The Conjuring of Imagery – In Conversation with Chris Appleby

Words by Isaac Parkinson

Chris Appleby is an artist who seeks surprise – the kind of surprise that emerges from what William Blake called “a process of self-annihilation.” This process confronts one’s preconceptions, prejudices and fears, and reveals that one holds an unconscious worldview. The painting process becomes Appleby’s vehicle to punch holes in the walls of those preconceptions, allowing new ideas and conjured imagery to broaden and evolve one’s worldview.

He describes the act of painting as “a live improvised process in which making the painting becomes an experience.” For the American Expressionists, paintings were visceral objects intended to leap off the wall and confront their audience. Appleby instead sees painting as a means for the artist to confront themselves. The imagery summoned upon the canvas is not exclusively for its viewer to experience, but more immediately for its creator to contend with.

Lilith and the Lieutenant

Such exploration demands an appropriate working practice – a vehicle that can enter new and unexpected worlds. The foundation of many of Appleby’s works is formed with bole, a wet clay mixed with adhesive most commonly used for gilding gold leaf. Its application adds another two or three millimetres of depth, creating a visceral, interactive surface – no longer a static facade, but now a three-dimensional textural plane. This topographical complexity and uncertainty provides an opportunity for interaction and intervention.

While it is drying, there is a limited window for text to be etched into its surface. A sense of urgency pushes Appleby to act upon it, bypassing the cogitating and considering of his rational self to plumb directly into his unconscious. The surface can then be further altered after it has dried, and Appleby uses various tools to craft its texture. The outcome is a more malleable landscape which demands intuition and experimentation. The text etched into the drying bole floats among the figures like a divine voice from an unknown speaker. Appleby stresses that the goal of this experimentation is to conjure images not only unfamiliar to his mind, but often uncomfortable to his preconceptions.

Kiff influence

This collaborative attitude towards the work’s ground is where one can observe the influence of Ken Kiff, a fellow artist, friend and crucial inspiration for Appleby’s work. The two worked together extensively on framing. They shared a belief the object of the painting and how it is presented are both of great importance.

Most artists would be afraid to admit to such sincere affection and praise of another artist, but Appleby naming his central protagonist – a detective named Lieutenant O’Kiff, who appears in many of his works – after Kiff indicates the strong bond he felt to his work.

Woman with Protruding Tongue (S-165) by Ken Kiff, 1982. Acrylic on paper. 69 x 88cm.

 Kiff was particularly averse to the binary view of form and meaning, instead believing that in painting, “shape, colour, character, meaning are fused into one action.” While writing on the work of Joan Miro in a 1989 volume of ‘Modern Painters,’ Kiff notes the importance of a work holding an intangible presence:

“As you continue looking, the face of the artist, which seemed to have been turned away, turns to face you again, and the energy of the paintings begins to flow.”

Martha Kapos – poet, writer and former student of Kiff’s – wrote in 1988 on Kiff’s interactive relationship with the ground of the painting:

“Kiff has always been the sort of painter, like Pollock or Klee, who regards the picture surface as an overall substance in which forms are embedded or from which they emerge, but never as a passive receptacle on which elements are imposed.”

Appleby describes Kiff’s images as “the residue of time spent ‘travelling’ the rectangle.” Kiff spent a lot of his career focused on the process of making. Sudden interests developed for new materials, such as the encaustic process of painting with hot wax. Paint was applied to the surface and then stripped away. A razor was used to cut into the paint and score the surface. Holes were made within the surface, reminding us of a work’s materiality. This plasticine landscape is exactly what Appleby is also striving for in the malleable ground he forms with bole. Images are allowed to emerge from the form under the artist’s conjuring hand.

Kiff often worked on board, finding its resilience appealing. While discussing a 1988 show at Fischer Fine Art, Kapos took particular interest in the triptych ‘Empty Street, Shadow Above a River, Sea Space.’ In this work, paint is stripped away to leave large portions of the hardwood’s natural earthy tones:

“The effect of this is to make one realize that although the continuous skin of paint is not sustained in a literal way, a sense of continuous picture plane which integrates that brown into a luminous whole does extend itself created and unbroken in the mind.”

Triptych: Empty Street, Shadow Above a River, Sea Space by Ken Kiff, 1986-88. Acrylic and oil on board. 366 x 278cm.

Paul Klee was a huge influence on Kiff, and to a lesser extent Appleby, in their approach to technique and the formal process.

Klee consistently expressed a strict interest in the mathematics of form, and particularly colour theory. He stressed the importance of “the artist placing more value on the powers that do the forming than on the final forms themselves.” Klee’s notes on colour theory suggest a strictly mathematical viewpoint, determining how value, chroma and hue impact the formal construction of painting.

Appleby agrees to an extent, believing in the essential nature of praxis and the physical engagement with the work. Yet such strict formalism objectifies thinking for him. There are greater intangibles, and the centre of gravity of each work is inevitably in the artist’s motivation and intention. Using a musical metaphor, common for Appleby, he mentions the raga, a melodic mode of Indian classical music known for its ability to “colour the mind” of the audience. Its framework stresses improvisation, requiring those intangibles of motivation from the artist. But, he stresses, before you can reach the raga, you must learn the sitar. The apparatus of language, whether in a melodic mode or the material of painting, must be absorbed before improvisation can occur within.

 Another influential artist for Appleby’s creative process is Philip Guston. In 1957, Guston stated:

“When I work, I am not concerned with making pictures, but only with the process of creation ... I feel that I have not invented so much as revealed, in a coded way, something that already existed.”

This corresponds to Appleby’s interest in painting’s revelatory nature, as opposed to a prescriptive illustration of predetermined images. Two key facets of this are conjuring and surprise. Guston in fact used both of these terms to articulate his work. Speaking specifically on the colour blue:

“Blue is a strange colour to use for me in any case - because it always evaporates ... But to bring it frontal, to make it feel on the plane, to me, is something to conjure with.”

And later, on surprise:

“My own demand is that I want to be surprised, baffled. To come in the studio the next morning and say, “Did I do that? Is it me? Isn't that strange!”

Dawn by Philip Guston, 1970. Oil on canvas. 170 x 274cm.

For art to be truly surprising to the artist, its expression requires authenticity. For Appleby, authenticity occurs outside the binary distinctions of ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ art. The two terms are often used to distinguish artists – figurative artists, who work with the recognisable images of our known world, emphasising a naturalism and fidelity to more effectively recreate their immediate surroundings; and abstract artists, who conversely build forms which do not adhere to the natural world, but instead hope to express something beyond or outside established imagery.

In Appleby’s practice, figuration and abstraction sit parallel to one another. The act of painting is inherently one of abstraction. The very process of performing upon the canvas will transform the empirical subject of a painting into an object of art.

Particularly in a pre-photographic world, one purpose of image-making was the recreation of the natural world. Yet even for artists who sought this fidelity, there was the inevitable imprint of their editorial presence. Appleby notes J. M. W. Turner, whose landscapes’ brushwork carries a signature of authenticity. For Appleby, this presents a kind of ‘musicality’ which can only come from the intuitive unconscious, not to be recreated or captured.

However, authenticity is not guaranteed by the process. Great formal skill is required to effect an immediate presence upon its viewer. Appleby discusses the difference between art which exists through a window, and art that comes off the wall and lives amongst us. The former is merely an observed artefact confined to the borders of its canvas, whereas the latter arrives to arrest its audience, capture its attention, and emotionally involve the viewer in its formal shape. Appleby again returns to the raga here, noting its ability to capture and evoke the feelings of the audience. The music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis also recurs in our conversation, discussing the surprise of their authenticity, rebelling against established language and codes. In particular, Coltrane’s avant-garde modal jazz embodies the impulsive experimentation for which Appleby strives.

In the vein of language, the conjuring of imagery stands outside of a translation from the unconscious mind to the canvas. Meaning is not extracted from the form, but rather is inextricably embedded in the form and revealed through the process of making. As Klee said, “art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”

The notion of translation, or perhaps even transliteration (converting from one set of characters to another), suggests an existing code of values to represent internal thought. This presupposes defined edges and shapes of unconscious instinct. That presupposition elides the subtle processes which occur within the aesthetic mind, behind the veil of cerebral logic. The most we can ascribe to the relation of those processes to a finished painting is therefore ‘interaction’ – that through the intermingling process of touch and performance, our aesthetic processes can find some satisfaction through the form.

Appleby speaks with disappointment on the contemporary landscape of art, which for him has become a derivative cycle of image-making infected by algorithmic determinism. Postmodernism is perhaps too neat a label for this, but the relativistic structure can be applied to understand the lack of intuition and imagination when work is only reconfiguring and responding to previous work, rather than to the self. Nothing can be conjured when the images being created are facsimiles of facsimiles. The apparatus that Appleby mentions in relation to the raga is central to this. Appleby’s frustration with contemporary art stems from artists becoming lost in the codes of artistic language and projecting them onto reality, rather than using them as a conduit to express their reality.

The modern media ecology is too intent on responding to user demand with self-affirming stimuli to be able to produce those challenges to our preconceptions. He recalls speaking with an ad executive involved in the post-war boom of consumer manipulation. What was then a mere experiment in social conditioning is now the dominant mode of media consumption. Appleby seeks to challenge this, to find that empiricism and hunt out the truth.

Appleby’s process is one of experimentation, influenced by the similarly form-focused artists Kiff and Klee. For them, the process is less about the final image of an artwork, and more about the means by which it is created. Importantly, those formal means must be a sufficiently fluid practice of instinctive interaction between artist and material to allow images to be conjured and contended with.