"You’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?"
Paul Warren in conversation with Gary Cummiskey
Paul Warren is an artist and illustrator with an interest in surrealism and abstract art. He works in a variety of different mediums, including collage. Paul's work has been published by Dumpster Fire Press, The Odd Magazine and Word Vomit Zine. He has online galleries at Deviant Art and Instagram. He lives in Daventry, England.
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You live in the town of Daventry, Northamptonshire, in England. What is the art scene like in England these days? What is the support for visual art? Is there a fair bit of regionalism?
I think the art scene in England is pretty staid these days. It only exist in most people’s lives when Banksy sprays something on a wall somewhere. All of the big exhibitions are London-based, with a corporate sponsor. From time to time something interesting will pop up in an independent gallery away from the capital. I usually find out about these after the event. National media focus only on the big exhibitions: Monet or Hockney, for example. Living here these things easily pass you by! So yes, I think there is some regionalism. There have been attempts to revive the Art Lab idea in some areas, including Northampton. There are people creating art locally but few opportunities.
Thankfully I have a day job. I would never make a living out of art, wouldn’t want to, it’s far too precarious. I also have the freedom to produce what I want.
When did you first start making art? What artists inspired you when you started out, and what artists inspire you now?
I started making art as a child, drawing mainly. I do remember being obsessed with the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album artwork. I spent virtually an entire school holiday producing Sgt Pepper-inspired drawings and paintings. It was the colour that amazed me. This was the late 70s, early 80s, in Northamptonshire ‒ there didn’t seem to be a lot of colour about then ! At about this time my eyes were opened to abstract art. The art teacher at my high school, I’d have been about 14 , sent me into a storeroom to collect some paintbrushes. On the wall there was a print of ‘Cossacks’ by Kandinsky. That blew me away. I didn’t know art could be like that. The most modern thing I’d seen up until then was a print of Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asniéres’.
My intention upon leaving school was to study art, but this didn’t work out and I became disillusioned with art and stopped painting and drawing as I didn’t see the point.
When I was about 19, though, I discovered a copy of Patrick Waldberg’s Surrealism. This had a massive impact on me. This led to discovering Dalí. Dalí was to me, then, the greatest artist ever. I couldn’t get enough of his work.
I started painting surreal landscapes featuring faceless ballerinas, elongated tables, jugglers on stilts, human faces buried in walls, mannequins and of course cypress trees.
This led to me collecting anything I could find on Surrealism. I was also taking an interest in Futurism and Impressionism at that time.
Another chance discovery was Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. I couldn’t believe that book, staggering, full of these images that just threw themselves at you, written by someone who seemingly didn’t care. Major influence. Forty or fifty books in and he’s still having the same impact. The cut-ups were a revelation. He was a genius with that. There is a richness and beauty to the prose that a lot of people just don’t get.
Through Burroughs I came to the work of Brion Gysin. Incredible talent and who’s heard of him, compared with Burroughs? Very few people.
Another artist whose work means a lot to me is Emmy Bridgwater, the British surrealist. She didn’t produce a huge amount of work but what she did produce was mesmerising. Her painting ‘Night work is about to commence’ is astounding.
An artist whom I’ve returned to recently is Stanley Donwood, best known for his work with Radiohead. The work he produced with Thom Yorke in the early 2000s is very inspiring. It has a questioning, almost anarchic, edge to it. Very powerful work.
I’ve always been influenced by writers. A passage from a book or a lyric from a song often triggers something. Lately this has become more apparent. For instance I’ve been working on artwork inspired by the writer Stephen Michael Whitter. These combine images of mainly derelict buildings with Stephen’s text, incorporating drawings, collage and digital artwork. I’ve shown Stephen these and he has been incredibly supportive. Hopefully they will find a home somewhere. Hopefully in book form.
And of course I’ve made a couple of pieces based on your work. One of these, ‘Each step backward erases each step taken’, was interesting as it led me on to do a small series of astronaut-based pictures. One of them, ‘Astronaut on a deserted Street’, was used by Ryan Quinn Flanagan for the cover of his recent book Fowler’s Revenge.
I produced a series of paintings heavily influenced by this period under a pseudonym The Watchman. I’d read the Djuna Barnes novel Nightwood and I got the name from the ‘Watchman what of the night ?’ section of the book. The British surrealist artist Conroy Maddox also used that title for one of his most famous collages, which I later discovered.
The Watchman artwork had titles like ‘Mannequin Genocide’, ‘The Last museum’, ‘The Great Illusion’, ‘Radio Nudes’, ‘The Forgotten season’, and ‘Blood sports in the morning’. The choice of title was very important to me at that time.
You tend to work in collage, but what other mediums do you use? What is your approach to making art?
I am working mainly in collage at the moment, both hand cut and digital. It’s a time-constraint thing as well. For the work I’m producing at the moment collage is the only way to get these ideas out. It’s also allowing me to incorporate text into the artwork, something I’d been trying to do for years.
I have a technique for layering the collages, which combines hand cutting and digital montage, which seems to work well.
I prefer to paint if I have the time. I use acrylic, watercolour, oil, as well as pastels and pencils. When I paint I use very traditional techniques. The ideas tend to come quick, so I tend to work quite fast. I rarely work from sketches, so what you see is, generally, the first idea put down. Not ideal, but I can’t do it any other way.
Some of your artworks comment on political issues, such as the invasion of Ukraine, or on UK politics. What do you see as the role of the artist in today’s society?
This is a fairly recent thing for me. I was appalled by the Ukraine war and initially produced an image of Putin with a clown's nose and hair, with something offensive written across his forehead in Russian. A few people liked this, so I had it made into a T-shirt design and tried to sell it through an online site. The intention was that anything I made would be donated to the Ukraine appeal. I sold a handful of these, then the site took them down. They were inappropriate, apparently.
I posted about this on my Facebook page and Mike Zone, who is the editor for Dumpster Fire Press, got in touch. He’d brought one of these T-shirts and was shocked by the site’s action.
He was in the process of putting together a new anthology titled World on Fire and offered to use my Putin artwork. This opened the floodgates for me and I sent Mike god knows how much Putin/Ukraine/anti-monarchy/anti-capitalist artwork.
Most of which appears in the book. The book later became World on Fire: Propagandie ,with proceeds going to the Ukraine appeal. So, a big thanks to Mike for that.
I would hope that any artist is touched by world events such as the war in Ukraine. From my point of view, you’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?
The big figures from the years of punk have either passed on or have gone very quiet. Do you think punk it still relevant today, if not more relevant than ever?
Yes, I think it is still relevant. The ability to shock has largely gone, owing to the fact the world moves on and we’ve seen it all before. But the punk attitude and aesthetic lives on. The music is very relevant, particularly in Britain at the moment. There is a Liverpool-based poetry zine called Word Vomit, which carries on the punk aesthetic. Kate Floss who runs it has been kind enough to accept some of my text-based work. It’s DIY publishing ‒ I love that sort of thing.
They do a lot of open-mic nights too. It’s the punk thing of just getting out there and doing it.
The punk aesthetic is something that I looked to last summer, for a series of alternative Queen’s Jubilee ‘stamp’ designs. These were based on a portrait of the Queen, satirical in nature and incorporated cut-up text made from media coverage, song lyrics and TS Eliot, as well as a bit of social comment on my part!
Jamie Reed was the big influence for the idea. Also David King, who did a lot of the artwork for Crass.
I was impressed with your series about the murdered actress Sharon Tate. In a way it reminded me of Warhol’s Monroe portraits, as well as his Death and Disaster series. Was Warhol in any way an influence?
They do share some similarities, not intended though. I’ve been looking at a lot of Eastern European collage and photomontage, notably the Polish artist Janusz Maria Brzeski and his ‘Birth of a Robot’ series. I didn’t realise until I started researching Sharon Tate how iconic her image could be. I say ‘could be’, as it’s been overshadowed by Manson. He took that from her. The series was intended to redress that , to take back her image. There were meant to be 10 or 12 images in the series, but it’s spiralled a bit and at the last count I had 45 pieces.
What is your opinion of outsider art? I admire outsider art tremendously, but I can’t help but feel it is becoming a sort of style.
It’s becoming big business. The Tate had a big outsider art exhibition a while back. Scottie Wilson, the surrealist, is a good example of an outsider being brought into the mainstream, setting him up with an exhibition in a gallery and while the show was going on he was selling his artwork outside a pub around the corner for the price of a pint! Wilson had been selling his art from the back of a van before that.
Roland Penrose tried to bring him into the surrealist fold, but Wilson was treading his own path. That’s often the case with outsider art ‒ by its nature it’s different, often idiosyncratic, and generally has little commercial appeal, well, at least at the time it’s being produced.
I believe you are working with Mike Zone on a collaborative novel. Can you tell us a bit about this?
Yes, it’s to be called Dead Star: Control. The initial inspiration was the Sharon Tate artwork we discussed earlier. Obviously I can’t say too much at this point about the plot except that it’s a Burroughsian /Philip K Dick sci-fi thing that explores a lot of the themes surrounding the Tate murder. Mk Ultra, conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. Some of the Tate artwork will be in the book. It’s interesting, as when this idea developed, the artwork was influenced by the plot and vice versa. That’s what I find exciting ‒ the role chance plays in the process. Having a loose idea and just seeing where it leads.
Dead Star should see the light of day later this year or 2024.
We’ve collaborated before on Mike’s chapbook Fuck You: A Fucking Poetry Chap. That was great fun. The illustrations weaved around Mike’s text. It seemed to work quite well.
Another project in progress is a collaboration with both Mike and the poet Shannon Lynette, titled ‘Razorville‘. I’m providing artwork for that.
What do you see as the future of art in England?
Interesting question. I’m not seeing anything inspiring coming out of the mainstream art world. The problem is it’s all about sales and profit. Everything I see that is inspiring, a little bit different, is online. There are a lot of people like myself who need to create art ‒ it’s about searching for something different. I don’t really take an interest in contemporary art anymore. Everything is too commercial, too safe, too nice.
Where’s the fun in that?