From A - Z with Barbara Rae

By Laura Campbell, 01.05.2016

Barbara Rae, Standing Stones and White Sea (West Coast of Scotland), c. 1984. © The Artist. Image courtesy of the Open Eye Gallery.

Like so many artists whose practices have reached maturity, Barbara Rae commands respect. She has the authoritative air of a firm but fair teacher, of someone who really knows their stuff as a result of accumulating a wealth of experience both in the art world and beyond it. She’s 73 this year, so that’s as is expected, but what might surprise some is her self-deprecating sense of humour and refreshing openness that belies her seniority as a highly respected artist.

Rae’s studio is a bit like her work: meticulously set up to provide optimum conditions for spontaneity. It’s tempting to relate its every nook and cranny: the glass roof letting in pure natural light, the collection of pot plants, the neat stash of CDs that she listens to as she works, the little side room storing her library of moleskin sketchbooks —but I digress. If this paints a picture of a woman precious about her work then you’d be wrong. Strewn haphazardly across this vision of perfect orderliness are bits of collage, prints, sketches and paintings at various stages of completion.    

 She invites me to delve into her sketchbooks and visibly lights up while recounting sketches’ backstories and her process for making the finished works. Pointing out a drawing made in County Mayo, Ireland, she describes her fascination with standing stones as a student. Another sketch prompts Rae to tell me about her time spent in Utah. “I’m dying to go back to Arizona.” she says, “ There comes a point when you lose a connection with a place. That’s why I really need to go back.”

Rae’s strong desire to return to a site of inspiration before making a planned series of prints gives an insight into her process. You can imagine the artist charging herself up with the essence of a place, be it in Scotland, Arizona or South Africa then returning home to her studio to let lose. “It drives me nuts when people describe me as a landscape painter. Do these look like landscapes to you?” she laughs rhetorically. The answer to that is emphatically no. While Rae’s paintings have some figurative elements that allude to place, her paintings are a far cry from the safe easel paintings the word ‘landscape’ conjures.

Back in the studio, the enormous canvases are acted upon in intense sessions. “You have to work fast.” She says, “The idea takes a long time; the painting doesn’t take a long time.’ Sometimes Rae makes a series of prints before working on a painting with the same subject in mind, but often it’s the other way round. Both mediums are equally important to her and she has the same approach to both. “Printmaking has taught me a lot over the years about the painting process and the layers within them.”

Rae’s forthcoming exhibition for Edinburgh Art Festival, aptly titled ‘Return Journey’, will give a unique opportunity to reflect on the artist’s evolving relationship with painting and printmaking. Some works, such as those made in the 70s have seldom been shown, and though different in terms of execution and palette, it is striking how persistent Rae’s vision has been over the decades. Rae explains that it was an important moment when she realised you could make more than one work from a single idea: “No one told me [at art school] you don’t have to think of a fresh idea for each and every painting!” Armed with this knowledge, Rae went on to develop a distinctive style that continues to inspire a new generation of artists.

With the conversation turning to Rae’s own influences over the years, it proves facile trying to pin her work down with references to art history or other artists with a similar flare for colour. In response to the suggestion that John Hoyland might have been an inspiration she laughs surprised. “John? No! I’m too dumb to be inspired by John. I don’t make completely abstract paintings. If I did they’d be crap.”

“I don’t care about what other people are doing; I’ve got enough problems of my own. I can only do what I can do. I can only paint what I know. If I see something in a gallery I like then I’m glad to have seen it. But it doesn’t worry me, I don’t think ‘is my art going to look as good as that?’” Adding facetiously, “more often I’ll see a painting and think ‘that’s awful! I hope my work doesn’t look as bad as that!’”

But what of her known approval of Richard Diebenkorn’s work? “I wouldn’t say I was inspired by Diebenkorn, I’d say I liked his work. I used to tell my students to look at him because it’s easy to see his progression as an artist: you can see how he went from A through to Z. You can’t get to Z without going through the processes, something today’s students don’t often realise.”

“You have to absorb your influences,” she continues. “ You can’t make them the main point of your work.” There is a shred of irritation in her voice that you might attribute to the fact she’s had her fair share of imitators. Rae cares deeply about artists’ integrity and it is telling that she admires those whose careers have been prolific, brave and single-minded. Among them are the insatiable painters Picasso, Tapies and Goya: Spanish painters whose urgent brushwork often radiates raw emotion.

As students of Edinburgh College of Art in the mid 60s, Rae claims that she and her peers never had the added pressure of referring to themselves as artists; something she agrees helped her practice develop naturally. “You were students back then, plain and simple,” she says.

The cultural climate Rae emerged from is utterly different (some might say more straightforward) than the one that students must navigate today. It’s arguably unhelpful that students are now encouraged to proclaim themselves bona fide artists immediately after graduating– some without the benefit of life experience. Rae’s advice to them is to develop their own voice regardless of what others are doing, to paint what they know, and to work damn hard; there’s no shortcuts to ‘Z’.

Barbara Rae: Return Journey. Open Eye Gallery. 1st – 31st August 2016.