A DEFENCE OF IMPERFECTION

This interview was first published in PSM in June 2010 to coincide with an exhibition of Jonathan Newdick's solvent transfer prints and his pencil drawings of farm buildings. To see a selection of the prints and drawings click on GALLERY below.

"An exhibition has an economic aspect; it has to. But this is only part of the story. It is a chance for me to see my work outside the confines of the studio, to strip away the subjective element. It’s a moment of truth, possibly uncomfortable and never predictable. Also for this exhibition it’s a sort of dummy run – there are plans to move the pin-ups/conflicts part of the show to Berlin later in the year.
   “An exhibition must also have the power to jolt the imagination. And I do mean ‘jolt’ – I don’t mean ‘shock’. Shock in contemporary art has become all to familiar so that people have become inured to it, anaesthetised almost. I want to arouse the viewers’ emotions, to subliminally encourage them to generate their own narratives from the starting point of my ideas. It does happen: I remember an occasion in Venice when I was showing some large charcoal drawings of that city which Venetians call ‘La Serenissima’ (meaning ‘the most serene’). A Venetian noblewoman came in – La Contessa something – I can’t remember her name. After looking at every drawing with some care she said to me rather severely in Venetian ‘You have undressed La Serenissima. But you have found her soul.’ And she left. Better than selling and certainly more memorable.
   “Anyway, that’s all in the past. Let me try and explain what I am attempting to say in this exhibition: for some time I have been uneasy about the apparent perfection of contemporary imagery. The image, cinematic, televisual or printed has never been more ‘perfect’ but to my mind it is increasingly losing touch with reality. Life is not perfect, and neither is what we see. In our daily lives what we see is centrally well-defined but is always less clear at the edges. Peripherally we see only sets of suggestions, often blurred, always indistinct. I want to question this assumed perfection: to find reality in the imperfect. Also for some time I have been thinking about re-considering pop art, the art of my childhood and youth, I suppose. I still remember the thrill of discovering Robert Rauschenberg in a library book while still at school, (I think you could legitimately call Rauschenberg the father of solvent transfer) and after fifty years it would seem reasonable for me, on a personal level, to re-assess pop art and its aims.
   “So my starting point was twofold: this dualism between dull perfection and rather more rewarding imperfection alongside the dualism between pop art-like images of pin-ups and photographs of war and conflict. Certainly a contrast here. And yet the pin-up of course has always been an essential part of the foot-soldier’s armoury. The fighting soldier in the dust of Afghanistan, the swamps of Vietnam, or the trenches in the Great War were, even though history mythologises, in severe reality. A reality which at times (probably frequently) must have seemed distinctly (or hazily) unreal. The pin-up on the other hand really is unreal and for the young soldier she becomes a benevolent and enduring comforter and a foil to the blood on the clay and the apparent stupidity of orders.
   “Having arrived at my contrasting themes the next question was how to present them, and, before that, where to find images of conflicts and pin-ups. Clearly they would have to be from existing printed sources – on the one hand I am too old to be fooling around in a studio with glamour models (and anyway I wanted historical as well as contemporary images) and on the other hand I don’t suppose Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup would appreciate my getting in his way in Afghanistan, even if I had the stomach for it. Besides, one of the points of pop art is that its visual references are pre-set. Ever since I was at college, and before that, I have been keeping press-cuttings – everything from religion and philosophy to gardening, from art to zoology (yes, really – that’s not just a convenient A to Z!). No end of pictures there, and as well as trawling through that lot I have been through magazines, books, post cards and also part of the Paul Arden archive (thanks to Toni Arden’s interest in the project). Also the internet of course, but the problem with the internet is that there is so much dross to wade through before you find anything with potential. It’s a source you can’t ignore though and in a way I sort of like Google: you can enter your name and discover all sorts of stuff about yourself that you never knew or had forgotten!
   “This picture research was a tedious process indeed (and, in view of the nature of the imagery I sought, a sometimes harrowing one) but I eventually found what I needed and I then edited my selection to 178 war pictures and the same number of pin-ups. Why 178? Because as well as the pictures on the gallery walls I will be producing three books and I need a total of 356 pictures for all of these. One book will be devoted to pin-ups, one to conflicts and the other to a combination of both. I then photographed all these pictures, put them into the computer, cropped them to the correct proportions for the finished works and retouched them where necessary. This was confined mainly to reducing colour and adjusting (mostly increasing) the contrast. Then I printed them all to about post-card size and lastly photocopied them to their final, larger, sizes. At each of these stages, and particularly at the photocopying stage I am losing image quality. I am happy to see it go, because as perfection lessens, so power and authority seem to increase. Within reason of course; you can’t take this too far. Remember too that I am often dealing with fairly poor originals anyway. Don McCullin’s photographs from Vietnam are understandably grainy – that is often their strength, and photographs of Brigitte Bardot from a 1962 Paris Match or of Billy Fury from Rave magazine of the same period aren’t all that good either, so I’m often dealing with imperfections from the outset.
   “My reason for using photocopies is fundamental. They become the bases of the final pictures and the important point is that photocopy toner can be dissolved with acetone. This is what I do: I lay the photocopy face down on my paper, anchor it with weights to prevent it moving and then brush acetone on to the back of it. The acetone seeps through the photocopy, dissolves the toner and I exert pressure on it with a wooden roller, in so doing transferring the photocopy image on to my paper. I have to work very quickly as acetone evaporates almost immediately. I then peel off the photocopy and it is only now that I know the result. Before this juncture I really have no idea – all to often it’s a disappointment: an image that I thought might be ideal simply doesn’t perform for some reason. The rejection ratio is high and my paper expensive but there is no other way. Proofing would be pointless as each transfer from an identical photocopy will be quite unlike the previous one. No two are ever the same. But this is important, this element of serendipity and chance. Anyone today with a digital camera, an Apple Mac, the right software and the belief that sitting before a computer screen for hours on end is somehow creative (it isn’t, it’s manipulative) can produce a perfect image. But perfection is at best dull and is often dead. The only real perfection is imperfection. The handsome face is a bland face and of use only for a Gillette advertisement. But a scar on that face raises its natural beauty to a higher level by creating intrigue, questions and narratives. Whatever the cliché says, beauty is not only skin deep.
   “But, and this also is important, you must not confuse imperfection with carelessness. The solvent transfer process in unpredictable, often, as I have said, disappointing, but I do take as much care as the process allows, especially with the editing and frequent discarding of final pictures. It’s all a bit like darts. These pictures appear at first to be prints but, as the results are so different with each transfer, each one is unique, original. Throw one dart and you’ve got a double top but the next throw, which appears identical to the first, produces a five perhaps, or a thirteen. The same process with the same equipment giving quite different results.
   “I’ve not said much about the other side of the exhibition, the farm buildings. In a way, a rather unexpected way perhaps, they do have a parallel with the pin-up/conflict pictures. They are, after all, about contrasts and imperfections. A 200-year-old barn will, of its nature, be imperfect, redundant perhaps, possibly irrelevant to contemporary agriculture, anachronistic. There will be tiles missing from the roof, weatherboarding hanging loose from a rusting nail. And above all there will be the encroaching ivy, brambles and elder. These are the scars on the handsome face and a perfectly restored barn would not begin to hold the same interest.
   “The title of the exhibition? ‘All new, nothing new’. It’s a reference to the fact that while all the work is new – produced within the last year, its roots are age old, looking back to the pop art of the 1960s and beyond. To Spain in the 1930s and to 1914-18, to conflicts ancient and more recent and to the transient and timeless allure of the pin-up, all forged together by the dissolving art of the transfer process and the continuing search for ‘imperfection’.”