EXTRACT Gollon - Tamsin Pickeral

Chris Gollon: Humanity in Art

Cover image, If That's All There Is Let's Break Out The Booze, copyright Chris Gollon, 2010

Introduction

'True painting is the sum of all parts, of the life before, of experience, loss, love, longing, of the moment and of the life to come. Each and every painting should be a reflection of the past and a springboard to the future.' Anonymous

Superlative novels transport the reader to a different world, to a world and its adventures encapsulated within the few hundred pages wrested from a creative mind. Equally Chris Gollon's paintings bring to life a different realm: one of mystery and irony, a little off kilter, where the ugly attain beauty, inanimate objects shudder into life and the bare soul of humanity is brought forward for questioning. His subjects unfold mostly within an ethereal twilight zone, or under cover of darkness where nothing is quite normal and the laws of time and space career off on a course of their own making. This realm of Gollon is one of cities at night with darkened doorways, beckoning candied-neon lights, a rush of faceless people expediting their demise - the bowels of life stirring under night's shadowy mantle. He draws his characters from these adumbral recesses to expose human weakness, vice and folly with striking perceptiveness and often marked humour, revelling in the ridiculous without being judgemental. Occasionally a saint creeps in. Gollon is a painter of life, good and bad.

Like Francis Bacon, Gollon is entirely self-taught and received no formal art training. He is a figurative painter first and foremost, and one of significant technical skill honed through intense study of classic art books and years of hard work. Through these years his painting has continually evolved; he has developed a new mode of expression for the nude - that most classic of art forms - and has taken figurative work to a different level where the body becomes indicative of an idea; capable of holding a concept. Despite the intellectual sub text that underpins much of his work, his paintings are balanced by often ironic and sometimes dark humur. Gollon paints big ideas, but his self-deprecation prevents pretension filtering into his work.

Gollon's approach is defined by its innovativeness and a sense of organic growth that is reflected through the constant evoluton of his style and ideology. Aside from the groundbraking developments in his figurative work, he has redefined still life painting allowing objects to assume identity and enact their own mini-dramas. He blurs the boundaries of genre, investing his still lifes with a tangible sense of humanity - portraits of wine glasses cavorting, cheese escapades and pots in bsattle - while his landscape paintings are part still life and some of his figurative works are part landscape. He combines these still life, landscape and figurative genres together in his extraordinary religious paintings. Gollon does not consider himself a religious painter, yet in 2009 his epic series of paintings the Fourteen Stations of the Cross was unveiled in the Church of St John on Bethnal Green. The paintings, which took ten years to complete, have caused waves through both the art world and religious communities on an international scale from Europe to North America and Australia to Sri Lanka, and form the basis for Somerset Maugham prize-winning novelist Sara Maitland's book, Stations of the Cross. These avant-garde works have pulled religious art into the twenty-first century and redefine this traditional art form; they are controversial and they are brilliant in their simple logic.

The body of Gollon's work comes from a small, old barn in Surrey. Barn is a grandiose term, the building is a lean-to shed; ivy grows through the roof, there is no heat and the one huge window is taped in the middle where a bird flew into it. Canvases dating back to the 1970s are stacked against the walls, the floor is piled with books, hundreds of books, atop which are bundles of paper, tubes of paint, ashtrays, brushes and a pair of snakeskin boots. A mannequin hovers in the corner at a rakish angle, wearing a sombrero and a smile, and fom the rafters hangs a yellow felt hat and a broken guitar. The outdoors is trying desperately to invade, the ivy has made it and so has the odd rat. Wonderful, bizarre plants are gathered outside the window, their seed heads knock on the glass when the wind lifts, grass has grown through the doorstep and creeping tendrils of something persistent have wound their way across the wood cladding. It is Gollon's studio of choice, far more salubrious locations rejected in favour of this small pocket of isolated, lived-in charm.

In the midst of this creative chaos is the self-effacing Gollon, former wild man, paintbrush in one hand and cigarette in the other, usually accompanied by Bob Dylan playing on an ancient cassette player. Music is prerequisite for Gollon in his studio. The artist was a teenager in the late 1960s, fully embracing the accompanying hedonism, and later in the 1970s became a small but integral part of the emerging music culture, hanging out with friends in bands like Tomorrow, The Skids, and The Cult. Norman Smith aka 'Hurricane Smith' who worked with The Beatles, Pink Floyd and The Pretty Things, was Gollon's neighbour and a frequent visitor to the Gollon home. Even once he was established on his path as an artist Gollon continued to affiliate himself with the music culture choosing to remain on the peripheries of the art world and forging his own singular path independent of the changing artistic trends. This was a brave move on behalf of an artist whose career has been littered with huge hurdles. His arrival amongst the main fold of contemporary artists is due only to his single mindedness, the support of his family and his agent, David Tregunna, a little bit of a luck and an enormous natural talent, helped along with a lot of tobacco and restorative elixirs.

The Arcadian chaos that is Gollon's workplace is a world away from the cool, white interiors and quiet sophistication of the IAP Fine Art gallery who represent him, and their current space in Imperial Wharf, London. Yet out of his shambolic studio the artist has produced some cornerstones of contemporary art, paintings that will form part of the fabric of tomorrow's art history.