Trial and Error

Jennifer Caroline Campbell’s visit to an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s work became flavoured by his death which was announced later that day...

 

‘I feel as though I’m stumbling around, going wrong in every single possible way until something happens’

 

– Frank Auerbach talking at the Royal Academy, 2016

 

Sometimes the to-and-fro between frustration and compulsion that I experience when painting makes more sense than anything else in this absurd world. At other times the habit feels like partaking in an unhealthy obsession upheld by deranged weirdos. So it can be a real tonic to hear other painters/deranged weirdos talk about their process. The words of Frank Auerbach make particularly fortifying vitamins for me, because of the way he makes work, the quality of that work and his relentless commitment to the process. 

 

I stand in front of a hefty ochre painting called Maples Demolition, Euston Road, 1960. It is part of an exhibition called Frank Auerbach: Portraits of London' at Francis Outred and Offer Waterman. I drink in the bristling marks, scratches, sweeps and bumps, their collective irregular rhythm dancing between agitation, courage and doubt. A lumpy but ridged mustard line runs diagonally from the left side of the top edge to the right-ish side of the bottom edge and seems to sit on top of all the other shapes and marks. If it were not for this sturdy line the contents of the painting might tumble out at me.

 

Auerbach, who was born in Berlin in 1931 and died in London in November 2024, was notorious for his doggedly regular studio practice. Models, often close friends, sat for long stints in his studio while he worked and reworked their equivalent in paint or charcoal, producing his many portraits. For the landscapes he went on local walks, making drawings to bring back to the studio. In both cases he reworked the same image over and over, often scraping all the paint back or rubbing all the charcoal off many times, making the finish point hard to predict. This is not a practical or efficient way to work and serves as a good reminder that the artist is not, and should not be, a production line. His process of multiple attempts is left visible in the finished works, embedding them with the human urge to strive and search. The weight of this trial and error, melded with the works ability to hold up on their own after all, is the tension that creates the aliveness in Auerbach’s best work.

 

A few paintings on, I try (and fail) to decide if these are landscapes or portraits. Initially they read as landscapes, yet somehow they have the feeling of being portraits. Landscape paintings can have a sense of openness, inviting the viewer to enter them. But with Auerbach’s landscapes there is no room for me in them, something is already there. I stop in front a painting called Primrose Hill Study – Autumn Evening, 1979. A hard cold patch of sky is being encroached upon by a shouting mob of angular juicy forms that nearly succeed in shaking off their shared conjuring of a landscape. One bright red mark sits glowing thickly towards the right of the scrambling horizon and feels like it was made last. Like all the gestures in this painting, this red mark is simultaneously a thing in itself, a vivid equivalent to something felt, and a visceral trace of the act that made it.

 

A painting called To the Studios II, 1982 holds me in front of it. In its centre is a frenzied mash of marks that threaten to pull the anchored shapes around it into its greedy belly in a mighty collapse, but it does not, it resists. This painting makes me want to run straight to my own studio to paint. I ask myself what drives the perpetual human trying, this persistent attempt upon attempt, that I always find in Auerbach’s work? And what is it exactly that a painter working in this way wants to find? These kinds of questions are common fuel for the conversations that have shaped my approach to painting in recent years. Friend, painter and occasional teaching colleague Jeb Haward has something to answer for here. Taught by Rose Wylie, Roy Oxlade and Dennis Creffield, Haward has contaminated my thinking and methodology in regard to painting in a particular way. Creffield, Oxlade, and Auerbach were all taught by David Bomberg in his influential evening classes at Borough Polytechnic. Haward, who also corresponded with Auerbach, said that Auerbach’s approach meant that every day and every painting was a new experience and that this is what drove him. 

 

I have always been drawn to the idea that each painting is a new and unknown territory. If you know what it will look like, what is the point in painting it? Valuing the unplanned in this way is, of course, nothing new in painting. Yet I grow ever more curious about these ideas and their capacity to live on, despite, or maybe because of, the claims that they are inert, or embarrassingly old news. Maybe it’s a result of attending art school in the YBA after-glow and getting quickly bored of the then fashionable idea that everything must be new and cynical in order to have meaning. In her brilliant 2011 essay ‘AB-EX and Disco Balls’ in Art Forum, Amy Sillman says ‘basically, expression’s really embarrassing’. She goes on to consider partaking in abstract expressionism now as a camp re-invention of the left over, repositioning it in relation to gender and queer culture, and reclaiming it from the clique institutionalised trap it has washed up in. Her essay made me see the headliner moments of art history as so many thrift store items, each teaming with new possibilities. I’m not interested in empty remakes or retro nostalgia, but I am excited to mine, reconnect and re-own fragments from paintings trail of adventures. Trying too hard to be new is both old and an echo of commercial logic. Standing in front of Auerbach’s landscapes feels vital and present, not vintage in any way. They speak directly to my mind, body and the current world. 

 

In both the past and the present, a commitment to painting in this unmeasured and impulsive way, brings with it the necessity to embrace uncertainty. Auerbach’s landscapes tell me that uncertainty is a vital part of life and not something that can be banished from it, no matter what politicians and advertisements promise us. Absolute certainty is fleeting, just as absolute safety is a fantasy. The dream of surrounding ourselves with impenetrable boundaries, of purging our communities of all risk, is a dangerous illusion, prone to turning into a cold ordering and violent draining of the world. I do not mean that we should give up taking responsibility for people (creatures or places), that is something very different. In fact, the real danger is that we are increasingly forgetting our empathy towards those living in peril. Auerbach’s biography is a reminder of that innate human responsibility towards the precarious. He arrived in London in 1939 at the age of seven, under the beneficence of Iris Origo and fleeing a Nazi Germany that his parents, tragically, did not survive. The question of what London was to Auerbach, and what home is to anyone, hangs in the air suddenly.

 

More of Auerbach’s words swim into my mind: ‘babies run before they walk because they want to get somewhere’ – Frank Auerbach (on BBC Radio 4 show This Cultural Life, January 2024.)

 

It is the ‘want’ in the sentence that strikes me now. From an infant’s first urge to stand on two feet and move forward, to every act thereafter, an acceptance of the unknown, of risk and of uncertainty are part of the deal. The revealing of this truth in Auerbach’s landscapes of London is what quenches me. The lesson they wordlessly tell me is that aliveness is something that has to be tried at, over and over. This searching and trying is what stops the world becoming, in the words of Federico Campagna in his 2018 book, ‘a stockpiling of dead stuff’.

 

I finally exit the gallery, full of an invisible thing that seems to brighten my insides with an eager sensibility. Suddenly I am very hungry. On the tube I start to make notes for this article. When I get to my studio I look at a painting that I have been working on for weeks with the nagging feeling that it might need to be painted over, again. I make an instant coffee and start re-listening to some podcast interviews with Auerbach. I start painting over the weeks-old painting, full of doubt and impatient hope. In my ear, via my headphone, Auerbach’s voice says, ‘all art comes from dissatisfaction’. I sip some coffee. My friend texts me to tell me the news of Auerbach’s passing. I text back that I will try and write a review of his London Portraits exhibition. I immediately doubt my ability to write this article. I sit with doubt and make friends with it. 

 

I have not included any images of the works because they seem to lack too much as photographs. You can either imagine them or go and see the exhibition, which is at Francis Outred and Offer Waterman Galleries, London until the 7 December 2024. 

Jennifer Caroline Campbell