Interview with the artist. Nicola Smith interviews Michael Horsnall

What compels you to make art Michael?

I have this inner compulsion to allow the beauty and ecstasy of life to pour through me. I like the process of poetics and part of me just likes to have fun!

How do you go about starting a new piece of work?

I have this inner urge that keeps me turning stuff over. If I don't actively allow that force it makes me unhappy-it seems to have its own dynamic. I've always been doing outdoor artwork, poetry and painting though spasmodically. Being here at university has allowed me to become more prolific and productive-it also allows me to call myself an artist. Three years ago I dreamed of being an artist and now I just call myself one.

Do you tend to do a lot of Artist research before you make a piece?

I've had an interest in art from an early age so having such a large mental history of artwork means I can just look at something and know what resonates within me. When I come to do things, when I look at artists to see if they strike a chord within me-I'm really searching for fellow travellers..if they strike a chord then I'll discover more about them..Art for me isn't just about ideas, though I am interested in what other people think; what critics think- I'm only really interested in what passes through me.

I see you work in various different mediums-painting, outdoor installation. Do you see these as seperate themes as well as different mediums?

To me its all the same thing! I would call myself a landscape painter; I paint inner landscapes and I work in the landscape itself. Different levels of me engage in different aspects though. There is a light hearted enquiring level to my process and then there's the underlying roots where the visceral, primal and spiritual are engaged. I just have this underlying impulse-I thought that being here (university) would allow me to vent it but it just gets bigger! If I have a tiny idea, if it comes from that creative centre then it will expand-if a seed is planted properly then it will grow-I just go round watering seeds!

I can see that your work takes Religion as an underlying theme. What is it that you want to convey?

I have a mystical drive myself and I look for it in other artists- Beuys, Rothko,Kiefer they all have that same sense of being. I like to put a sense of delight into my work-Gods delight in the world-hence the huge expression,the large scale outoor pieces. The religious aspect comes from my own being. I applied to come to university here after the creative experience of an 8 day silent retreat along the line of Ignatius of Loyola-he was strongly interested in the link between spirituality and imagination. I find it difficult to deal with distractions and sidetracks from this theme-some work can be serendipitous of course-most is in fact- but what I need is to stick to my main train of thought.

How do you find creating artwork now that you have the university at your disposal?

This(studio) space is where I say "This is my thumbprint" Only now I can call this stuff art. Most men have their sheds at the end of the garden, I have mine here! Although I paint here, my outdoor installations are what I love. I have a strong impulse to get away, to get out and do something when I'm stuck in here..I'm like a yacht with a big sail but a very heavy anchor-this is part of my anchor, here. A few other good things about being at University are that I get the legitimating use of a student card, an adequate studio space, and I get to call myself an artist!

You title every piece of Art you make-How important is titling to you?

Labelling is key to my work and part of it. labelling refers to my other pastime which is poetry and emphasises that what I'm doing is fundamentally about poetics. Also that we are here partly just playing the gallery game of something being art if it is called art-so I call things art by naming them. This means that I can definitely call my readymade stuff art- to call it art though I must have first personally understood the process and the frame of reference-The way the gallery sanctifies objects as art is really interesting.
I also like to tell stories and parables, weaving religious symbolism into my art. When I label something I label its significance for myself as well as indicating significance to the viewer-its the same as poetry, will the word hold its meaning?

You seem to work on a large scale, both in your paintings and outdoor installations-why is that?

Theres a 'big' streak in me! Ever since I was a child I've been wanting to make things. There's an odd imbalance in me; I often try to confine myself, make myself small, because I don't have confidence in myself. But it never works! Instead of confining myself and my work to a small scale I have realised I need to make things big. The bigger a thing you do, the more people can take pleasure from it...I like interacting with ordinary people at the level of joy and and creativity that is in them..I believe in life giving, life affirming..its all of us together you know.

When you interact with the general public do they usually enjoy your work or do you get a lot of criticism?

I'm a lot happier talking with passers by than I am sitting in seminars! (The people have no expectations I guess!) I'm not put off by any bad criticsm because when something sings for me I know it will for others-usually my outdoor work intrigues people-I guess if they all hated it then I'd pack it in!...Seminars and tutorials are not often enjoyable experiences for me. I tend to get defensive and I don't like explaining my work. In fact I find it rather stupid and disrespectful of people to demand of me why I have made something -or what a piece of work 'means' I don't think there is an answer to "what does it mean?" the question is stupid. On the other hand sometimes seminars can give useful insights.

What do you want your viewers to take away with them?

Simple pleasure and amusement mainly-I'm interested in what gives or brings life! Work expresses my being and if I do the work I can sleep at night. This means I make art because I need to. But the work isn't the important part but often an attempt to articulate the beauty thats inside a person..so when you are struck by the beauty of a line of silver flags across the land that beauty is inside you-its from you not from the work. Thats why I like talking with passers by-I can see the beauty in them.

Put out more flags: Hells Mouth Bay Abersoch 2007

Put out more flags is my largest and most ambitious outdoor work to date. I enjoyed this project like no other as it was hugely interactive with many people helping with the erection and unfurling of the flags as well as coming to view and play with the piece which was ephemeral as the tide and only in place for seven hours. The delight lay chiefly in the serendipitous nature of the project-good weather conditions being paramount. As with most of my outdoor projects I insert myself into them either anonymously as a passer by or overtly as the maker. Overall the work was well recieved with the shimmering light and the wind picking up on the elemental forces of delight that attract souls to this place.

'Events inside a chalice' March 3rd 2008 found objects and plinth

Events inside a chalice is my most recent indoor work and marks a shift into the more self conscious mode of relating text to object and of reprocessing the old surrealist 'trick' of presenting several possible resonances simultaneously. Here we see the bread and wine but where is the chalice? What does the chalice refer to? is it the symbol of the word in religious imagery or is it the cube of the gallery which focuses the attention-is the bread and wine made sacred by man or by God? This kind of parabling is made possible within Post modern culture as the monolithic ly coercive meanings fall away and we are left freely to ponder-which was the very manner in which the parables were told- with all their subversive, deconstructionist effect...Jesus Christ-the great iconoclast.

'The Parable of the Sower' - summer 2006- many people,a beach,5kg glass stones.

Much of my work involves story telling and parable. Here in 'Parable of the sower' (Hells Mouth Bay 2006) I have sown the beach with 5kg glass jewels and then photographed passers by picking them up and taking them home as treasured possessions. I then returned from my holiday with a bucket containing 5kg sand. The theme in a sense echo's Fernando Torres 'grief work ' which I tremendously admire but the empasis is not on sorrow but upon quiet joy-hence the subtitle of the parable (sand into glass -sorrow into joy) A key point of this work is that none of the participants in the parable except me was aware of the plot-this means that the pleasure was simple, real and lasting-from my point of view one could not more completely erase the presence of the artist than this.. One family observing the whole process came to ask me the next day as I was out checking the beach again.On hearing the explaination the man turned to his wife and said: "See I told you he was either an artist or a nutter!"
Parable enables us to carry profound issues into the postmodern world (like Rothko) but without the aggrandisment.

Bibliography :

After Modern Art 1945-2000 David Hopkins Oxford University Press UK 2000
Abstract Expressionism: David Anfam 1990 Thames& Hudson London
ArtePovera (Art from Italy 1967-2002): Museum of Contemporary Art
Art after Conceptual Art: Generali Foundation MIT Press Vienna 2006
Primitivism and Modern Art: Colin Rhodes Thames and Hudson London 1994
Deconstructing installation Art:Fine Art and MediaArt 1986-2006
Graham Coulter-Smith online book http://www.installationart.net
The Revenge of the Philistines: Hilton Kramer Secker &Warburg London 1986
Pollock Veiling the image: Donald Wigal Baseline Co Singapore 2005
Howard Hodgkin: Andrew Graham-Dixon Thames&Hudson London 2001
The Philosophy of Modern Art: Herbert Read Faber London 1964
The Myth of Primitivism: Susan Hiller Routledge New York 1996
Paul Klee The Nature of Creation: Hayward Gallery London 2002
Paul Klee From a Sketch book to the Painting: Muzeum Nardowe Warsaw 2001
Patrick Heron: Mel Gooding Phaidon London 1994
Matisse: Sarah Wilson Academy edition
Kiefer: Anselm Kiefer 1985 Thames&Hudson London
Mark Rothko 1903-1970 Revised Edition Tate Gallery Publishing 1999
The Power of Art: Simon Schama BBC Books 2006

Arte Povera and the resonance with it in my own work.

"I associated the idea of making new art with that of 'the voyage' and its formalisation, as far as it concerns meis a mixture between the desire to know and the desire to act, between expressing and reproposing the eternal drama to which the exhibition, a contemporary labyrinth, gives shape and physical form, as well as tracing upon the surface the final destination"

Jannis Kounellis 2002. from Arte Povera p57




" The artist was seen as one who 'mixes himself with the environment, camouflages himself...enlarges his threshold of things' and who, unlike his over theorised American counterparts...draws from the substance of the natural event-that of the growth of a plant, the chemical reaction of a mineral...the fall of a weight. In many ways the exemplar for this neo-romantic construction was Joseph Beuys, and the german artists symbolically energised fragments of stone and lumps of wax or metal would find their way into works by Arte Povera's main practitioners..."

David Hopkins on Arte Povera p170


There are some things that are difficult to express and so I have included the above quotations which put well into words my own sympathies in the seeing of Art as a'labyrinth' or a place of examination, revelation and restatement of fundamental relationships. I have been struck by janis Kounellis's interest in alchemical hints and in boundaries-see above Civil Tragedy 1975 and the charcoaled Sanza titulo of 1967. Also by the insistence upon bringing life into institutionalised situations see twelve horses in a Rome gallery 1969 In life there is always the inrush of the eternal and the magnetising/ energising of the immediate object- I am very interested in these issues from a catholic perspective. In my own experimental installation above-Vaughan Cooper's shiny shoes Dec 2007- there can be seen the same interst in energising objects, in boundary and in the transcribed eternal. Also in 2007 I approached Walsall Art gallery with the proposal of running an Anglican service in the gallery-this was refused by the curators. In the same way that I have found kindred with the Impressionist/Expressionist painters so I find a kindred with what has been termed here by Hopkins the Neo Romantic practitioners of Arte Povera.

I have found that Kounellis and Arte Povera have in many ways given me an entry point into a discourse which is directly relevant to my work. This is because I do not see art as a game, as a political wing, or as a sardonically raised eyebrow. None of these things interest me personally in the least and I cannot move with them. Kiefer once said that he could only produce that which passed through him and I echo that sentiment-purely cerebral work leaves me cold and classical form is simply beyond me. So I have been really excited by Artists such as Kounellis.

Arte Povera and janis Kounellis-conceptual influences and my own work below ..'Psalm' Jan 2006 'Homage' June 2006.

"The reference to classicism or to art history-is persistent in Kounellis' work and indicates a breadth of meaning that our contemporary existence must be at the point of rediscovering...." Arte Povera (Art from Italy) p125
I was looking for a bridge into what might be loosely termed conceptuaism in order to locate my ownefforts and found it to an uncanny degree in Janis Kounellis. I had already spent several months closely examining Anselm Kiefer and had long been an admirer of Beuys so I was aware that there was the possibility for conceptualism to 'carry weight' in the same way that Rothko sought to load his paintings with the tragic heroic. It is this ability 'to carry weight' which attracted me to Kounellis and Arte Povera.I was already along this road with my own work: 'Psalms' shown above was my first attempt at taking objects and loading them with a mythical significance. I had been for sometime thinking about how to depict the transcendent and hit upon gold and silver reflectivity for the obvious connection with divinity in Christian spirituality. I first wrapped a tree one winters day and was amazed to see many people attracted by the glowing dance as a winter sun played upon the swaying tree thus transforming it into a contemporary burning bush. I was treading unwittingly the same path as Kounellis in trying to link the everyday to the deeper significance. I repeated the work on a much larger scale the next summer in a month long installation called Homage. One could also pursue a discussion on the 'poor' nature of the materrials I have used-foil and glass gems in my work.

Here we see 'Circumcision' By Pollock (1942) 'Talking about Art' (1975) by Hodgkin. Both pictures though different in intent arguably refer to implied realities of experience. Certainly Pollock and Hodgkin both intimate to experience siezed and held - in circumcision one sees a kind of symbolised brutality and with Hodgkin we 'see' a transitory recall of experience. Regardless of wide debates regarding the 'shouldness' and the 'authenticity' of later work in these styles I personally find the application of paint in this way strongly compelling both to view and to do. This means I am strongly wedded to a phenomenological approach whose structural underpinnings are to be found more in psychology, anthropology,theology and neurology rather than political economy or a desire for'newness' of expression.

There is a sense also in which expressionistic work is fictive rather than mythic or symbolic. By this I mean that the painter is simply story telling and not seeking great depth of gravitas. This certainly applies to my own painting particularly at this current stage of my development- In the same way that the poet collects phrases and mimics the masters or the fiction writer practises genre by scene setting and character building I am simply trying to develop a lexicon.

I think it is true to say that expressionism in painting continues to find its fragmented pathway through the present because of its unique evocative quality and because the painterly gaze is an entity in its own right. By this I mean that expressionism is closely linked to poetry which is also directly evocative of sense recall in a manner which is best described as visceral/neurological. If we couple this with the capacity of painting to carry symbolic remnants, the very action of painting also carries kinaesthetic reminders of what might be termed the generic child- by this I simply mean early experience coded in sensate form and then structured into responses; there are quite strong neuro biological arguments (Antonio Damascio for example in Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain) which link emotional response to reflex networks laid down early in development.

Though Expressionism has been questioned both politically as a historical partner to fascism and economically as generating a mystified postmodenist Art work which simply bolsters the commodity market - there is, nonetheless a magic and an attractiveness to the application of paint to canvas or paper which is truly compelling for both viewer and painter. Personally I find this latter quality far outweighs any critique of the style and the tradition of expressionism and intend to continue with the huge challenge of exploring and developing my abilities with the medium.

One day at school M.Horsnall Oct 2007

With this painting I have picked up on the understanding that 'abstraction' is not in fact abstraction at all. This was strongly argued by Rothko and Gottleib but more recently by Howard Hodgkin who classed himself famously as a 'representative painter of emotions'I have here allowed a random beginning to pick up a theme as an event of personal biography whilst also experimenting with the stronger blacks evident in say Mothewell, Kline or an early Pollock. Behind the anger of the blacks one can pick out a nine square 'crab'-the repeating design Klee used for many of his Tunisian Watercolours.

Line, form and colour. Paul Klee

Paul Klee Conqueror 1930

Paul Klee has also been an influence on my painting partly through his investigations into the vagaries of line and the relationship between line and colout mass and partly through his using these relationships to invoke theme on a non representational basis.

Dancing over Bethelehem Jan2008 (colour sketch)

Sketch at my daughters dance class Dec 2007

The strong overlap and resonance between my work and Pousette dart's can be clearly seen here with this unintentional sketch which I made whilst bored to tears at yet another dance rehearsal. Most recently with my painting I am trying to find ways of turning these small sketches into larger works.

The Transcendent 1942 Pousette- Dart

One could claim painters by the dozen who went with the push towards an abstraction which sought both a personal symbolism and a transcendence. I have extensively reviewed the expressionists of the New York school and draw unashamedly from them but the person who has been a great influence upon me for his mysticism has been Richard Pousette-Dart. Dart's The Transcendent-1946 reproduced here seems to sum up all that I aspire to -though as a fellow traveller not as someone to impersonate. I loved Pousette dart's notion of 'dancing' upon the canvas and of work which came out of 'numberless hours' secluded in the cathedral of his self.

Untitled Sept-Dec2007

Close examination of the surfaces shows a concern with frottage,grattage and intaglio as I have yielded to the impuse towards a deeper personal symbolism along the line pursued by those interested in the heritage of surrealism-for example Max Ernst- I have followed many painters in this well established expressionist mode. in my experience however the modes of cutting,rubbing and incising carry a genuine potency which,though exposing the author to the charge of an excess of style over content-do have powerful evocation and as such remain authentic.

Untitled-M.Horsnall Sept- Dec 2007

My own painting has come to strive at the development of signs and symbols which have personal significance for me and,I hope, may have resonance for others. I have chosen the expressionistic mode for reasons outlined by Kramer earlier-for the potential richness and breadth of application.

This interest in line and nature resonated in turn with my early interest in Christo and particularly with his Running fence erected across the desert in 1967-For some strange reason the sight of it on film, some twenty five years ago now, bought me to tears and the memory has stayed. Couple this with an old interest in Goldsworthy and Richard Long and a thread of beach art has also begun to emerge.