Artist Story: Narbi Price

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

I suppose I was always the kid at school who was good at drawing, so I think I always wanted to be an artist despite not really knowing what one was. I’m not sure I even know now to be honest.

Being mixed race and always feeling slightly separate I think, has been an influence on my interests, which I’ve only really realised as I’ve got older. The sense of being different to my white relatives, growing up on a council estate in a working class family with an abusive stepfather, banal everyday racism and so on. I escaped from the fights, the loaded questions, the shouting, by retreating into books and drawing.

I think the everyday has always been of interest, but with the awareness that my everyday was perhaps different than that of my peers. The particular strands of TV, film, comedy and music that resonated and continue to resonate with me are the ones that share these themes. Seeing things that I could recognise as of my experience at a young age through TV shows like Steptoe and Son, films like Kes, comedians like Billy Connolly, or music by bands like Pulp, was much more influential than any art.

When moving away from home to go to university, my hometown became more interesting to me than it had been when I had to live there. It felt like a time of change, and the concern with the everyday became the focus of what I did throughout my BA, in different ways. Paintings of my grandparents’ empty house, of my estate, of Saturday evening TV, of the places I’d been but was no longer.

What connects the events that took place at the sites you depict in your paintings? They seem to be quite a random collection, from personal events and things that happened locally, to historical crime scenes and stories from popular and underground culture.

I suppose it could be read as a grand act of self-portraiture, the events are those that resonate with me in some way. I think it’s a very human thing to do, to want to connect with the past somehow, physically, by putting yourself in the place where something happened. Be that to feel closer to a lost loved one, or an idol, to pay respects to strangers who suffered, or whatever. I don’t know what we expect to experience when we get to the spot, some psychic resonance perhaps? I want the paintings that take these things onboard to turn down the noise that we might experience in reality. To shift the focus to the looking, the experience. I suppose now, I’m making paintings where other people have been but are no longer.

Why is it important for you to have visited these sites yourself? Are you interested in psychogeography or is there a sense of making a pilgrimage to these particular places?

Both. I’m certainly interested in psychogeography, hauntology, etc. But I have an inherent frustration with how wishy-washy these terms can be. Pilgrimage seems to be a closer term to what I do. It’s important that I’ve made a journey to a site myself. The process is also a practical thing, an engine to make a painting, to remove (or limit) choice from what it might look like. When I arrive at a site, then I have to make a painting of what I find. Of course there are still innumerable options, but they’re vastly reduced by the process.

Do you think it’s important for viewers to have knowledge of the events that took place at these locations, or are you happy for viewers to make up their own narratives?

It’s important that the paintings operate on their own terms, as paintings first and foremost. And when it comes to histories I see that as a many layered thing. We (and I) focus on sites usually because of a singular event but there are innumerable events that have also taken place at any given location, that we will and can never know. I find that fascinating too. We ascribe value to drama, but the paintings take that away. They allow a more contemplative space. This is why the event or history that I’ve chosen is never completely explicit, it’s coded into the titling or in the gallery interpretation. I want there to remain space for more complex interpretation, which is why the paint frequently also does perhaps unexpected things.

How did your series known as The Ashington Paintings come about? You’ve described them as being “about the ghosts of Ashington”?

The Ashington Paintings were a major part of my PhD which I completed at Newcastle University in 2020. It looked at the legacy of The Ashington Group of painters (aka the Pitmen Painters) who were an amateur group of artists making work about their lives for close to 50 years, from 1930s to the 1980s. I didn’t want to make contemporary recreations of the group’s work so I spent a long time walking the streets of Ashington, getting to know it and making friends there. I made paintings of sites where mines used to be, made walks from the houses of members of the group to their places of work, all of which is now gone. Ashington was built to service the mines, it was stripped of that purpose when they were closed and now feels marooned. Its layout however is that way because of where the mines were sited, so the streets are hunkered around voids. There’s a rhythm to the streets that peters out, journeys without destinations. It’s something that happens in other post-industrial towns of course, but the remoteness of Ashington (despite being only 14 or 15 miles from Newcastle, the bus takes over an hour to get there), its particular accent and culture, seem to accentuate these things.

You seem to really enjoy finding painterly solutions and tricks for conveying what might be quite complex information. Which artists, or paintings, have most influenced your painting style and your approach to making paintings?

In terms of painters, I think I always go back to the gaffer – Rembrandt. The confident brevity of his marks, the way the illusions dissolve on approach, the lumps and bumps that become a shorthand for detail, all of those things that combine to a viewing experience that’s akin to communing with the dead. There’s also bits of Hockney in the 1970s, Hoyland in the 1960s, Diebenkorn in the ’60s, and Havekost in the 2000s in the mix somewhere.

In terms of composition and sensibility, Jonathan Meades’ 1990s satirical TV documentary series Further Abroad had a huge influence on me. The cinematographer was Robert Payton and he used very geometric, static shots, flat saturated planes of colour and everyday urban environments to striking effect. It wasn’t something I was really conscious of until watching them back years later, and realising that they’d stuck somewhere and had come back out in my compositions.

You’ve made a series of paintings of floral tributes. The flowers appear as if floating on a raw canvas background – you’ve removed any sense of surrounding landscape or cityscape. Why did you decide to depict these floral tributes in this way?

I wanted the work to be about the act of remembrance in a wider way, rather than the specific memorial or situation the flowers were placed to mark. I know the histories and the sites of some of the memorials but not all of them, it was an attempt to make the paintings less specific, more universal. The universality of life and death – y’know, those little insignificant themes to make work about… It’s also a nod to vanitas and memento mori painting which most often shows the symbolic objects on a plain background. I think in a lot of ways, the work as a whole is about loss and mourning, for times, for people, for places. This series just makes it more explicit.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, you made a series of watercolour paintings of benches that had been ‘closed’ to dissuade people from loitering and to encourage social distancing. How are these different to your other paintings in terms of subject matter and your approach to making them?

This was a big change, mainly in that I didn’t take most of the source photographs myself, they were sent to me. It started informally, with people sending me messages or tagging me on social media, saying that this bizarre sight of benches wrapped in barrier tape in ever more elaborate ways looked like something I’d paint. They were correct, the phenomenon really did appeal to me. We weren’t allowed to travel, so I gave instructions on how I’d like the shots to be composed and scores of images came back to me, from all over the world. This thing was happening seemingly spontaneously internationally. The curator Liz Ritson and the artist Alice Herrick both sent me dozens of images, along with maybe 40 or so other people, many of which have made it into paintings. I also produced a publication of 40 of the paintings (1), and have revisited some of the images for larger, more resolved works.

You won the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2017 and the Journal Culture Awards Visual Artist of the Year in 2018, and you’ve also been a prizewinner in the John Moores Painting Prize. How important are these prizes in terms of raising your profile as an artist?

They were certainly important in improving my visibility, and I think there’s an associated kudos particularly among other painters. In terms of what they might have done for my career, it’s hard to say. The press certainly don’t cover them in any meaningful way and I didn’t see a tangible increase in sales or anything like that as a result of those awards, but I’m certainly glad to have won them. That being said, there have been significant opportunities that have come directly from being part of them, my relationship with GalleriaSix in Milan, Italy, for instance came directly from the exposure of being in John Moores in 2010, straight from my MFA.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

I was first aware of Vane shortly after I moved to Newcastle to do my BA in 1999, in its previous guise as a festival that took over the city centre and surrounding areas in the autumn. Each night it seemed there was something exciting to discover in disused shops, terraces and warehouses. It was a fantastic way to discover the city and an introduction to a thriving art scene. I didn’t like or understand everything I saw but it was a brilliant way to get to know my new city and scene. Vane has an egalitarian approach to working with a meaningful range of artists, that aren’t just the ones on their roster, and are at all levels of career stage, from established practitioners to student shows, community shows etc. Paul and Chris are that rare thing in the Newcastle and Gateshead art scene: gallery directors that are boots on the ground, some of very few you see at openings that aren’t just the ones at their own venues.

Interview by Stephen Palmer

Link

(1) ‘Narbi Price: The Lockdown Paintings’, Narbi Price, pub. Longsight & Bruce, 2020

Read more about Narbi Price’s exhibitions at Vane.