Painting is a little like walking the dog

Artist Robert Bordo speaks with PRAKSIS’s Nicholas John Jones about process and materiality in painting.

Robert Bordo, Letter, 2021, oil on panel, 40.6 x 50.8 cm

Nicholas John Jones: Robert, our sixth issue of PRAKSIS Presents features a selection of PRAKSIS alumni whose work is complexly engaged with its physical media and ideas about “medium”. I see your practice as exemplary of that: your exploration of your specific medium, painting, is restless and intensely exploratory. You tend to work in a serial form, each series of works weaving together networks of internal references from across your practice. Your paintings also often feature recognisable images, some of them directly alluding to travel and exploration: painted globes, maps, letters, postcards. Above all, you are hugely attentive to the materiality of your paintings, and the signification of paint as medium. To start us off, is there a particular work you’d like us to look at?

Robert Bordo: Well, we could start with this, Letter, a painting from early 2021. It uses a technique that I developed in my 2019-2020 crackup series – paintings of cracked windows made by incising into the paint surface to reveal painted layers beneath. Its imagery refers back to my airmail letter works of the 1990s, but this particular painting’s surface has a spidery kind of quality. It echoes climate and weather effects that only happen in wintertime, and that come from my everyday observations of my rural environment: ice formations on glass, patterns of crackling on frozen surfaces. So, this has an apparent minimalism, and the idea of a letter, but it also contains a kind of secret narrative. On first look it seems very beautiful: it’s like a blue sky enfolded in an airmail letter. Close up, though, you discover a fine crackling in the paint, like a secret, private communication.

Robert Bordo, Yarn #1, 2021-22, oil on linen, 61 x 76.2 cm

Since painting this I’ve been working on various fronts. I’m revisiting my early 2000s postcard paintings series – elaborate puzzles that combine abstract composition with details that come from photographs, painterly moments combined with more descriptive, illustrative painting, all within the same small piece. Alongside this I’m making studies for a new series based on the crackup paintings. The studio process is based on developing a group of preparatory studies that help me build a familiarity with a group of underlying ideas and images, so that eventually the concern with technique falls away: the paintings ‘snap into place’, they just happen, without technical deliberation.

Robert Bordo, Teacher's pest, 2021, oil on linen, 213.4 x 160 cm

NJJ: I sense that for you, it’s necessary to make the working process just a little difficult to compel your attention – that getting to that “effortless” place where technique falls away can be lengthy and even frustrating at points. Do you enjoy the process? Do its difficulties add to the satisfaction of achieving what you’re looking for?

RB: Yes and no. Sometimes I feel like I’m digging myself into a hole and I want to bust out of it. I have to get to the point where the paintings are more than “special effects” – demonstrations of technique. Making the crackup paintings, for example, a technique and a material metaphor emerged in tandem: a platform to explore specifics of line and light and colour and sensation within each work, but also to get at my wider concern, which is the way that painting is able to create a space of uncertainty, a place that you may be inside or outside of. So right now, I’m fine-tuning the studies until they “green light” me to forget the conceptual angle, and just allow the paintings to “happen”.

I suppose my roots are in Abstract Expressionist process: painting and scraping, searching… For the last four decades, though, my approach has become much more research-orientated and the role of “scraping and searching” has shrunk. Over the last eight months, alongside the postcard paintings, I’ve been making ‘shovel’ paintings – signalling an awareness that I’m digging around looking for something. The edges, the colour, the brushstrokes, the underpainting revealing itself – all that stuff is very important to me, but having a conceptual frame lets those features of the painting become the nuance, rather than the essence, of the work.

NJJ: Today, paintings are seen on screen more often than they are in real life. Representation on screen imposes a very distorting filter. It tends to repress the specific qualities of a painting’s facture, and sometimes paintings that impress on screen can be very disappointing in the real. The dominance of the digital seems to present painters with two options: to make paintings with qualities that relate to the screen, or to try and make work that offers an antidote to “life on screen” – to focus strongly on the real, visual and embodied, impact of paint as medium and painterly process. I wonder if you agree that the omnipresence of illuminated digital images has fundamentally changed the stakes for painters, and how you approach this situation.

RB: When you come from a background of abstraction, as I do, the process of making a painting is very distant from thinking about the screened image, which is much closer to printmaking and digital conceptual art. Those latter disciplines are all about layering and bringing the background up into the frontality of the picture plane – into two-dimensional space. I would date this conversation about painting and the screen back to the 1990s work of Albert Oehlen. Later, Charline Von Heyl “cleaned up” Oehlen and developed that uncanny collision of pop-culture and meaning into a more graphic painting. Personally, I feel closer to painters such as Thomas Nozkowski or Merlin James: artists who build surfaces that have time in them. Traces of the process may be more or less visible, but the surface always tells the story of time spent in the making process. When painted images are designed to relate to screens, or when paintings are shown on screens, it becomes harder to discern the time of making. The ideal for image production seems to become a form of timeless excellence or perfection. Similarly, society globally has come to desire seamless, immaculate products. This is artists such as Jeff Koons exploit – the desire for an elaborate, beautiful “sheen”.

I’m still in the world of making quasi-abstract paintings, figurative abstractions. Maybe that’s “old fashioned”, but it’s inevitable: I have my biases and my histories of making. For me, concept and material practice are always intertwined, but the image can’t be “perfect”. There is a simultaneously physical and conceptual process of retooling and changing, altering the scale, of allowing pentimenti and memory to arise and reside within the paintings. A painting isn’t satisfying for me if it’s “perfect”. It can’t be too thin and beautiful. And so, on balance, I have more in common with the second of the two positions you identify. 

NJJ: Through painting you spend time with a particular subject, seeking to physically work through and manifest an idea. Can you describe what you’re looking for? Is there a critical point when a painting “comes alive”?

RB: I think it’s in the space; with the surface of the painting as a record of the events that have given rise to it. The crackup paintings involve what is effectively an etching technique; a monochrome is inscribed with a line in a process that mixes drawing and painting. They resolve themselves when the plane of the painted space is activated: the lines and colours and the interactions of space and form cease to be technical, cease to be about the “scheme”, and take on a poetic form. There is always a plan or scheme (in those particular paintings, it’s about using brilliant underpainting that turns the inscribed elements into fractures, like cracking glass), but if the technique and the idea are too transparent or dominant they can obstruct the really important part of process, the deeper part of adjusting, changing colour, allowing the surface to reverberate with touch and the build-up of paint.

So, the process is not primarily about the conceptual frame, or the moment of figuring out and delivering the image. It’s about there being this time of making, where I try to keep the painting wet, and I’m dealing with how the light will make the image more vivid; how colour and nuance are interacting – a back-and-forth between an abstract formalism and a centred idea, an anchor. The painting only coalesces when its nuances, the interactions of form, begin to show something transformative that is perceived, not understood – an overall pictorial story of a kind that is definitely “un-rational”. Its space is sensed – not simply seen but apprehended. The point is not the technicalities of making the painting, it’s their capacity to get to that point, and the process has to allow time for all that to happen.

 Robert Bordo, Homage, 2013, oil on canvas, 137 x 166.5 cm

NJJ: That perhaps makes your paintings seem very internalised, or ineffable, but we can’t overlook the fact that they are layered with imagery relating to your experience of the world and the events going on in it. Sometimes the references are personal, whimsical, wistful, even humorous, but the crackup series appears to contain a directly political metaphor: it was made at a time when the US (and elsewhere) was undergoing a frighteningly overt phase of political fragmentation and the fracturing of long-held norms and assumptions. At present, you are making further studies of broken windows, but these ones are taped up. What’s going on?

RB: These new studies first took shape when the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in NYC. Anger boiled over and Soho store windows were smashed. The new studies were inspired by  great images of taped-up luxury store windows that I found online. However, the tape also has a personal resonance. When I was a young artist in Canada, art school teaching was totally dominated by “hard edge” abstraction: we called it “tape” painting. I fled Montreal because of it: I wanted to study the painting of experience, the painting of nature, of the psychological, of the bucolic, of sensation and affect. That led me to New York and the study of Abstract Expressionism with New York Studio School teachers such as Mercedes Matter and Philip Guston. There, I found myself contending with the concept of the specific, transcendent subject: a discourse that was equally alien to me as a young Canadian. That was not my meaning either. So I find it funny, even ironic, that I'm back to thinking about tape.

That noted, the processes that I studied back then in New York were very consequential: processes of adding and taking away; trying one route after another; manifesting an effort and a history; engaging a process of intuiting and searching for a subject without necessarily knowing what you're doing. Cecily Brown is a good example of a younger artist who works within that process. She's kind of a magical artist, because she understands the parameters of her concept and has a very specific knowledge of what her outcomes will be, but she also explores the labyrinth that her process navigates. My work has always been about trying to anchor my thoughts and feelings and reactions to culture and to painting with some sort of metaphor that opens up a pathway. The material aspect of the painting evolves, inviting the conceptual side of the process to change its focus, to become more malleable and open to the material results. And so there is always a certain existential quality in my paintings; I don’t just deliver a graphic representation of a shovel or a dirt pile (Homage, 2013, for instance), but an image that has an archaeology, a reference to the studio process – not shovelling outside, but shovelling inside!

I take my dog Rufus walking in the fields on a leash that extends to twenty feet, and when he senses another animal around (a deer, say) he goes crazy and runs in the opposite direction (potentially twenty feet, if the leash is fully extended)! I sometimes think that painting is a little bit like walking Rufus on that leash. Some paintings – the globes (from around 2001), for example – are on a very short leash; the painting is kept restrained. The postcards are on a medium leash, while the dirt piles that I mentioned before, or the weather paintings of the mid-2000s, or the new series of “fence” paintings that I am working on currently, have more room to ramble. With these, abstract mark-making and subject matter are allowed to get close to a kind of expressionism, while the paintings are held together (very, very lightly) by a thematic idea of landscape.