On this Episode of I Know This Guy, we have David Taborn. David is a contemporary mixed media artist based in London, England. We touch on how he came to be a world renowned artist and how he weaves philosophy with is art, most notably that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Date: December 15 2020
Episode: 36
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces David Taborn, a British Abstract and a Contemporary Mixed Media Artist Based in London, England.
Subtitle: “Aesthetics is to the artist as ornithology is to the birds”
Final Show Link: https://iknowthisguy.com/episodes/ep-36-beyond-factual-nonsense-w-david-taborn/
In this episode of I Know this Guy…, Norman Farrar introduces David Taborn, a British abstract and a contemporary mixed media artist based in London, England.
His work was featured in an exhibition at the Galerie Martin Kudlek. In this episode, we touch on how he became a world renowned artist and how he weaves philosophy with art most notably that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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Part 1
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David 0:00
Like the number of times that I’ve read over these many years I’ve been painting, that painting is dead. In the magazines like headlines, whenever there’s a kind of a new conceptual movement, or whenever, there’s an element, again to do with computer art, that they always want to make these kind of blanket statements about things and one of the factors that is exactly as it is in music, is that if it’s good, it’s timeless, and it is revisitable and that’s what you want in art is something that you can revisit and find something because you are different.
Norman 0:48
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of I Know This Guy, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of some of the most interesting people I know. Before we get started, please like and subscribe to I Know This Guy, wherever you get your podcasts. By the way, my kids want me to say something about ringing a bell? What the hell’s a bell?
Hayden 1:22
So Dad, who do we have lined up for the podcast?
Norman 1:26
Alright. Do you remember Mariannita and Marcello from Brazil?
Hayden 1:30
Yeah, the power duo.
Norman 1:32
The power duo, yeah. They recommended another really great person, David Taborn, and he’s a world renowned artist and from the get go, he’s known what he wanted to do all of his life and he’s done it. So he’s done nothing but create art. How’s that?
Hayden 1:52
It’s pretty rare and incredible.
Norman 1:56
Yeah and he’s a really cool guy, too. So I can’t wait to talk to him.
Hayden 2:00
Yeah, let’s dive in.
Norman 2:04
Alright, David. So welcome to the podcast.
David 2:06
Thank you, glad to be with you.
Norman 2:09
One of the things we always get into right off the bat with any of our guests is we want to hear their backstory and find out what makes them, them. So why don’t we start with that? What makes David, David?
David 2:20
I often wonder, I seem to have been blessed with serendipity, throughout. So I seem to have stumbled, from one thing to another in a very fortunate way. I mean, my early memories, I was brought up in what they call a kind of slum clearance area, where buildings that were about to be torn down. So it was a very kind of poor area and in fact, I think one of the kind of performative elements of my early years was at the bottom of my street was a 20 foot wall and the bottom of the other street was a 20 foot wall and another 20 foot wall, because we had Winson Green Prison, we had the local psychiatric unit, and we had the hospital. So we had three walls surrounding the street that I lived and what that meant was that every so often, someone would be walking along in pajamas and we wouldn’t know which wall they’d escaped from and I remember on one occasion, and always, if somebody escaped, a mounted policemen would arrive, like your mounted police and I remember one day, there was some kind of kerfuffle and my friend’s father came out in his pajamas, it was early morning to see what the the rumpus was about and of course, he got arrested. Because they thought he’d escaped from, either the prison or the psychiatric unit or the hospital, one of the three. So I always have this kind of lovely memory, really, of the theater of my kind of early years, which was very good. So anyway, that’s I suppose what started but also, my father was a toolmaker and my mother was a seamstress, and neither of them were able to take advantage of further education and for some reason, I managed to pass the 11 plus, which we have here, and go to a what was called a Technical Grammar School which was really great. So it meant that I had books and things because there was only ever one book in the house and that was, it wasn’t even in cycling, it was called a cyclopedia. Not even an encyclopedia, so it had a limited amount of information and it mainly photographs of gorillas and things inside. So it didn’t do me too much good. Except that, although we didn’t have kind of very, very much money, we had a dictionary, and my father and I used to sit and find odd words and ask each other how to spell them, and then try and work out what the definitions were for these words and in the meantime, he would be doing portraits of me in the margin of the newspaper. So there was always that kind of background connection with some not suspending disbelief, but some kind of otherness, that we were kind of, I suppose, all of us looking for then. But anyway, I went to this school, and I found out I was quite good at rugby. So, I love playing rugby a lot. Even though I’ve probably got injured more than most and in fact, I always remember the scrum collapsing, and I came out the scrum and my elbow was, the bone was sticking somewhere else through the skin and the teacher took me to this hospital, and they did all kinds of stuff and then he wanted to drop me off at home and most of the other students, the pupils there, very kind of middle class and so they lived in a road, not a street, and I was a little bit embarrassed, so I kept saying to him that look, just drop me off here, I’ll walk the rest of the way. But anyway, he insisted on dropping me back and then I think that that as well is when I realized that something like that has a silver lining. You get mentioned in assembly, you get people scrolling the name on the cast on your arm. The girls are very sympathetic, it was win win, all of that. So, anyway, that was basically what happened there at school because it was a technical grammar school. We did mainly kinds of sciences and maths and stuff and because I was quite good at maths. My father taught me logarithms when I was very young, because he needed to use it in his work. So I was quite okay with numbers, which meant that the careers officer I always remember saying, Oh, yes, we found you a future here, young table and study accountancy. So they found me this job as a trainee accountant and so I started to go there and I realized that I was falling asleep at like five o’clock when I got back home and, and so this can’t be right. I’m 17, full of libido and a lot of energy but not for accountancy. So not wishing to disappoint parents, I applied for a job in Germany, because I’d learned German at this school as well. So I kind of did okay with German. So, I thought if I apply for a job in Germany, then I can go over there and then I can kind of transmogrify. I can metamorphose into some poetic buyer and ask a person, with maybe the hint of a personality and so, I went over there and got this job as a bookkeeper. Well of course, they may choose and again, another signal moment for me was when I had this comptometer with me, you know what a comptometer is. But anyway, I’ll tell you, it’s a little machine that’s a bit like a calculator, except it’s purely mechanical and it spews out all the numbers on a roll of paper. So, I found out that using the notes and the ones and a few other numbers, I could draw pictures on this thing. So, I was supposed to be kind of adding numbers and stuff like that. But anyway, I did all these little drawings and then one day, their supervisor came around and he couldn’t work out the calculations I was making, but then he noticed that they all began to form in a kind of pixelated way, some image, sometimes a landscape, sometimes a self portrait. So anyway, as a reward, he gave me the sack and off I went. Fortunately, at that time as well, I had moved into this house into this room in a house where the landlord, I was doing drawings here and there, and he liked the drawings and he said, Well, don’t pay me any rent, I’ve got lots of relatives with houses in the nearby district. Every month, I’ll drive you out, and then you do a drawing, and that’s your rent. So I thought, well, that’s really great. So I did that. Meanwhile, this is all to do with how I came to be a professional artist, I suppose and then, when I was in the guesthouse, the kind of the pub there. There were a lot of Americans, there a lot of GIs and so, as a relief from me having to speak German all the time, I started to speak to some of the GIs and met this Sergeant who saw me drawing one day and said, Oh, could you do a mural for the PX in Ludwigsburg. So I said, Yes, but I don’t really have many materials. So the next day he sent around this thing, I have never seen a vehicle like it, it had caterpillar wheels at the front, and like a lorry at the back. It was a strange kind of hybrid vehicle and this big, big guy, or massive person, he was, he said, I’ve come to pick you up to take you to Ludwigsburg to pick up some materials. So we went there, we got canvases, we got paint, got everything I needed and so then I did my first proper commission, which seems about seven foot by three and a half foot landscape for the PX, which also meant that I was honorary an employee of the American Army. Which meant that, they had this, I don’t know if you have it in Canada, but they have this system over there when I was there, that on the last day of the month before they do to get paid again, because everybody’s spent out. They would have a night where everything was free. Burgers, Coca Cola, music, a lot in the PX. So I was allowed to go to that as well and visit this kind of little America, full of jukeboxes and twirly lights and really fantastically high cholesterol food that was so addictive and loads of sugar everywhere. So, that was I suppose the way it began to dawn on me that I could do things that I enjoyed and reap the rewards from it. So that was it, basically. I mean, I tried to study at the Guard Academy, but there were no grant systems there. So I couldn’t do that and so that’s when I came back to England to apply to an art college, because I realized that really, I had to, I couldn’t be an autodidact without getting overdrawn intellectually. So, I thought, I’ll go to college and then I came back, and that was when I started to study as an art student. That was a long drawn out beginning. Sorry about that.
Norman 13:59
No, no, that’s perfect. Matter of fact, I’ve got a couple of questions. So first of all, you said something at the very beginning about I was on a road and they were on the streets. What’s the difference?
David 14:13
Oh, yes, I suppose you wouldn’t. Well, the thing is, in the mornings, you go in and the teacher would read out addresses and the posh addresses were always on Road, Avenue, close, something like that. Something very sweet, but in Birmingham, which is where it was then, the streets were the ones that had no front garden, you opened onto the pavement. They were built really, as the latter part of the Industrial Revolution. So there were basically two up, two down houses with no gardens or anything like that and it meant that on the roll call, every morning, they would go to check the addresses of people and it would be the only one from a street, and so it just kind of I don’t know if it, so it embarrassed me. Yeah, I have to be frank about that. I just felt very underprivileged even though I was totally spoiled by my parents. Having incidentally been rejected by my mother at birth. Yeah and in fact, I think she brought up the placenta for quite a few months before she realized the mistake. But it was to do with the fact that she’d always wanted a daughter and I had two brothers and I arrived, and she said to the nurse, Oh, no, no, another son, and instantly felt guilty, which I played upon from before I could even walk I’m sure that I exploited a sense of guilt, in order to gain that extra little bit of love.
Norman 16:18
There you go, Hayden.
David 16:24
Yes. I can see that that’s gonna strike a chord. I can see the tears in your eyes.
Hayden 16:30
Yeah. I’ll have another podcast.
David 16:63
Yes, yes. The sequel.
Norman 16:36
What was the other question I was gonna ask? Oh, I know. It wasn’t a question. This is a comment. Just before I turned on the computer to get onto this podcast, I was watching this show and I’m just going to sound like I’m going down a different rabbit hole. But you were mentioning, you’re reading the dictionary and I was absolutely amazed by what this documentary was talking about. It was talking about William the Conqueror and how William the Conqueror over the first 20 years ended up as reestablishing the language as we speak it by entering 50% or getting rid of 50% of the Old English words. So the English that we know right now started to be, well 50% of the language was French and they started going through this list of words, and it went, Oh my gosh, I had no idea that that’s how old English was ripped apart and how a new language was basically created with the culture basically overnight within a decade or two, which is pretty amazing. So when you were saying you were looking at the dictionary, I’m just sitting there, it just kind of hit me that wow, that dictionary is 50% probably either Latin or French words. Just kind of cool.
David 17:58
Yeah, absolutely and in fact, one of the things that intrigued me about studying German, was the way in which they almost had a poetry bypass when it came to creating a unique new word. Everything was a description of the function. So, television for instance, used to be fancy apparatus, which is far seeing apparatus instead of television and in fact, one of the books that I did, which we’ll deal with later perhaps, but one of the books that I worked on, related to a German word that was invented to cover the condition of mad cow disease and anyway, so you had this new word, which was 27 letters long in German to describe mad cow disease and a couple of years ago, they decided to redact it to take it out, because mad cow disease was cured. So they don’t need to waste their ink on this new word and so they got rid of it. So I think, basically, you have this strange tidal situation with words, which makes it very interesting and every so often, you do get that kind of reactionary behavior that you describe, because similarly, it wasn’t too long ago in France, where they banned the importation of English words, like the weekend, and so on. They wanted to get back to proper French, and not rely on the importation of either Americanisms or English words for that, and so, I think it’s constantly being abused and misused in order to help people articulate their agenda, their position, which, in itself is fascinating, just as a slight aside there because one of my inspirations for I suppose any conceptual input in the work I do is Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and which is, I’ve used his approach to liminality in the work that is, there’s quite a famous example that he uses, the duck and the hare, where you have a cartoon of a duck, which, if you look at it, again, it’s becomes a hare, and then it becomes a duck, and then it becomes a hare, those kind of drawings that are ambiguous, and they can flip over from one meeting to another in front of your eyes. He wanted to examine what happened in between, when you’re moving from one interpretation to another interpretation, what happens in that space in between, and that’s the very space that for me, is occupied by ours. That kind of liminal space. But anyway, that’s a slight distraction from wherever we were.
Norman 21:29
I know I started it, I apologize. All right. So you ended up at art college? Okay. Let’s go from there.
David 21:42
Okay, so at art college, and suddenly, it’s a completely different world and this was in the 60s. Yeah, I forgot to mention, when I got back from Germany, I needed to earn some money and so I became a supply teacher in a school for a couple of months while I was getting stuff ready, which again, was a big, big kind of learning curve. But slowly my hair started to get longer, and I got myself, I was in with a bit of a gang in the street anyway of motorcycles. So I managed to get myself a nice motorbike, and we would all seen Easy Rider. So, all of the motorbikes we had had tiny little moped wheels at the front, and big fat tires at the back, and it’s just proper choppers back in the day there. So, I started to enjoy this other existence, which was amongst a lot of like minded people who seem to be quite anarchic. Another thing, little flashback I just had there was in the middle of my growing hippieness, I managed to get this outfit made of a kind of green silk. A bit like Sergeant Pepper’s, that kind of stuff, and I went to visit my mother and I got out of this car that I’ve got this old naked car and she said, Oh come in quickly in case the neighbors see you, she was so worried that this strange looking long haired hippie, was the neighbors were going to see me come in. But anyway, that was good and I kind of did, I did quite well. I mean, I was so grateful, to be able to be painting and drawing full time that I work very, very hard and I got rewarded for that. So I got a number of prizes and stuff and in fact, when I graduated, the local newspaper came around and they took a photograph of me and instead of being like, the artist was with a berry and a palette and some brushes and so, at the time, I was working on these 20 foot canvases using buckets, like pouring the paint and so I insisted on being photographed holding a bucket, instead of like a pallet, and so I looked more like a window cleaner actually than an artist. But I remember the principal did say he never came across anybody who works so hard. So I felt rather flattered by that and certainly, I got to the end of that and graduated and then I got offered two places one of the Slade School of Fine Art for postgraduate or the Royal College of Art for postgraduate and I decided the Slade was for two years and the Royal College was for three years and I thought, I’m so mature and I’m such an accomplished, well formed artist who’s going to be a household name any second now that I best do the two year one instead of the three or one because otherwise it would somehow restrict my movement of the up the ladder of importance. So, I went and did the Slade. Of course, the other things didn’t quite pan out. But again, when I got to the Slade, the work I was doing was so big that they didn’t have enough studio space. So they rented, they paid rent for me to have a railway arch as a studio and then I was allotted, I was given a tutor, personal tutor, Keith Vaughn, who was quite a well known, kind of figurative artist from a previous generation, and he came up to see my work in the studio one day, and I could tell for the first couple of minutes, that we were on a completely different planets. He didn’t understand what I was on about. I certainly didn’t like his work. So they left me alone for those two years just to get on with my work, and then at the end of the two years, I put up an exhibition and yeah, I wanted a scholarship from that. So, it clearly went down. Okay. But it meant that I didn’t actually have very much input from the Slade. But, it turned out okay. Yeah and so when I left the Slade, Oh yeah, that was funny. Again, I had to earn some money. So I got this job two days a week teaching poetry and art in a girls school, just to keep me going and the St. Trinian’s films, Saint Trinian, it’s about this girl’s school and they all misbehaved terribly. It’s a kind of a comedy film. But, it was a bit like that, because I was to remember teaching poetry to these girls, and they’re about 20, 15 year old girls, and they just went out of control. I mean, I was young, and I had no discipline over them at all and I remember the headmistress coming in to see how I was getting on and the first thing she did was put her hand on a big blob of clay on the doorknob as she came in and then she looked up and one of the girls thought it was a good idea to stand on the spinning wheel, the potter’s wheel, and do pirouettes and so that was another good old sacking I got, because I did pick up one or two useful rejections in the past. But that carried out, and then I got, for some reason that there’s this other artist, a well known artist, who recommended me to this head of Liverpool College of Art, that I could be a good associate lecturer. So he came to the studio, and he gave me this job, which meant two days a week, I would drive up to Liverpool and teach and that gave me well, more money than I’d ever had, I think at the time, and still, plenty of time, because I’d always vowed never to spend more than 50% of my time doing anything other than painting. It would never reach that, so I was perfectly happy with that proportion, whatever. I’m not good with numbers now. But whatever, as a percentage, then that seemed to be a reasonable thing to do and so I did that for five years, but of course, I forgot, as soon as I started to earn money up there. Up in Liverpool, the big drinkers up there, and so I drank pretty much everything I earned for the first six months of the job, and then one day, I thought, this is ridiculous. I’m traveling up from London to Liverpool, spending a lot of time traveling. Why don’t I get somewhere halfway? So I thought I’d get somewhere halfway. So I kind of looked on the map and there was this county, Herefordshire in the middle of Great Britain and so I found out that there was this mission Hall, this kind of old school in the middle of the country that was being auctioned. So I thought I’ll go down to the auction and so I kind of drove down with a friend to the auction. I’m not really serious about it. But anyway, I sat at the front of the auction, and they’re all kind of local yokels behind me. A little straw coming out of there and everything and he kind of went on and he got up to 5000 and then I thought, I’ve got to put a bid in, otherwise, it’s a waste of time. So I’ll put my hand up and I bid 5500, and expecting the yokels behind me to start go, Oh 6000 or something like that, I’ll keep our cows in there or something and anyway, nobody came to it. So they even Bang, bang, bang, right sold to the person at the front of the store. So, I said, Oh, what do I do now? Then he said, Well, you’ve just bought it. You’ve got to give us 10%, 550 pounds, so I said, because actually one of the things I had learned, you can’t use this in the interview, of course, it is bullshit. So I said, Yeah not a problem at all, I’ll write you a check out now. So I wrote a check of 550 pound gave it to him and off we went and I had a month to find the rest of the money. But I didn’t even have 550 pounds in my account. In fact, I had about 20 pound in my account. So then I followed up everybody on you and said, Can you lend me 50 pounds, until I got enough to cover the check because I knew it would be five days before the check got honored. So anyway, that go on it and then I had another three weeks left to come up with the rest and so I went down to the local authority and said, Look, I’ve just had an auction I’ve just acquired this place with no roof, no water, no electricity, lovely looking place in the middle of the country. Can you help me out? And they said yes, we’ll give you a mortgage we want. We want people like you around here, artists, better culture. So they very generously gave me this mortgage at 14 and three quarter percent, which was quite a massive amount, but I was just absolutely over the moon that I could actually see it through and not just lose the deposit. So the next stage was to go there. Because I hadn’t actually seen the place. I’d seen a photograph of it. I hadn’t actually visited the place before I bought it and so I thought I’d just go and see what it looks like. So I went and of course it was like those fairy tales with brambles everywhere, you couldn’t find the door and you expected to find some sleeping princess somewhere. But there was no sleeping princess, just a whole load of weird things around. So I have to get a caravan first of all, then because I can’t even kind of get in. So I saw this advertisement for an onsite caravan, that you could buy that you couldn’t tow it, but they would deliver it at 80 pound it was. So they delivered it and they delivered it on the comet and I had this tiny little car and so I thought oh, I’ll drag it into the garden. Because dragging it into the garden or at least I’ll clear some of the brambles. So I kind of hooked it up to the front of what was a Austin 1100 there, put it in reverse, and then revved up and went back like that and of course, the inevitable happens, was that what was a flat fronted car now look like a boat, it just kind of pulled the front of it out complete and the caravan didn’t move an inch. But I didn’t realize that I was being watched by the locals who were laughing a bit but are very nice people. So one guy came and said, Oh, I got a tractor. So anyway, he came around and he dragged the end for me and then I spent five happy years there until I had to.
David 34:55
I got this letter from Liverpool College of Art. Not sacking less than the opposite, which was equally as distressing. It said, you’ve been with us now five years, and we’re very happy with your work, you are now permanent and it made me I always came out in a rush, and I felt kind of a bit ill at that, so I thought I have to leave. So I handed in my notice, and left and then I thought, what should I do? There were other things going on, as well. So though, okay, I’ll sell the place and then move to somewhere where nobody else wants to live, which is cheap enough, and then just carry on painting and then went to the local garriage to pick up a newspaper, and they hadn’t got my newspaper that I wanted, the one with the topless woman on page three and stuff like that. They only had like, the serious things that and then it said, fellow in Fine Arts applications, Nottingham University and so I’d give that a shot , so I applied for that and I got shortlisted for the interview, and I had no experience of anything like that. So, they say, I’ll bring some examples of your work. So I hired this big lorry, and I took about 6’10 foot paintings with me for this interview, and a big projector, which I borrowed with slides, you probably don’t understand that slides, transparencies, little kind of actual images and so I put those in, and I went to it for this interview with all the, I think there was six professors there from the university and this one professor kept annoying me, I was talking about the paintings and stuff and he kept asking me to define was like arbitrary randomness, stuff like this and he was really cramping my style. So anyway, I ended up having a row with him and I thought, Oh, that’s enough, shut it now. Especially as I was halfway through, the projector broke down. So I couldn’t even carry on with that. I had to start talking in front of the paintings, of what was there. So I went out, and they’ll do the other five people there and they said, How did it go and say, Oh, yeah, I’ll just start pack it up now, so I started to pack up, and then I couldn’t believe when they said, Mr. Taborn, can you come back in, and then they said, Well, we’d like to offer you the scholarship. It’s the same rate as a senior lecturer, and you get a studio. I said, I would do it for nothing because it meant a free studio, and they said, Oh, you should have told us before, we could have saved a few pounds here. But anyway, they were truly welcoming and it was a bit of a dream come true. Because it was three years of being artist in residence in the University and the University itself, had no practical department at all, it only did history of art and so it meant that I was like, sort of like a panda or something like that, something to be kind of looked at, some strange creature in this studio that they could also send students have to if they had any kind of methodological problems. They wanted to understand some aspect of what a painter does and the only other commitment I had was an exhibition every year, and they had a beautiful gallery. So it was very, very good and it gave me the chance to really experiment. without restriction, because I had enough money for the materials and then, I started exhibiting a bit there and won a couple of prizes.
Norman 39:18
What year was this?
David : 39:40
This was 1979 to 1981. Because I was, yeah, I left the Slade in 1972 and moved into the mission whole in 1973, was there until 79 and then, the University was 79 to 81. That’s right. Yeah and also I did, they said, Oh, would you do a maybe a live class because some of the students there who just do art history, and some of the staff would quite like to learn how to draw. So I set up a little life class every Thursday evening, which they paid me extra for as well, I wouldn’t have done that for nothing as well. But by that time, I was smart. I said, Don’t keep saying, I’ll do it for nothing. So, and I remember the professor and his name, you couldn’t make it up. His name was Alex Smart, Professor Alex Smart, Smart Alec. It’s true. Yeah. Professor Alex Smart couldn’t believe it, I thought he was joking and anyway, he turns up, he wants to do a bit of drawing in the live class, and he’s spent his lifetime doing a bit of drawing here and he brought in this tiny pencil and I never thought of a correlation. I find a correlation between the size of a pencil, except it clearly existed in this case, and taking these tiny little pencils, and he’s sharpening it, and he drew like an architect, if you know what I mean and I said, Look Alex, because I called him Alex. I said, Well, what about this one?Why don’t you borrow my big fat pencil and also, why don’t you not sit down when you’re drawing? Why don’t you stand up? That way, you can step back and you can move around, because he was like, it was like something you find in an amusement arcade, where you put a penny in, and they knock nails in shoes, or whatever. Am I going too fast through my life for you, or you’re too slow?
Norman 41:38
This is perfect. I love it.
David 41:40
So, anyway, I got to the end of that and that was good and so then I thought, What now? So I got two kids by them. Because in the intervening period, I’ve had many incidences with the opposite sex and so one of them resulted in marriage and then I had two children and we were there and say, What should we do after? And I said, Well, I’d quite like to move back down to London, really, because, it’s good to see galleries and stuff like that. So we moved back down to London and then I was on this visiting circuit, where the way the system used to go then was that you’ll be offered a day as a visiting lecturer, and you go, and you do a tutorial with maybe half a dozen students and it would be you with a full time artists coming in and doing tutorials as against the like, the full time staff who would be there, doing the other stuff and so, I used to do that at various different colleges, Birmingham, Nottingham, some in London and that was okay for a while and then I thought, No, no, I’ll just go with, just with the painting. So, I kind of carried on painting, and then, that’s when I worked out this system, this cosmic system. Because, if I’m nothing, I am a cosmologist, and so I worked out that if you’re broke, and you keep the faith, then a minute before midnight, something will turn up, and that’s what’s happened ever since. I get broke, nothing’s happening and then just when I’m kind of reached, when I’m maxed out on my credit cards or something comes tapping out the window, and says, Oh, here’s some money for you and so that’s what happened, really, I got a bit broke, but then I got exhibitions, oh, and factual nonsense, the gallery and so on, that was the next thing that while I was at the Slade this, this judge and his wife started to buy some work from me and they invited me to, Oh, they got divorced. That’s right and then she was getting remarried. So she invited me to the wedding and then she had her son, Joshua, who then was 17 years old and he came up to me in the bar, and he said, very, very posh Joshua and he said, Have you got an agent? And I said, No, because I don’t really get agents in our world. He said, Well, can I be your agent? I said, Yeah, help yourself and suddenly off he went, and I thought nothing of it and then about six months later, he said, I’ve got an exhibition venue. So it managed to get me an exhibition and then he got me a couple of sales and so on and then we kind of built up this good kind of working relationship and then he wanted to open his own gallery and so we found somewhere in Hoxton and he wanted to call it Factual Nonsense because I’d done a painting the previous year, we tried called Factual Nonsense. Again, descriptive of vintage tinian space, this kind of in between space and and so he said, could he call it Factual Nonsense and I said, Yeah, as long as people know that I didn’t kind of call the painting after the gallery because that would have been so undignified, wasn’t it? It would have been a different type of nepotism. In fact, that’s a good case to get another word into the equation. May I just interject with one of my favorite words, which is palindrome? Yeah and I’m kind of a little bit obsessed with palindrome partly because in a world of asymmetry, asymmetry is such a beautiful thing and you probably already know the longest palindrome. Can I say it?
Norman 46:29
Yes. Sure.
David 46:30
Okay and he said narrative palindrome which I love, which is a man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Yeah. So if you write that down, it’s a beautiful, symmetrical palindrome. Yeah, a man, a plan, a canal, Panama. You can test that and by the time we come to the end of the interview, if you can get right, there are prizes because you can take anything off the top shelf.
Hayden 47:01
David, I’m sure you’re aware of the word for fear of palindromes, right? A fear of palindromes.
David 47:10
A fear of palindromes?
Hayden 47:11
Yeah.
David 47:12
Palindrome Phobia.
Hayden 47:14
I think it’s technically called Aibohphobia.
David 47:16
Is it really?
Hayden 47:18
Yeah. Which is a palindrome in itself.
Hayden 47:21
Oh, yeah. You must be so proud of your boy and I tell you, you must give him a lot of free time.
Hayden 47:33
Way too much.
David 47:34
Yeah, exactly. But I forgot where we were.
Norman 47:42
The exhibition and Joshua.
David 47:45
So we had the inaugural exhibition there, which was, I also titled a painting A Guide for the Perplexed and so that was the exhibition was, the first exhibition is called A Guide for the Perplexed and that was kind of pretty well received and he organized a retrospective, which traveled to Germany and in different parts of Great Britain, as well as his gallery. So that was a good relationship. But sadly, well after, I think we’ve been together about four or five years, and we had a little bit of a Barney, a little bit of an argument and we kind of fell out for a few months, but then thanks to his mother, she wanted us to kind of make friends again. So we kind of made friends. But then before we got to meet for the last time, he died. He’s 26 years old and he got a few bad habits and anyway, he kind of lived in the gallery, slept above where my paintings were kept, there was a little kind of sleeping area there and coincidentally, gone through the Basquiat exhibition at the serpentine and of course, Basquiat was also 26 when he died and Joshua had a lot to drink, imbibed a lot of stuff and also got into the habit, I think, of taking a little nip of something before he fell asleep. So, anyway, he must have either intentionally or unintentionally choked on his own vomit on Tuesday and but he wasn’t found until Saturday because people say Oh, the gallery’s not open and it wasn’t till they kind of broke in and found him. So that was a great sadness because he studied painting for a bit. But then he studied history of art at the Courtauld Institute and he was very, very good and in fact, he organized, the Courtauld Institute, of course, was a very, very traditional place to study history of art and their history of art pretty much ended with Cubism, they didn’t kind of move up very far. So when he was a student, he organized what became known as the east wing collection, where he got contemporary artists, myself included, and he organized an exhibition in the Courtauld of contemporary work, which still goes on. So he was very instrumental in moving in some of the traditional kinds of academic constraints that history of art departments sometimes tend to have, because I don’t know if it’s the same in Canada, but it tended to be very much a kind of a chronological sequence, if you are studying history of art. So you’re going in the first year, and you’d be be studying old art, a second year up study, not quite so old art and then in the third year, you’d be going straight, rushing straight up to kind of Cubism and Dadaism and a bit of futurism and then I think, it ended at the end of the First World War, the studies and so he managed to bring about some enlightenment there. But as I say, he died and that was very sad and in fact, he’s still spoken of greatly. There is a website that still uses Factual Nonsense, which is run by someone I exhibited with at Joshua’s in order to keep the whole kind of ethos going, which is pretty good. Yeah. So anyways, that kind of finished and what happened then?
David 52:23
Something else happened. Oh, yes. Then I got nominated, then I was broke again. Then I got nominated for a Nesta Fellowship. Now Nesta stands for the National Endowment for Science Technology in the Arts, and it was basically set up with lottery money and it was to give people a chance to develop their work and hopefully, cross pollinate the other disciplines, science and technology. So I was nominated and then given another three year fellowship. But you stayed in your own studio, they gave you plenty of money to develop your work and so that took care of another three, that was 2003 by that time to 2006 and then as soon as that finished, I stumbled across a fellowship in Brooklyn, at the Urban Glass. I saw this advertisement, and they said, we’re looking for an established artist fellow to join, do this fellowship and he or she doesn’t need to know anything about glass, or neon, or anything to do it. So I thought, Oh, I’m your man, whatever anybody was endowed with ignorance of what glass does, it was me. I’m the closest don’t come to class and it really was close, was when I was carrying a big watercolor and the wind blew it and it’s smashed in my face and and I kind of cut the side of my face and I went into the office and said, Oh, and the secretary kind of fainted. This was the university and I went into the laboratory and looked in the mirror, and when I smiled, because he saw the smile, the side of my face opened up as well. Yeah. Because, with glass you don’t feel anything, it’s so sharp. So anyway, I didn’t use that as part of my preamble at Urban Glass Studios, but it meant that I could go over there without really knowing anything about glass and they wanted somebody to go in because they’re full of kind of techies, who can blow glass and slumped glass, do neon, with all the kind of craft skills that are necessary, but I think they wanted some conceptual input from somebody who might say, I wonder what would happen if you did this? Or is this possible? So I went over and did that and that was such a lovely time I had there. People were really nice, and I enjoyed it as well. You know Capgras Syndrome? Imposter syndrome. Well, anyway, I used to walk, I had that his apartment in Flatbush, and I used to walk to the studio in Brooklyn and I used to have to walk over this kind of zebra crossing thing, past the GI recruitment place and I always wore camouflage trousers then and a T shirt and I got my bald head and everything and almost every days, some young recruit would go, like salute me, as I was crossing over the road, and so I just kind of, because if I speak, I have an English accent and I know, my cover will be blown and I can no longer pretend that I’m a member of the Special Forces, like, I’m a seal, I don’t know, whatever they are, whatever animal they call themselves. Yeah and so that was also a part of it and from that subsequently, they wanted me to have a show in the Robert Lehmann Gallery. Yeah and this was for 2008, Easter of 2008 and I don’t know if you remember the Easter of 2008. But that was when the Lehman Brothers collapsed and the world collapsed, everything, entropy ruled that particular moment.
Norman 57:16
I remember that very well.
David 57:18
Yeah, well, I just put up all my paintings and all my artworks and my neon pieces in this exhibition and everybody was kind of running out of their offices, with a boxes of stuff that they got, of many tissues and everything, but it meant that nobody was buying anything and so that was it really. didn’t sell a thing and then came back to London. That was 2008. Yeah and, it’s been vicissitude at all ever since because that’s another nice word, isn’t it? I like nice words.
Norman 58:01
It sounds like you like nice words.
David 58:03
I like nice words. Oh, that’s partly why I did this social and this kind of distraction into the world of books. Quite some years back now, about five years ago, I think something like that and that was partly because I love words, and I’ve never used them in the work I do and in fact, it’s almost been a battle to rig myself of any of those kind of narrative associations or figurative associations within the work. I always go is a bit of a purist in that sense, having been influenced by abstract expressionism and post painterly abstraction, all that kind of stuff, where you didn’t want anything to associate itself in logistically, with the look of the real world, and I remember doing a few watercolors and I ended up writing. Suddenly like I wish I could use words some suddenly really banal, childish, and like a very high cringe quotient and I remember doing that, I’m an artist and then my second wife, Vanessa, gave gave me this book that you’d come across kind of a law book, and so I thought, yeah, so I opened this this law book, and I wanted to make it kind of float in a cage so I made this two metal cages, one on top of the other because I’ve always been obsessed with walnuts with window nest, so we’ll probably get onto until barn and humans quote, which you asked for, some kind of telling quotes. Well, before we get into that telling quote, one of his other famous quotes, is when he defines sculpture as being something that you bump into when you’re stepping back to admire a painting. Yeah and so the the implications there are that, something which doesn’t require you to suspend disbelief and to believe that you’re moving via two dimensions into three dimensions, and you’re climbing through this window, which is what wall pieces and paintings do, but it’s kind of sculptural, and then that’s its limitation. I don’t fully subscribe to it but it is a kind of a useful clause. So because I wasn’t able to use the words in the way that somebody like Anselm Kiefer might use in his paintings, I felt very self conscious about that. So then I started manipulating these books, and I got this book that they’ve given me, and so I set it in, you know Moire patterns? Well, if you very often see them, if you’ve got two sets of either vertical lines or grids, and they move in front of each other, they form this kind of silk like movement. Have you ever seen that or come across it? Sometimes you’ll be driving past a double mesh something, and you’ll see it’ll appear to kind of move, and that’s called the Moire effect, M o i r e and so I wanted this effect. So as I kind of captured this book, opened it up like a butterfly and then I poured resin, polyester resin, clear resin onto it until all the pages became translucent and so that it was all gobbledygook. This law book, except that the one recurring theme that was legible, was A R T, because that will be the start of Article five, Article six, in the law book and so all you saw was art, art, art, art and I thought, yeah, that kind of that will do for me. So I did that. But it then led me to kind of look at books as objects, but also I saw them both as objects and as kind of pixels, if that makes sense. So when I was working on an individual book, I would be working on it in the way that one might acknowledge a single pixel as being part of a broader hole. So I had all the books around the studio, like a murmuration. You know what a murmuration is? No? I gotta tell you. I have to be a lexicon really.
David 1:02:56
Now, murmuration is, when all the birds form this organism, they’re flying back, and they create this flow, starlings when dusk falls. If they fly, that they appear to be, like, jellyfish or something in the sky. Yeah, that’s called a murmuration and it’s where the little bits and pieces come together to form an organism, a big organism of themselves. Yeah. So anyway, that’s the way I saw the books and so I would work on each one and see what it fed me, whether the title affected me, whether the look of the book affected me, or whether I needed to invent something within that and then I just kind of went around modifying, and I ended up with my equivalent of a Kindle book. It’s not very good in an interview, but I’ll show you one of them. You see this, this syringe? Yeah. The syringes full of the ground, book, or bed short story. Yeah. So that you inject the book, the ground book. It’s a kind of a Kindle equivalent, except that it’s instant. You don’t have to read the book. You simply have it intravenously. So those were some of the different aspects of booness that I was looking into, which again, ultimately meant that I did 250 of them and then I thought, I’ll do a book of the books. So then I constructed this book, full of images and little introductions to them and that was called the data rail of delusion. There’s one on the walls. Data rail. So, the story behind that, you’re not going to get a chance to ask questions actually. With that one, I got the book done and it was a limited edition of 100 and each one was going to be special or was specially constructed with little convex mirrors, so that you saw your reflection inside the book. So you’re actually in the book itself, and I got all these set up, and then there’s this Mayfair gallery and they they said, Oh yeah, so we’ll have an exhibition in a launch in October, show the books and launch the limited edition and and then tragedy struck, and the money person behind the gallery, sadly died and the gallery closed and so that’s where it stands now. So I still have drawers full of limited edition books and all these books, although I’ve sold about 30 books over the years since like separately to art collectors. But that’s always had to be put on the backburner. So one of these days, I’m hoping to do something with a book because the book was finished, and then I started to kind of revisit canvases again, and started to rekindle my affection for gesture reality, and that type of haptic sensation that had been messing with the books. What I haven’t mentioned, and it’s kind of you to ask, was the Homunculus period, which was in between Factual Nonsense, and the books and the Homunculus period, I chose the the kind of generic title Homunculus, really just because I saw each one of them as kind of some kind of self portrait. But basically, what I was doing was, I was looking for some other means of expressivity, other than paint, and brushes, because I began to suspect that I was doing these kind of heavily pastos paintings, and quite gestural, and that it was maybe not challenging enough. So I thought, I’ll try different methodologies and so I first one I did was I kind of painted on some metal and some wood and stuff, and then I got an angle grinder, and I kind of studied drawing with the angle grinder and then that led on to a whole new series where I was forever looking for a new way of making a mark, but also in a not dissimilar way and my descriptions are quite meridius. So you’ll find that, starting off on the outside and come back to the inside seamlessly is that I would bury things. I would have a sheet of wood or a piece of metal or something and I would bury things, actual objects or colors or I would route and fill it with polyester resin or epoxy resin and then I would paint over it like a complete painting. So you see nothing and then I begin to excavate a bit like archaeologists, so I’d start cutting back and finding these, in my head, what kind of absolutes because they were there for all time. So I was I was going through this process of unearthing these things, which of course was a very obvious analogy to the concept of deconstruction, and I’d always been enamored with painters like Dada, or Gorky, where they would have layer upon layer upon layer of scum balls and glazes and so on and so you’ve got to look at this surface and as you got closer to it, it will begin to unfold and you could peel back the various layers and so you’d kind of doing what we all want to do eventually which is turn the arrow of time round. So you would start looking back into the origin of the painting itself and I’ve always enjoyed stuff, actual stuff, physicality, the materials or the tools or anything that you can actually touch. Anything that is kind of antidotal to the virtual world that we are, as we speak now inhabiting and so I always wanted this manipulating stuff. So, that made a whole series of works were done using construction materials, and pretty much everything. I was using welding, blow torches and one of the biggest ones I did, because one of the, I suppose one of the definitions that I like about artists, it’s the difference between the intention and the results. So, you’re looking at what happens when an activity intervenes, and it takes you somewhere that you could never, you could never simply travel in a cerebral way. You arrive at it, through this, this kind of physical narrative, if you like this journey of doing things. So, that’s trying to find something that would have that kind of tension of ambiguity that would excite me in the same way that again, back to somebody like Banaz, what would excite me is that I would be 20 foot away from Banaz and I go, Yes, I really kind of respond to the color and stuff like that, as I got closer and closer, the materiality of it would reveal itself. But not only that, so that not only would I begin to see the layers underneath, but also begin to become conversant with Banaz’s attempt to introduce time into the equation. So for instance, you’ll be looking at Banaz, and there’ll be, it’ll slowly, notice that there’s a little dog in the corner that’s been painted pretty much the same color, the same tone as the background, so you don’t notice it for quite some time. So it emerges afterwards, you also notice that the cups are tilted slightly upwards, the vessels are slightly upwards in the kind of Oriental perspective way, so that you’re not just looking at the object, but you’re looking at what’s inside them. So you’re getting that kind of full narrative and of course, one of the things that he always wanted in his work was he wanted to create an equivalent to going into a room full of people that you’ve never been into before. The way in which things slowly unfold and reveal themselves. As you begin to settle down and you lose your self consciousness, you’ll begin to notice things and so he wanted to emulate that, or try and try and find an equivalent experience to that sensation and I’ve always found that as well, I want both things. I want the window to be a real window, where something is going on in there and other world is going on there on the wall and I also want to be rejected as soon as I get close enough to acknowledge the material that forms the painting itself and so I get thrown out and then I come back in and throw it out and back in. So it’s this constant kind of bouncing backwards and forwards. This suspended disbelief, as it’s often called, where you leave the one realm and you move into another realm. But as soon as you’re in that realm, you’re thrown back out again and an Australian psychiatrist, I can’t remember his name, psychologist, rather, was describing why it is that humans need toys, and again, his simplistic description was that we need something to mediate between the interior reality and the exterior reality. So we have these toys that hover between the two types of reality, the subjective and the objective and again, that’s another reasonable definition of wearing artery sides, for me anyway. Sorry, you were asking another question.
Norman 1:14:44
Yeah. I’m curious about you’ve got all these different layers and then yeah, I’m listening to you talk about it and each layer unveiling another layer and another layer. Where do you start with something like that? I’m just trying to get your thought process.
David 1:14:58
Well again, one of the things that is common to every kind of art form, is that the bottom line is, you have to trust your responses. If it feels right, then it is right, or I’m just going to contradict myself now. Or if it makes you feel perplexed, or if it makes you cringe, then it’s likely to be even better than you expected, because so many things I’ve done, I’ve looked at them and thought, This is not good, and then I’ve kind of put it to one side, and I’ve gone to work on another thing, because that’s that. I tend to work on many things at the same time, concurrently, so I would leave it for a bit, and then over a period of time, my peripheral vision would kick in, and I’d start noticing it and sometimes it would call me over and say, I want a bit of attention. So I would give it a bit of attention, either smack around the head, like, irritated or something like that, just to get it to go or do something else. But sometimes, I would think it’s not as bad as I thought it was, and then maybe a week later I go, that’s actually finished, even though it went in a different direction to the one that my head had constrain me to believe was the direction it was going in. So that’s where the activity does come in, you see, it does take you somewhere, how you introduce time into the equation. One of the things as well, that always excited me, from when I very first came across people like de Kooning, any of the abstract expressionists really was the frozen moment, the gesture that is frozen in time. So with de Kooning, a big sweeping movement of paint, or multiple colors of paint across the surface, which would then dry and that would be, like frozen in time, that would be a moment, that would be not just a moment, like a lump of rock, it would be a moment like a choreographed dance. It would signify the speed at which that mark was made and so you’d suddenly find yourself looking at a painting, as an orchestration, as a series of movements across the surface, as well as the other things, as well as the way they associate themselves, with the real world. The way the form goes, the relationship to the framing age, which incidentally, I’ve always been a bit obsessed with the framing age as well. Because, the age is where the One World Ends, we’re talking windows here, where the One World Ends, and the other world begins and so I’ve always found myself, like, if I go into a painting, in fact, my system for looking at art is very straightforward. I go into an exhibition, I almost sprint around it, 60 mile an hour, and I notice maybe two or three paintings, and then I go off and have a coffee, and then I come back down again and then it’s a bit like an interview, and I’ve shortlisted a few paintings unknowingly and then I get drawn over to look more closely at a painting and I look at the painting, and I move around within those four corners. But then, also, I start traveling, like a snail around the edge of it, almost seeing the kind of linear relationships of the color and so on to the framing age itself. I think that’s partly to do with my early interest in what was notionally called deductive structure, like, Frank Stellar and in fact, our friend Barnett Newman, where you would have a structure which related to the framing edge itself, it would be a verticals or horizontals, but somehow, it would point to the extremities of the cage, if you like, or the arena in which the activity took place and, so the edge itself would seem to somehow amplify the objectiveness of the painting, without losing out on the wallness or the windowness, if that makes sense.
Hayden 1:19:44
Hey there guys and gals. That’s it for part one of our interview with David Taborn. Make sure to tune in next time to hear those interviews. As always, make sure to like and subscribe to the podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. That’s it for me and I’ll see you next time.
Hayden 0:02
Hey guys and gals. Welcome to part two of our episode with David Taborn. If you haven’t heard part one yet, make sure to go back and listen to that. David was such a character to interview and honestly, I could listen to him talk all day. So you should definitely go back and check out the rest. If you are a fan of the show, we’d love to see you in our new Facebook group. You can click on the link in the description, or even reach out to me or the group or Facebook page personally, and we’ll make sure you get in there. We’d love to hear from you and love to hear your thoughts on the show. So make sure you let us know. That’s enough housekeeping for now and here’s the rest of the interview.
Norman 0:50
I also loved the way that you described how sometimes you have to cringe and when you were describing that I’m sitting there going, yeah, that’s kind of like life too. Yeah, you have moments in life where you just cringe and then over a period of time you look back and go, Well, that wasn’t a bad move. Oh, that was a door opener and so as you’re talking about that, I’m sitting there going, Man, I’ve got a lot of cringe worthy events in my life, that if I look back at is starting to bloom. But anyways, you could relate that to life.
David 1:24
Well, trust your cringes. I mean, I think that goes to your cringes. That’s the slogan. To the future.
Norman 1:33
Yeah. There we go. Hey Hayden, do you have any questions?
Hayden 1:36
Yeah, just even along that line. Like, I think it’s also, if you’re cringing at something, or you’re evoking that kind of emotion, you’re capturing something, right? Like you’ve actually moved yourself to make that or have that.
David 1:51
Exactly. Yeah. It makes it visceral. Yeah, it kind of taps into your inner being, because we’re all very complex and we all have kind of different hang ups, as well as our different propensities, and just to locate things that actually touch you is life enhancing. I mean, you’d have to be truly on the spectrum to fully avoid too many cringes in your life, and funnily enough, can I talk about one painting I made which was kind of the end of the homunculus ones, and it was called, it’s a six foot by six foot piece made out of copper pipe on the outside, and it was called Joey The Musical Voice and it related to a famous case history called Joey the Musical Boy, which was this early pioneer of autism, Bruno Bettelheim ran this clinic to deal with autism. He himself had spent some time in booth involved anyway, he came across this young boy called Joey who could only exist or thought of himself as as a machine, and could only feed through pipes and have to be wired up for everything, and had no sense of self other than the fact of being a machine that had to have fuel and all these kind of things and that was a kind of a strange homunculus feeling for me anyway and so when I found out that Bettelheim himself was a bit of a fraud, in that he used to cherry pick, so people would visit the clinic, and he would have severe cases of autism and then apparently cured children who’d suffered from autism, but in fact, it was all a little bit manipulated. So you’d bring out some jolly little person, pretty well balanced to perhaps hardly have any problems at all, and they say, you should have seen him before he was, it’s just like that, that guy that’s all kind of wired up there. So anyway, that was the start of this thing, this idea of self mythologizing and creating our own storyline, our own backstory which we all do, and and in fact, I was going to joke about if you believe anything I say then more for you. But of course I am veracity personified, but that apart there was part of the subject was I’d been to an auction sale and I saw in the distance this work on paper, and I thought that looked interesting. I went over, and it was by Joseph Beuys, and he wasn’t in the catalogers like, abstract thing. So I know I put a bit in, got it for a couple of 100 pounds and I thought, Oh that’s great. That’s really nice and then another one came up and so I got those and I thought, well, if I get them authenticated, I’m going to be a rich person.
David 5:13
So then I thought, How do I do that? Anyway, the only way of doing it would be to contact Frau Boyce who lives in Dusseldorf in Germany and give her 500 euros and then she would say, Yes, it is. No, it isn’t and I thought, well, I don’t really like that very much, especially if she comes back and says, No, it isn’t, I’ve just spent five 500 euros for that. So I thought, here’s another example of liminality. It’s like shredding it’s cat. It’s either a boy or it isn’t a boy, but at the moment, it’s hovering between one or the other. So I put that in the painting as well within this frame, and then it led me on to Wagner. So I was reading a bit about and I was kind of reading about that a little bit and then I came across some aspects of anti semitism that he was involved with and I thought, Oh, that is very strange, because also he backtracked on that Wagner. So there was this duality going on there. So that’s another binary thing going on here and then I was thinking about Freud, Sigmund Freud and his relationship and by coincidence, another serendipitous occurring. Somebody said, Oh, we’re re-upholstering Freud’s sofa, what used to be Freud’s sofa from his house in Hampstead and they’d been using it on a stage for some kind of set, but it had to be the actual one. So I said, Oh well, can I have a bit of the old plus and a bit of the old innards? So they got me some of the horse hair and they got me some of the innards of it and then I came across these pews, the pews, the chairs that you have where you can put your hymnbook at the back behind them, in mission halls and stuff. I had one of those. So I sliced it in half so that would fit it against the wall and then I stuffed the horsehair into the box where the Bibles would go, because that they looked exactly like pubic hair, like coming out and then I had the Wagner’s, I started to melt them and they formed part of this thing going on. But of course, also I got these pipes traveling around the outside around the framing age, which I then plumbed into the chair and I plumbed into everything so it’s a bit like Joey, in his condition. I kept the whole painting on the inside alive by plumbing really by connecting pipes here, there and everywhere and also I broke the leg of one of the legs of the chair, and I bandaged it with Freud’s sofa cloth. Anyway, so that basically what that was dealing with, was self mythologizing. Which you had like with Barbie, you had it with Bettelheim, you had it with Freud. But also, I don’t know if you know, but with Beuys, he was always banging on about how he was in the Luftwaffe and he got shot down over the Crimea and he was always saying, Oh yes, these groups have kind of taught our truck driver once they rescued me and they wrapped me in felt and grease to keep me warm and that’s why I use Felton grease in some of the works I do. It turned out really that the rest of the Luftwaffe battalion or whatever they called, went on a search party and they found him and they brought him back. So he kind of created this very interesting myth because he wanted to be a shame and he wanted to be dealing with that other world. One of his famous performances with a wolf, a live wolf and so on. So, I mean, I don’t hold that against him, but it means that a lot of autobiographies are written with almost Trumpian disregard to facts.
Hayden 9:23
I had a question actually, because you brought up that definition of art for yourself, like Wittgenstein or Wittgensteinian and I look at it, when did you kind of define that for yourself? Because I feel like with composers I met, I’ll put my camera on, that’ll help. I feel like I’m at least for myself, and for a few people know, like we’re always kind of like looking for the next definition of it or like trying to constantly redefine it for ourselves or what music is or what art is, but like, it seems like you have a solid grasp, at least of what it is for you. When did you discover that and how has that helped you focus your work?
David 10:06
Yeah. Again, I think pretty much most of what I do is a posterior or phenomenological. So the act occurs first and then I slowly resonates or, slowly insinuates itself into my consciousness about what the ramifications of it are. But also, because I’m interested in things like musicality, when your father is asking about what, either when something is finished, or when the image emerges that you’re happy with? Well, it’s exactly the same way. Very often, if I look at a piece that I’ve done, then, if the music’s right, then it’s right and I’m not a synesthete in that sense, in wholesome sense of seeing numbers as colors or anything like that, but I certainly make a correlation between, music and the relatively inanimate art object, but one which has the timelessness and multi directionality of something like a painting and music itself, because it’s kind of constantly moving backwards and forwards as well. But, like, there’s an artist June who was a great influence, he was a member of the Fluxus group, and I don’t know if you know of his work, but he was the one who first actually did the superhighway, the global superhighway, where he had multiple events taking place across the globe. He was originally trained as a pianist. But of course, his work moved very easily through the different disciplines of object making with his robots, and so on to prepared piano pieces, not unlike cage only, much more violent and in fact, on one of the performances that he did, our old friend Joseph Beuys came in unannounced at the end and has been playing this piece on a piano that was full of objects that were likely to cut your fingers off or do things. So, it kind of prevented you from moving freely across the keyboard because you had to negotiate these things. Anyway, when the piece was ended, Beuys came in with a sledgehammer and proceeded to smash the whole thing to smithereens and that they actually kind of struck up a quite a useful relationship thereafter, because of that type of almost nihilistic, although it isn’t really nihilistic, but what it does is it kind of sheds light on the commonality. I mean, the one thing that we’re all interested in is viscera, isn’t it? We’re all interested in the way in which we’re somehow touched by things. Well, at least there are exceptions and I don’t want to talk about architects again, but there you go. Yeah. So, if something moves you, then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s life enhancing and when I’m working on something, I want to be surprised and that’s why I’m working on these large watercolors at the moment. I like nothing more than to go to bed with something that is drying, that I have no idea ultimately how it’s going to end up in the morning, whether it’s going to be a good thing or whether I have to work on it some more or whatever, but there’s going to be this kind of nighttime transmogrification from wetness to dryness or whatever and the hues are going to change, the tone is going to change. The look of it is going to change and when I wake up in the morning, and I can see in my head how it was when I went to bed, because one of the things that I do have is a little bit of an eidetic memory. So, a little bit of me, like, manages to keep images in my head and then in the morning, I get a look at it, I’m all kind of excited to see how it is. Invariably, my heart sinks. But I mean, my heart has sunk so many times. Yeah and you have to be very careful. Of course, when you get wood out of water that’s been in there for centuries, don’t you because it falls apart. Yes. So treat me gently during this interview.
Norman 15:52
I always look at events of the world similar. Going to bed wet, COVID. What’s going to happen at the end of it when you wake up, when the world wakes up? What’s it going to look like? 9:11, 2008 those are sort of ongoing pieces of art in my eyes.
David 16:12
Exactly and the thing is, it takes a long time to I mean, that they always say with isms in the art world, like that woman says in 10 year periods, and you’ve got to be out of that 10 year period, or however long it is. Out of that context, before you can objectify, before you can kind of see a little more clearly what it meant and sometimes, like now the stuff I’m working on now, for me, resonates and sheds light on the stuff I was doing in the 90s and I never thought I would return to aspects of that. But that syntax and that vocabulary that I was dealing with then. But it’s different now. It’s like you never stand in the same stream twice, isn’t it? Anyway, by the way, I just realized, I’ve been kind of rambling on so much. You have to excuse me, but I do get over excited when I get attention.
Norman 17:18
Oh, no ideas, you made my job extremely easy. You’ve already answered most of the questions. I am kind of curious. You were talking about something coming full circle. Are you finding now that it’s been 30 years? Basically, since factual nonsense? Are you starting to see elements of your work from 30 years ago coming back?
David 17:41
Well. What do you mean, generally?
Norman 17:49
Yeah, just generally. Like I always find in my life, something will happen and I look back and it’s just, it’s come full circle.
David 17:58
Yeah, again, I think I used the metaphor Mobius Strip, where you travel on the inside, and it becomes the outside and the other way around. So what seems to occur is that, and again, it relates to everything we spoke about before, about the way in which time has to intervene as well, in order to clarify things is that a lot of the things that I thought factual nonsense were about, are not in quite the same order that I thought they were. Because obviously, my perceptions are slightly different. But also there were a lot of things in the ether at that time, which I think is what you’re probably getting that is the fact that the context, the cultural context of that time was different to certainly to the way it is now and also, it was the beginning of cybernetics in the sense of the way in which we could manipulate reality instantly, or we could make decisions instantly as soon as, like Photoshop came in,as soon as this came in, and decisions could be made instantly and I think for me, that made it even more important to have a gestation period, because that’s the one thing that is missing with instant responses is the way in which things get modified or even torn up during a gestation period, the that we kind of catch up with things and when you look for instance, on Instagram, or any of the kind of social media pages where you can tell pretty accurately if an image had been constructed on the computer in the first place, or if the decisions were made, emulating the kind of cybernetic condition of instantaneity. Because there isn’t that hard one image, that sense of something being, battled for, and where you’re in urges are either being accommodated or being rejected through the process, but at least ways they’re being questioned. So there isn’t that kind of interrogation that goes on, by and large with a lot of the kind of instant graphics and in fact, I first noticed that strangely, I’m only thinking now, but when you look at early films, and you look at later films, and you see, goodness, those early films, they spent ages looking at the side of that woman’s face from the same position. Whereas, you look at a film like 30 years later, and it’s like, bang, bang, bang, you move from there to there to there, like, it’s all staccato and this is a vast generalization, but what it means is that the kind of thing that I subscribe to, by and large, I still subscribe to now, which is the way in which the human condition can somehow have light shed upon it by the mere fact of almost Neanderthal manipulation, because one of the things I always felt was, if anybody hasn’t benefited from evolution, it was me. I once got sent a postcard by the way, of this Neanderthal man and when it came through the door, and it was a mockup of a Neanderthal man, and I thought I don’t remember that being taken and it looked, I thought it was me, and it was this Neanderthal, totally unevolved.
Norman 22:22
Was he wearing green silk?
David 22:27
Yes, I know. Yeah. But, these context makes a big difference and of course, one of the strange battles that I think we all have, except for your light, of course, because he’s still formative, he’s still is so young and is the fact that those like formative years that when your appetite is really, you’re really hungry for something, and you’re looking around and pick it up, tenets from here and tenets from there and they kind of stick with you and they become, I think the most difficult things to question. When you said about, like the cringe quotient, well, and I mentioned also perplexedness, because I’m always looking to be perplexed as well. Because sometimes I’ve been to exhibitions. The first one I went to was fully perplexed was that there was a neo expressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy in London many, many decades ago and I went there and I thought, I don’t like this, it might give me a headache, I got migraine coming on and stuff and I was going on kind of feeble, and I go through an existential crisis, and then when I got back home, I kept seeing these images and one of them of course, was Philip Guston, the way his work changed almost on the flip of a coin from being lyrical abstraction, during his most abstract expressionist period, to being almost cartoon like large scale crumb brothers cartoons, massive things and I looked at them and the first thing you think is, what a betrayal. He kind of let the side down, he’s loss of faith. Because you’ve got all these kinds of tenets, all these rules that you’ve absorbed by osmosis, the jam really thought through, and you’re saying, Yeah, this is what’s important, not what he’s doing, that’s superficial, that’s cosmetic. You come up with all kinds of cliches, they’re all put downs you can think of that you would exploit at a dinner party to raise your status. So you start putting them out at these people like that and I was getting like these headaches and stuff and then I thought, I can go back and have another look. So I went back in and had another look and, after about three visits, I was sold. I thought, Goodness mio, this is so exciting, that really questioning this, that questioning that, and I have to come back again and I noticed that there were things kind of going on inside me that were questioning it. Same with the first kind of 70s manifestation of postmodernism, where people would start dredging up mythology of subject matter, so you couldn’t move for minor tours. So, it’s also a start of the kind of feminism and spare ribbons stuff as well. So you got, if you step back into a minor tour, trip over an egg, there were all these kinds of symbolic objects around, and everybody wanted to be like tissue, and everybody wanted to use Greek words in their titles and he was like, this is somehow going to give them status by creaming off what’s gone before, and showing just how well informed you are. So, there are all these kinds of movements and of course, your own work is situated, because it’s your own work and it’s a lifetime’s thing, then yeah, it’s going through all of these little conduits, isn’t it? It’s going through these little sitcoms, so to speak. Does that answer it? Maybe? I don’t know.
Norman 26:43
Yeah. It does.
David 26:47
I have my own mobius strip, I tell you.
Hayden 26:52
One thing I’d like to just hear from you. I mean, you mentioned how there’s different phases of art, like 10 year blocks or so and, if you’re working through those periods, your work is going to be influenced by that. But then there’s also the element of like, there’s you inside all of your work throughout those periods. I’m curious, like, where is David within work through that lineage? Because I mean, you hear that in musicians and composers, you can tell a Wagner piece from a Beethoven piece for obvious reasons, yeah. But like, Where are you inside all of it?
David 27:33
Well, of course, I mean again, I’m always grateful for other artists’ statements and of course, Robert Motherwell said, the artist is the last to know and so as a practitioner, in a way, you can’t really afford to do anything other than feel relevant or not feel relevant. But try and keep in touch with what feels right, given your own limitations, given your own preoccupations, and so sometimes, like, at the moment, like the number of times that I’ve read over these many years I’ve been painting that painting is dead in the magazines, like headlines. Whenever there’s a kind of a new conceptual movement, or whenever there’s an element again, to do with computer art, that they always want to make these kind of blanket statements about things and one of the factors that is exactly as it is in music, is that if it’s good, it’s timeless, and it is revisitable and that’s what you want in art is something that you can revisit and find something because you are different. So you visit the same stream, you step in the same stream, but it’s a different stream, because you’re different, you’re older, you’ve experienced more, you’re looking for different things and so, if something is timeless, like if you go and see a good Titian or a good guy, again, a good bar, then it’s going to touch you, it’s going to make sense to you and you’re going to be able to extrapolate as well as just simply be moved by it. You’re going to be able to steal a few things from it, and say, Oh, this is an interesting way to do it. Like, one of the things that I at one stage stole from Banagher was his working method of putting in a great big canvas up and working on a couple of things at the same time and not deciding on what size they were going to be. But waiting until they kind of expanded and then cutting it out, framing it and saying, okay, that’s the size it’s going to be and then of course, he was notorious for, it’d be invited round some buyer to say, Oh, it’s lovely painting I bought from you last year and then, halfway through the dinner party come out, get his brushes start working on it a bit more. So, it’s that kind of relationship that you hope for, you hope that like I don’t burn very much in my star. I burned funnily enough, a couple of weeks back, I burnt a couple of canvases that I absolutely knew they were rubbish and I’d never allowed myself to say that they were rubbish until that moment that I decided I wanted to have a fire in the garden, and couldn’t find any wood anywhere. So it was all mitigated. Because I’m so self-obsessed, I did a video of it burning on my smartphone. Yeah. Just in case it might have relevance one day. So what I’m saying really is that, I think we kind of evolve, as the work evolves and also, that the bottom line quest is the same all the time, isn’t it? We’re trying to make sense of what is notionally called the human condition, but we’re just trying to make sense of what it is to be us and to enter and to fill full, not empty. So I think it’s simple and complex that one on the same time, which is again why string theory is such a beautiful theory.
Norman 31:46
Let’s get to your quote, we ask every guest, even though it keeps getting buried.
David 31:58
Well, you will choose people who like talking about themselves. Yeah.
Norman 32:03
Well, this is the moment.
David 32:06
Okay, right.
Norman 32:07
So what is the quote that you brought to us today?
David 32:11
Okay, that was born in humans famous quote, which was “Aesthetics is to the artist as ornithology is to the birds” and the reason I enjoy that quote, and I’ve used it many times, is that it’s more than it seems. Because at first, you understand why he’s saying that initially, what you’re saying really, is that the theory of art should have no impact on the artist’s practice. He shouldn’t be influenced by the study of his art form, whatever it is, in any more of a way than a bird is influenced by the study of birds. So it’s saying that kind of fairly straightforwardly, except, then you start to look into it a little bit more, and you go, hang on a minute, let’s look at the effects and sure enough, like we were just talking about formative years and so on, aesthetics does affect the artist, whether he likes it or not, because of the involvement and the interest in the notion of the study of beauty, which is a simple definition of aesthetics and similarly with ornithology. Now, the birds of course, they won’t study about themselves, but ornithology itself will affect the birds because it means that some birds will survive and some will die because of Ornithology and so there are these kind of side effects that take place that do actually impact upon it and so it’s one of those definitions, or one of those statements that has a bunch of trues within it and some of them are kind of useful to recall from time to time. They could just be a useful bomb for our otherwise clouded, narcissistic, self preoccupation. Speaking personally of course, I mean, I’m not not impugning either of you two with anything like that. Self deception.
Norman 34:39
Yeah, there we go.
David 34:42
So one interesting thing with Barney because I already mentioned that other quote of his, didn’t I? The sculpture one, stepping back and bumping into it. But, one of his most famous pieces, which was who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue, a massive painting with a big zip of vertical line there, which again, early deductive structure way before the minimalists and of course, it got slashed some years afterwards by so called artists, and an arca cast is to slash it and they were Oh Gods, we’re never gonna kind of get this surface back together again. I know let’s go to this fellow whose name was Bladder, now I would never go to anybody called Bladder, I really wouldn’t. I’ll go somewhere else because I believe in nominative determinism, and so, I wouldn’t go for a Bladder but anyway, they went for a Bladder and he had it for about six months and he came back and he said, you can’t see that be like somebody wearing a fake wig, you can’t see the joints. So they will kind of look at it alone and sure enough you couldn’t see the joint, it’s just done beautifully and the reason for it was a big fat roller, glued at the back, a big fat roller and mixed up approximation of the red. Guys roll around. Bish, bash, Bosh, kind of decorated it really, because they got back and the experts looked at it and they said, well, wasn’t it a little bit shinier this year? Because I think you’d like emotion or something weird like that. But anyway, what was quite interesting was a bit like the boys and the fakeness, the notion of fake news and stuff, which again, fake news factual nonsense all goes round and round, isn’t it? So they said, Oh no, this is terribleness, it’s not the Barnett Newman. So anyway, they took Bladder out of the equation, and they got someone else in. I can’t remember what their name was, but it wasn’t like that. It was sort of like testicle. But anyway, they got somebody else to come back in and they stitched it, like a surgeon and then they did proper forensic examination of the surface and they did it beautifully. You could still see just a little bit there, but it was at least it got the essence of the Barnett Newman painting back. Blow me down, as soon as the fella came in and slashed it in the first place, heard about this, rushes back in, gives it another slash except that, this is the twist in the tail. That’s why things aren’t always that bad. Because he went in, it wasn’t on display. Because they put it on the side of it. But next year was this blue one. So he thought Oh, I’ll slash that then. So I’m thinking, yeah, this is kind of quite interesting really about the veracity and the integrity of the person who went round slashing it, cuz really, if you can imagine going if you’re a gangster, a hitman, and so go and kill Old Joe over there, and then Joe’s gone in for a drink, and you all kill him, then instead of this other innocent person walking by. Your reputation would have been shattered, wouldn’t they? They’d never hire you again to get rid of somebody, because you’d be just so indiscriminate and that’s what happened. So this guy again, he’s now in some kind of psychiatric unit somewhere, having now slashed another bond in human but a different one. But at least the good thing is, guess who they’re not giving it to to repair? Yeah, you’re right. Bladder. Yeah, he’s out of the equation. So those that was an adjunct to the quotation. But yeah, that’s kind of one of the quotations I like to bring out when I’m trying to impress somebody. Like now. Yeah.
Norman 39:19
So on that note, when Mariannita was on the podcast, she told us that she welcomed criticism and even enjoyed it. How do you deal with critics?
David 39:31
Do you want me to get the spider? Take him up?
Norman 39:36
Only one? Yeah.
David 39:39
No, actually, it really depends. That’s a very, very interesting question because on the one hand, I relish criticism providing, I can feel the person dishing out the criticism, somehow has a grasp of what it is they’re criticizing. I’ll tell you why that is. I was when I had my first exhibition at Nottingham University and the fellowship team there and they always wanted you to the artist to give a gallery talk. Yeah, so all paintings around and so I started, sworn in around, like I do, rabbiting on about the paintings and then suddenly I heard this fella, This is rubbish like that and an artist stormed out from the gallery and my instinct was to run after him and to give him what for for criticizing me. Now you see, that’s not the right approach is it? If somebody criticizes you, then you have to take it on the chin. You go, okay. What is it that they’re saying and what’s the agenda for that and I tend to, I mean, like with other people, sometimes unintentionally be a bit harsh with them. But most of the time, I’m kind of really, really want something good, I’m really looking to be very happy. I’m really looking to be touched by something and love it and like with Mariannita, I’ve known her for such a long time and I love her work. I love her approach and I’m envious of Marcelo, because she’s such a good fam, she’s such a strong person and Marcelo is such a one off. It is like the best inbred pony you could come across is so Marcelo, really looks good, really looks good. Yeah, kick the stable door down, and he’ll kind of go to the wrong place at the wrong time, with my salary, got a little electric bike, and as you know, because you’ve interviewed him, his visual impairment, although it’s not so bad now and I met them for a coffee. Last year, I was on my electric bike, pedal assist bike and Marcelo said, can I have a go and Mariannita said, No, no Marcelo. Next minute, he’s on it and he’s not only on it, but he’s traveling at like, 60 mile an hour, up and down, Pimlico and she’s kind of in the middle of the road saying, Marcelo! Come back, come back, you kill yourself and that’s what he’s like, he’s a disciplined loose cannon, if that makes sense.
Norman 43:09
Disciplined loose cannon. There we go.
David 43:12
Yeah both of them, I love them to bits. I mean, I met Marcello, when Joshua was taking me to look at a new studio and Marcelo was looking to find a studio for Mariannita when she came to London and that’s how we got to meet each other, talk to each other because he was too slow to walk and I am naturally reptilian anyway, so we were about the same. We were neck and neck, about 100 yards behind Joshua, who was striding off in his public school plus fours, and his handmade leather, bespoke Savile Row shoes, clip clopping along as they do. Yeah. So, but with regard to that question, yeah. That’s one of the most awkward questions I’ve ever been asked today. Because, part of me wants to say, Oh yes, I welcome criticism, yeah, coming in and, tell me it’s a load of rubbish whenever you like, but I don’t. I want people to really like to stop, when I want them to be somehow affected by it and if they give me a bad time because it’s not like something else that they do like, then in some ways, it’s a no consequence to me. If you know what I mean. It’s not a very good answer, is it? To a rather difficult question.
Norman 44:59
It’s a tough question.
David 45:00
Yeah, I mean, had my eye shine it back on you.
Norman 45:07
I take it really hard. I’m similar. Don’t give me a thumbs down and those are the worst. If you just get a thumbs down, it’s like somebody just walking out. Oh, a dog just burst into the room here. If you just get a thumbs up or thumbs down, you don’t know what it is that people don’t like.
David 45:32
Yeah, what did wrong.
Norman 45:35
Yeah, what did I do wrong and can I fix it? I know and Hayden knows this. On social media, I work in the eCom Industry, basically and you’ll have somebody that just says, whatever, blah, blah, blah and I’ve reached out and said, What do you mean? Blah, blah, blah, let me know what you’re talking about because I want to know, and yeah, it does bother me. I really don’t want to look at comments, but I do, I cringe. Hey, cringe worthy.
David 46:05
Yeah, exactly. But, again, the other flip side of that is that, and again, Marianiita set up my Instagram site. Yeah. When she was over some time back and she took my phone off me and she starts kind of putting these photographs on and everything and I thought, Oh, that’s okay and then she put it, she said, Oh no, like that one, like that one and I said, I don’t like that one. No, you’re gonna like that one better hard, it’s not gonna hurt you, I’m gonna kill you. I don’t like it, and so having this kind of internal battle between me saying like, I don’t really like that, but also during the lockdown, and I had to kind of temporary studio in the out in the sticks when I was working just on watercolors, and so as I was kind of, I got into this routine of I would work in this small studio on the watercolors, and then about five o’clock, I’ll get on my bike and I would cycle about five miles to this little pond with little geese, and a mill and stuff like that proper pastoral English landscape and then I will get my sketch pad out, and I do little drawing, a little landscape drawing and she came across, she’s all you must put these on those such lovely drawings and so she Bish, bash, Bosh, she does put these landscapes on. Now, to me, the representational stuff I do, which is not very often, but I do like doing it occasionally, it means absolutely nothing to me, it doesn’t relate to the work at all. It’s like a hobby or it’s like an exercise, it’s just something that I do just to pass time and because I can do it, then it somehow, if I bring it back, and like the family say, Oh, why don’t you do more of these? Look at these houses and look at those geese, that’s all I got so much gooseness about them, you can really capture goodness and I tried to explain, that my heart isn’t in it for that, because it doesn’t shed any light on the perplexing problem I have about what am I going to do when, like, I’m now approaching the menopause, as you can probably tell, and I would have thought that by now. I would have understood something, if you’d asked me when I was like 20, when are you going to achieve a level of sagacity that you can tell us all what reality is? I would have said like 27. I would have known exactly at 27 I will know what’s going on, and here I am now approaching 40 and still, I have no idea at all, what this thing is about and of course I get really interested in quantumness basically, I really am a big fan. I’m subscribed to New Scientist and stuff. I really love finding out about the different theories, the different hypotheses, membrane and string theory and so on and I’m always thinking, Yeah, this is exactly, just like it is now for me. Here I am, like you lead there, when he gets his guitar out or what instrument up there, I can pluck the string and go oh yeah, pluck the string. There’s a sound, I can’t see the sound anywhere, I can hear it. I can’t see it in here. It’s that kind of thing and then I’m thinking yeah, this is we’re talking the same language here, me and the cosmologists. But of course it’s a fabrication, because I am clear to understand this than Trump was in understanding COVID-19. I get so political with him.
Norman 50:44
But he knows it 100%, doesn’t he? Like Al Gore invented the internet.
David 50:51
110%.
Norman 50:52
Yeah, there we go.
Norman 50:54
Let’s touch on some obstacles. What do you think is or what was your greatest obstacle in your career?
David 51:02
Besides me?
Norman 51:03
Well, sometimes that’s the case. Right? But I don’t think that’s ever been the case.
David 51:09
Well, it kind of has, in one sense, because although I’m finding it a lot easier having this little discussion than I thought I would. Like most good actors, I’m profoundly shy. But also, not just that, I’ve always had trouble with the notion of, and ridiculously so the notion of networking, and the notion of selling the stuff, doing everything like that. I’m absolutely rubbish at that kind, which is why in the past, done better when I’ve had somebody represent me, like Joshua or so on and that’s what I find difficult and I think it comes down to, I think there are a couple of significant moments in my tragic life, early life that helped to move I think I was speaking to the lad about delusions of adequacy. Well, when I was at school, I remember my teacher being away, this was in a very young school, my teacher being away ill, and this teacher of the I don’t know what what the term you would use for the ones that have an IQ slightly lower than the chair on which they are sitting, or anywhere else in that class and that she said, Who can spell which, and so I put my jolly little hand up, and I said, w i t c h because I thought, that’s clever that is, witch is different which. Anyway, I got smacked around the head for that, and humiliated because it should have been w h i c h. I wanted to say to him, Well, you should have put it into context, but of course, I was only about six or seven when that happened. So that wasn’t very good for my self esteem, then we had the whole kind of upbringing thing. I remember being invited when I first went to that big school, when I was 12, I got invited to a supper, I think they called it at this friend who decided to make friends with me, and his name was Roderick Plantagenet Barton. So you can imagine, he didn’t come from a street, so I went to his place, and there was a proper little thing laid out, cucumber sandwiches and stuff like this and I really didn’t know how to behave at all and I felt so self conscious, and so embarrassed by it. So that didn’t help, those things didn’t help and also one time at school, all these painful things you’re bringing up in me now I’m gonna get PTSD if I’m not careful. But anyway, I remember some seconds coming around and I was a big lad then and a big appetite and lent over and grabbed this, whatever it was and suddenly, I got another smacked around the head from this other teacher who expected me to sit there and say grace and wait for it to land on the plate. Well, you kinda have to do that the way I was brought up, because if you didn’t do what I did, you wouldn’t actually get it. So anyway, all those things meant that I was, I’ve always hovered and again, this is probably where it comes down to. I’ve always harbored between being full of myself, like now while we’re talking about me, because one thing I’m sure of is that I know more about my life than other people do. So at least I’ve done my homework on that one, but it means that I’m not very good at seeing my work as a commodity, seeing my work being retailed, even though I absolutely know that that’s the reality, that’s what it has to be done. That’s the only way that I managed to I know, I look anorexic, but really, I’ve been even thinner than I am now and you have to do things to eat and also, you have to complete the triangle, which is always odd as well, I’ve always thought, Oh yes, I’ll be in my self isolating studio and I’ve always been so happy when I’m just working on my own. Absolutely. But unless somebody comes along, and is interested and looks at it, then that triangle is incomplete. You have no audience and although it’s not essential for the production of it, as somebody like Ben Lockwood would testify. At the same time, you want somehow for it to be visible and for your input, for your being that’s inside it, this kind of existential benefits station of you that it somehow touches other people, and I’m not quite sure how grown up that is even now. So those are the obstacles that really, they’re really feeble obstacles. Because sometimes, I’m incorrigible, and I was waiting for you both to contradict me on that one, but there you go. You can wait and wait.
Norman 57:12
Let’s talk about the other side then. What about your greatest successes?
David 57:19
Half an hour I think?
Norman 57:20
We got time.
David 57:23
Yeah, I can see jealousy where I can see, envy. Greatest successes? Yeah. What do you mean in terms of object making? Or in terms of generally throughout life? Yeah, on a meta level, my biggest success is the fact that I’ve managed to stick to being a professional artist without breaks since I was 15, when I started to sell drawings of boats on holiday at the seaside, and I’ve managed to keep that there and the integrity and also, I’m quite proud of not having succumbed to the various superannuated temptations that have come my way, in terms of jobs and remuneration of different forms. Because I’ve been so lucky. I mean, like, I’ve had three fellowships now, that’s three times more than most, isn’t it? It’s a lot of fellowships. It’s a lot of money given to me and also, I got 2018, I got the Gottlieb Foundation Award, about 10 years before that, I got a Pollock Krasner award. So every so often, people have given me money.
Norman 58:49
I don’t mind that. I don’t mind when people give me money.
David 58:52
Well, I know. I don’t mind. Actually, there’s a beautiful couple who lives in New York, and they’re getting a place here in London and they’ve kind of collect, I’ve got a couple of collectors who just never learned so they got lots and lots of pieces of mine and they always turn up where my car is died. It’s unbelievable. The last three times, and I thought Oh shit, I’ll go on a bike again and everything, they come over and say, Oh, I have that. Here’s the money and then I go out and I buy another car, and that’s the way it kind of goes, I get bailed out by things, by people and thank goodness I’ve got three basic collectors, and I think 40 is the most one of them has, another one has 28 pieces. That’s a lot of stuff, considered I don’t have very many collectors, otherwise I would be original. I’ve got three or four who have been very loyal over the years, and very supportive and I really appreciate that and that kind of keeps me going, because you really only need one person, to say, Hey, you amount to something and you feel big, you feel good about yourself. Even if it’s only momentarily, you feel like you swell a little bit in a nice way, not like a diemer or some kind of abscess on your neck. I don’t like that kind of stuff.
Norman 1:00:45
That only happens when you have 5 to 10. Right?
David 1:00:51
Exactly. Yeah. By the way, can I compliment you on your hairstyle?
Norman 1:00:57
On my hairstyle? Yes, we go to the same barber, right?
David 1:01:00
We certainly do. Yes.
Norman 1:01:03
Now, when we do a recap next time this year, I’m hoping that you’ll grow the beard as well.
David 1:01:09
Yes, I tell you, I might give it a try. Except that you don’t think that might compromise my otherwise beauteous bizarre?
Norman 1:01:19
No, I think the beard would be, it would help.
David 1:01:25
Would help? It would help. Okay, okay. I can take that. We’re talking back again about criticism. I can take that.
Norman 1:01:33
There we go. I just had to do it. But look, this has been beyond enjoyable conversation. I gotta ask you back at one point, because you’re just, you’re so great. I mean, I’m asking you questions, and I’m expecting a certain answer and all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom, and I’m laughing. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much during an interview as what I’ve done with you. So thank you.
David 1:02:02
Oh, that’s very kind. No, I tell you, I’ve enjoyed it, too and if we were in closer proximity, I would make it my blood brother.
Norman 1:02:15
There we go.
David 1:02:16
I would slash your palm, slash my palm, stick them together.
Norman 1:02:19
Just like that.
David 1:20:20
Just like that.
Norman 1:02:23
David, it really has been great. I’m glad you were able to come on to the podcast today and at the end of every podcast, we always ask our guests one question and that’s, do they know a guy?
David 1:02:39
Well yes, I actually hint at two guys, I feel they are interesting in a completely different way to me, should I say both? Oh, I can’t say both because you’re gonna have to choose one of them.
Norman 1:02:56
Or both, depending if they want to come on, we’re always looking for interesting guys.
David 1:03:01
Okay, well, this is again, a page out of the Trump theory of how to be successful and that’s my son in law Colton, who is a one off himself, he runs a kind of video business, he’s filmmaker and he’s a very, very interesting self made person and he’s always up for anything really and his background was his father apparently used to drive him about 200 miles from home, and then, kick him out the car and give him 10p and say, make your own way back, that kind of stuff. So there’s that and then other one is, this fellow that I met about 18 months ago, a guy called Chris, and he set up a magazine, the River Magazine that ran a couple of articles about me, because he got put on to me when he was dealing with the Factual Nonsense, because there was another another kind of event that seemed to have Factual Nonsense as a precedent for it and anyway, he is a Liverpool guy. So he came over and we hit it off, and he’s just a very interesting guy. He is one of those multi talented ones again, like your lad, he does the web stuff. He does a whole load of things. He runs the magazine, but also, he’s also a painter, and he paints in his shed at the back end and he’s lived in Spain. He’s done things in different places. He’s just kind of been, he’s not very old. He seems to have been around everywhere. I think he’s in his 40s maybe something like that, but he’s an interesting guy and I don’t know that there’s an element of integrity about him that I really want to, he’s a very, very sincere guy and also he takes it on the chin as well cuz if you’re from Liverpool, they have such a weird reputation scousers, about like, nicking the hubcaps off cars and stuff like that. So, I can read him quite nicely and we will always have a nice drink when he comes. He lives on the coast somewhere. But anyway, those two are kind of dynamic people, not exactly in the art world. But I noticed from your other podcasts anyway, that you deal with quite a broad palate.
Norman 1:06:13
Yeah. It is very diversified.
David 1:06:16
Yeah. Because before we go, how did you come to be where you are, and doing what you do? In one sentence.
Norman 1:06:31
Complete fluke, having a cigar, phone call came in, three different phone calls and I said there was one common denominator, I know a guy and Hayden looks at me and says we should do a podcast about that. Interesting people you know and that’s how it started. It was a COVID project, and I am 100% introverted. So doing a podcast is very much outside of my comfort zone.
David 1:07:02
Well, you certainly made it a lot more comfortable for me than I expected it to be. So I appreciate that and in fact, I’m so comfortable. I’m taking that patch off my face.
Norman 1:07:15
Alright David. So thank you, again for being our guest today and I can’t wait to contact Colton and Chris and ee when they can get on the podcast as well.
David 1:07:25
Well, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed it and thanks for making me feel comfortable in my own skin.
Norman 1:07:30
I’m glad you took the sticky paper off.
David 1:07:38
Oh, you noticed?
Norman 1:07:40
Yes. Alright. We’ll talk to you soon. Thank you.
David 1:07:41
Okay.
Hayden 1:07:47
Well, that’s it for our interview with David Taborn. Make sure to tune in next time for our interview with Michael Peterson. You might recognize that name from him being at the top of the country music charts for a while. He’s also a great producer, songwriter. Along with all that, he took a less traditional path to become a country star. So that was kind of interesting to hear. So make sure you check it out. If you want to join in on some discussion of today’s episode, make sure you join our Facebook group. That’s our group, not our page and we’re trying to get some conversation going over there and we’d love to hear from you if you’re listening to the show. It really helps us out and helps grow our community. Thanks so much and I’ll see you guys next time.
