Interview with P. S. Bock

conducted by Carolina Castilho

“I’m 42 years old. I’m a cat person. I have a cat named Mammouth. It’s funny because mammoths are huge animals, but my cat is so tiny! My three-year-old daughter wanted to name it Mammouth. My favorite moment of the day is having breakfast with my daughter and my partner. Apart from that, painting is the biggest source of joy in my life.”

Can you tell us a personal story about yourself?

Yeah, I have a story which is also linked with my painting, which is that when I was eight years old I used to go to this art academy and they used to give us reproductions of famous paintings and say “copy them”, and that’s how we would learn. And I remember choosing a painting from Seurat, Dimanche d’été à la Grande Jatte, which is a really peaceful scene of people walking by the river, and there is this man with a big hat and women with huge dresses, and a lot of colors. I had gotten a box of pencils from my parents and I remember sitting there for weeks and weeks, very dedicated to this painting, which had so many details, and it was a great feeling. I felt like I had found this bubble, because I really wanted to live in that painting. I remember there were kids screaming around me, but I was really just focused on my painting. And then in my twenties I lived briefly in London, and I went to the National Gallery and they had a huge painting of Seurat, Une Baignade, Asnières, which is also about people having a good time in the afternoon at the river, and because in England the museums are free I went there a lot and just spent a lot of time in front of this painting, just sitting there immersed in the painting. And yeah, that brought me back to that moment as a kid. what I wanted to do, it just came naturally that what I was writing about made its way into my practice. Which I feel like happened with a lot of artists at the time, I was seeing a lot of selfportrait type of works.

Elements of pop culture and capitalism, especially brands, seem to be recurring in your work. What is the reason behind this?

I think at first I did it without thinking about it, but we are surrounded and educated around brands, to a point where we don’t even see them anymore. For me, painting them is underlining their presence and a reminder that they are omnipresent in our lives, and that they are problematic, at least for me. Problematic for what they represent, because they are just the tip of the iceberg and underneath it are all the social, ecological, economic consequences of capitalism, a system that is really destroying us and destroying our planet. Capitalism is a system that is embedded in our daily life and in all the transactions we make and have with people. And I believe it’s a very decadent society, we don’t even see its ugliness anymore because we are so used to it, we are born with it. It’s a mixed feeling because we grow up with all that ugliness and it’s part of us and our culture, so it becomes a love-hate relationship. It’s like ‘I want them gone, but I know I would probably be lost without them’. All my paintings take place in cities, because I’ve always lived in cities, and there is a lot of gray and concrete everywhere, so I leave a lot of space for that, and I could change that, but it’s also a part of me. I would feel sort of nostalgic if these things weren’t there. and before I wouldn’t dare to paint bigger paintings. I think being far away from home gave me more freedom to just try things. And what is funny is that when I think about the first big painting I did, I didn’t have paper that was big enough, and instead of going to buy some I just took smaller sheets of paper and I painted big characters on them. So I ended up with six of these papers and made one big painting. I think I started with baby steps and then I said, ‘Okay, now I can paint on a bigger piece of paper’. And that’s when I bought bigger paper.

Could you take us through your artistic process?

I’m a very impatient person and I cannot bother with drawing a perfect sketch, so I always do a very rough sketch in the same painting where I’m going to paint. Because of this imprecision I always end up having to change some things over the course of the painting, like the direction of an arm because it doesn’t fit anymore, and things like that. I don’t have the patience to do it in another way, and I like it because it gives some spontaneity to the painting and I think imperfection is also a part of it. Also I’m incapable of drawing with a pencil, I have to really paint the shapes with the paint, so it’s a really physical process. I feel like I use the energy coming from the body to paint, so I like to do massive shapes and have heaviness, and it’s also why I use acrylic, because it’s opaque and heavy and it dries very quickly. Again, that’s very important for me because I can’t wait.

Could you tell us a little bit about your time in Bogotá and the impact it had on your work?

Yeah, I was there for two years because my partner is from there and he had to go back to work. I had never lived in Latin America before, actually I had never lived outside of Europe before, and Bogotá was a big change. I think it had a huge impact on my practice, because it’s where I started using big formats and it’s where I really started to paint. I think because I was so far away from home and everybody I knew, I could finally give myself permission to paint in bigger formats and knew there wasn’t anybody seeing me or watching over my shoulder. I think it’s because it took me a really long time to have confidence in my work,

And I think Bogotá also inspired me on the content of my paintings, because I love painting people but I didn’t really know what scenes to paint. And in Bogotá street life is very important, people gather outside a lot, and at the same time a lot of people have to go out everyday to sell things in order to survive. There is a lot of unemployment and no help from the government, so you see a lot of people coming up with different businesses and they do it in the street. So the streets are a lot more alive than in Europe, and it is amazing to see because you have a lot more contact with people, but at the same time you also think of the reality behind it. So I felt inspired to paint these people in the streets, who are also the people who nobody talks about. They might be the majority, but they are the ones who are invisible to the people in power. The people that nobody talks about but that are everywhere. Bogotá for me was a huge inspiration.

“I think being far away from home gave me more freedom to just try things. [...] And I think Bogotá also inspired me on the content of my paintings, because I love painting people but I didn’t really know what scenes to paint. And in Bogotá, street life is very important, people gather outside a lot, and at the same time a lot of people have to go out everyday to sell things in order to survive.”

Where would you like your career to take you? Where would you like to see yourself in the next few years?

I’m really just starting as a painter, because I’ve been doing illustration for a few years, but I started to paint about three years ago. So I’m just starting to show my work, and I’m really excited for all the opportunities to come. I want to keep painting and to exhibit my work, I have a project of a series of paintings with scenes around a basketball court in my neighborhood, which at first seem normal but then elements of drama become noticable. I’m also working on a graphic novel, and I guess the most important thing would be to be able to make a living out of my art.

Are there any artists or movements that have particularly inspired you?

Other than Seurat, I would have to say that one of my biggest inspirations is David Hockney. I love many of his portraits, and I went to see an exhibition a few years ago in Paris and it was amazing. His paintings are huge and I spent a lot of time watching the details, the creases on the clothes and on the curtains, the collars, … I really felt a connection with how he paints and it seems like he really enjoys it. Also, he’s like 80 years old now and he is still so modern and he never lost contact with the way art has evolved. I wish I knew more women artists, and I remember a girl asking our art history teacher in school why she only showed us the work of men, and the teacher answered that there weren’t any women that were good enough. Yeah, we were all shocked and didn’t know what to say. We didn’t know a lot of them, it’s true, but it was also her job to show us more work by women. Matisse is another artist who I grew up admiring, but I discovered much later in life the work of Vanessa Bell, who is the sister of Virginia Woolf, and she worked during the same period of Matisse and their work is very close. So her work is really good, but we don’t talk about her. And then a contemporary artist who I admire is PowerPaola, who is a Colombian-Ecuadorian artist famous for her graphic novels, but she also does some paintings. And then Lola Lafon, who is also a writer, and she inspires me a lot because of how she speaks about her process and about her writing. I feel like she writes in a very physical way, she describes the feelings of the characters by describing what happens in their body. And for me the body is one of the things I love to paint the most, and like I said before painting is a very physical act.

What advice would you give to other female artists?What has been the biggest lesson you have learned so far as an artist?

I don’t know if I have a lot of advice to give because I’ve just started my journey as a painter, I probably should be receiving advice. But what I’ve learned in the years after I finished art school is that the important thing is to work, work until you make it. I hated my work for a long time, for years and years it was hard for me to paint because I hated the paintings. My partner was always telling me nice things about it and giving me words of encouragement, but I kept hating it and didn’t want to show it. So I kept working because I wanted to see it through, and I had a different job before but I left it because I wanted to paint. It was difficult because sometimes I felt hopeless while doing it and I was doubting my work so much, but eventually I stopped hating it and started to enjoy it. And that was what I wanted all along. To be able to like my work. For me I made it! And if I hadn’t worked so much I wouldn’t have gotten to this point. That’s why I would say to work, work and work. But I do think those years would have been better if I hadn’t doubted myself so much.