The Impulse of the Work. Ciarán Murphy and Merlin James consider the intimacies and connections of painting.

Ciarán Murphy: There’s something in your work that brings to mind the scenario of recounting a shared experience with another. There might be some points of connection; some shared mutual understanding or recognition, while on the other hand, points where the connection fades. As a viewer of your own work, does this description resonate with you at all? Merlin James: That question of what we know or don’t know, recognise or don’t recognise, in a work of art is at play on lots of levels: representation/abstraction, tradition/innovation, and so on. I’m conscious all the time, of pushing on from what I know, qualifying the familiar with the unfamiliar. Our consciousness probably always consists of that mix of expectation and qualification. So, the question becomes how does this pertain in a special way for art? I think some of my work certainly invites a ‘solitary’ or ‘lonely’ mood. While it might refer to (or be read as referring to) my private experience, it’s also about the inherent situation of the artist, and the viewer of art. Sometimes the emptiness, the depopulation, of my images help evoke this. Equally, the paintings depicting figures, even more than one figure, address the question of relationships, and how relationships are partly seeing the other as the self, as the known, and partly as the stranger.

A more general caveat to all of that is that the message of my work has never been one of inevitable alienation. I think the impulse of the work is to connect, to seek intimacy and affirm its attainability. That might even be intimacy with objects (art objects especially) and with environment, and certainly intimacy between human beings (including between artist and viewer in some way).

Maybe related to that is the appearance of animals and birds in my paintings over the years, which I note in your work also. Is there something about consciousness and human or animal ‘being’ going on there for you?

CM: I think you describe this wonderfully. Perhaps it’s this recognition of a separation or gap within oneself and with other people or objects, that forms a necessary precondition for intimacy or connection. And yes, my interest in animals is related to this phenomena; something is there, present, but can’t be fully ‘disclosed’ somehow. I also think this has parallels with looking at images more generally, a kind of ‘yet to be revealed’ quality.

I’m wondering if you are a reader of books? Or if you would have certain writers or genres who might resonate with your art practice? MJ: I don’t think of myself as well read. I’m haunted and daunted by all that I’ve never read. I was dyslexic as a kid, so reading and writing came late and came hard. But then I ended up writing a lot on art; and of course I do read. But I certainly don’t read much theory, for example. I suppose I trawled through some critical theory back in the 80s – Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and the ‘New Art History’ as it was called at one point. Some of it was stimulating at the time, but not much sank in deep with me. I feel a little bit closer to some 19th and 20th-century German aesthetics. With philosophy in general I always suspect I’m not really getting it. If I do understand an idea I always think: “surely it can’t be that simple”.

I love to read novels, but my reading is very patchy. I’m a slow reader and never have enough time. I guess at some point I’ve read a lot of ‘classics’, the 19th-century Russian, English and French heavyweights. Sometimes I’ll get a bug for one writer. It might be genre stuff, like all of Chandler or Simenon. Or I tend to read what comes my way by chance. I’m just reading the third of a crime trilogy by Nicola White, who’s a Glasgow-Irish writer. Glasgow has a huge crime fiction scene. There’s something very non-narrative in my painting I think, that puts it in another category from literature for me. However, the idea of genre itself interests me a lot; genre is a huge factor in my painting, so how genre operates in literature interests me.

The other thing is reading poetry. It’s often poets who happen to come my way; I’m reading the latest collection by John Freeman – a poet living in Wales. And Harry Gilonis – a London poet. I feel painting is closer to poetry than to prose, and I’m especially interested in reading the criticism of poetry, which I take as my model for writing critically on art.

CM: Do you have a set rhythm to your working day? Tidy or well organised studio? Do you paint in the one position standing or sitting? MJ: No set rhythm. Productivity fluctuates, but I’m mostly working. Sometimes writing keeps me out of the studio for a while. I’m trying to edit and re-work some of my essays on art, as a book, and I recently went a month hardly painting, which is unprecedented.

I have racks of paintings going back to the 80s, and I have one long ‘working’ wall, covered in paintings, some in progress and some from different periods for comparison. I’m always taking paintings out from the racks, rotating the hang. Then works might come back from an exhibition or from a gallery that’s been holding them, so I’ll reacquaint myself with those. I rarely start painting before noon, and I often work into the early hours. I’m very messy and untidy. I work until the studio is like a bomb site, then, I’m ashamed to say, I pay someone to clean up. I can’t tidy the studio myself; there’s a psychological block there. I never use assistants to actually make any aspect of the work, but for studio clean-up and building maintenance, I do have help. My studio is right behind the house, so I can get in there any time. It’s been good through Covid in that way.

Ciarán Murphy’s exhibition ‘Solid Gone’ is currently on view in Grimm Gallery, Amsterdam. His travelling exhibition ‘Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily⁠’ is on view at The Model, until 13 March and is showing at the RHA Gallery in September.

Merlin James lives and works in Glasgow. He is represented by the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, and shows with Sikkema Jenkins Gallery in New York. His solo exhibition at The Philadelphia Art Alliance continues until 4 March.