Charlie Billingham on Fops, Fools and Popinjays

 

Charlie Billingham, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I have happily followed your work for some time. I am particularly interested in your appropriation of those great masters of British satirical illustration - Cruikshank, Rowlandson, and Gillray, for whom I have a great affection.

Yes, they are artists of whom I too am very fond. When I was young, my parents bought a series of Cruikshank etchings from the 'Monstrosities' series, showing exaggerated fashions from the 1810s and 1820s. They hung in the bathroom and around the house, and for me this spawned a fascination for caricatures from this period.

  

You gained an MA Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art, and you later completed a Post Graduate Diploma at the Royal Academy Schools, London. It must have been a validating experience to every day walk past the sculpture of Sir Joshua Reynolds which stands in the entrance courtyard?

Yes, it was! Both art schools also have incredible plaster cast collections of replicas of sculptures from antiquity, displayed in the corridors. The connection to a rich cultural history was unavoidable at the Royal Academy Schools, where there is also a beautiful library with a lot of rare book and prints. It was here that I was really able to develop my interest in British satirical prints from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and could start to collect an archive of images, from which I work. I was also fascinated to learn that Gillray and Rowlandson (both born 1756) had attended the Royal Academy Schools, and that that area of London, around Piccadilly in St. James' and Mayfair, was where they and their contemporaries' prints were sold. And it was while I was studying there that I also discovered some wonderful shops nearby that deal in those prints today; so I have started a modest collection of the original prints myself.

  

The fascination that we British have with the humorous crudity of sex, and with various bodily functions – which is evident from Victorian Music Hall performers to Carry On movie, and Benny Hill and beyond – does not so often appear in contemporary visual art. So, congratulations for presenting this cultural underbelly in a modern-day forum!

Thank you! Rowlandson et al. seemed quite comfortable revelling in images of sex, gluttony and desire; I would say more so than their Victorian successors, and this is certainly an element of their drawings which appeals to me. And it is something which I also relate to painting: a medium which is messy, fluid, hedonistic and at times frustrating, and certainly complicated.

 

 It is meant as a compliment when I say that there is something of the British pantomime about your imagery: various established protagonists appear; dukes and duchesses; vagabonds; fops; fools and popinjays; all of whose pomposity is pricked and traduced, in the manner of Hogarth etc. Pantomime comes from a blend of past eras, thrown into a blender and recycled across the ages. Are there parallels to your painted figures in the contemporary world?

Yes, I think so! When I make my paintings, I often crop and distort small sections from old prints, and in doing so strip away a lot of the original information and historical narrative. Part of the reason for doing this to create a more open and ambiguous meaning within the painting, and I think that opens up opportunities to make parallels with figures in the contemporary world.

 

 One of your paintings is based upon Gillray’s humorous ‘Fashionable Contrasts, or The Duchess’s Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke’s Foot’. The original is a scathing piece of social satire. Do you think that social satire has any teeth today – can art upset the status quo? Are we doomed to ever-repeat historical precedents?

I think social satire is very relevant today, and certainly has teeth! But I think film and video play a far more vital role now. The print tradition in satire doesn't seem to have changed a great deal since Gillray's day, and a lot of newspaper satirists seem to go back to this period's tropes. But with the advent of film and television, and now videos on line and social media, social satire has a lot energy, and a big audience. I think of how funny and cutting Harry Enfield's character Loadsamoney (from the 1980s) was and still is, and the British comic Viz, and more recently, television comics and impressionists like Tracey Ullman, who can reflect acutely on the contemporary moment in ways that are both hilarious and thought provoking. But in painting, and 'fine art' more broadly, I don't think satire holds so much purchase. And, indeed, I wouldn't categorise my work as satirical at all. Despite using imagery from historic satirical prints, my work is very much about painting rather than humour.

 

 Your work depends on your strong, traditional drawing skills.

I think Drawing is such an important and relevant activity and practice, for any discipline in the arts! It's a great shame to hear that it's dwindling in education. Drawing is such a great way to communicate with images, and I would say that it is only with practice that that connection of the hand and the eye and the mind can really be fluid and confident.

 

 When I look at your work I am transported to the scenes in Nicholas Hytner’s film, ‘The Madness of King George’ (1994), in which the king’s son, the Prince Regent, played by Rupert Everett, displays a brilliantly foppish ‘outsidership’. Are you drawn to the ‘outsider’ in any respect?

I think that, without wishing to sound grandiose, artists tend to be drawn to the outsider; it is an occupation and lifestyle, which, by its very nature, rejects convention and thus puts one 'outside' to an extent. And yes, I feel drawn to the dandyish, peculiar and unequivocal qualities of the outsider.

 

 Can you let me know three of your favourite films, and three favourite books?

I loved Yorgos Lanthimos' absurdist black comedy, ‘The Lobster’. And ‘Fargo’ is an old favourite of mine. And, if it's not cheating, the beautiful and romantic BBC television series from the early 1980s, ‘Brideshead Revisited’, is something I go back to frequently. I love the writing of J.D. Salinger, especially ‘Franny and Zooey’, also his wonderful short stories - a format I greatly admire. And Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver's Travels’ is a classic with a lot of great themes. I also have a great fondness for Philip Pullman's ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy: excellent literature for all ages; I can read them again and again.