Robert Heald: You’ve been in Berlin for seven years now. This is the second time you’ve made it back to New Zealand for an exhibition. Why did you move overseas and what have you been doing since you’ve been away?
Sam Rountree Williams: I left in 2009. I’d finished Elam and was looking to do my master’s in Europe or the United States. I ended up at Düsseldorf Art Academy studying under Herbert Brandl, an Austrian painter. I was there for two semesters before returning briefly to New Zealand, then moved to London for two years. Eventually, I washed up in Berlin.
The work’s changed a lot. Before you left New Zealand, you were making abstract paintings with shells and spray paint. What brought on the change of style?
When I was in New Zealand, I was trying to hit this midpoint between abstraction and figuration. I found that unsustainable, and gradually became an abstract painter. By the time I was studying in Düsseldorf, I was making geometric abstract paintings, but I was also producing these cartoony, fast, free, funny figurative drawings. I realised I wanted to combine the colour and surface orientation of the abstraction with the humour of the figuration.
The kernel of my current style formed while I was on the Turps Studio Programme in London around 2013. When I got to Berlin, it developed for a few years before coming to fruition. From 2017 on, I started making paintings like the ones you see here.
There have often been male protagonists in your work. Are they self-portraits?
I avoid calling them self-portraits. They’re reflections of the self, but I don’t want them to be understood as self- portraits. The existential, psychological scenarios I depict should be open enough for other people to identify with.
How preconceived are the paintings?
Images pop into my head and I make sketches. Then, over time, some images stand out as more poignant, and I turn those into paintings. I sketch them onto the canvas as the starting point. Sometimes, as in Italy am Main (2020), not much changes from the drawing—it’s just a process of building up the colour. The other three paintings in the show, however, are significantly worked over—the original images largely gone. In Fantasia (2019), pentimenti show through.
In your paintings, figures are often isolated within domestic spaces, towers, or other structures. Does that reflect your Berlin experience?
Alienation in bigger cities is a common theme in modern and contemporary art. But my figures’ isolation has to do with the loneliness of subjective experience more generally. It also reflects self-imposed isolation in the studio. At the same time, there’s a desire within the paintings to break free from individual consciousness, to reconcile with other people and the universal.
I recognise the central stylised tower in This or That (2020) from driving around Berlin.
It’s based on the Berlin TV Tower, elongated into something like a metronome, so that one could imagine it tick-tocking back and forth between the towers on either side. Those I see as watchtowers, with people inside, but they also look like space-age television monitors. There’s an ambiguity: are we watching those people or are they watching us?
Your reclining male figure returns in the current show. He’s in two of the four paintings. In some works, he looks buried, lying in an alcove of light or colour. I first thought he was dead, but his eyes are open.
His eyes are open. He’s definitely conscious, able to perceive what’s going on around him, but frozen, unable to act. He does look buried. Buried alive, perhaps. It’s ambiguous. Is he cut off from the life of the picture or is he dreaming the rest of the picture?
People often link you to Michael Illingworth.
I like Illingworth’s paintings, especially his stylised forms. Stylisation embeds his figures within his compositions. There’s an equality between his figures and the environments they sit in. My figures are more separate from their surroundings, like actors in a stage set. The figures are key and everything else is a prop.
Like Illingworth, you often subdivide your paintings into different compartments. That reminds me of Rita Angus’s painting Journey, Wellington (1962), where she brings different timeframes into a single painting.
For me, Renaissance painting is the more direct reference. Renaissance paintings often describe different moments—separate from one another in linear time—in one image. However, in my paintings, these are less distinct moments, more simultaneous moments in different worlds or in different aspects of the same world—what’s visible and what’s invisible.
There are also planets, suns and moons floating around in the current show. This creates a sense of time and diurnal rhythm. When did you start using these symbols?
In my painting Isis and Osiris (2017). There was a sequence of them traversing the painting, like the moon going through its phases. It was a way to reference the passage of time. They’ve continued to appear. They can simultaneously represent a beginning and an end—as in the beginning and the end of a day—because you’re not sure if they are the sun or the moon. So, though time passes, there’s no movement, no change, just a sense of constancy, an eternal dusk. It’s stasis. It’s Groundhog Day.
The most brightly coloured and fantastical work here is Italy am Main. The title must be a play upon Frankfurt-am-Main.
Yes. Italy am Main is my only painting directly based on a dream. In the dream, I inherited a studio in Frankfurt. I was conscious of the Main river in the background with this German classical architecture all around. My studio- mate studied in Frankfurt and compared the building in this painting to the old Portikus gallery, with its classical façade. ‘Italy’ was simply a reference to the classical architecture in this German context.
That painting reminds me of the final scene in Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972). Is the figure staring at a painting of a landscape or through a window?
It’s ambiguous, with all those windows or frames within the space, and the way the horizon differs between them and with the background. The frame on the right, which the figure stares at, is more clearly a picture frame for me.
Your naïve, cartoonish style is disarming. Does it enable you to introduce more sincerity?
Definitely. I always come back to Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Sometimes it’s necessary to wear a mask to say things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
Do you get fed up with people psychoanalysing you through your work?
I don’t mind being psychoanalysed. In fact, I love to hear other interpretations. I make the paintings out of a will to understand things—things about myself and things about the world, things that would otherwise be unknowable. But that doesn’t mean those things become completely clear to me afterwards.
In Waiting (2020), which we showed at Auckland Art Fair 2021, an apparitional devil waves to the viewer. Last year, you also did some spray-painted shell paintings featuring devils. It was interesting to see you going back to the shell paintings and combining them with figuration.
I made my first shell paintings in 2009. The idea was to have this seashell ground with spray paint over the top, but I struggled for imagery. In Europe, it was impractical to continue the shell paintings. They were cut off prematurely. In 2018, though, looking out over the Mediterranean Sea during a storm, I suddenly had this thought to return to them. I felt the oil paintings were becoming increasingly smooth and non-jarring. I wanted something more violent. I don’t mean human violence, but the violence of a storm, say. In that moment, I realised the imagery should be devils. It pulled the painting in another direction. You’ve got this very natural ground and this very urban paint medium sprayed over the top of it, which are clashing languages, then the devil as an image. The devils are another reflection of the self. They’re not evil, maybe not even bad—they’re mischievous, as one might refer to a child as a little devil. There’s mischief in combining the shells and the spray paint, and the devil figure reflects that.
In New Zealand, a lot of paintings are small and intimate. Yours are relatively large and they behave better at that scale. When did you realise you wanted to work large?
As soon as I tried working large, it felt natural and the work became better. Now, I find it hard to make small works. It becomes uptight—overly controlled. I need to work on a scale that pushes the pictures outside of my compositional control, but also where viewers don’t perceive the limits of the pictorial space as clearly, so they can get lost in it. It’s also a function of expectation; they’re not such big paintings in the European context.
There are a few New Zealand artists in Berlin now. How has Berlin responded to your work?
Very well, I think. But, in Berlin, painting is typically more mannered, ironic, self-conscious and unromantic. While my painting has humour, it’s not ironic. Coming from here and having studied in Düsseldorf—which also has a very romantic, unironic painting tradition—I think it’s natural for me to be genuinely romantic in my work while simultaneously showing a sense of humour about it. In New Zealand, we marry humour to sincerity so we don’t look like we’re taking ourselves too seriously.
Sam Rountree Williams, Dreamers ,was at Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, in March.
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