‘In the doing is the knowing’ The Baron Gilvan, performative painter
“I don’t paint topographical landscapes. I won’t just paint Cuckmere Haven.” Chris Gilvan-Cartwright is in his studio, showing me a sixfoot-tall abstracted-landscape diptych. The studio takes up half of a converted barn, in Firle, and the diptych takes up half the back wall. He’s wearing a flowery shirt, a trilby, and shorts. It’s hot outside. There’s a lot of gesturing. His enthusiasm is infectious. “It’s a painted space, which refers to a landscape. It might appear unpeopled, but there are people buried within it, And not just people.” I’ll be with him half the afternoon: it takes a while for me to understand what his art is all about, and it’ll take some doing explaining it back to you. Let’s start at the beginning. Gilvan-Cartwright spent the first six years of his life – from 1966 to 1972 – living in West Germany, where his (English) father was the lead tenor at the Mannheim National Theatre opera house. His home backed onto the Käfertal forest, whose wild, murky depths fired his imagination, as did the stories he was told: “German folklore is always in the shadows of my work.” He spent a lot of time in the theatre, and got to see “how stage sets look spectacular to the audience, but when you peer behind them, you realise they are held together with gaffer tape, and nails… the curtain had been lifted on the Wizard of Oz.” “My paintings tend to have a stage in them,” he says, gesturing to help my eye follow several colourful swishes at the foot of the diptych. “I draw a line on which the action
24
takes place, on which my world can emerge.” Similarly, he points out, there is a horizon line, towards the top of the work, which creates the illusion of perspective. “Artists are inventors, inventing illusions,” he says. “As an artist you are simultaneously watching the performance, and dabbling behind the scenes.” His parents split up, and he moved to England: as a full boarder at St Peter’s School, Seaford, during term-time, in Weston super-Mare for the holidays. And then on to Wycliffe College, in Gloucestershire, where he took up art, largely drawing intricate galleons, particularly sunken galleons. “I called them silver ghost galleons,” he says. “I loved their faded grandeur, their fallen-in magnificence… they are still sunk beneath the surface of my work, alongside a lot of other things.” He got into Central Saint Martins after school, and, after graduating with a First, won a bursary to study painting in Cracow (between 1990 and 1992) under Jerzy Nowosielski, a celebrated painter/philosopher influenced by Russian iconography. There was a wildness about post-Wall-fall Poland; he went off the rails (“too many parties; too much vodka”) and suffered a breakdown. This was “a grounding experience”: “I fell, and I fell apart, and I put myself back together again. That’s why the theme of ‘The Fall’ is so prevalent in my work.” He moved to London, where, after a period of recuperation, he took up stage performing, in tandem with his art: as the lead singer in a band; as an actor; as a clown. And he assumed a stage name. In real life, and as a painter, he was Chris Gilvan-Cartwright; as a live performer he became ‘The Baron Gilvan’. It was, he says, “a mask to hide behind… The Baron persona had floated to Blighty, clinging to the wreckage.”
