Artists - Daniel Lehan

"As soon as you squeeze the tube and the paint emerges, you know this is paint of the highest quality and that you are in for a treat. '' - Daniel Lehan

It is nearly always my intention to make a painting or to use paint in a way that is first imagined in my mind's eye. These intentions and thoughts are the first step in my creative process.

I guess that these imaginings, uncomplicated by making the actual work allow the work to exist briefly in a state of perfection.

I regard this need for an imagined state of perfection as a counter against doubts concerning my ability or will power to create the work.

In my studio my imaginings and prior thoughts are quickly usurped by the process of physically making the work. When doing so, my concern for control is tempered by chance and the unexpected.

The process of making work, I believe, is akin to play.



I decided to be an artist when I was 10 years old.

I was watching " Animal Magic '' presented by Johnny Morris.

There was an interview with a young man who painted wonderful pictures of animals and birds. Before the programme had ended,I had bought from the local toyshop tins of Humbrol paint and some brushes. I don't think I realised that the paint was for painting model airplanes and that it was oil based. In my enthusiasm, I tried to use water to thin the paint.

No matter.

I was hooked.

I wanted to be an artist.

For the next year I painted and drew, for some bizarre reason, snakes and zebras.

A childhood memory which predates this and which I regard as being significant ~

I found an old jar. The lid of the jar was gold coloured and scratched with brown marks and had gloss green paint on it.

I remember breaking the skin of the paint with a piece of wood and the sticky paint spilling on the ground and on to my hand.

At my school in Margate I was greatly encouraged by the art teacher, Mr Gilham. He would show the class slides of paintings.

I seem to remember in particular, seeing works by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Piero della Francesca. He gave me free reign to the art materials and also lent me his personal copy of the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

I studied the Foundation Course at Medway College of Design, where I was fortunate to study A Level Art History with Vera Brumby, a wildly enthusiastic and vastly knowledgeable teacher.

From Medway I went to Winchester School of Art. Graham Crowley (now Head of Painting at the Royal College of Art) was up and coming, full of ideas and insights with a remarkable way of using words that took time getting used to.

I was awarded a scholarship to study in New York at Parson's School of Design. Armed with notes from Vera Brumby ~ you must see the Polish Rider by Rembrandt at the Frick Collection ! ~ I trawled galleries, museums and performance spaces, able to see new work and many paintings and sculptures I had seen only in reproduction.

A visit to the Barnes Collection at Merion, Pennsylvania to see Matisse's Joie de Vivre and seeing the work of Pollock and De Kooning in Manhattan were the highlights of the three months spent in New York.

Back at Winchester, Gillian Ayres arrived and seemed to personify a painter totally in love with painting and paint. We argued once during a project she ran to paint big paintings. For some reason I took issue with this and questioned why she wanted us to paint BIG paintings. I suggested a project during which we painted really small paintings and I quoted, the importance of Paul Klee, who rarely made large work.

Several hours later she found me, having now entered into the spirit of the project, making a huge drawing (8ft plus in any one direction) on the banks of the river that flowed past the college.



Since leaving Art school, I like every other painter I know, have tried to manage the delicate and often infuriating balance between having to earn money to live and trying to paint.

A full time job gives you money to live but no time to paint !

A part time job gives you time to paint but rarely enough money !Nowadays, I have struck a workable balance between working for a living and painting.

I live near Stratford, London with my partner Elizabeth and I teach part time at Waltham Forest College in Walthamstow.

My studio is in " Mother Studios '' a new set of studios set up and managed by the artist Joanna Hughes in Hackney Wick.

My recent thinking and reading has centred on why people look at paintings and why some people make paintings.

I have found that my reading of psychoanalytic theory and the experience of studying a foundation course in art therapy at Goldsmiths College, has influenced my thoughts.

It seems to me that people looking at paintings and painters painting are replicating a range of experiences concerning the infant in relationship to its mother.

Looking at paintings parallels the experience of the baby gazing into its mother's eyes. (This gaze or mirroring is considered crucial to the baby's development. The baby forms a loving trust that allows it later to separate from its mother).

In looking at paintings we enter into a dialogue, that is similarly a two way process. The viewer looks at the painting, this is obvious, but the painting is not passive, it can, and does in a sense look back, it return's our gaze.

As John Berger has written (The Shape of a Pocket, page 21, Bloomsbury, 2001) ~

The painted thing speaks if we listen.

My personal experience is that looking at a painting often gives me a good and positive sense of self. (I guess because I like doing this, so much). And I can feel, a sensation of being ~ of settling ~ in my body, with time being held still, when I look at great painting.

John Berger, again, in The Shape of The Pocket, page 245.

Every painting has its silence.

I have certainly experienced this silence, most recently, when looking at Bruegel's The Census at Bethlehem (1566) and Goya's The Family of the Infant Don Luis (1784).

I can only surmise that, in some way, in the silence of looking at the painting and the painting returning my gaze, I am being nurtured.

Why some people make paintings, or rather why some people feel compelled to make paintings, is more of a mystery to me.

There are theories that propose that making a painting is similar to aspects of a mother and child relationship ~ the four sides of the painting replacing the physical body, the physical boundaries of the mother ~ the decisions, changes, alterations, the process of making painting being akin to preverbal interaction between mother and child.

Painting clearly has something also to do with reparation ~ compensating for the psychologically injured parts of ourselves in childhood and sublimation ~ channelling potentially aggressive and destructive drives into a creative activity.

But, given that everyone to a greater or lesser degree, will engage in acts of reparation and sublimation, these theories do not explain WHY some people paint paintings and others not.

Certainly, I've no better idea than the ten year old who used oil based paint designed to paint airplane kits, who tried to dilute it with water and who painted snakes and zebras for a year.

If you have ideas you'd like to share with me, please e-mail me through my website

www.daniel-lehan.com

September 2002