Patrick Michael Fitzgerald interviewed by Chris Ashley, please use the following link:

http://pmfitzgerald.wordpress.com/interviewed-by-chris-ashley-2009/

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Conversation: Seán Shanahan with Patrick Michael Fitzgerald
December 2001/January 2002 (from the catalogue “The morning hours”,
published for an individual exhibition at Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, March 2002)

S.S.
Why have you asked a painter rather than a critic for this dialogue? How much has complicity to do with it? What do painters know that others don’t? Does this denote a shortcoming/failure of the means to arrive at something understandable to lay people?

P.F.
Inevitably painters will speak to each other. From time to time one is drawn to the work of another artist, to another painting world. How do these worlds touch? How do they differ? One rarely hears what painters have to say for themselves, though this is not necessarily such a bad thing. After all, what a good painter really has to say should be said in the paintings. Nevertheless, a discourse or commentary can grow around a body of work, so at the right moment it is only right that one intervenes to try to make things a bit clearer. I live and work in relative isolation and only occasionally speak to other artists, when I do in any serious way it is with those artists whose work intrigues me.

In the end what is of real value is often difficult and rare. So who is art for? I don’t know…I would like to think that in some way one of my paintings is quite literally a place; a place where something has happened and potentially will happen. You can walk past it, enter it, encounter it by chance, seek it out and be moved or disregard it. Ultimately, it is for anyone who will simply stand before it, give it time and look attentively. More often than not, something will happen. The risk of failure is clear, but does that make it less worthwhile? I think failure is part of the equation and it’s as if at times careful looking is almost an ethical thing, the aesthetic experience almost breaks out of itself.

The question referring to knowledge is important. I have spent a lot of time with art, looking at paintings, investigating and learning about them, developing technically, making them etc. I imagine you too feel reasonably confident in your knowledge of painting. I for one cannot pretend that when I make a painting I am starting from zero, as I recently heard one artist say. The history of art is there. It cannot be dismissed. One always starts from something; from knowledge but all this is not really the point, trying to be clever is not the important thing for me. What I want to deal with is an unknown outcome, to work my way into that, into what I don’t know, to articulate a future and discover and understand something. In that respect what I want to show is not knowledge as such but a process or unfolding from knowledge, which is also so inherent in the way my paintings are made and such an intrinsic quality in the  nature of my painting.

S.S.
I don’t feel “reasonably confident” in my knowledge of the history of painting. I have a certain know-how. When you say you are articulating a future this seems to me to put your painting in a very conscious present, how do you decide on the paintings completion and how is this “now” projected onto an “articulated future”?

P.F.
I usually stop working on my paintings when they seem “right”. This “rightness” usually occurs when in some way the painting is held back or delayed. It is as if the ideal or perfectly finished painting is never quite possible. I tend to think that the finished painting; the idea that you somehow arrive at the “now” is really an over-stepping the “now” and a kind of deceit. In my practise at least, it is a slowing down and holding back that seem to engender a more authentic and distilled present for a painting. I believe it was Wittgenstein who said something to the effect of; “Where others go on, I stand still”. Despite this, I feel I must say that I do not deny the idealising impulse…a kind of ideal painting in my mind. I would even say that this is probably my core motivation. I have always been very interested in those painters who have taken the art of painting beyond what was conventionally expected of it. In that respect what I am doing is not a “deconstruction” of this tradition at all. In the Jewish tradition, it is said that the Messiah is coming, but never now: a suitable metaphor perhaps.

S.S.
I’d say the “now” is an ongoing event of anticipated futures and revised pasts. A mix of different times, our framing of the two depends on our position in the present and this present is defined by such framing. (W.Benjamin- Each generation invents the next and revises itself in the process).Your painting is a realm for the Idealistic, spiritual, immaterial/mental. Where visual meaning is analogous with written/spoken meaning? By citing Wittgenstein are you not diluting a Philosophical form based in linguistics? If you are allowing this kind of cross-over, (an open concept of painting- and a promiscuity normally justified by a paradigm shift), are you not undermining the ineluctable inner logic of  the medium?

P.F.
It is not a question of the immaterial. As a painter, I’m obviously dealing in part with material (and materials), with paint and support etc. What is interesting is how it is shaped in relation to thought and intelligent looking. In my paintings I try to establish a sustaining tension between thought and material. When I’m at work I’m very much dealing with the problems of making a particular painting. I am not a linguist.(though Wittgenstein also wrote and thought greatly on aesthetics). My interest in Wittgenstein is not academic. What strikes me about Wittgenstein is the concordance between his life and his thought. He lived his thought out. He was not a professional. There seems to be a particular attitude towards things, a trying to grasp what is at hand, what is immediate to us and not overstepping it. That statement I quoted made an impression on me; I thought, “that position is like mine, and suggests an alternative to jumping to false conclusions”. For me as a painter, it suggests the possibility of creating a painting world from things closer to hand and an economy of means in their making. For the paintings it means always keeping the right distance which in turn means letting the paintings operate on their own terms and have a life of their own. I hope that my paintings are very much paintings with their “ineluctable inner logic”, but does that mean they will never reverberate in relation to a word, a cloud, the morning, a piece of music or another painting?

S.S.
You are living in an isolated situation and your reflections seem to come from self-analysis/enlightenment. The very singularity of your condition strikes me as more interesting than a discourse that would have to take into account so much new artspeak that I think we would end up commenting on a situation instead of affirming a completed painting. In all it’s singularity. What you talk of as withholding or delaying is really a discreet declaration of authority. Each painting should extrinsically embody this hard won hesitance, yet its completion is not a question of any choice but yours. Do you not think you are avoiding responsibility for your actions by hedging your bets, by appealing to a greater uncertainty?
How is this thinking made visible? What constitutes the ‘holding back’ in the finished paintings I’ve seen?

P.F.
No, responsibility is key. I don’t think it’s a question of hedging my bets but more a kind of wager. I recognise the inherent risk involved but I also expect something in return, I ask a lot from a painting. Sooner rather than later most of my paintings reach a stage where they are quite acceptable; they adhere to certain rules or a formal correctness, they become “good” abstract paintings, but something is always lacking. This moment is crucial… then I always change them. It is like a backward correction. I overpaint them entirely or partially, maybe scrape half of it back to the support or canvas and just leave it like that. The over-painting often takes the form of over-lapping or layering with the obvious temporal implications. The opposite can happen, the actual physical work is slight, thinly painted perhaps and the painting is much slower, more mental. In the last two years my paintings have shifted back and forth between flatter paintings with a clearer separation between figure and ground and then again more three dimensional works, still frontal but much more object-like. Both tendencies move to a certain kind of ideal in painting. In the more recent work however there is a synthesis. The “figure” elements are always off-centre. They creep in from the edge or edge off it, other times they are locked or leaning against the edge, or sit in a corner. This seems to trap the paintings and the gaze in a moment of tension that I like. There is an uncertainty as to whether they are object paintings or figure/ground paintings. What’s more, in some cases there are drawing elements consisting of drilled holes or routed lines that suggest the same ambiguity but are also concrete. They somehow manifest  the dilemma and mystery of the picture plane. The word poetic is perhaps too easily used but it is that kind of idea; things happening at the same time and in the “right” though not obvious way. Despite uncertainty, in a strange kind of way something suddenly happens, the painting works and I usually leave it. The best way I can describe this moment is that it is like a moment of resolved unresolvedness. I like the idea of a specific openness where something strange starts to happen, where that special presence and singular experience of making (or looking at) a painting comes about, something which as yet I don’t fully understand.
How do you feel about the idea of ambiguity in relation to your own work? Is it something to minimise or articulate?

S.S.
My work is without ambiguity; it is the categorical physical manifestation of my feeling. To what degree would you say that the composition of your new paintings are ‘glued’ together by colour?
Do you think that the colours (generally speaking) muted character creates the reflective air that seems to hover around the work?  Does the new work rely more on colour than in the past?

P.F.
Perhaps I should confess that I often feel I don’t understand colour at all… I mean it’s immeasurable, hard to pin down and an incredibly volatile but determining element to use. The problem is that colour is an increasingly essential structuring element in my paintings. I need to build with it. There’s a big contradiction here; maybe my paintings are structures of opposites. Paint is colour but also material. When you think about it, it seems very odd, how can I build with say green or red? Many of Philip Guston’s paintings are woven and held together by vermillion. Though I’m not interested in representation as such, muted colour enables me to tether the paintings  to the world of things around me and I guess, is also a matter of the personality of the work; a matter of its own light. Occasionally, more intense colour appears… and acts as something which activates or “switches on” a given painting by way of contrast but it will make up only a quarter or so of a painting or a lot less. Activation of a painting is not wholly dependent on colour. I’m very fond of “cheap” colours: ochres, indian red, oxide red, greens etc. Intense pure colours would be too obviously sublime for my paintings. So, reflective yes, but by way of being sensual objects and to be experienced as such… every time a painting is looked at it is remade, rebuilt by the gaze.

S.S.
There is a new lightness in the work, a greater confidence and a more matter-of-fact straightforwardness, that in earlier works was missing or less apparent. Even though the work still seems ‘hard won’ the ‘pentimenti’ seem more implicit than explicit, could the new control that the work displays be the result of your familiarity with all your means, or would you say that the familiarity allows greater security for breaching unforeseen territory?

P.F.
The new work is more to do with the morning. A year or so ago it came much more from the realm of night: towards a dark light. Now it is luminosity I’m after. Morning suggests clearheadedness, so there is a more direct touch and certainty in the application of paint and in the drawing elements too. Familiarity can be both a curse and a blessing… it can result in mannerism. I want to make new paintings and I want them to be better than the ones I made before, so the responsibility to my work  entails that I use everything at my disposal to the best of my ability in order to pursue an “unknown outcome”.