How to disappear completely

Once one of the New Glasgow Boys, Ken Currie has emerged as an astonishing artist in his own right. On the eve of his first Scottish exhibition in a decade, he talks life, death and tracksuit bottoms

WHEN I went to interview Ken Currie the other day at his studio in the East End of Glasgow, somewhere behind the glowering, towering statue of John Knox in the Necropolis, he told me that rather than work feverishly on a painting, changing it and changing it and changing it, he prefers to let it evolve, to marinate in the juices of his mind.

This article was written something like that. First of all I was going to say that, having not exhibited in his native country for ten years, he is the forgotten genius of Scottish painting. But I've realised that's not quite right. Rather he has allowed himself to fade from view, enjoying the sensation as he drops from the public consciousness, blanching like celluloid in the sun. For a decade, he has been a man retreating inward, creating an oeuvre of increasing substance as he himself grows ever more faint. Compare him with his contemporary Peter Howson, who seems to thrive on publicity; Howson is a showman, Currie a shade.

This pattern is repeated in his work. Look at the paintings of the mid-Eighties, the highly political works which brought him international fame as one of the New Glasgow Boys alongside Howson, Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski. These pictures are crammed with life - hard-edged working men, richly rendered in reds and umber, climbing ladders, playing music, bellowing through megaphones, going bunnet to helmet with the police, all against a backdrop that is recognisably Glasgow, concrete and neon and tense.

By the late Nineties, Currie had stopped painting like this. You could see the old work in the murals of the People's Palace, but the artist himself was now painting spectral, translucent figures, glowing white and blurred, against backgrounds of nothing but blackness. These were, you guessed, the ghosts of his former characters, falling slowly into the void. "The blackness of the paintings," he has written, "represents a primordial terror, inhabiting all of us - a terror of the end of existence and nothingness."

And lately, in Currie's more recent work, the people have often vanished completely. The former champion of figurative painting has abandoned figures altogether. A white sheet spread against the black, a blanket draping an empty table, the fabric perhaps lightly stained with the suggestion of a human form, these paintings are empty of content but still stuffed with meaning. Ken Currie has gone from crowds to shrouds in 20 years.

"Given that I haven't shown in Glasgow for so long," he says, "I'm beginning to see that some sort of statement is required."

Currie is very nervous about the forthcoming show, which will be in the Mackintosh Gallery at Glasgow School of Art, scene of his graduation exhibition in 1982. "This feels like my second degree show," he jitters, with the air of a man who has chewed through all his fingernails and is about to start on his toes. "It's my old school and I always associate that environment with judgment. But I think it's really the right place to have this exhibition. I feel like the Art School is part of my soul. Twenty years down the line and I've come full circle. It seems like a hell of a long time ago. I don't even know the person that I was then."

It has to be said, he needn't worry. Although he's not entirely sure which, if any, of the paintings he shows me are going to end up on display ("I'll decide on the day"), they are all eye-poppingly wonderful in an unsettling sort of way. Currie, the living embodiment of the phrase "It's the quiet ones you've got to watch", has an alarming imagination to go with his mild manners.

He has granted this interview with some reluctance, insisting that we focus on the work "and don't ask me about my record collection or whatever". This is usually the kind of thing that has journalists tearing their hair out but, in Currie's case, the work is fascinating.

We walk around his studio looking at canvases. The first is a huge painting, about seven feet by five, which goes by the working title Summer Nights. Currie, as we shall see, loathes irony, but the distance between the painting's name and its content drips with the stuff. Against an inky background, a group of shaven-headed, bare- chested young men in trackie bottoms administer a beating to an unseen victim, presumably bunched up on the ground just out of frame.

"This is just an observation of the city," Currie shrugs, blithely. "I think a lot of people would immediately be able to identify the stripe on the trousers as Adidas. We think of gangs of young guys going around with that sports gear on. I am always really wary of bringing clothes and fashion into paintings because it dates the work very, very quickly. But what interests me about this particular uniform is that it has a slightly military element to it. This is a group of Glasgow neds engaging in their favourite pastime, which is beating people up, but I also wanted to suggest that this could be any army on the rampage, a group of soldiers who have gone crazy, stripped off drunk and engaging in some act of terror. And it could be at any time as well. So although it has a local sense it has larger implications."

This is classic Currie. He has long been fascinated by the barbarism that lurks just beneath the veneer of western society. A keen historian, for him the neds of Glasgow city centre are directly connected to the ethnic cleansers of Serbia who are in turn connected to the pogroms of the past and the unglimpsed terrors of the future. He wouldn't put it as bluntly as this, but for Currie, Al-Qaeda and the Tongs are kissing cousins. Rather appropriately, we are meeting on September 11, anniversary of the atrocities which perfectly encapsulates Currie's obsession with the link between capitalism and brutality, the way that the wealth of some begets the rage of others.

It is often written that his painting is misanthropic, that he is incapable of seeing people as anything other than deformed with venality. "We're all entitled to a bit of misanthropy now and again," he harrumphs when I ask about this, "considering the complete craziness of a lot of people in the world. But I think it's more that I'm interested in the grotesque, in the ugly in humanity, and I want to emphasise those things. To be able to make a comment on that - on the grotesque and the comic and the tragi-comic - if that's being misanthropic, then, yeah, I'm a misanthrope."

Put it another way then, I say to him, is your art angry? He leaps on this. It's clearly a favourite subject. "Yeah! I believe in that. I think art has to be angry. I can't stand all that cool ironic stuff. I think art has to be about passion and anger. I just believe that. And I think that people want to be confronted by that. When people talk about art they talk about passion and conviction. They want that kind of confrontation.

"That's why I feel so out of kilter with the times at the moment. Irony is the zeitgeist and it has been for the last ten years. Whereas I'm militantly un-ironic. I am Mr Serious!" He laughs and so do I, but we both know he's not kidding. "This is what I go for. I can't think of any other way to do it. This notion of irony, of let's not get too serious, it's only art, I hate that. There are too many horrible devastating ironies about life that, to me, are more powerful than looking at some dilettante-ish bit of irony on a gallery wall."

Like what?

"Well, for example, the irony of the Israelis, who were themselves the victims of the most horrific persecution of all time, becoming the persecutors. That is irony. For Arabs, that is an irony of biblical proportions. And these are more important ironies to be dealing with, rather than making ironic paintings."

In other words, and to quote Johnny Rotten, he means it, maaan. It's worth emphasising though that although Currie is a deeply serious individual he comes across way more uptight in print than he is in real life. He seems to me a fairly gentle figure, good humoured and a bit shambling. He's stocky with an expression so hangdog it makes Droopy look like he's had Botox; he also has a weird brushed- up hairline that gives the impression that a wee guy with spiky hair is standing directly behind him.

We move on to a triptych which Currie is racing to finish and which appears to show close-up views of some kind of medical procedure, fingers probing wounds and oddly shaped instruments pulling at tissue. Everything is red. "These are very literal statements," he explains. "There's no irony, there's no subtext. They are just very straightforward paintings of someone getting bowel surgery."

Last year Currie was commissioned to produce a portrait of three leading cancer specialists for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As research he spent hours at Dundee's Ninewells Hospitals, sketching and photographing as patients went under the knife.

"To actually observe surgery is amazing," he says. "It's actually quite beautiful. The whole thing is literally like theatre. You're in a darkened room with a very, very quiet group of people and all you see is these masked faces looking down on this heavily spot-lit area. And they have all these mysterious devices. The body is covered in these green sheets and they just leave this area exposed for the incision. I was expecting Monty Python's jets of blood, but it's really clean. When they start working on the body the colours are incredible - oranges and purples and pinks. I couldn't take my eyes off it."

Presumably the patient had to give permission for Currie to paint his insides? "Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean this is Mr So-and-So's bowels." He waves a hand through the air at the panels. "It'll be interesting to see if he'd like these on the wall. I doubt it."

Currie was not the only witness to the surgery. He shared the operating theatre with around 20 medical students, all elbowing and jostling for the best view. At one point, Currie found himself up by the patient's head, which gave him a bit of a funny turn.

"It was a real leg-shaker," he recalls. "Because when I saw his face I could actually connect a person to this. That was when the horror. I mean this person was being eviscerated. These people were engaging in a kind of ritual wounding in order to heal. They rip people apart and put them together again. It's a deeply mysterious thing to observe."

Currie's own internal landscape is not so easily examined. An extremely private individual, he admits that talking to me is "agony, agony", will only confirm the bare facts of his life - a wife, who is also an artist, three children - and balks when I ask him about his own childhood. Pressed, he sketches it in: "I was brought up in Barrhead, just outside Glasgow. I left there at the age of 20 and went to the Art School. And that's about it. A very traditional west of Scotland upbringing. Nothing unusual."

This is infuriating because there's loads I want to know - has he ever been a victim of violence, is there poverty or persecution in his family background, has he had to cope with death and sickness, if he thinks the world is so awful why did he bring children into it? - but these things are strictly off-limits.

He lives a monastic existence, coming into the studio every day and spending hours alone painting his wraiths and winding sheets. Sometimes he listens to music, but not so much lately. He has "a kind of hypersensitivity to sound" and wears earplugs to bed, much to the amusement of his wife, although we can also take it as a further retreat from the world, an acutely sensitive man blotting out an entire sense.

At 42, he is so keenly aware of mortality that it has become the dominant theme of his work. He feels time passing faster and that makes him want to retreat into his work even more; there's an urgency in his dedication to painting. Nodding, he says "I have become aware that I have a finite amount of time."

Does death itself scare him? "Oh, yeah. Course it does! Doesn't it scare everyone?"

No, not everyone.

"Yeah. I suppose a lot of people find comfort in religion, but I think it's really awful." He laughs a black laugh. "It's the worst thing that could happen to you."

It fascinates him though. That's what all those luminous figures are about, blurring round the edges, fading to black. Currie seems to be trying to get close to death in his work, close enough to just touch it and draw back. And he is as indistinct and shadow-clad as the creatures who flow from his brush. You could call him the forgotten genius of Scottish painting, but Ken Currie - a man who sees the forces of history at work in raised fists and falling skyscrapers - has always had his eye on the long game. His paintings are memento mori and also candidates for posterity. "I have to work harder," he says. "There are no excuses any more."u Ken Currie: Recent Work is at the Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, September 28-November 16

Copyright 2002
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