The Monthly discusses art and drawing with local artist, Una Price – Part 1 – Influences

Can you remember when you were first attracted to art as a form of self expression?

My earliest memory of externalising my interiority using art to express myself was when I was around 3. My mother had gone out and I was very emotional. I painted a picture that I named Rain and another I called Monster in the same sitting.

I can still sense the experience of focus and instinct coming together and a sort of other place; a portal opening and my central being bearing witness. I remember accessing a quietude that was able to soothe and that provided a kind of psychological balm. I liked getting lost in this other space and enjoyed the experience of my own private world.

Obviously I’m describing this in hindsight and I’m using words that a child of three wouldn’t use, but I’m describing this innate and intuitive experience the way I remember it. It only affirms just how important it is that children’s environments allow and facilitate self expression, and that whatever the child’s experience is, that they have some means of describing it.

Are there artists who have inspired you?

There are so many artists who have inspired me and not only for the work they have made. Inspiration is such a broad term and can take place in a variety of ways. I need inspiration on different levels.

There are of course the great painters that I have always admired: Rubens, Goya, Titian, Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Leonardo Da Vinci, El Greco, Durer, Delacroix for instance.

Great painters of story, myth and history. Dramatic themes of victory and betrayal, war, poverty, cruelty, political commentary, temptation, love and lust, liberty and revolution, death and disease, infirmity and religious allegory.

The enormous scale of some of these paintings I find really inspiring. I have stood in front of many great paintings and been awe struck in their company. Combinations of masterly draughtsmanship, incredible application, and what seems like a devoutly attuned skill is enough to inspire anyone surely, but along with such charged subject matter and existential credence cast over huge scale paintings feels inspiring even if foreboding due to their dark palette and heavy subject matter.

Nonetheless, I enjoy the culmination of many decisions the artist has made along their way to make the work. It maybe that I’m an artist myself, but when I’m taking in a piece of work that captures me, I cannot help but imagine how they created it; from the colour mixing to the mark making, the light captured in such a sophisticated way, or the placement of a figure or any symbolic facility within the work. I find it all inspiring.

I have a particular inclination for large scale works. I enjoy the physicality of them.

I’m just as greatly inspired by some artists for the people they became and their courage. The obstacles they endured and sometimes overcame, their honesty and bravery in embracing their humanity, and steadfastly going on a journey using art to describe and understand themselves and the world around them and often against such adversity.

Van Gogh is someone I feel greatly inspired by. I feel such an affinity to Van Gogh because he was such an impassioned person and someone who felt his emotionality and interiority so intensely. He said ” I don’t know if the world is unbearable, or if I’m too sensitive” I often have a proclivity towards such sensitivity.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t change it, sensitivity is a gift and a curse and everything in between, but just knowing that someone as sincere as Van Gogh existed gives me inspiration and that his strength of conviction and dedication to whichever curiosity was occupying him at any particular time in his life gave his life meaning, depth and direction. His drawing a perfect combination of raw curiosity and the purest of intention which seems to render a kind of beauty that I find mesmerising.

His work, is some of the most inspiring work I think possible for a human being to make. His self-portraits are so moving. They capture an intensity of self that is just extraordinary. In my own work I’m interested in emotionality. It goes hand in hand with my own experience of feeling since I feel so deeply. Whether its a drawing of a tree or a person, I like to include this aspect of my emotional experience of the object. Dostoyevsky published a short story titled “ The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” in which the narrator has a vivid dream of a parallel Earth but without suffering. What initially appears wonderful quickly becomes terrible as it dawns on the narrator that this other world has no place for love. At this point, he pines for the pain that accompanies love. “I long, I thirst, this very instant, to kiss with tears the earth that I have left,” he says , “and I don’t want, I won’t accept life on any other”

Matisse, Bonnard and Picasso have inspired me. Hockney, Magritte, Leonora Carrington. Louise Bourgeoise, Sickert, Cezanne, Cornelia Parker, Laurie Anderson, Faith Ringgold, Soutine, Alice Neel, Celia Paul, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Varda the wonderful French New Wave film maker and artist, Edward Munch. The list is endless.

That is quite a list of artists who have inspired you?

I’m also inspired by artists who have been expansive in their artistic journey, following the natural course of their own particular wonderment. Its invigorating to look over an artists life and see such evolution of mind, heart and soul captured in their work. I believe we are in Soul, and are each experiencing it from our own part of the shore. For me there is nothing more inspiring than the expressions of artists describing their experience of consciousness.

Although I’m always looking at other artists’ work and lives, and do take inspiration from them, I think my own artistic journey is becoming more inclined towards the study of people. It’s important for me to be inspired by other artists work, but not try too hard to emulate.

I try to approach my own work by connecting to the current within me. It has to come from that place for my work to feel sincere and make meaning from my own direct experience. Each new work involves a vital spark, and any theories or ideas of other artist’s work goes flying out the window, so to speak.

I try not to dwell or get preoccupied with other artist’s work because that feels too much like a distraction. My mind is my own and its only an authentic work that I’m interested in creating. Becoming attuned to my own presence is of the utmost preoccupation when I’m creating each work. Clearing the decks of anything extraneous, including the baggage of knowledge one accumulates, can be crucial to making authentic work. Clear airways in the mind and opening my availability to really being able to be present with myself and subject.

Chaim Soutine’s paintings of people, Alice Neel Portraits, Faith Ringgold portraits and Van Gogh’s paintings of people are a particular inspiration for me. Their paintings often have a quality of vitality that really speaks to me of the artist just as much as the sitter. Employing colour to describe a person is very exciting to me and challenging too, so these artists definitely inspire me. I might respond to one sitter with an impasto application of paint, whilst another asks for less pigment and a more liquid and evenly applied response. When I sense that I should make a paired down record of a person, there is a much more alluded to suggestion of mark, as opposed to starkly stated. I find that these artists made drawings and paintings of their sitters and confronted similar questions. Their decision making processes and choices feel very alive to me when I look at their work.

Lucian Freud has been an inspiration, in the sense that I can look at his work and feel what doesn’t work for me, as well as what does. Artists can be inspirations in helping me to decide through contrast. I can look at Freud’s work and think about why something jars within me, and then make decisions about how I want to find meaning in my own work.

When I think of Lucian Freud’s portraits, I feel there is too often a sort of glued down quality of his sitters. I’m not saying that his work isn’t interesting to me – It is, but the electric light in his studio, the claustrophobic grey palette and the same orchestration of mark becomes repetitious, and to my instinct, is too frequently used for so many people. It feels to me like the personhood of his sitters gets lost amongst so much sameness.

I believe each sitter is a unique experience and something in me is fascinated by the idea that I make a point to be particular in how I describe each sitter. In my mind, too much of the same thing can rob both an artist and the sitter of a kind of dignity and vitality that they both deserve. Formulaic approaches to making art of people doesn’t feel natural for me in my own work.

It’s important to me that my own work expands and breathes, and that there is room for elasticity of response to each individual portrait I make. I don’t concern myself with any conscious style. I believe in the rich well of the unknown, that something other, the spontaneous and even mysterious that comes through and this is why a sort of balancing act is necessary. Too similar a palette for so many paintings is not an approach I am interested in my own work. I believe in flexibility and changeability working alongside the wrought and familiar, the skill and the basic principles.

Recently I’ve been looking at Celia Paul’s paintings of people and her self-portraits. Throughout her life she painted her mother and the titles of some of her paintings interest me. Her painting of “My mother with Shining Eyes” an example and “My Mother and God”. I enjoy the idea of making responses to other artists work. Artists have of course done this throughout the ages, and on seeing Celia Paul’s paintings of her mother I found myself quite moved. There is a tenderness in the paintings and a sort of captivating intimacy that resonate. I’ve been thinking about making some drawings and paintings of my own mother, so discovering Celia Paul’s books and work felt nicely timed.

I have recently read her book “Self -Portrait “ which I very much enjoyed. She is becoming a great inspiration to me. Her gentle nature seems to permeate the work. She seems like an interesting person in many ways.

I’m also interested in making a series of self -portraits. I’ve recently discovered an artist called Anthony Eyton who is now 101 years old. He recently made a self – portrait painting that I absolutely love. He’s become a real inspiration to me! There is such a liveliness about his painting that is just infectious!

What about other influences?

Psychoanalysis has had a huge impact on me and how I experience art. I can say with certainty, that through analysis, my mind changed, facilitating more of a connection to the intuitive within. It has been a rich enquiry of discovering substrates of the mind that have revealed a lot and influenced how I experience the world. I have no doubt that this will carry over into my own work. I’m becoming more curious about trying to catch and define expressions of the psychological.

I’m influenced by all forms of the Arts. Theatre, Film, Music, Literature and Poetry. The Natural world. Philosophy, History, Myth, various religions and cultures, ritual and ways of being. I’m influenced by ideas of the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

All of these have influenced me deeply and helped to form who I am. They help to buffer and sustain, encourage and inspire me. Through the arts and my own psychoanalytic process, I am reminded time and again, that connectivity and courage can and must be cultivated.