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How important is material in your work?
I am aware that as a painter, people often think I will have an obsession with the supposed technicality of painting, and I don’t think that I do. Or at least, I am wary of it and the gravitas it seems to be automatically given. I’m also really aware of how limiting that approach can be, particularly to those just starting to make art.
Don’t get me wrong, I have paints that I prefer and methods and things that I’ve learnt and used through trial and error over the years, but I don’t particularly like talking about it: for me it’s the practical element of making the work, not the conversation I want the work to be about. Some people can be dismissive of this and hierarchical about what they class as ‘proper painting’: I have no time for that, I think often that’s just ego talk…
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Ambit Magazine, Issue 238, 2019. Cover & Interview.
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Ambit caught up with Claire Dorsett after her recent solo exhibition at Workplace Foundation (22 June – 27 July 2019) in Gateshead. Workplace Foundation is a contemporary arts organisation which supports emerging artists outside London, with a focus on the North of England.
Ambit: Claire, you describe your painting as a visual journal or note taking. Are you translating quick drawings that you have made on paper or are you painting a narrative directly on canvas?
CD: There’s an element of translating from drawings but the paintings are their own thing... I keep sketchbooks that are like visual journals and full of snippets and notes and whilst those themselves might suggest a narrative, it’s never my intention to give a full narrative or to prescribe a narrative, and that remains true for the paintings as well.
So the sketchbooks are a way for me to record my thoughts and observations, and they are more casual than a traditional sketchbook - more marker pen and random books that come my way than pencil and specially chosen art quality paper, so I don’t overthink it because really bad art tends to happen when I do that.
When it comes to painting, I tend to rifle through older sketchbooks rather than more recent ones, in the hope that I can look at them more objectively and pick out what still feels important.
A range of ideas and thoughts can then merge into an image - I might have drawn something in the heat of a moment but later it becomes a sign or a symbol for something, hopefully, much bigger and more universal, and perhaps completely apart from what I had initially paired it with feeling wise.
I find drawings to be open; they are the beginning of something and they record the urgency of trying to get a thought down - I hope to retain this energy in the paintings rather than lock them down to one interpretation, and I think that’s where trying to translate how I approach a drawing to how I approach a painting comes in. I want there to be enough room in them for the viewer, otherwise it’s all just a big exercise in self-indulgence.
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Corridor8 - Online Review of solo exhibition.
‘Claire Dorsett: FRONT’ at STOCK gallery, Manchester, UK. 2018. Alison Criddle for Corridor8.
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On the left-hand wall, three bold new works hang alongside one another, identical in size. The other walls are bare, the space waiting to be filled by first impressions, curious looks and stories yet to be made and exchanged. In ‘Cool Dude (Whatever)’ (2018), a bold red Tunnel of Love heart pops against a block, black background. One edge of the heart stretches open and a silhouette outline of a singer, all angular shoulders and faceless mystery, stands behind a microphone stand, illuminated in the same deep red. A contrasting fast blue background – a street scene or a stage backdrop – makes for a moody contrast. The figure is isolated, unknown.
The painting speaks of modern idols and feigned indifference; fantasies framed and filtered, coolly observed and strongly felt. A soundtrack to unsteady times, conflicting emotions and curated impressions. The ‘I was there, look’ of social media feeds butting up against the fashioned dreaminess of fandom. Putting on a show. Collectively encountered, singularly experienced, Dorsett gives voice to the personal and public, the shielded and the posed. A songwriter’s heartbreak album is another person’s Spotify playlist. One tortured lyric becomes a ’grammable leg tattoo. Front men and fictions and fantasy flattened out as one.
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Modern Painters Magazine: Review.
‘Claire Dorsett: You Do The Talking’, George and Jørgen, London, 2012-1; reviewed by Coline Milliard for Modern Painters Magazine.
February Issue 2013, page 79.
Full Text:
‘YOU DO THE TALKING,’ the title of the show, has the ring of challenge. It’s as if the Slade graduate were daring her viewers to put their own words on her colorful acrylics on canvas and navigate the confident brushstrokes she dispenses so sparingly. Or perhaps this was the last recommendation she gave her paintings before leaving the room.
As it turns out, Dorsett’s canvases do the talking very well indeed. Her bare-bones pictorial language is strikingly efficient: The colors are vivid but often limited to a couple per painting; the evocative motifs are just detailed enough to be readable. In Big Leaf, all works 2012, a virescent line turns the plant’s convoluted silhouette into a calligraphic sign on the canvas’s raw expanse. The Day-Glo yellow Rave Window is a stylized, psychedelic rendering of the stained-glass extravaganza of Notre Dame, in Paris, seen in a kind of drug-induced delirium.
At times, Dorsett’s round strokes bring to mind the cartoonish aesthetic of Philip Guston, and she certainly shares some of the renegade Abstract Expressionist’s dark humor. In Human Sundial, a gravestone acts as a gnomon, marking time until the ultimate hour. Untitled Room pictures a sparse bedroom decorated with Hokusai’s Great Wave, that ubiquitous students’s favorite. Dorsett gives the humble scene monumental dimensions, shoehorning a quotidian reality into the lineage of historical painting. And she asks fundamental questions: How does one live with art? Which images make us tick, and why?
Dorsett has often used a large scale, grappling with the medium’s weighty tradition. Yet here - Untitled Room aside - she mainly zooms in, testing her still-fledgling lexicon on smaller canvases. The modestly sized pictures function as so many vignettes, capturing snippets of though and real or invented moments in her daily life: an arm raised in protest in Fag Break, white ellipses on smeared darkness in This Week It Snowed. The result is convincing: The pictures speak for themselves.
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Modern Painters Magazine: group article.
Featured in group article “100 Artists To Watch”.
Modern Painters Magazine, Dec/Jan Issue 2012.
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“It is our conviction that people with the best eye for emerging artistic talent are other artists. So for this issue we asked the generous and discerning individuals below, all of whom are well established in their careers, which younger or underappreciated artists they have been watching. The list that follows - broad, international, and distinguished by the variety of approaches represented - contains their choices.”
