About
Hello, my name is georgie. I usually sign and write my name in lowercase for aesthetic reasons - it's not a typo. I was born in Stepping Hill Hospital, Stockport in 1983.
Anyway, I'm a painter. I decided I wanted to be an artist when I was about 15; prior to that I either wanted to be a teacher or a vet.. I'd be an awful teacher so I'm glad I never pursued that seriously! I have no idea why I wanted to be a vet as I find animals alright to look at but wouldn't want to start poking at them.
I followed the usual educational route: GCSEs, A-levels and a foundation course, topping it all off with a degree in Painting from Loughborough University. I loved my first two years at uni but unfortunately I hated the final year and because I felt so bad I made awfully dark, melancholy paintings - I tore them all up you know!
So everything was geared towards this final point, the Great Degree Show! Then that was it.
It was horrible, my work was so big I couldn't keep it stretched so I rolled it up, put it in my parents' loft and simply stopped painting altogether. A year and a half later, after visiting a small but incredibly inspiring open exhibition, I took the work out of storage, re-stretched some scraps and began to get my spark back. I remember getting selected for my first exhibition at one-c Gallery in Devon.. It was so exciting! Since then I have worked like crazy, developing my practice, exhibiting both nationally and internationally and figuring out a work/painting balance as I still work full-time to pay the rent.
I am so glad I started painting again - I can't imagine my life without my painting. I am aware just how cheesy that sounds but I don't mind.
I was asked some questions recently by a nice guy called Alex who's doing his Art Foundation course. I'm quite awful at explaining my work but sitting and typing answers to someone else's questions is something I can do, albeit with terrible sentence structuring. So here they are..
The text included in your paintings is pretty much indecipherable, is this intentional? And if so, why? Is the selection of words spontaneous or planned?
This is completely intentional, often I will elongate and distort the letters to make it even harder to even get an idea of what's there. This is because the text is my own thoughts, (totally spontaneous), things that are bothering me, things that I can't talk about, memories evoked by the process of painting.. Then at other times it can be lyrics from whatever music I'm listening to and sometimes just words and sentences I can hear in the background on the TV. The text is there for a couple of reasons, the first being psychological, just getting it out of my head, the second for aestheitc reasons as I like how it looks and the mystery of it. I often get asked about it and what it means. To be honest with you I don't usually like words or sentences that are incorporated into paintings as I feel that it dictates the response you give/get to/from the work. That said, there are plenty of artists who successfully incorporate text into their work without that overall feeling of being dictated to. I suppose it all depends on the skill of the artist and, for me, their use of colour and paint as a medium.
I'm always fascinated about what artists decide to do with the edges of their canvases, why do you choose to leave some unpainted?
OK, this is something that really bugs me when I'm at exhibitions, as does how the canvas is stretched. Nothing annoys me more than a badly stretched canvas with untidy edges or problems with sagging or accidental ripples formed due to it being too slack. Why spend so much time and effort on a painting when the surface is wrong?
But I digress, my edges.. Well, I prefer for the image to almost wrap itself around the edge and in an ideal world I would do this with all my paintings. I am, however, a painter with bad habits, and one of these habits is to forget my edges, get to a deadline then panic about them. It often gets to the night before work has to be somewhere before I do them. I make resolutions to always paint the edges as I finish pieces so as to make it easier if work gets sold or if it has to be shown somewhere and for whatever reason I never do it.
For me, edges are really important and I was cross with myself because I noticed when hanging the show at the Courtyard that I'd missed several. Ermengarde's left edge jumped out at me as I walked through the space.. "Idiot!" I said to myself...
Your paintings seem almost personified, especially by the names you give them, do you feel a sense of responsibility for them?
Oh yes. It's quite weird really but they're like little pieces of me, full of memories.. I can look at a piece and remember how I felt at the time of making it, who I was thinking of, what I was trying to achieve.
Naming them started simply as a way of knowing which was which and for the most part they're not named after anyone as such. There's the odd exception to the rule but for the most part they're just names I like mixed with Eddie Stobart lorries - I love Eddie Stobart lorries!
I find that I tend to talk about the paintings as "she" and "her" rather than "it". I worry that people will think I'm a bit odd or that I'm attempting to seem a bit quirky so I censor myself in emails and letters when discussing the paintings unless I'm writing to someone I know well.
What makes you choose to work on a large scale sometimes, whilst at other times a smaller scale, or even in books? And can you tell me a bit about why you make your artist's books?
Scale's something that can make such a difference in terms of visual impact on the viewer; I realised this whilst doing my BA.. What I didn't know anything about at that time was making a living as a professional artist, a quite tricky thing to do and something I had no idea where to start with at all. I came up with a vague sort of action plan, a plan which seriously considered just getting my work "out there" and the best way to go about it. It was then that I started working on a smaller scale, something that I find incredibly difficult both compositionally and conceptually, not that there's much concept to my work, it just achieves something on a larger scale that it doesn't when smaller. I also view large-scale paintings as "works of art" if that makes sense, you kind of commit yourself to them more than you do with smaller pieces for the sole reason that they're technically more challenging to transport/exhibit and there's a good chance that they'll be with you for a while because who has the space for a 5 x 5 ft painting in thier home? Not many people!
You see I want people to be able to own my work, paintings are made for walls after all, and working smaller was a means for this to happen with sales funding larger, more ambitious pieces. When I started out as "myself out of the education system" I had absolutely no money and had to re-stretch old paintings and paint new work on those. I also started making books from the scraps of canvas and exhibiting them in related exhibitions.
The canvas books were something I used to make and work in at uni for two reasons. One: I had lots of canvas scraps. Two: I didn't like conventional sketchbooks in the slightest, they were no good for figuring our painty ideas.. I got into the whole "artist book" scene simply through my desire to exhibit my work, any of it. I made lots of mistakes initially, deviating from what my books were about in an attempt to fit in to the print/illustrative style prevalent at the book fairs and the exhibitions. I felt my books were rather looked down upon at the first fair I attended. Luckily I met and entered into correspondence with an amazing collector of artist books who helped me shift my warped book ideas and understand artist books in a historical context. Consequently I now make my books as I did before, as records of paintings, process and incidences. They're very tactile and people tend not to be precious when handling them either - I love that.