This new series of Studio Visits entitled 'Behind the Canvas' encourages our clients to get to know Messum's artist's in more depth and to share our experiences as we work to develop the shows which will feature at Messum's St. James's over the coming months. Email your questions to studio@messums.com and join the discussion each week.
"We are creating a 'common room of ideas' - not formal but reflective of the personality of Messum's and the artists we represent". David Messum
In our first visit 'Behind the Canvas' we are delighted to invite you to join David Messum and Katie Newman on a visit to Steve des Landes' Liverpool studio, via Zoom, to discuss Steve's recent exhibition at Messum's St. James's in October 2020, get a 'sneak peak' at the new work which he is developing and begin plans for the next exhibition.
WATCH THE ZOOM STUDIO VISIT HERE:
JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send questions to Steve des Landes via the Comments section on the Blog or by emailing studio@messums.com. We look forward to re-visiting Steve in his studio during April when we will put the questions to him and record the answers for everyone in another Zoom session.
Our 'Behind the Canvas' blog on artist Steve des Landes continues with an introductory essay on the artist written by curator and author David Boyd Haycock, following his visit to Steve's studio in early 2020:
Steven des Landes paints people and landscapes filled with angst, uncertainty, anguish and hope; he offers up romance, and disappointment; opportunity, and failure; hard work, and meditative reflection. A woman in a green polka-dot dress sits at a window, gazing at a vase of flowers; a man in a white vest twists his fingers and looks off to one side, rusty orange gasometers rising behind him; a couple feed a flock of rooks – the man looking (anxiously, or perhaps just bored) in the other direction. Rarely does anyone fix you in the eye in one of his paintings. His people seem to be preoccupied; life often seems elsewhere. Des Landes is – as his work boldly attests – an artist with an extraordinary personal vision. His paintings are instantly recognizable.
Born in Preston, Lancashire, in 1962, Steven Des Landes now lives in Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool. He grew up in Southport, Lancashire, a place he describes as ‘a small seaside town, very gentrified with elegant Victorian villas, eminently middle class. That was my world, cosy and sheltered until I was sixteen, before I started venturing out. Liverpool was a mystery to me, apart from the odd trip there with my parents.’ Art was an early interest, and he was drawing before he was reading. Visits to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool helped inspire a love of painting. The most influential artist on him at that young age was William Blake’s great acolyte and admirer, Samuel Palmer. ‘I tried to copy his work for years,’ Des Landes explains, ‘and I still have a deep love of those early paintings.’
By the time he was fourteen he knew he wanted to be an artist, and at sixteen went to Southport Art College. He was following in the wake of his cousin, the New Wave musician Marc Almond, who had studied there a few years earlier. ‘Marc paved the way for me, and I followed,’ des Landes observes. And like Almond – who in 1981 with his band Soft Cell turned the sixties pop song ‘Tainted Love’ into an international smash hit – Des Landes would eventually bring a new twist to mid-twentieth century classics. His debt to the likes of Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Edvard Munch and Chaïm Soutine is clear. But there’s something new here, too, rising from his own personal journey. His paintings have their own stories to tell, even if it’s not always clear what that story might be. Like many artists he feels uncomfortable trying to explain them – but equally, he is always keen to talk, as if he himself is searching all the time to fully understand what he is creating.
Thus of his striking painting The Truth to be Told, in which a woman stretches out the wing of a dead crow, he says there is no firm narrative behind it: ‘the image just came to me.’ He acknowledges, however, that it certainly has something to do with humanity’s increasingly uneasy relationship with nature, of which the current pandemic is only the most recent manifestation. ‘We are reaping what we have sown,’ he suggests, 'and all our modern psychological conditions fuel greater levels of anxiety. We are in many ways I feel returning to medieval levels of superstition, perhaps no longer seeing science and western medicine as the protector it was once. The crow makes itself known always, and is hugely intelligent – a real force of nature. I like them as birds, and they create fantastic shapes in the sky. There is more to this than I have touched upon, but I don’t want to explain it away, it’s important to keep some mystery. Many of my themes often come back to some symbolic disconnect between humans and nature.'
Women also frequently play a central part in the narrative of his paintings, and he knows that he is sensitive to their nature, to what he calls ‘their suffering.’ This feeling is accentuated, he believes, by the fact that he was adopted as a baby. His adoptive father, a merchant sea captain, was often away on long voyages, and as a child Des Landes spent a lot of time with his albeit rather distant adoptive mother. Though she was not very affectionate, he fondly remembers that as the eldest in a family of three adopted children he often stayed up late with her to watch ‘Play for Today’ on the BBC. This, he now realises,
was basically to keep her company. She was quite forthright – and perhaps a little blunt – but very good company, acting out daily events with such drama that we kids loved to listen to her around the dinner table. She was half Norwegian, very self-contained. But I often wondered if she really wanted children at all. This relationship, he feels, helped him to see the world ‘through women’s eyes’. He thus considers the women in his paintings as being very significant to his vision: women as carrying the weight of loving, caring, losing, feeling.
With a very early assuredness of his future career, it was perhaps inevitable that the things surrounding him in his youth would prove important artistic influences. One of these was the landscape of Plex Moss. This vast area of broad, flat rather desolate fields and ditches a mile or two inland from the sand dunes of Formby and Ainsdale, is on the edge of Southport, where he grew up. It is an empty, haunting, slightly disturbing sort of place, and it features as the backdrop to many of his paintings.
After his initial studies at Southport Des Landes moved on to the Storey Institute in Lancaster (now the University of Central Lancashire) to study Fine Art. He was one of only a handful of students who made use of the life room, under the guidance of a young teacher who had studied at the Slade under Euan Uglow. This was a time when representational art was largely seen as something of a backwater. Whilst many fellow students were under the spell of Pollock and De Kooning, he and a handful of others were looking at Corot, Manet, Vermeer and Rembrandt. ‘It was very tough,’ he recalls now, ‘because at such a young age you wanted to fit in and be accepted. I felt like the other tutors ignored us. But I’m glad I followed my heart as it has led me to where I am now, nearly forty years later.’
On leaving Preston he eschewed the chance to move to London and settled in Liverpool instead. This was the mid-1980s when, economically, the city was at the lowest point in its history. With unemployment high and the local economy moribund, it was no easy time or place to pursue his chosen career. As it was for many talented people in this hugely creative city, these were challenging times. Supported by part-time jobs, however, and the odd painting sale and mural commission, he was able to continue painting without the effects of what he calls ‘the fear and compromise a regular job’ would have had ‘on my vision and chosen career.’
In 1988 he found a place to live and work in Holmes Buildings, an old factory-warehouse right in the heart of Liverpool that was being turned into an off-beat cultural centre featuring shops, a café and live music venue. ‘It could not have been a better place to work,’ he reflects now. ‘My studio was on the top floor and was surrounded by bands practicing – The Christians, The Farm, Echo and the Bunnymen – as well as many other painters. It created a very diverse and often quite unreal sense of normality, people calling in at all times of day and night.’ It was exactly the sort of place that demanded creativity, and made anything seem possible. It was around this time that his painting Loyalty came second in the ‘Merseyside Contemporaries’ competition, with the acclaimed Liverpool sculptor Sean Rice winning first prize. ‘At this still quite early point in my career I was very much influenced by Munch and his series of paintings, The Frieze of Life,’ he explains. ‘Munch’s paintings of the stages of a woman’s life have influenced me enormously, and still do.’ As the troubled Norwegian artist once noted in his diary,
(below: Images from Edward Munch's The Freize of Life' Oslo Museum)
"There should be no more pictures of interiors, of people reading and women knitting. There would be pictures of real people who breathed, who suffered, felt, loved. I felt impelled – it would be easy. The flesh would have volume – the colours would be alive." Edward Munch
It was a fin de siècle view of the world and of painting that would have deep impact on twentieth-century European art, and one that continues to resonate in Des Landes’ approach to his work. Thus we find that Steven’s other main painting influences into the 1990s were the German and Austrian Expressionists of the early twentieth century – the likes of Max Beckman, Emil Nolde and Egon Schiele: ‘It is only in the last five years I have started to move away completely into a more British and even English sense of landscape and narrative, one that is much more personal to me.’
This rediscovery of his native roots (for we must not forget that early love of Palmer) has been built upon years of foreign travel in between. A formative experience was a three-month sea trip he made with his family in 1974, via the Panama Canal to New Zealand and Australia. The latter country would prove ‘a massive influence’. At first it was ‘the hot burning colours’; later, as he learnt more about the country – returning there for twelve months in 1983, and again in 2019 – it was the gritty social realism of life in the Outback and the harsh other worldly quality of the landscape combined with the mysterious Aboriginal Dreamtime that affected him. ‘The Australian landscape seemingly vast and empty represents a “state of mind”,’ he explains, ‘a spiritual idea of the land which has influenced my approach to the vastly different English landscape.’
These paintings of the landscape are as important to him as those of people, and he sees the land imbued with a spirit. But he is not in any way religious – though he acknowledges a spiritual side to himself. As a child he attended Sunday school, he likes Bible stories, and admires that great twentieth-century painter of religious subjects and distorted human figures in various acts of living, loving and working, Stanley Spencer. And a painting in Liverpool’s Walker Gallery that he describes as his ‘constant companion for thirty-five years’ is a fifteenth-century Netherlandish crucifixion scene, Christ Nailed to the Cross. The crucifixion, of course, was an important motif for a number of significant mid-twentieth-century British artists. Not just Spencer, but also Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon – both artists whom he also admires hugely.
In the late 1990s Des Landes began enjoying some recognition as a muralist. This led to a number of commissions in Scotland – in particular on the Shetland Island of Whalsay. His time spent there eventually inspired a number of paintings focused on life by the sea, and the ‘Whalsay widows’ – women whose husbands had been lost to the sea. He could have kept going along this increasingly successful path, but knew in his heart that he wanted to be a studio painter. For almost ten years he withdrew to his studio, painting, exploring, learning and rediscovering himself as an artist. He then re-emerged in 2018 with a hugely successful exhibition at the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead. Bold and powerful, his paintings received acclaim from critics and public alike: ‘Genius in the Air,’ declared the Liverpool Echo. Brought to David Messum’s attention, he was snapped up, and for the past two years has been working with this exhibition – his London debut – as his sole focus.
Liberated from the ties that have bound him in the past, he says that he now has ‘a traffic jam’ of visions and ideas, all bursting forth, each work leading inexorably on to a new one. Beautiful, disturbing, perplexing, romantic, torn – in turn they are all these things. ‘I am now starting to see my creative struggles over the years as part of one long continual journey,’ he explains, ‘which is starting to express a consistent vision and purpose that has eluded and frustrated me for most of my adult life.’ He doesn’t see another contemporary figurative artist like him at work today in this country, though he notes similarities between his work and that of Paula Rego. ‘Perhaps I am out of step with these creative times,’ he wonders. ‘I just want to do my own thing, whatever the consequences.’ As the works in this exhibition reveal, it is a viewpoint that has led him down an exciting and redemptive path.
David Boyd Haycock is a British writer, curator and lecturer. He is author of a number of books, most notably A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009)' which was followed by a critically acclaimed exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.
TO VIEW PAINTINGS BY STEVE DES LANDES, CLICK HERE OR VISIT WWW.MESSUMS.COM
TO SEND A QUESTION OR COMMENT TO STEVE TO FEATURE IN THE STUDIO VISIT DURING APRIL, PLEASE EMAIL studio@messums.com
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