John Stark

I’ve always made images, since I was old enough to hold a pencil I think. I always enjoyed that space of escape and all the problem solving that came with it. And like most artists it was never really a choice, I just kept doing it, like a bad habit or a sickness. I did some pretty tough jobs as a teenager, which made me realise very quickly what I didn’t want to be doing, so I tried very hard at art school and eventually made it into the Royal Academy Schools in London. Twenty years on, I’m still trying hard and it never ceases to challenge me, that’s the addiction. Painting is so unforgiving.

I try to address issues such as love, fear, belief, solitude and death. Myths, it seems, have been able to make some sense of what little we do know. However, it is consciousness that makes us such incredibly complex beings, this awareness of our place in a vast unquantifiable universe and the inevitability of death.

Unlike other animals that just eat each other, we are capable of deceit and betrayal. I try to think positively of humankind but our potential for evil does frighten me when I see what we have been capable of throughout history. So as Jung said, we have to confront our shadow, our darker side. We have to understand what potential is contained in all of us and take responsibility. It is a terrifying realisation but we all need to understand that.

That’s a difficult decision… It’s between Medusa and St. George and the Dragon. Either way, they are both hero-versus-monster myths although slightly different. What’s great is how this archetypal myth can be applied to almost everyone’s everyday lives because we all have monsters to overcome and are facing some kind of resistance to the goals we want to achieve.
But going back to the question, I would have to choose the myth of Medusa and Perseus. The idea of Perseus’ shield as a mirror to reflect the gaze which turns people to stone is very powerful and, as a painter, I can think of painting as a deflective shield – deflecting the attacks from all monsters and by doing so acknowledging their very existence. Medusa herself is also endlessly fascinating, operating in a liminal space between beauty and horror, attraction and repulsion, sympathy and rage. Ultimately, hers is an enraging story of cruelty. She was raped by Poseidon and then punished for her sins with the curse of monster-ness for eternity. So although there is this natural impulse to ward monsters off, we also have this hankering for the monsters’ triumph.

When I think about it, it does seem most myths involve some battle or struggle. I suppose I could cheat here by choosing the grand redemption myth of Christianity, the ultimate description of human struggle ever imagined, where perfect eternal goodness battles with utterly determined evil for the soul of humanity. Not necessarily agreeing with it but it’s likely it’s the number 1 top story that most accurately captures the reality of the human condition.

Possibly. The future does look bleak, doesn’t it? But I’m not making a political decision to show a scary apocalyptic world to frighten people, it comes out naturally that way. I’m drawn to create something out of the dark. I have tried to create works that aren’t dystopian but they always lack a tension I’m searching for. Maybe I just like fighting monsters; if you don’t go to them, then they will come for you.

This can really vary. Some small paintings are made in one day – if it’s a good day. The largest works can take up to six months. Because I apply the oil paint incredibly thin it’s usually dry the next day, so I don’t have issues with drying time holding me back. I try to work on seven to eight paintings at one time, then a hierarchy emerges and the weaker ones tend to get destroyed. A lot of paintings get destroyed along the way and there are often several attempts at achieving one painting.

I think it would be difficult to make a work rooted in figuration that isn’t on some level symbolic. Three dots very quickly resemble a face. So I guess my paintings, much like a black mirror, tend to reflect back what the viewer brings to them. They are about an accumulation of knowledge throughout history – and not just exclusive to art. I also draw on knowledge from other areas such as anthropology and archaeology. An archaeologist will see a painting of a bone, for example, very differently from a car salesman. Whether that knowledge remains hidden or not lies in question.
In general, I work with a specific cast of idiosyncratic figures that could be seen as symbolic, such as the witch, the monk, the leper, and the beekeeper. Although these come with a lot of pre-programmed signification they can still mean different things to different people. You can’t really control that and I find it interesting how these specific characters and narratives remain open to interpretation.

Yes, DoL Po was something a little different and more politically motivated than previous exhibitions. The ‘DoL’ in DoL Po stands for ‘Division of Labour’, and the painting Medium of Exchange is actually one of a few collaborative paintings I made with creative friends Rebecca and Mike. It actually started out as an idea for a pub sign and the paintings where exhibited back to back. We took the idea of a magic trick, and the idea of a glove – actually, a beekeepers glove, which renders the hand invisible. So it becomes a reference to Adam Smiths’ ‘invisible hand theory’, which invokes references to income distribution, economic growth, trade and exchange, or simply put, capitalism. You put a half in and you get a full coin back. This all flips back on itself as the coin simultaneously relates to the phases of the moon, which like the tide of the sea, we are all under its influence.

Paintings are like windows so the stone frame occurred quite naturally. It’s funny because by employing this very formal architectural element in the work, suddenly a door of endless possibilities opened. I was literally painting a brick wall, which suddenly seemed full of potential. I imagined there could be wolves in these walls, monsters behind them, etc. They can act as sites for still life or I can break through and turn them into windows onto other worlds. So rather than evoking the feeling of being trapped, to me, they actually operate in the opposite way by liberating the painted space.
In the Roman Catholic Church, the alcove is often the site of transubstantiation, where the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Painting holds a similar transformative potential and, more recently, my concerns have shifted away from the image and more on the materiality of the paint and the object-hood of the painting.

The painting Leprae depicts an infected alcove. Here, the alcove references ‘leper’s squints’ or hagioscopes, which are small architectural devices in chapels that allowed lepers and other non-desirables to view the service from outside without coming into contact with the rest of the community. In Leprae, the alcove is blocked so they can’t see in, turning leprosy into the subject seen and to be exalted instead of it being hidden from sight. So an alcove, once the site of transubstantiation, now becomes like the skin of an ‘unclean’ unbeliever.

I’m reducing things down at the moment, the paintings are becoming more minimal and blacker, which works really well with the highly varnished, mirror-like surface. There’s something about these darker works being on the limits of visibility that really interests me. From a distance, they can appear as black rectangles and, as you approach them, the images emerge and draw you in. With the black alcoves, it’s also unclear what material they are supposed to be made of; it feels like it could be oily rubber, space dust or some kind of dark matter.

I’m currently working on a collaborative project with the musician James Lavelle, of Unkle, who I met at the Ngorongoro II exhibition in Berlin. And there’s a three-person show on the cards for next year. Other than that, it’s the usual run of art fair deadlines which keeps me busy.