. It all comes from the studio in Edinburgh. There's one earlier painting in it, which I recently discovered. During COVID, I couldn't leave Norway. They shut the borders for two years. So this show has Exposed Painting, Bluish Violet Red Oxide, one of the last paintings I made in 2019. When it was finished, my assistants dutifully wrapped it and put it away, and in the last three years I haven’t seen it at all. When we came to putting the show together, we discovered this painting in the racks, which makes a nice balance. God, I wish I could remember how I made these colors. It is quite luminous and very liquidy, the actual surface of the painting. It’s very much like my watercolors. There's much more intensity now in the colors, because of my time working in Oslo during COVID. My studio in Edinburgh has natural light, but the studio in Oslo has directional light from one side, and it's very dark during the winter. So actually, there's an intensity in the colors, mainly from looking at the landscape window. I have a fantastic studio that overlooks the fjord, and you have a beautiful sunset that comes through. 

BG: Has light and landscape always been influential for your paintings?

CI: It's always been through the work. A lot of my life in Scotland, and certainly my life in Oslo, is being outdoors. I may talk about it more than I did previously, but the reason I make abstraction is the figurative work that I was making many years ago, it explained everything to you. It gave you a narrative that you followed, and then maybe it was great for the five minutes that you saw the painting, but when you walked away, it disappeared. The work that I made was loosely based around natural forms initially. I think it takes a long time to realize the things that influence you, whether it be the light or the space. I live in two particular places where the light is quite pertinent, I mean, everybody would say the light is quite special where they live, but I’m by a soft light which is very beautiful, and it can be quite magical at times. But that happens whether you're in Iceland, Norway, or Scotland, or on the coast up here, I suspect. 

BG: Growing up in Edinburgh did you think a lot about the absence of light or the lack of light in the winters?

CI: Never the absence of light. Even in the winter, when there's an absence of light, there's light. And now in Oslo, it gets very dark, but when there's snow on the ground, it gives off light. So if you take the Titanium White painting, and you expose it to light, as it gets darker, the light gets stronger, and it gives off light. If you wrap up a Titanium White painting, it will go yellow, and when you expose it back to light, it will come back to white again. But that's just a chemical reaction. That's a physical thing that happens with the paint, or a chemical thing that happens within the paint. There's something nice about creating light through space, or space within light. You might have an area of a painting or watercolor, particularly where you're creating a space, but that space is luminous. I mean the painting, bizarrely enough, that gives off the most light is the black and gray one [Exposed Painting, Lamp Black]. You’ve got something black, it becomes something else, and it feels light, but it feels like it has a history of light.

BG: Was there a turning point when you realized that the work was very much about emitting luminosity?

CI: No, it just is something you come to realize as you understand what you're doing at work. Early on, I would use devices to make certain paintings. I used to deny it was about the hand. I was in denial of that because I tried to make something that had its own history, but actually, it's all about the hand. It's all about the physicality of making a painting and the emotional response to a painting's surface.

BG: How do you think the light in Berggruen Gallery will affect the exhibition? 

CI: I was quite surprised because I hadn't physically seen the space before and it's interesting when you see your work in a very different context. I’m always curious to see how collectors light the paintings. I always think it's quite nice to let the painting live in the light that's there and I get a feeling that in [Berggruen Gallery] the light changes all day. That's quite nice for the work, I think the work ages nicely that way because it doesn’t remain static.

BG: Before becoming an abstract artist you were a figurative artist. Can you talk a bit about this transition?

CI: Many years ago as a figurative artist, when you looked at my work, or you saw my work you had all the information at once about the figuration. It had the narrative, it had the story. Then at the age of about 24, I realized I wanted to make something to last a bit longer. So I started to make a series of works that really didn't involve the figure and really didn't involve the gesture. The paintings began to form themselves and take on their own intrinsic histories, so they were almost like found objects. It really started from the time I had a linear drawing of a wild cucumber plant, and I sank the image into cardboard. The image, for the first time, became part of the material. So it felt like an object that had a history, as opposed to me giving it history, which ultimately is what I like, because it's all about the gesture. It's about the weight. It's about human fragility. I like the idea that in my eyes, they still remain very figurative, although for many years I denied the figure. It's all about the physicality of the painting. You know when I'm standing in front of it, and it hits me in the chest, that's a human trait. If it retains that possibility of failure, then it works, if it doesn't, then it becomes simply mannered. Many years ago, when I was a student and I was doing a job for somebody to paint a house, I wrote some stupid things on the wall and painted them over, but they came through. About four weeks later, the actual silhouette of these things came through. In a way, these paintings, the first mark that I make, are kind of an etching. There's just a moment in time when I make these paintings. I can't go back through them and eradicate a mark. It's there. With the Exposed Paintings, I reveal the color by using turpentine. I feel like it's sort of like Turner's watercolours. He's painting the sky and it's blue. He puts an orange through it, and it makes the blue come alive. If you look at Exposed Painting, Sapphire Blue, it has a red oxide through it that you would never see. But that color comes alive, and when I take it off with turpentine, it livens the color. 

BG: You often talk about the importance of fragility in your paintings. Can you explain more what you mean by this?

CI: I think something has the right to failure. I think as a human, you have the right to fail. And I think as a painting, you have the right to fail. And, if it didn't have that possibility of failure, it'd be very mannered. It would just be, just have a narrative. I like the idea that it retains a fragility or the suggestion that there is a fragility. So what appears to be measured is not measured. What appears to be half and half is not half and half. The line that's made, which is constant through each painting, is made by hand. It's not made by tape. It's not made by a ruler. It's made by hand. My hand is not perfect, and when I put a pencil to the work it can fail. I used to call them agitated verticals, and the point where you have this line, it has a possibility of failure, I guess. If it didn't have that possibility of failure, it simply would just be a matter of painting and it would just be a process. And you know, process is great, but you have to worry about process, because the minute you understand it, and the minute you master it, it's time to stop doing it and do something else. 

BG: But it seems like you’re a very process-based artist. There is an intentionality yet the unpredictability is very important to the process. 

CI: Yes, I mean, I would be lying if I said I didn't know exactly how I wanted something to occur, but the things that occur by you doing it, make it work. As I've gotten older and made more and more work I understand more about the process. So the work you have here the Exposed Paintings have been going for many years, and they kind of started off as black, with many colors mixed into the black and dissolved once. Now the Exposed Paintings start with a color being laid down then a black on top of it, then it's taken off with turpentine, then it's repeated, and repeated and repeated. So in a way, I'm adding. Something that is subtractive is very additive. Since the light in Oslo is very different in the studio, and I couldn't see the paintings, the Exposed Paintings, I had to work out how I dealt with the painted surface again. So there's a shift. You can see it from the Tondos with the Split Paintings, the paint is applied vertically with a brush the size of a bottle's neck, one stroke at a time over a wet surface. If you look at the black side of the painting, you will see the color underneath. I leave a strip, and that's all free hand. It's a very different thing from making the Exposed Painting, but it works in a similar way. And I think working on the Tondo, which is, you know when you paint on edge, you can stop at the edge, but when you've got a curved edge, the application of paint, or the way that the brush is handled when you hit the edge reacts in a very different way. It pushes your hand in a different direction. Then to see the structure of the paint, I had to do this in Oslo, with the side light, it became banded and was much more physical, a much heavier application of paint on the Tondos, which I enjoy. It emphasizes the surface. I guess because of the way that I've been working, I've gone back more to the physicality of painting, it’s that thing when you stand up on something and it's like a dance. It’s a very physical process, but the physicality I denied for years because I wanted the work to sing on its own.

BG: Your Exposed Paintings have these disturbances, or hidden colors working behind the dominant color. As I understand, Quincedrone gold is a newer color for your work. In what way is this color disturbed?

CI: The disturbance, oh it has a violet that you don’t see. When that color is put on it's a very different color. It starts out as a muddy yellow. In life when you look at something, you are looking at verticals that things are going through horizontally, that's what happens in the Exposed Paintings because the paint is put on horizontally and then we put verticals through it and you reveal it. 

BG: You’ve said  “What a Rothko, Newman, or a Blinky Palermo does is give you a moment to pause. I like this idea of seeing something and reading it and having to look at it again and again.” Why is it important for the work to have this quality of being very open to interpretation?

CI: It always felt a bit freeing. I mean, I think when you look at something, or when you come to something, you bring something else to it. So when you look at a white painting, it might be a white painting, but if you're wearing red that day, it picks up that color. I'm aware of the fact that a white painting is about many things, the sky, and the light, but it's also quite a cathartic thing for me. The titles are deliberately blind because I could title every painting after something such as a landscape or a place, but the minute I do that, it shuts it down for me, not only the viewer. It ties me to it. I would much rather remember the time in my head. I think something is viewed through time, and I guess that's what I'm talking about. I mean, you could see many exhibitions, and you look at them, and sometimes they stay with you, sometimes they don't. I like the idea that painting takes time to view, or work takes time to view. And I like the idea that it changes all the time, depending on your emotions as well. So you can say a work is not really made sequentially. It's made from the time that I'll do a sketch, the time that my assistants make a stretcher up, the time that they prepare it, the time I physically work on it, the time that I hide it away and look at it, the time that I'll bring it out to photograph it again and see it in a very different light. Then the time gets transported to a place by your gallery. And then maybe it's only finished when you spend time with it. The work that I enjoy looking at is people like Blinky Palermo because you can go back into the work, and you'll see it again to understand it. So that kind of relationship of revisiting and also time is very important.

BG: You've said your Titanium White paintings are the most spiritual of your works.

CI: Well they are very different for me to make. I will work on them for anything up to 18 hours without stopping because the paint has to be wet the whole time. The reason there are so few of them is that physically I can't do that many, well I could but I’d suffer. When you're doing that you have turpentine on paint, and then paint ends up on your arm, and it drips into your armpit. If you're doing one action for 18 hours it is cathartic. So many things come in and out of your head. So all these paintings appear simple but they're quite complex. In a sense. I'm always surprised when, for example, you're looking at an Exposed Painting, especially when I have people in the studio or a museum, and I'm giving a talk, and somebody will ask, "How did you paint the bottom left rectangle white?" or "When did you paint that?" When people ask that, I know the painting is working because from something very simple, like a block of color or black, a color reveals itself, and your eye is taken through the painting, it's like it's spiraling, so the space is always changing. The active part of the painting becomes a bit I haven't touched, which I kind of find ironic, and that becomes a bit that pushes it. They are quite physical, you know, they're not contained. 

BG: In a series of works when you stop using one color and shift to the next, is it intuitive or do you wait between each work to decide on the pairing of colors?

CI: I keep color on my palette for many years before I use it. And when I start using it I go really full into it. I suffer from a process of education or work ethic where you work something through till the death of it. I guess that's what I do. If I find a quality in something, I just really go with it. For many years, the Exposed Paintings were just violet. That occurred because I used to have an uncle in the 70s, whose entire house, from the carpet to the curtains, was all violent. 

BG: Is this the uncle who was a tapestry weaver?

CI: No, that's Archie Brennan. Archie was the uncle who I kind of grew up with. He was a famous tapestry weaver, and he did tapestries with Roy Lichenstein, he was an artist in his own right. 

BG: Did you watch your uncle work when you were young? Do you think there is any inspiration there in your process?

CI: I did watch him, my Thursday night job was to go to the Dovecot studio to help clean up for the weavers. The Dovecot studio was an arts and crafts studio set up 140 years ago at that point, you had very big looms, and I lived very nearby, so I had the job of helping warp up, which is putting the string on. I’d often go to my uncle's studio and he’d be sitting warping up. I think weaving a tapestry is quite an amazing thing. I tried it in art school and I found it irritating because you have an image and you follow an image. 

BG: So you didn’t like how pre-determined the image is before the process has begun?

CI: Yeah, I guess you need that because it's something you have to do in layers and with structure. If you're making a painting you can go from different points, if you're making a tapestry you have to warp it up very slowly. It's a very different process. I think really what Archie did for me is I was amazed. I was in awe. If you went into his studio he’d be drawing and making something. I went to an artist’s studio yesterday, and I still get that feeling that something magical is happening. You see into someone's life in a very different way when you go to their studio. When I was younger I didn’t really understand what but I knew something magical was happening. My father had a workshop, but at the tender age of 12 when you don’t know what you want to be, I recognized that Archie was doing something that was important to me. You know, I always made drawings, but I wanted to be an artist because Archie was doing that. It opened a door for me.