Collection Study
Michael Simpson, Bench paintings, 1996–2009

Texts by Barry Schwabsky,
William Pym and
Dexter Dalwood
April 2014

Bench Paintings is a series of large-scale oil on canvas paintings produced by British artist Michael Simpson over twenty years (1989-2009). All the works in the series are titled Bench Painting and each has a number assigned. All are unframed and have roughly the same dimension. In total, there are around forty existing paintings, however the artist has also destroyed by burning or painting over an equivalent number of works over the years. All of the paintings depict a bench centrally placed on the canvas, with variations, additional symbolic elements and sometimes texts. Bench Painting no. 50 (1996-1998), no. 55 (1999-2002) and no. 74 (2008-2009) were all purchased for the David Roberts collection in 2013 from David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen. Bench Painting no. 77 (2009), which is the second last of the series, belongs to the artist.

The artist proposed presenting four works together, giving a greater coherency to the group. The fourth painting was selected with the artist in relation to the other Bench Paintings within the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. The three works from the collection all come from different periods within the series, and no. 77 represents its last phase as the penultimate Bench Painting.

Bench Painting No. 50 was made between 1996 and 1998 and measures 530 x 238 cm; Simpson settled on the proportions of 17 by 8 feet as a coherent and constant stretcher size in his paintings. It was a solution that allowed the artist to create a formal elegance by stretching the image parallel to the length of the painting and isolating it in the centre of the space; the painting is signed and dated on the reverse. In the middle of the painting, a lattice of fine black lines suggests a wide, hollow bench. The permeable gridded planes contrast with a solid white brick wall behind. A crisp rectangular shadow on an unmarked floor adds to the dominance of stark horizontal forms within the composition. The narrow palette is restricted to subdued greys, blacks and off-whites. The elemental forms and contrasting materials of the bench, wall and floor are foregrounded by the use of a few fundamental pictorial elements: straight lines and limited colours, textures unvaryingly repeated across geometric planes. The enormous scale of the painting mirrors or even exceeds the size of an actual bench, placing the viewer within the scale of the tableau.

In Bench Painting no. 55, from 1999-2000, the bench is depicted as of a hard, dark polished wood. The painting measures a comparable 519 x 236 cm and is also signed on the back. The material, combined with sombre lighting and bevelled finishing, evokes church pews or coffins. An empty white hymn board in the top right-hand corner carries the word ‘PRAYER’. Again, a restricted palette is used: grey background and olive-green floor. Three rectangular grills (or drains) punctuate the floor, hinting at (practical or symbolic) spaces beneath the space on the canvas.

In Bench Painting no. 74 (2008-9) and no. 77 (2009), Simpson reduces the bench to its essential form unanchored by gravity. The bench becomes a suspended black beam in an unarticulated abstract space. In no. 74 a meticulously rendered crumpled ochre shroud lies across the ‘bench’, revealing the white number ‘74’. Without a concrete setting, the bench seems to be elevated, hanging in the air, with the right-hand end rising further. In an interview with art critic Karen Wright in August 2013, Simpson said “gravity constantly disturbs me”, recalling perpetual experiments as a child tossing objects into the air and being angry and frustrated that they always fell back down.

Bench Painting no. 77 depicts another tilting black block suspended in front of an unarticulated white plane. Two rectangular boards in the top left corner of the painting are framed by shallow shadows, as solid canvases or plaques on an otherwise flat plane. One half of this ambiguous diptych is blank, an empty white field; the other black with the legend ‘THE SHADOW OF IDEAS’, the title of a book by the Italian sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno. The work, from 1582 and dedicated to the English King Henry III, addresses the ‘Art of Memory’, the method of loci, or ‘memory palace’, first developed in classical antiquity; and the relationship between an image and letters or syllables, figures and concepts.¹

¹ Giordano Bruno, trans. Scott Gosnell, De Umbris Idearum, The Shadows of Ideas and the Art of Memory. Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, pp. i-xi.

Michael Simpson has in his studio an extraordinary library and collection of rare editions of twentieth century avant-garde books and periodicals. He recalls that whilst growing up “there was not a book in the house”. Simpson appears to have conflicting relationship with books, as the symbol of knowledge that is both imposed on the individual but can also liberate him. In 1987, Simpson started working on a series about the nature of books, titled The Stamping of the Book, in which a character throws, stamps on, or straps books to his own body. He later abandoned the idea, having made only one painting but many drawings.

Some of the earliest works in the Bench Painting series (from 1992-1995) were exhibited at Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 1996, and a catalogue Bench Paintings 1992-1995: Michael Simpson was produced alongside the exhibition. Bench Painting no. 55 with three others (Hymn, Bench Painting no. 58, 1999–2003; Psalm, Bench Painting no. 54 1998-2001 and Song, Bench painting no. 59, 2000- 2005), were part of an installation presented at the Tithe Barn and Old Gasworks in Bradford-on-Avon in 2005. A second catalogue Hymn Psalm Song Prayer Bench Paintings was published on this project. In 2007, there was an exhibition in London at David Risley Gallery of Bench Paintings from 2005 and 2006. Michael Simpson has been represented by David Risley Gallery since that time.

The bench motif offers to Simpson a “value as a fixed coherent form”: an ubiquitous and distinctive object not committed to any particular historical moment.² The repetition of a motif, endlessly reiterated yet different each time, characterises Michael Simpson’s practice and research. The idea of the constant return to something, or to somewhere, is a mechanics between obsession and ritual. Simpson was raised in England by his Russian mother as a Jew, but later in his early adolescence turned towards atheism, which became an important concept in his work as an artist. The bench, though occasionally suggesting a church pew, embodies a more universal experience of waiting and of the inevitable passing of time towards mortality, and of the many civic and religious institutions where “justice and injustice are administered”.³

² Michael Simpson, Hymn, Psalm, Song Prayer. Bench Paintings. Manor Printing Services (July 2005)
³ Ibid.

Simpson started reading the work of Giordano Bruno as a teenager, and continues to read and grapple with his philosophy. Bruno’s life and ideas are at the core of the Bench Paintings project, particularly his execution at the stake in the Campo De’ Fiori, Rome, in 1600. The sixteenth-century Italian philosopher had been charged with blasphemy, immoral conduct and heresy following an eight-year trial. Through the Bench Painting series, Simpson attempts a ‘homage’ to Bruno, to find a way of “depicting the circumstances surrounding his death and to examine, in more general terms, the infamy of religious history”.4 Bruno’s work on cosmology and science challenged assumptions of man’s position at the centre of the universe and of the universe as finite. His work influenced many philosophers, including Hegel, Leibniz, Goethe and Brecht, who held him as a symbol of free thought and modernity.

Another fundamental figure of inspiration for Simpson is the late Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, with whom he corresponded. Unfortunately, only the first of four letters is still owned by Simpson, which is a postcard from Morocco from 1978, presented here for the first time. A video of the short play Come and Go. A dramaticule 1966 (2000 production directed by John Crowley) is on display in gallery 4. Three women sit on a bench whispering inaudible words to one another. In the final scene, the women hold hands and the character Ru says “I feel the rings”, although no rings are apparent on the six hands. The play is orchestrated with extreme precision and embraces strong geometrical patterns and repetition, methodologies at the centre of Simpson’s Bench Paintings.

James Joyce is also an important figure for Simpson. In gallery 4 is a copy of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s last work written with the assistance of Beckett and published by Faber & Faber London in 1939 two years before the author’s death. In the same gallery there are several copies of Transition magazine on loan from the artist. Transition was an experimental literary journal of the avant-garde, and the most important of the American expatriate magazines. It featured surrealist, expressionist and Dada artists. It was founded in 1927 by poet Eugene Jolas and his wife Maria McDonald and published in Paris.

Most issues included contributions by Joyce, called Work in Progress, which later became Finnegans Wake and contained many allusions to Bruno. Beckett met Joyce at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, in 1928 and it was Joyce that suggested he read Giordano Bruno’s work. As a result Beckett, in his first published work, wrote an article on the subject in 1929 entitled Dante Bruno Vico Joyce. The taking up of an Italian tradition by these early twentieth-century writers is continued by Simpson in his work: a quest for perfection and symmetry through rigorous structures and repetitions transposed from literary to aesthetic spheres. His early paintings employ distinctively Italianate elements including putti and floral garlands, however in the Bench Paintings the reference is muted.

A selection of Simpson’s drawings is presented for the first time at DRAF. Although mostly preparatory sketches for the large paintings, they are clearly different in style. Very diverse in dimensions, media and paper, the drawings are full of colour, often vibrant, performative and free in contrast to the precisely finished surfaces of his oil on canvas works. The paintings are built up of several layers, making the image very solid – imbuing the object with weight –, but the drawings are characterised by a light, fresh touch, with more intuitive rapid marks.

As a painter, Simpson is also greatly informed by early Flemish painting, above all Vermeer. What strikes him is its elegance and, as he said to painter Dexter Dalwood in a conversation had on the occasion of the exhibition at DRAF “[…] in terms of elegance, nothing gets better than 1671, when Vermeer locked several grey rectangles together and made A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that painting. It’s as if he anticipates abstraction. I think a painting must move beyond its subject, and the pictorial elements seem to me to be entirely incidental.” Despite their lack of explicit religious subject matter, all of Simpson’s works are characterised by an aura of mystery. Their vast empty spaces are strongly meditative, calling for silence and a moment of reflection.

In 2012, Simpson started a new series of oil on canvas paintings, one work of which is shown here for the first time in the last gallery. A composite four-canvas work from the Leper Squint series sees Simpson continue his investigation into the “infamy of religious history” through a different architectural motif. The ‘leper squint’ is a small slit in the exterior wall of some medieval churches through which excluded lepers were able to view the service being conducted at the altar. As with the Bench Paintings, this large work is unframed, but this time is vertical, with tall ladders positioned centrally through the spine of the painting (leading up to the eponymous squint). Earlier works from this series depicted stools or short stepladders. An exhibition held in 2013 at David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen, entitled The Leper Squint Paintings showed much smaller works, including a diptych from 2012 where the presence of the central object is substituted by a group of pigeons.

by Barry Schwabsky

Michael Simpson Bench Paintings

A specter haunts the paintings of Michael Simpson. An invisible spirit moves through them, which one senses rather than sees. It poses a question for the viewer.

Simpson has been engaged with his monumental series of Bench Paintings for nearly twenty years; Bench Painting no. 1 (Death of Giordano Bruno) is dated 1989-90. The most recent, which Simpson says are the last in the series, date from this year [2009].¹ The paintings vary somewhat in size but are typically about eight feet in height — about as high as a tall man such as Simpson can reach without a ladder, a fact significant not only from a pragmatic viewpoint but also because of what it might imply about the humanist force of Simpson’s work — and in length, at first (until around 1992) about twelve to fourteen feet, but since then in the range of about seventeen feet. If the vertical dimension of the paintings expresses an acceptance of the limits, though undoubtedly stretched, of what the human individual can encompass, then their horizontal dimension expresses all that exceeds the individual. The tension between these two dimensions of existence is essential to the paintings’ content.

¹ This text was written by Barry Schwabsky in 2009, a few weeks before Michael Simpson concluded the Bench Painting series.

The paintings are representational but not figurative; the human being is implied by the evidence of its absence, of an unfulfilled expectation: above all in the motif of the bench itself, always empty in these paintings yet always reminding the viewer of the possibility that someone might have occupied it or might be about to do so.

Who is that someone? Any response would be entirely speculative, but should in any case be based on an observation of the depicted situation. Since the paintings’ imagery is sparse, the clues are

few. In the earliest of the Bench Paintings, the space is entirely nebulous but a certain naturalistic normality is implied simply by the fact that the bench casts a shadow. Soon enough, however, the setting is given greater definition: A grid of bricks defines a wall and one of tiles defines a floor, for instance in Bench Painting no. 19, 1992-93; other paintings depict walls of numbered lockers (Bench Painting no. 51, 1997) or enamel tiles like those one might encounter in a bath house (Bench Painting no. 52, 1998); the floor may be quite plain or bear handle like devices that Simpson thinks of as foot traps (Bench Painting no. 52) — the idea recalls, perhaps, Duchamp’s Trebuchet, 1917 — or drains (Bench Painting no. 54, 1998-2001, no. 55, 1999-2002, no. 58, 1999-2003, no. 59, 2000-05). Even in these cases, the space remains somehow or another unreal, even uncanny — blank, cold, out of time. Most recently, the settings have once again become non-specific: In Bench Painting no. 66 [Bruno Resurrect], 2006, we see the bench floating against a pale violet field with no horizontal line to indicate either a horizon or the division between floor and wall, yet the bench throws a distinct shadow onto — onto what? Onto more of the same atmospheric violet, which only takes on an illusion of planar solidity just there where the incongruously crisp shadow falls; in Bench Painting no. 65 [Bruno Resurrect], 2006, with its white ground, the bench casts no shadow. In any case, the benches sit in a kind of alienated space, perhaps quarantined or custodial. Whoever is meant to sit on these benches is under judgment — souls in purgatory, perhaps. (In any case, religious overtones hang ominously in the air, at least in those paintings, begun in 1998 and 1999, in which the space is furnished with tablets bearing the legends HYMN, PSALM, or PRAYER.) Is it the viewer who is meant to deliver the verdict?

Perhaps, but inevitably the judge must be judged. I don’t think anyone can look at these paintings and feel entirely comfortable with him- or herself. Without being overbearing, the paintings are austere, solemn, grave. They are slow works, conducive to reflection. To look at them, or rather (since they seem to affect the viewer physically rather than just visually) to be with them, to be affected by them, immersing oneself in their rich though understated visual harmonies — I have only ever been able to see a small number of the Bench Paintings at one time but I imagine the experience of sharing a large room with a significant number of them would be something like hearing an austere but complicated piece of music like Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, 1570, a work for massed choirs surrounding the listener, one of the outstanding works of Bruno’s lifetime and which he could conceivably have heard during his sojourn in London in the 1580s—is to grow pensive.

But wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. Here I am mentioning Giordano Bruno as if his importance for these paintings was already evident, and yet I have only so far referred to Bruno indirectly, through the subtitles of some of the paintings I have cited; but his is the ghost that haunts Simpson’s paintings. If their memorializing tone is never in doubt — the benches in some of the paintings are black and polished shiny as coffins; other benches are accompanied by wreaths of flowers — it is only their textual supplements that reveal the connection to Bruno: some of the subtitles, as I have mentioned, but also inscriptions in the paintings: In Bench Paintings no. 67, 2006, no. 68, 2007-08, and no. 65 the bench itself is inscribed with the date of https://edit.therobertsinstitu...’s death, 17 February, 1600, while more recent works are blazoned with titles of Bruno’s books (Bench Paintings nos. 72, 77, and 78, all 2009). These verbal clues can prompt viewers to make visual connections: The wreaths of flowers might recall the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, where Bruno met his death, while the insect zapper seen in Bench Paintings no. 23, 1992-94, and no. 31, 1994-95, can evoke the horror of his execution by fire.

Why Bruno? Because he is something like a saint for the religion of free thought, if such paradox be permitted — its martyr. One of the outstanding minds of the late Renaissance, he was a priest whose brilliance brought him honour but whose unquenchable fascination for forbidden learning, critical thinking, and fearless polemics made him a pariah. Finally, he found himself in the hands of the Roman Inquisition by whom he was tried, imprisoned for seven years, and finally burnt at the stake for his heretical ideas.

For most of human history, the dimension of existence that exceeds the individual — its horizontal dimension, as I put it earlier — has been expressed through religion; Bruno, whose spirit invisibly haunts Simpson’s Bench Paintings, represents the possibility for a more rational and critical expression of this aspect of life, and his execution, the violent inability of religious authority to countenance its questioning. Bruno’s trial was overseen by Cardinal Bellarmine, himself an outstanding intellectual (and who later forced Galileo Galilei to recant his views on astronomy).

Unlike Galileo, Bruno refused to recant, and when sentenced, according to some sources, replied:

“Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

The judge too is judged. In art, the only judge that counts sits in the place of the unrepresentable. It is the ghost in the painting. The abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, for one, knew that what counts is not the question a viewer addresses to the painting, “What does this represent?”, but rather the one the painting addresses to the viewer: “What do you represent?” Simpson’s paintings offer us time and space to ponder the question, along with the challenge to try to answer it.

by William Pym

The Confidence Man

There are five elements in Michael Simpson’s Leper Squint. There is a scuffed but sturdy wall.

There is a band of floor below the wall. There is a ladder, starting on the floor and travelling up much of the wall. There is a small dark square punched out of the wall just above the top of the ladder. There is a shadow, casting an impression of the ladder on the wall and floor. That’s all. The painting is on four panels, so these five elements are repeated four times. Their differences are minor. The ladders have slightly different widths. The walls are worn out in unimportantly different ways. The angles of the shadows suggest different hours on the clock, but nothing dramatic. It is more or less the middle of the day on each panel, with the sun high in the sky. It is a work free of flourishes, reduced as far as possible for the narrative to function. The ladders are pin-straight, without diminishing or entasis. The floor doesn’t grade as it fades back. It is a rectangle rather than a plane, really. The holes don’t have dimensionality. They are squares, really, rather than holes. The shadows create the only diagonal lines in the composition, and the shadows alone allow the scene the illusion of perspective; without them the work would appear completely flat.

The title of Leper Squint announces the subject of the work and the direct symbolism of the five elements. Meaning arrives with this quiet cue. The hagioscope or ‘squint’ was a slit that created unobstructed views through the internal cruciform architecture of medieval churches, since even the faithful could not see around corners. The ‘leper squint’ was a slit of this sort on an external wall, designed to create a view of the church for those people — unwell, ugly or otherwise — who were not welcome inside. This pocket of negative space is as powerful a symbol as one might hope to find. The leper squint embodies all the indignity of the outcast, all the shameful callousness of the institution. It shouts of the vulnerability of the individual against the group and it punches its own hole clean through the fundamental Christian tenets of ‘faith, hope and charity’ espoused by 1 Corinthians 13, in turn exposing the frightening power of doctrine. To look through a leper squint is to feel, in perfect clarity, cruelty from almost a thousand years ago. It is cold evidence, and that evidence speaks for itself.

Simpson avoids going into details here. In this painting everything is described, so nothing needs to be embellished. The hole is an instrument of division and control, devised in the name of god by the powerful. Through the hole and behind the wall is the firmament of Christianity, a thing of unimaginably gigantic size. The wall completely covers that gigantic thing, which is helpful and appropriate, because that thing cannot be accurately depicted. The ladder is a functional object, invented to help everyone and constructed by no one in particular, which allows temporary access to the hole. The floor is the earth, to which we are bound in our lives — hence the need for a ladder — and to which we will return when all’s said and done. The shadow is proof of the sun, which allows us to grow. That’s the painting.

It became clear, from a day spent together, that Simpson avoids going into details in general. Over 25 years he made 77 large paintings of benches inspired by the death of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth- century Dominican friar and prototypical freethinker whose scientifically derived pantheism led to a heresy trial and his eventual execution. Bruno was, for a long time, something of muse to the artist, and Simpson’s feelings about the man carry a solemn intensity. But he doesn’t proselytise or wax about his great inspiration, and would certainly bristle at the romantic notion of a muse, even though Bruno was with him in the studio, often his only company, for all those years. Simpson rejects romanticism. He rejects zeal.

Simpson rejects zeal because he is painfully attuned to the dangers of authority, as proven by the tyranny of those drunk on faith throughout history. [Refer here, reader, to Leper Squint, if this needs reiterating.] To declare oneself king of anything, as a mortal, is an absurd concept. If one is a king then why must one submit to death? To declare complete understanding or resolution of anything, as a mortal, is an absurd concept. Our demise is the only guarantee. Michael Simpson’s paintings seek austerity and simplicity because this is the only option for someone who sees certainty as a foolish pursuit.

“I am trying to figure out whether to make another one of these,” he says, pointing to the ladders. “It’s not a question of whether I’ve exhausted the idea. It’s a question of whether there is anything more there.” Simpson submits himself to his subject. “There’s a point when you lose sight of what you’ve made,” he says, and this is the point of transcendence, the point where uncertainty sublimates into something else, not bliss, but something unnamable and valuable that at least isn’t pure doubt. “What you make is a true manifestation of what you’re about,” Simpson tells me toward the end of our time in front of the work. He won’t pretend he’s found a single answer, and he has been painting for more than 50 years.

The experience of Leper Squint is one of peculiar and total awe. It is recognisable. All its parts and its scale are familiar. It’s not alien. It is an extremely large painting, as big as you’ll see in a museum, but not frighteningly so in terms of what’s depicted. It’s not the dwarfing, Ozymandias sort of awe. If you were able to climb up that ladder you could fall off from the very top and not hurt yourself too badly. And one should not say, despite the term’s outrageous utility in recent art critique, that the painting is “uncanny.” There’s nothing unusual about it. It doesn’t burrow its way into the recesses of the psyche, it doesn’t haunt. It’s legible from the start, it doesn’t mutate. It is completely conventional in many ways, yet completely unresolved. And that, in fact, may be Michael Simpson’s contribution to the ongoing history of painting. The work compels you to stay with it, and deepen your relationship with it, even though nothing will change. How could it? “I can’t say it’s been a pleasure,” Simpson says.

Dexter Dalwood in Conversation with Michael Simpson

DEXTER DALWOOD: This is a difficult question to start with, but how would you describe the project of your work, if you actually had to say “This is what I’ve been concerned with”?

MICHAEL SIMPSON: I think I’d begin by saying that I’ve tried, as a constant in all my paintings, to give form to an idea. Over sixty years ago, I began to think about the infamy of religious history. Before that, as a boy of thirteen or fourteen, I had already developed a loathing for all religion. And when I became an art student, I was constantly thinking of ways to translate these beliefs into painting, but it always ended in failure. And then two things happened: first of all, I read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Necessity of Atheism, which had a huge impact on me; and then, quite by accident in Tbilisi, on a trip to Russia in the late ’50s, I found a copy of The Ash Wednesday Supper, by Giordano Bruno, the

Neapolitan philosopher burnt at the stake in Rome for heresy in 1600. Now, I didn’t know who Bruno was when I picked this book up. But it was a real eye-opener to me, and when I came back to England,

I read everything I could find on him and by him. Without going into too much detail, I was struck by his volcanic mind, his intellectual courage and the beauty of his language. I began to formulate an idea which was, in essence, a homage to Bruno. But it was until some 20 years later, in 1989, when my own language for painting had begun to evolve, that I started the series, almost speculatively, which I called Bench Paintings. In my mind, the bench became a place of waiting, the passage of time, an em- blem of human forbearance. Interestingly, despite the size of the paintings, I began to think of them as vanitas still lifes.

DD: One thing about these paintings is their scale, the other is the simplicity of the imagery, which you use in a very direct way. The experience of how they appear as images, especially seeing them in reproduction, is very different from the physical, very visceral experience of seeing them as painted surfaces. There seems to be a kind of deliberate stubbornness to making work that large. It demands a particular way of being shown; it’s not easy to transport, and not easy to consume. I wondered if that’s also part of the thinking behind why the paintings look as they do, in terms of the scale of their ambition.

MS: It was never, in a commercial sense, a good idea to make paintings as big as this, unless of course you’re Anselm Kiefer, and money was the least of the things that I worried about. I’d made smaller paintings in the past, but all my instincts were for something much bigger and monumental. I think the size of a painting is determined by the character of the idea. Even a 17-foot painting can be drastically failed by the loss of, say, one inch. Eventually, into the fifth or sixth year of the series, I settled on the proportions of 17 by 8 feet, which seemed an exact and elegant solution to the problem of isolating the image in its own space. The form of the painting, the mechanics of how it is made, is absolutely paramount. Formal elegance is an important factor for me.

DD: When you say elegance — could you elaborate?

MS: It’s a kind of architectural elegance that I’m talking about; the way a painting is built, like a Cotan still life before he became a Carthusian, for instance. The elegance is breathtaking. The exacting proportional values of colour and form cohere to a point where they cannot be questioned. Or, say, a building by Adolf Loos, or Bruno Taut. But in terms of elegance, nothing gets better than 1671, when Vermeer locked several grey rectangles together and made A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at that painting. It’s as if he anticipates abstraction. I think a paint- ing must move beyond its subject, and the pictorial elements seem to me to be entirely incidental.

It’s purer than its counterpart, by the way, A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, painted in the same year. All those Dutch painters who follow — Saenredam, Bart van der Leck, Mondrian, and so on — the history of Dutch painting, that Flemish desire for perfection, I find deeply moving.

DD: It’s interesting what you say about Saenredam. The Interior of the Buurkerk at Utrecht [1648] in the National Gallery, was always one of my favourite paintings as a student. I’m always interested in the space in a painting, and always thinking about what it would be like without the figures. Which is why I’m not so interested in later Italian painting, like Caravaggio’s, because it doesn’t seem to be about the spatial quality. In terms of space in painting, there is a very frontal attack to each of your images, where what you have to deal with is right in front of you; it’s brought to the surface. As in post-war American painting, the image exists within a very shallow surface, and we have to deal with the surface as the surface. You don’t present a photographic space, it’s a realised painting space, but it’s still a very shallow space. There isn’t a created space for the viewer to enter into; we’re still kept very much on the outside of the painting, or the painted surface.

MS: Yes, I’ve always felt that this shallow space that you talk about has an awkward, almost metaphysical atmosphere about it. It’s usually accentuated by the frontal scale of the bench itself,

giving the painting a kind of tension. I remember recognising as a student that a painter like Léger painted his images almost in your face, right on the surface of the painted plane. It made me look even harder at the space beyond. A simple lesson, I know, but an important one. It’s possible — probable, in fact — that I took something from Léger then and never let it go; it’s developed as an important structural part of my own painting.

DD: The lesson from Léger being not just the fact that the paint sits on the surface, and the surface is the image, but more than that?

MS: Yes, much more. I don’t actually like Léger’s paintings very much. I don’t think I could ever get to that state of pictorial decoration. Austerity is an important part of what I try to make.

DD: But also very important is how the edges work in relationship to the image.

MS: Do you mean the edge of the canvas itself, where the canvas leaves the stretcher?

DD: I mean what happens towards the actual edge of the rectangle. There’s always an element of distressed edge. If the image were cropped, that would be a very different thing.

MS: Yes, all logic would say that if you paint out to the boundary line, then the illusion would be that much greater; but in fact the opposite exists: if you paint with respect to the boundary line, the illusion is much greater of a three-dimensional space. It’s a curious phenomenon.

DD: And when do you think that came into painting?

MS: Ah, well, that’s a great question. I think, maybe, with American Abstract Expressionism. Guston, who I admire very much; early Guston. There are others of the period, of course.

DD: Matisse was also very much involved with that: the edge is the edge. I suppose the thing happening in a painting that’s in front of you is what happened as the painter made the painting, rather than being an allusion towards something else. That’s the way that the rectangle seems to be acknowledged.

MS: Yes, I agree.

DD: But I also have to think of something Alex Katz said about English painting in a film I once saw about a series of works he’d selected for Tate St Ives. Talking about a Thomas Lawrence portrait, he said—and you hardly ever hear this from an American artist — that the great thing about English painting is its inherent elegance. As soon as I heard that, I realised there was something in it. We don’t like to say it, but it’s true. Historically, there is an elegance to Thomas Lawrence’s painting, Gainsborough’s, Constable’s, even Bacon’s. And I just wondered, would you be embarrassed to be thought of as an English painter?

MS: Not at all. The first thing I thought of when you said that, the first painter who came to mind, was Roger Hilton, for me the best of the Cornish painters. And it’s interesting because he was a crash-bang-wallop of a painter, and yet exceptionally elegant as well. And no, I wouldn’t be at all worried about being called an English painter.

DD: I’m also interested in talking about the imagery, the religious imagery: the ladder and the leper window, which you’ve used in previous paintings.

MS: The leper squint. Which is what these paintings are about.

DD: And does it bother you if uninitiated viewers, who come to these paintings cold, with no access to the religious history or interest in it, have no way to read the imagery?

MS: No, it doesn’t bother me at all. No. I would hope that the image would be suggestive enough, compelling enough, to carry its own weight.

DD: The strength, for me, is the stubbornness of the painting. I don’t know if you like the idea of that.

MS: I very much like the idea. I like stubborn. I like persistence and insistence. I couldn’t have made 77 bench paintings over twenty years, without some degree of stubbornness. And — what? — half of them exist now, the other half I’ve destroyed. And even now despite the fact that I stopped the Bench Paintings five years ago, I still don’t feel, in many respects, that I got out of that series what I’d hoped for. Part of me still wants to start all over again. You know how it is with painting. Each one is such a struggle. The element of fear, of uncertainty, is constant; it never goes away. I don’t know how it is with you, but every time I begin a painting, I have to really get myself together, and try to ignore the weight of history. The weight of the history of art, I mean.

DD: That’s what’s so interesting about it, the relentlessness of the project; it’s almost like a control experiment. What will come out of just keeping this thing going? It’s a bit like a joke that’s been told so many times that it becomes a threat. Because of the weight of all the pre-existing paintings that relate to this one, it becomes something more than just the thing it is.

MS: Well, I think there is something in the persistence of these paintings that is contemplative, introspective, something only recently I’ve begun to be aware of. Over those twenty years or so, the idea certainly developed, and uppermost in my mind was always getting to a point of the plainest simplicity. I also wanted to investigate how rich a painting can become using a fixed coherent form. I think it’s worth mentioning here that although my work has clear subjective references, I’m primarily concerned with the mechanics of painting, which perhaps explains a little of why I persisted with this series for so long.

DD: Looking at the new paintings in the studio here, the first thing I thought of, when I came in, was one of the very first photographs made in England. Do you know the one by William Henry Fox Talbot with the wooden ladder against the farmhouse and the shadow falling?

MS: I think I do know it, yes.

DD: It’s that shock of sophistication and innocence at the same time. Looking at these, it’s like being in the presence of a four-year-old child sitting on a chair staring at you. They have that kind of presence in the room you don’t quite know what to do with; they wrong-foot you in a good way by how apparently simple the image is and how difficult it is to consume. I guess what I’m really talking about is that the stubbornness is what sticks and makes you unable to assimilate and put this image somewhere you can just say, “Oh, I know what that is; that’s that”. And now, moving on from the Bench Paintings, there’s a kind of opening out of a different sort of feeling of lightness and innocence, and yet with the same rigorous stubbornness.

MS: Well, thank you, although I’m not sure whether I would think of them as being light! To me they seem to have the same spirit in them as the Bench Paintings, and to carry the same threat. But shadows are deeply subjective things.

DD: Yes, they are, but I also meant that these ladder paintings feel light in a good way – more serene.

MS: Actually, it’s the shadows which interest me most of all in this painting. But going back to your earlier question, it wouldn’t matter to me that people looking at this painting had no idea what a medieval squint was. Do you know what a leper squint is?

DD: Only through your work.

MS: They were built as small windows in the outer walls of medieval churches; not for looking out but for the lepers, the undesirables, to look in. They could squint through the hole to observe the service.

They weren’t allowed inside for obvious reasons. The first one I found was in a small Dorset church called St. Aldhelm’s in the late 50’s. I had no idea what it was to begin with. It was years later before it became apparent to me that I might be able to use the image. The problem was giving it some kind of context. The ladders, of course, are an additional fiction, an absurdist notion of ascension.

DD: But in that sense, the ladder in these images becomes a contemporary ladder.

MS: I hope so. I hope the execution of these paintings is thought of as entirely contemporary. But it’s also important to me that they are placed within a longer historical tradition.