We sat down with Joe Gilgun to talk about his artistic process and his most recent painting: A Field I Shouldn't Be In.
Beth: Let's start with the latest limited edition, A Field I Shouldn't Be In. For anyone seeing the piece for the first time, what was going on in your head when you started it?
Joseph Gilgun: Disappointingly, I never really know what's going on in my head. I think it probably started with something simple: let's just get these colours right. If I can get them right, that's a good start, a big help. Colour's important to me, but it tends to be whatever's close to hand when I've had the idea. With this piece, I remember telling myself: make the effort, dickhead. Make sure it's exactly what you want it to be.
Slowly it takes form, and you realise what your head's been doing. I've noticed, and it's taken me a while, that the weather changes everything. If it's sunny when I start, the colours reflect that. But if it rains the next day and I'm still working on it, I have to get rid of all the summer. I'll paint over it. Each day new things are happening and it affects what I'm doing, to the point where I'll start again. It's not a bad painting, but it's a different day, the light's different, the way I've just spoken to some twat on the field is different. Small things can completely alter what something was going to be.
A big part of my day is going on a walk. When you live on your own and you get lonely, those little bouts where you go out can feel like a lot has happened. Objectively, not much has. But when you're on your own, meeting people is quite a big occasion, and kind of terrifying.
And the field I walk in: we're not meant to be in it. It's where the deer are meant to go, and there are ground-nesting birds. There are about seven or eight of us who use it, and it's really strange, because we all know we shouldn't be on it. We're all sort of looking at each other thinking, are you going to get me in trouble for being here? We never really meet. It's a beautiful field, but there's a feeling of being watched. I got told off by a guy in tweed. I ended up painting that twat when I got home. The area has a few country Karens, you know, they wear all the gear but they're useless. So, nine times out of ten I've got my head on a swivel. Who's on the field with me? Will I be told off? You could get in trouble if one of these tweed-clad wankers films you, and you'd have someone knocking at your door. You'd think it'd be better to just not go in. But I love the field, and so do the other seven or eight people who use it.
The other part is that I've stopped acting and started painting, and that's a field I shouldn't be in either. I don't know what I'm doing. I just know I have to keep going. I've got a terrible addiction to it, I think. I don't want this to sound arrogant, but I don't have time for acting any more. I just want to paint. I just want to paint all the time, and to be left alone. I don't think that's a lot to ask of life.
And I do feel very, very lucky. Working-class artists are rare, because it's expensive. The reason I can do what I'm doing is that I was a working-class lad who accidentally got on the telly, made a bunch of money, and was able to say: right, I don't want to do that now. That's a huge deal for someone from my background. I don't think I'll die a rich man doing this. I'd have died a rich man if I'd carried on acting, but I think I'd have been miserable. I don't think I'd be as happy as I am now.
So there's an argument going on in my head constantly. Should you be in this field? You've spent your whole life wanting to be on the telly, wanting to be the actor people go "I fucking love that guy, I wish he was in this show" about. That's every actor's dream, and you work hard for it. There's a lot of rejection, a lot of misery, a lot of sacrifice. And then one day you pick up a paintbrush and think: oh, this is better. What have I been doing? It's frightening.
There's another layer too. You're on the telly. Why are you doing this? This isn't what we know you for. I've felt it myself when a singer moves into acting. For a lot of people it's uncomfortable. They think, “That's not how I know you, and it pisses me off that you've made that change, because I liked the other version”. So it's dangerous. It's another field.
I think that's why the paintings are so densely packed. They're dense with imagery and there's no space, and I think it's because my head won't leave me alone.
Beth: Is there anything in the piece you think people might look past at first?
Joseph Gilgun: What they'd probably miss, because they've no way of knowing, is that it's a real field that I really do go in. When I'm in that field, it reminds me of the situation I'm in. They're not to know I walk the dog in a field that's naughty, but when I'm in it, that's when I think about all this. Then I come home and paint. So I think they won't realise it's physical. There's an actual field as well.
Beth: Was there a part of the painting you particularly enjoyed making?
Joseph Gilgun: Getting the colours right was lovely. I don't always get it right. There are a lot of layers where I haven't thought enough, and I've gone, fuck, now you do need to think about it, you dickhead, you're going to have to go back. But that day there was a general feeling of nailing the colours. It sounds arrogant, but it was going really well.
I'm also constantly experimenting. Every painting, I try to do something different, and that day the techniques were new to me. I was using my paint sticks almost like oil sticks. I'm sat in the garage thinking I've invented it, it's just massive ego. I'd turned the tubes around and was getting nice, clean, flowing lines. Why don't people do this? Aren't I clever? And of course people have been doing it for nearly a hundred years and there's nothing special about my approach. I'm not massive on art history. Jack knows far more than I do. So I'm constantly thinking, Jesus, people will see this and know. Idiot. But I enjoyed the process, and I like experimenting. Just going, ah, this is working, it's unbelievable.
Beth: Now that it's finished, does it feel like what you originally imagined?
Joseph Gilgun: No, it's not very good now. I look at it and think, I wish I hadn't done that, and I wish I hadn't done that, and if you'd just done it this way. I was the same with acting. I'd watch everything back and think, why the fuck did you try so hard there? You've ruined that. And that's on the telly, where maybe a million people watch you fuck it up. You had an opportunity to get it right and you didn't. Nice one, dickhead.
George Condo is one of my favourite artists, and I don't want to compare myself, but he said something I resonate with: I feel like someone's watching me, like I'm getting it wrong all the time. I've had that with everything throughout my life. A feeling that I'm not getting this right and I shouldn't be doing it. There are people who are better, you should be digging a hole by the road somewhere. It's horrible, and I've always had it.
But I think without it I probably wouldn't work as hard as I do. I'm frightened of letting myself down, or you down. I've not met you in person, but I know you work really hard to sell my stuff, and that means an awful lot. I work hard because I know people are doing that for me too, and if I wasn't terrified, I probably wouldn't.
Beth: Let's look at your process. What does a typical painting session look like?
Joseph Gilgun: I try not to think too much. Every painting starts with: have a good time with this one, make sure that shows. And it slowly comes together. Like I said, the slightest thing can change it.
I was thinking about this last night: I sabotage a lot of my paintings. If it's going a bit too well, I might throw something at it. I don't like that it's going well. It makes me feel vulnerable, like someone's going to see it and say, he's done that quite well there. I don't quite like the idea of that.
As for the session itself: I get stoned. I'm high as balls. I go on my walk, probably on my second joint by then, I've had about three coffees, I put the telly on, put music on. I like a lot of Charles Bukowski poems. It sucks the atmosphere out of the room and things get a bit serious. And as I'm working, I read and I write a lot, so I write on the paintings as I go.
For the one I'm working on now, it started with the end of summer. In England it's suddenly freezing and summer's just done. Everyone gets ill, everyone goes downhill. I'm doing these big faces and it's all I can think: it's the end of summer, there won't be any more sun for quite some time, you're going to be miserable and hibernating. When you're on your own, you overthink things like that. It was just that sentence going round and round, so I thought, right, write it. Write it over the entire painting. And I never do that. Normally my writing is fluent. This was repetition, a bit like Basquiat's "milk, milk, milk," or whatever he wrote, where you read it and there's no symbolism, he's just telling himself something. That changed the whole thing, writing over all of it.
I'm sorry, I'm waffling. This is the first time I've ever spoken about my art.
Beth: You're talking me through your process, and I don't think any process is linear, so it's natural to jump around.
Joseph Gilgun: It just changes a lot, and I'm not frightened of changing it. I don't care that it's a good painting. If it needs to change, it changes. I don't want to be inauthentic. That's the constant battle: be authentic with what you're doing. And being authentic means making changes, because each day is different. Does that make any sense, or does it sound like a load of horseshit?
Beth: It makes sense. I think with art, people look for a lot of logic in it, when sometimes it's quite an illogical process.
Joseph Gilgun: A spade's just a spade. I get a bit irritated with that, actually. There are artists I love, and I won't name names because that's a shitty thing to do, but I feel there's a lot of horseshit spoken, a lot of overcomplicating something that isn't that complicated. This long, drawn-out dialogue telling people what it all means. I find it a bit painful to watch. I don't want my art to be convoluted. I don't want people thinking, this is so complicated I just don't get it. I want it to be authentic and genuine, because I think people see that, whether you mean them to or not.
Beth: Is there a particular time or place where you find yourself wanting to paint more?
Joseph Gilgun: No, I paint all the time. If I'm awake, that's what I'm doing. By about three in the afternoon I'm fucked, so I have an hour's sleep and wake up like a heroin addict. My back's sore, I'm still high as balls. Then I paint into the evening, until the dog starts demanding attention. He's like, are we going to spend some time together or not? It's like having a wife. So I go in and be with the dog for a bit. If it wasn't for the animal, I think there'd be a bed in that garage.
It's all I do. It's breaking my body. My back's sore, my shoulder's sore, I've got that wanker's wrist or whatever it's called.
Beth: Do you have any rituals, or little things you always keep around you when you paint?
Joseph Gilgun: It's drugs, isn't it? Obviously. I love smoking joints. And music, Bukowski. I'd love to say there was more, but I don't think there is. The rest of it is just silence.
Beth: You've said you don't usually know what you're going to paint beforehand. Do you know where you'll start, or does it take shape as you go?
Joseph Gilgun: One thing that affects it a lot is people, and the things people say to me. Like the guy who shouted at me over the wall. He pissed me off so badly I couldn't do anything else. I knew that day I was going to go home and paint that arrogant wanker in tweed. But other days I haven't a clue what's going on, and it slowly takes form.
Most paintings have about three layers of writing that you're never going to see. Each time I write, I'm getting something that's just happened out of my head. Awkward exchanges with people on my walks, some positive, some negative and inauthentic, that stay with me afterwards.
But, like we said earlier, they don't go home and think about me. They don't go home thinking, that young lad's a cunt, isn't he? What's he done to his hair? He's gone blonde.
Beth: We are matching!
Joseph Gilgun: We are matching, and we're having way more fun than Jack right now. Two beautiful blonde lasses.
Beth: Which artists, filmmakers, musicians, books or films have influenced you?
Joseph Gilgun: Loads. I grew up on things recorded off the telly onto video, with the old adverts still playing in between. Everyone did that, it wasn't that we were poor and couldn't afford proper videos. We had a Kylie Minogue box set, I remember that. The Sword in the Stone was one, The Goonies was another, and I watched them back to back, day after day, for a long time. I still know all the songs in The Sword in the Stone. I still put it on in the background, because I love it. It's a stupid film with a really crap ending. As an adult you watch it and think this is unbelievably bad, and I used to love it.
Then books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, kids' books, from a time when being creative was okay. Because I got to an age, in the nineties, where we'd say "don't be lame, stop reading." I was discouraged. I was from a working-class area. You're not going to be an artist, you dickhead, you're going to be digging a hole. You'd better get used to high-viz. For a lot of people where I come from, that's where you're going, and there's a quiet frustration in that. I was all right at art, I definitely liked doing it, but there was never a single hope I'd be doing what I'm doing now. If you'd told me, I think it would have irritated me. An artist? How lame. I'm meant to be a chav.
But I'm very lucky I found it. You know the guy who found the Staffordshire Hoard? All that Viking gold. It's like the universe put him there. All the stars had to align to get him to that tiny place where a ball of gold from a thousand years ago was waiting. It sounds corny, but I felt like that. I remember the feeling of I can't stop. I can't stop spending all my TV money on paint. I could have a Porsche.
Beth: Is there a piece of art you've seen recently that you love?
Joseph Gilgun: I've just got into Marcel Duchamp. I watched a little documentary about him. I'm still educating myself, and I'm careful about what I watch, because my constant fear is that if I get into art history, it'll fuck with my work. It's about having your own voice. You do need to steal, but you need to do it in your own way.
But Duchamp: I love Fountain, and I'm going to do a urinal myself. There was a line in a documentary that stuck with me. I think he wanted not being taken seriously to be taken seriously.
Beth: Are there colours, symbols or subjects you keep coming back to?
Joseph Gilgun: Teeth and eyes. And writing, though I don't like people reading it because my spelling is embarrassingly bad. Also, once I've dealt with something I've written, I cross it out. It's done, I don't feel it any more, it's out of my mind for now. So a lot of it gets crossed out.
Colour-wise, I always come back to Wedgwood blue. It's a very British colour, I guess, and it's my little nod to that. A lot of this is just for me. I don't know whether people see it.
The eyes come from being watched constantly. That feeling has never gone away.
The teeth: Jesus. We put this huge emphasis on words. Words are almost currency, when I've heard they account for only ten per cent of communication. How stupid have we become, where words mean more than action? And the damage our mouths can do, the damage my mouth can do. I've said terrible things I truly regret. And teeth are weird. They're a weird thing we all have. The front ones are for showing off, the back ones do all the work. You don't do anything with your front teeth apart from undoing a knot in a shoelace. Why are they there?
There's more behind it. When I was a kid I had a recurring dream. It sounds made up, but it isn't. I dreamt of two big mouths with big block teeth shouting at each other. They sounded as if they were deaf. They didn't know how to speak to each other. I was frightened to death of that dream, and I was at an age where I didn't have the tools to say, I'm having a bad dream. I look at my sister's kids, six or seven, the age I was, and there's just too much going on to be able to say it. I was frightened of going to sleep because I thought it was going to happen again. It traumatised me as a kid. So there's a lot behind the teeth.
Beth: What's one thing people might misunderstand about your work?
Joseph Gilgun: I work very hard. I know I need to rest more. I wonder whether people realise how much I've done. By volume I'm pretty prolific, and you'll miss that if you don't know. It's like the field: you're not going to know the painting is also about an actual field. You'll initially think he's just talking about acting.
I want people to know I'm working really hard at this. I'll get off this call and I'm straight back in, and that's the rest of the day. It matters to me. I really care about it. It's a weird thing that's happened in my life and I wasn't expecting it.
I wanted to say something poetic here, and I've lost it. Honestly, I don't know the answer to that question. I wish I did. It's too nuanced.
Beth: One you might know the answer to: if you could have one of your paintings hanging anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Joseph Gilgun: A dictator's toilet. The room where he has his poo. He has to look up every morning and think ‘I could’ve done that’. Somewhere like that would be great.
Beth: A closing question. If you could sit down with someone who's just bought this piece and ask them one thing, what would you want to know?
Joseph Gilgun: I don't know that I would want to know. I'd be worried they'd say, oh, we just love you on the telly. I've been doing this for nearly six years and this is the first time I've ever spoken about the art, which is why there's so much waffle and over-explaining. I asked Jack to run me through some questions beforehand so I'd have some sort of answer. I didn't want to look silly. I wanted to look like I'd considered things, because I have. And I had a brilliant answer to this one, and it's gone.
I think it was something like: it's your business why you've bought my work, not mine. I don't want the reality of the actual field to get in the way of how you feel about it, or what it might mean to you. You're the one spending the money. I don't want to ruin that. I fucking hate the film Inception, but what it does is leave you wondering what any of it meant. If the director came out and said, I'll tell you what it means, it's just about a field up the road, you'd say, are you kidding me?
Beth: I think people buy it for many reasons. I get to hear all of them, which is the lucky part of my job.
Joseph Gilgun: I bet a lot of it's mental health, isn't it? People going through it.
Beth: It varies widely. A lot of people do connect with it, and a lot of people struggle with how they feel and find that connection through the kinds of thoughts we were discussing before we started. We're all wondering what everyone else is thinking.
Joseph Gilgun: Maybe the boring answer is the best question: why did you buy it? Does it go well in your house? Does it match the colours of your ornaments?
Beth: That rarely happens, thankfully. It would make me sad. I've been doing this over a decade.
Joseph Gilgun: There's nothing wrong with buying a piece of art because you're interested in the person. I'm grateful and very flattered if that's the case. But I'd still be frightened of the rest.
The other thing is that once I've done a painting, I'm not interested in it any more. It's dead to me. It's out of my head. It's like keeping a journal. You write that your boyfriend's a prick, that he shouldn't have said what he said, that it really hurt, that he said it in front of your mum. You put it in the book, put it to one side, and you're not as furious any more. Not gone, exactly, but eased. It's the same with the paintings. I get one done and think, thank God, I don't have to feel sad about that poor lady any more, or angry at that man in tweed who shouted at me. It just gets rid of whatever it is.
Once it's done, I really don't give a fuck. I genuinely mean it: you could get a handful of them and set fire to them and it would make no difference. The reason I'm doing it is that I'm lonely and fed up, and once I've got it out of my head, it's like having a shit. You just flush it.
Beth: I think that's the best last line an interview could have.
Joseph Gilgun: Paintings are like having a shit. You just flush them. That's why I'm doing the urinal. I can't wait. We've bought a cheap one. I don't know whether to do what I normally do and bomb the life out of it with words and faces, or just write my name on it and be an arrogant twat who goes, that's it.
Since this conversation Joe has attempted his own version of fountain, he bombed it and wishes he’d just written his name.
You can view and purchase Joe Gilgun's art at Art of Protest online or come and see it in person in the gallery. If you have any questions about his work, contact us and we'll be happy to help.