Now in her 70s, Gillian Ayres has had to put a height limit on her paintings - but they are still as wide as ever, she tells Aidan Dunne.
In some respects Gillian Ayres, that most vital of painters, has slowed down. She celebrated her 76th birthday earlier this year and is not able to walk as much as she used to, so she doesn't climb ladders to make huge paintings any more. But, as she says, she can still drive and, more importantly, "I can still paint, which is all that I ever wanted to do really, so I'm not grumbling". There is a height limit to her work now, though.
"About 6ft 6in. But then," she says, with the satisfaction of someone who has spotted the get-out clause in a tough contract, "I can make paintings 6ft 6in by 10ft long."
Right from the start of her career she has displayed an appetite for working on a large scale. With many painters, there is a feeling that they are scaling up smaller pieces when they work big, but she seems equally at home working small or large. The work in her current exhibition at Hillsboro Fine Art tops out at canvases measuring 6ft square. Each surface bursts with energy and ideas. A distinctive vocabulary of lines and shapes, embodied in generous masses of singing colour (and, in some cases, sonorous black), engages the eye and takes it on an exhilarating imaginative journey.
Ayres was born in London in 1930 and went to St Paul's School for Girls where, aged 14, she decided she would be a painter. She studied at Camberwell School of Art and set about the difficult business of being an artist in 1950s England, doing part-time jobs. She'd met Harry Mundy, whom she later married, at Camberwell, and they have two sons, James and Sam (the latter now a painter himself). By then she was teaching, so she was juggling motherhood, a day job and her work as a painter.
At several stages in her life she has been in the not uncommon position of finding that the work she was making was not currently fashionable in the art world, yet she has always been her own woman, weathering spells of critical indifference to win considerable, and justified, acclaim. A series of major exhibitions, including shows at the Arnolfini in Bristol, and the Serpentine and the Royal Academy in London, confirmed her reputation as one of the most significant English painters of her time. She also visited Ireland and showed at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny in 1991.
In 1981, she cemented a long association with the West Country and Wales by quitting teaching - she was the first woman to be appointed head of department in a school of art in England, at Winchester - and moving to a house in Wales to paint full-time. The ensuing decade was perhaps the happiest of her life, she has said. Since then, she has moved south, to a house in a wooded valley between Devon and Cornwall.
She is one of the few artists to have resigned from the Royal Academy (RA). It happened in 1997 when, as part of the Sensation exhibition, the RA exhibited Marcus Harvey's gigantic portrait of Myra Hindley. Ayres felt the work was gratuitous and hurtful to parents whose children had been victims, and was also angry about the RA's treatment of some of its older members.
MANY OF HER painting titles refer to specific things, to places or literary works, operas or musicians, mythical characters or events. Django, for example, is presumably Django Reinhardt, while Goosegog Lane can be found in Under Milk Wood. But, Ayres says, they are associations, not guides to content.
"Music, for example, I don't quite know what I get out of it," she says. "Just as you can go and look at great art - you are there looking and you are not sure what effect it is having on you. Perhaps it has none. Not necessarily any, at first, not directly. It's difficult to say how, but it comes through in the end. It must."
Painting, for her, "is a sort of communication, but it's not literary, so there's a problem of articulation. I always feel I want to push that visual thing. You know, so often for people it's the story, they respond to the story. But, personally, for me, it's not the story, it's something else - but it's hard to say what that is. I know many people might find that unhelpful, but it's so easy to fall into the trap of using the wrong words. Even the word style, which it is tempting to use, is wrong."
There is the implication, in what she says, that the visual has been downgraded in contemporary art. She doesn't make that claim, but she notes that an emphasis on conceptualism can divert attention from the kind of visual experience she is talking about.
"Part of modernism does seem to entail a specifically visual experience," she says. "Monet's water lilies lead us into another sort of spatial framework. You can see something similar happening with Van Gogh, with Cezanne, with Pollock. And for me, this has to happen on a two-dimensional surface. It has to be worked out there. If you can do it, if you want it, and if you need it, you find yourself engaged with it."
For her, one painting usually leads to another. "You look at something and think: 'I could do that a bit better.' I know when I start a painting that I always want to find something." Here she pauses for a minute and smiles. "Though I don't know what it is I want to find."
Gillian Ayres: Recent Paintings is at Hillsboro Fine Art, 3 Anne's Lane, South Anne Street, Dublin 2, until June 17 (01-6777905)