Contributed by Elizabeth Hazan / During the night of election-related insomnia, I was thinking about how we find meaning in this crazy world and that reading personal histories can be life-affirming in a time of chaos. One of the delights of Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women was learning how all these artists who were fixtures in the art world when I was a child came to New York to start making art in the first place. For a number of years, I shared a studio with the artist Trevor Winkfield. While he has done some long-form interviews, I think his lively storytelling deserves fresh attention. Born in Leeds in 1944, he attended the Leeds College of Art and then earned a masters from the Royal College of Art in 1967 before moving to New York in 1969. He is represented by Tibor de Nagy Gallery and currently has work in “All Small” at Pamela Salisbury Gallery through January 12, 2025.
Elizabeth Hazan: I’ve been reading your book-length conversation with Miles Champion, How I Became a Painter. In it, you recount that, as a 15-year-old growing up in the north of England, you made a long bicycle pilgrimage to see a Francis Bacon painting after seeing one in Leeds City Art Gallery and became interested in Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters after learning about them from a BBC radio program called Art/Anti Art in 1958. I find this so remarkable! Most teenagers, if they are interested in art, first admire gateway artists who are more accessible. And you were not in an era, as we are now, that was saturated with images. What was your childhood exposure to art like?
Trevor Winkfield: Leeds at that time – the 1950s – really was a gloomy “dark satanic mill town” with the local Victorian mills in decline, if not closed already. I remember a lot of grayness, not helped by brutal Northern weather – it always seemed to be raining, or threatening to rain, and my abiding memory is having to carry a raincoat wherever I went. Utter grayness. Nonetheless, my imagination saved me. And though there was a lot of indifferent Victorian painting in the local municipal art gallery, I was surrounded by some magnificent Victorian architecture, including a disused mill in the shape of an Egyptian temple. But mainly it’s the gray, damp weather that impacted my childhood, rather than any art or architecture. Hence my frequent bike rides out of the city in search of Bacon and – unconsciously – color
EH: This industrial grayness and the post-war privations spawned a lot of creative souls who flourished; think of all the musicians that came out of England in your generation and slightly older. The draw of music is a lot more understandable than someone your age hearing descriptions of Marcel Duchamp’s artwork and going to seek out things like it. I’m trying to dig at what caused you as a young person to be drawn to certain kinds of art. Were you drawing at the time? Did seeing Francis Bacon inspire you make art of your own?
TW: I did a lot of drawing, even as a child. My mother lovingly preserved one of my earliest drawings, made at the age of four on the cardboard wrapper from a bar of soap. I never saw it again until she died in 1988, but it was very prescient, insofar as it already showed my future technique and subject matter – clowns, elephants and sailors – imagery that resurfaced in my later paintings, all drawn using black outlines and filled in with colored crayons. Just like now! But a little later, around the age of eleven, I began my first fumbling attempts at sculpture. I used small blocks of sandstone from a local quarry, which I’d whittle away at with my penknife whilst walking to and from school. That is until a concerned teacher warned me that I could easily stumble and stab myself, which promptly put an end to my outdoor sculpting. But there was a great sculptural tradition in Yorkshire at the time – when I first began art college in Leeds in 1960 we were assigned Henry Moore’s former studio, left virtually untouched since he’d quit college in 1920, not so much from reverence but because there’d been no money to renovate. It was only when a top-heavy clay sculpture I was working on keeled over and trapped my flailing body beneath it that I decided to quite sensibly devote myself to painting full-time.
EH: And Bacon?
TW: No, Francis Bacon didn’t have a visible influence on my painting, but as an example of rebellion he was admirable. I always remember reading in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ journal something to the effect – and I quote from faulty memory – that “the effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire, and then do otherwise”. I recall that, after I visited Ravenna, a friend asked me if the mosaics would have an effect on my paintings. I hated to disappoint her, but the mosaics left my paintings unscathed. I just admired them, and that was as far as it went. They may have added a chromatic undercurrent much later, but my color prejudices were already firmly in place prior to Ravenna.
EH: I love that your earliest drawing prefigures the mature work you are known for. The images in your paintings are complex and work on various levels but also have a radical simplicity. As it was much more of an effort to find things, do you think they became even more significant? Do people experience Stendhal syndrome these days?
TW: Leeds wasn’t the isolated backwater you might have imagined. It was a major industrial center (though in rapid decline) with over half a million inhabitants, a big university where I heard Kenneth Clark give a lecture on Leonardo da Vinci. I can’t remember a thing he said, but I do vividly recall the pristine black and white slides he showed, so unlike the murky aged images projected in our art history lectures at Leeds College of Art. Clark’s stark blacks and whites were very influential when I later took up monochrome drawings in earnest. And, of course, Leeds had good bookshops and libraries, and one could even buy copies of Evergreen Review a mere three months after they’d been published in the States. But it’s true, these things weren’t exactly handed to you on a plate, you had to want them and then find them. But I had a taste for the esoteric, the offbeat, though it’s difficult now, 60 years later, to realize just how obscure (and hence enticing) the work of Duchamp appeared in the late 1950s. Somehow I must have heard that Robert Lebel’s Duchamp monograph had just been published and I was determined to buy a copy. But how to find the three guineas it cost in 1959? By pocketing the weekly five shillings given to me each week to pay for school lunches, and going without said lunches for three months, I accumulated sufficient funds, having survived on a lunch of two chocolate biscuits for three months I ended up severely anemic and as thin as a rail. It might amuse you to learn that my very first Duchampian readymade was a packet of very strong purgative Senna pods, which I relabeled “Sleepless Nights” – quite schoolboyish scatological humor, but I was only 15.
EH: I get the sense that as a child you were somewhat like John Ashbery, who would later become a great friend of yours, sensitive and drinking in all manner of art and writing you could get your hands on. Was music also a big influence on you, as it was on John?
TW: I never had any musical training, though my voice was sufficiently angelic for use in the local church choir. Coming down a peg or two, a group of college friends and myself attended, in spring 1963, one of the earliest Beatles concerts, in Leeds. This was before Beatlemania really took hold. The Beatles had hired out the Odeon – one of the big cinemas in the center of Leeds – and quickly induced mass hysteria, including my own! Girls around me were attempting to throw themselves off the balcony screaming. Quite exhilarating, to say the least, and quite on a par with my own ongoing attempts to rebel against the conventional Bauhaus-influenced art education I was being force-fed at college. The sixties really were rebellious. But my esoteric “against the grain” musical tastes quickly returned. I began translating the little texts that Erik Satie wrote to accompany his music, simultaneously listening to pieces by John Cage, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and the English composer Cornelius Cardew. It was salutary for me to realize that none of my friends in New York, when I arrived in 1969, shared these avant-garde musical tastes. Offhand, the only exception I can think of is John Ashbery. Everybody else was extolling the virtues of Bob Dylan, jazz and folk music.
EH: Your use of color is very personal. Where did it derive from?
TW: As a colorist, I was basically self-taught. I knew what attracted me – bright colors, especially the printed variety which had been somewhat deadened by the newsprint it was laid on. As a contrast I was also researching bland municipal colors, the kind one found in government offices and hospital waiting rooms, hues that were intended to soothe, to be neutral – pea greens, pale blues, various creams. At the same time, I became besotted with heraldry, with its hieratic images strongly outlined, brightly colored and quarantined within separate borders. The images were above all flat and undemonstrative, much like the Egyptian wall paintings and Assyrian reliefs I was looking at around that time: flat friezes, bodies parallel to the background, unmodulated, as though onstage. It was a rather blinkered vision of what art could be, but one that was responsible for my lifelong love of Uccello’s battle paintings, which I first saw at the age of 14 in London’s National Gallery – an astonishing tableau that somehow manages to combine stillness and frantic movement. Black and white graphics only became predominant after I’d seen reproductions of Francis Picabia’s book covers. Much later, my book collaborations with poets used black-and-white ink drawings, with very strong blacks starkly played off against the whites, the visual equivalent of newspaper headlines.
EH: I won’t ask you about meaning, as part of the enchantment of your work is for the viewer to tease out the possibilities for themselves. (Robert Frost’s famous quip comes to mind: when asked the meaning of a poem he replied “you want me to say it again, but worse?”) Rather, I’d like to know more about sources for your endless shape shifting imagery – what might we be surprised to know feeds into your work?
TW: I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t have too many secrets to reveal as to the sources of my imagery. Early on, yes, I did plunder engravings and “How To” guides. (I was terrible at drawing hands and feet, usually obscuring feet behind boulders.) But now most of my visual inventions are concocted inside my head, though I still use the occasional botanical diagram, usually inverted or partially obscured. I’m a great believer in enlarging photos of objects I’ve taken, then tracing their outlines. This is how I constructed my portrait of John Ashbery. Initially, I’d asked John to send me a clear, full-face portrait of himself, which I then enlarged dramatically via xerox, tracing the main outlines, greatly simplifying them in the process until I created almost a caricature … but everybody recognized it as John immediately! It’s a technique that grew out of my reliance as a student on tracing still-life objects from books when I found myself unable or unwilling to confront still-lifes head on – there always had to be an artificial barrier between myself and the world, a concept that both John and I took from the French writer Raymond Roussel. So although this anti-realist attitude has never stopped me from appreciating the realist still-lifes of Chardin and John Peto, I still prefer, as did Roussel, “the domain of Conception to that of Reality.”
About the author: Elizabeth Hazan is an artist who lives and works in New York City. Her work can be seen in “Even in Arcadia There I Am,” opening at Hesse Flatow on January 10, 2025.
NOTE: We have ten days until the end of the Two Coats of Paint 2024 Year-end Fundraising Campaign! This year, we’re aiming for full participation from our readers and gallery friends. Your support is important, and any contribution—big or small—will help keep the project thriving into 2025. Plus, it’s tax-deductible! Thank you for being a vital part of the Two Coats of Paint community.
Simply delightful, thank you both!