Meet the Artist... Oliver Bancroft - GOLDMARK - YouTube

In my not so humble opinion, I haven't come across in the last quarter of a century anyone of this man's generation who gets close. This is 50 years since we opened this shop and for half of that time we've had an association with Oliver and we're still talking to each other. Just. Just. We may not be after after this. 20 something years ago we met and I saw a painting and I bought it without hesitation and I have continued to buy for the whole of that 25 years. I feel very privileged to have been able to to work with you and to look at what you're doing now. We're here to look at Oliver's paintings but I don't know how many of you know that he is also a filmmaker. He has shown all over the place. Whitechapel Gallery, the Barbican, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Kettle's Yard, Pompidou Centre in Paris. He's had exhibitions and festivals in Naples and Toronto and Salzburg and Munich and Zimbabwe. All over the place. We have to be very careful because you don't really like talking about what you mean do you? Maybe because we haven't rehearsed this. Not true. We have rehearsed this. Will you tell us a bit about your influences? When I was studying I was a painter and I did a master's at the same place I did a BA and I decided to give up painting as my main focus and I started filmmaking because of Nalin Welsford. He was my inspiration. He did an animation called Storm in a Teacup and it was a little boat in a teacup animation and I just thought I'm gonna make films. So my focus around filmmakers became my influence but then when I returned to painting I started looking at early renaissance painting and I used to be a Rembrandt fan but I gave Rembrandt up for paintings where the subject was where the light was coming from. Not somebody under a shadow like a Scorsese film but somebody standing there and they're glowing. That's the early renaissance. That's the best stuff. You get a gold leaf altarpiece. Italian. What's his name? Frangelico. You made a pilgrimage didn't you to see? I did yeah. Frangelico is like the prettiest early renaissance painter and I did a pilgrimage to Florence and Rome to try and see all his paintings in the situation they were intended for. If you ever go to Florence there's one museum that never has a queue and it's called the Museo San Marco. It's a San Marco museum and it's a monastery that's been converted. It's now a museum. There was a monk and he painted the frescoes on the walls and these are frescoes for monks so these are for the well-read religious types. So you see a painting of the crucifix and what it's about is not very clear to me as a person who's not a studied theologian and that's where the magic starts to happen when you start making up the stories. Yeah so early renaissance is my favourite because it looks alien. The perspective is wonky and there's none of this attempt to mimic a photograph. When I started making films I also gave up painting from photos. I think that was important because what's the point painting from a photograph when you can just take a photograph? I haven't heard a good argument against that. There's these two on the corner here. The top one, the red altar, that's from a frangelico. It's like a comic book strip of a local saint and there'll be little scenes from the saint's life. Usually it's like somebody being boiled alive or someone being hacked to death or they try to hack them to death but the blades go blunt because God saved them and these are great. This is where the artist is having a little bit liberated and having a bit of fun. So I started copying his predella paintings and I'd remove the people so it's become a set for a film rather than a depiction of an event. It's such a pretty painter frangelico and then there's quite a few of these are from the National Gallery. In the corner there's the guy lifting the fake trees. That's from an early renaissance painting in the National Gallery and I go there all the time and I always look at the wonky paintings. It's the ones that they don't quite know how, they don't know the rules of perspective as we know them now. So they struggle with the mathematics of angles. I like that stuff. The single tree there, is that a renaissance work? That's from, yeah, so that made that tree as a frangelico tree. I never, I don't think he quite depicted species in an accurate way. He didn't know how to, this is a laurel tree or whatever. So I loved his trees so I'd copy his trees, put them on my own paintings. It's kind of like to try and unlearn what I've learned from botanical illustration and depicting the world in front of you. Rather let's go for some guy who's trying to do his best. It's always a worry because when my wife comes down to visit and has a look at something which you've done and says wow that's fantastic, the next thing you're doing is destroying it. Tell us about this extraordinary perversity that you've got in terms of, how does that work? Maybe it's your wife. Well, it could well be, yes. So the process for me at the moment is I'll go to, I'll get to the studio in the morning and the picture might be A good or B rubbish and then by the end of the day it's either A good or B rubbish and then I go home and it'll be the opposite, it'll be good or rubbish. Destroying your picture is really important. So some things you just have to get rid of and I'll come back to them, I'll do the same image again later on. I'm always correcting things with a reflection or drawing a horizon line across the middle of a canvas. If something's not working out I'll put a line across the middle, like put the horizon line back in and the figure there, that painting was a real problem and then I suddenly, I fixed it and I did it in one, like half an hour it was good and I don't remember how it got good but it's like that's it and it's yes, maybe it's Jesus hiding under an umbrella maybe, something like that. It's not that bad. So there is a figure of the Christ in it. The one to the right of that, I happen to know that's political isn't it? Can you talk a little bit about how you feel the artist should think about political stuff? So that's from the only surviving photograph at the moment I think and I'm always into that. I think an artist's role is to be a witness. I'm a bit obsessed with donkeys. I was watching Rossellini's Journey to Italy with Ingrid Bergman who I'm obsessed about and she's, her and her husband, their relationship's falling apart. They never had kids. It's falling apart in Italy as they're in Naples and she's walking through Naples and Ingrid Bergman looks amazing, you know the camera loves her and I love her but then they're talking in Italian and somebody mentions oh look how small that donkey is and there's a donkey on the street walking past and I'll forget the film completely and I'll just watch the donkey. So I think the donkey is the, you know, it's the witness. Like Ahasuer Balthasar by Robert Bresson where the donkey lives this life through the cruelty of the people around it. The donkey is the great thing of that movie and I wished there wasn't anyone else around. I just wanted to watch a film about a donkey so I thought I'd better make that film. So I went to Greece and I went to the smallest island in Greece to find a donkey to film and it got to this island and there's only one donkey on this island. It's a film about a donkey that lives alone on an island. I went back, I was walking down the road, I lived near Blackheath at the time and turned out there was a donkey track. Then I could have made my film in Blackheath. Thank god I didn't because I did try to make a film about donkey later on and it was rubbish. The donkey is the witness. The donkey will always be there and I always think it's kind of observing us. You know, it's a tragic, comedic thing. There's an awful lot going on with that donkey over there on the left hand side if you look at it because the number of human legs it's got underneath it. Yeah, it's the people inside the donkey. Is that like people inside the lion? Oh yeah, yeah. We are a lion. I always think there's a lot of pressing issues on the individual and maybe as a group we're better. I don't know, togetherness. There's an extraordinary donkey on the end, doesn't there? That's a donkey suit, yeah. I made these donkey suits so people can wear these. You can wear the donkey suit. Does that make sense? I was going to ask what part of the character that appears to be hiding behind the donkey takes place but the other thing that strikes me is the lighting on it. It's like how your filmmaking relates to the art in a more direct way. That's that baroque thing of the lighting and you can listen to Scorsese talk about how he's used painting to inform his filmmaking whereas I'm a painter and I'm using film to inform my painting maybe. It's maybe the opposite but maybe the thing with the donkey pictures is I always thought about a car light. You're the light and you illuminate this creature in the dark. I always thought that if you're the source of the light you know that the world is dark without you. This creature is in the dark in a stormy sky and you've come across it. That's the I'm saying what is that creature? I couldn't say 100% what it is. I have made protest videos in the past where we broke into toxic waste landfill sites in a donkey costume like the what do you something about solidarity working together. Will you say a little about your use of gold leaf? Italian renaissance altarpieces you know that thing where you go into an old church and there's like in Greek churches and Orthodox churches there's no lighting so the gold shines and then the actual painting bits really dark and I thought I should have a go. There was an Italian altarpiece show at the National Gallery a few years ago and you got to walk all the way around this what do you call a painting that's made from multiple panels like more than a triptych like a heptoptylic or something. It's like 20 different pictures all glued together in this gold leaf frame and you saw all the way around it looked like a spaceship maybe maybe the gold is more than yellow and the yellow is is very yellow but the gold is more yellow. I think the assumption of gold leaf paintings is they're religious that's something to play with that assumptions or that consideration that in the viewer something to play with. Would you say you're religious? I don't know I don't know I'm not an atheist that's for sure I don't think you can tell me that God doesn't exist nor can you tell me you'd die. Will you say something about the multiple legs? I mean I've always been obsessed with shoes because I don't fit in normal shoes so like I'm a size 13 or 14 and sizes stop at 12 so I've always been obsessed by shoes that I can't so painting shoes, painting feet in pictures. I think multi-legs it's uh I don't know why not have more legs. Will you say something about this the sail paintings? I do those quite a lot and I can't remember what I did the first one I think I just it was something that wasn't working so I just I squared I painted over it in a square and I thought oh it's a sail and it's like it's like being a witness is there something about that witness thing you're you're looking at the covering. You you taught for a while did you enjoy that? Um it's okay I always feel like I'm giving too much away or not enough or make myself incoherent or it's too confusing I try. Can you tell me a little bit about these single figures like sort of Englishmen abroad getting burnt? Where are they? They're about an Englishman getting burnt. There are awkward people abroad or by the seashore there's my own memories connected to it and I'm almost putting myself now on my memories you know you you have you have memories and can you put yourself now in the memories of the past I suppose so maybe that's you know my condition is progressive so it's never sorry it's never standing still so there's always an element of putting myself now on that on those past moments yeah. Will you say something about don't if you don't want to but say something about how the work maybe has changed over the time and how your current situation whether that has changed the work or the way you feel about the work? Using a wheelchair most of the time has formed my process I think it's it's part of it but it's not it's just made me make more like focus more on painting I go to the studio to escape I think and to get involved and focus on something else maybe that's what I'm doing. Is making frames out of matchsticks is that therapy or does that hark back to a previous life that you had? They didn't mention it but I've made those frames very proud of them it takes a long time and then you have to you put the matches on you sand them down and there's something about the gold I lay the gold down I'm very I'm a very bad gilder don't don't ask me to gild anything um it cracks and uh it doesn't land flat and I'm happy with that because that's when the picture comes out through that awkwardness so the matches are kind of they're fiddly and you're kind of working out but you just you know one next to the other cut those in half glue them down hold them there so there's something it's less immediate it's more practice slowly but surely I kind of like it's like a you make things in a in a sweatshop kind of a way. Is that fair? I'm still making the films right I still like make I sent off over Covid during Covid I isolated for a while and uh I started filming this building site across the way and I sent the film off and it's 900 feet of film I don't know if anyone knows what that is but that's 25 half an hour footage it's a lot of money I sent it off it got came back half of it was blank and the other half was ---- and I got really excited I was like this is it this is going to be the next epic. I'm really grateful to you today for being as open as you have been because I think you've um told me more and us more uh in the last half an hour than perhaps you've told me in the last 25 years so that's it's very good of you. Thank you all for listening but thank you mostly um I don't really want to say much other than I'm so grateful for you talking like this and I just feel that we are very very privileged so thank you.