{"id":3012,"date":"2020-04-17T15:54:52","date_gmt":"2020-04-17T15:54:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/?p=3012"},"modified":"2025-09-10T19:51:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T19:51:41","slug":"just-get-on-with-it-matt-dennis-in-conversation-with-patrick-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/2020\/04\/17\/just-get-on-with-it-matt-dennis-in-conversation-with-patrick-jones\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Just get on with it’: Matt Dennis in conversation with Patrick Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Patrick Jones, ‘Colourfield Painting’ (2018), acrylic on canvas, 193 x 76cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u2018For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.\u2019<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong> T.S. Eliot, \u2018East Coker\u2019<\/em> from the \u2018Four Quartets\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the last fifty years- the period of time, give or take, during which Patrick Jones has been making art- the conditions of high culture, and of the culture of painting in particular, have been transformed beyond all recognition. The High Modernist abstraction that once upon a time provided a working template for a generation of painters has long since had its status downgraded from \u2018house style\u2019 of advanced art to period curiosity. The only way left for abstract painting to be useful, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, is in declaring its own uselessness. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or so a certain argument runs.  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of a single day spent with him in his Devon home and studio during the winter of last year, and across several hours of recorded conversation that roam digressively- and sometimes transgressively- back and forth, from his beginnings as a student at Exeter School of Art to the canvas he had been working on that morning, it became clear how little time Patrick has for this sort of thinking. His attitude to it is best summed up by the response he gives in the text that follows: \u2018I choose not to go there, however compelling the art-historical arguments for it might be.\u2019 Not that he is resistant to theory as such; but his orientation is positive, practical, and geared to the task in hand: the daily practice of making paintings. In bringing his full attention to bear on the thing in front of him, there is a necessary narrowing of focus. Anyone painting now, he insists, must \u2018isolate their area of interest and just get on with it.\u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which, in Patrick\u2019s case, means what? In the paintings of the last few years he has poured layer upon layer of thinned acrylic paint onto raw, unprimed canvas, creating fields of diffuse and suggestive atmospheric colour; and then worked around, across and into these surfaces with brushes and painting knives. Again and again, other painters\u2019 forms from the history of abstraction are explicitly quoted, but without irony, without any of the \u2018visual sarcasm\u2019 that artist Gary Stephan has identified as Postmodern painting\u2019s stock-in-trade. As Patrick explains, these borrowings are gambits to be tried, as he searches for the point of balance between the accidental and the consciously willed, between the free, drifting spread of poured colour and the emphatic placement of discrete form, that will, in his words, \u2018resolve the dilemma of the picture.\u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to begin at the beginning… <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

‘Gut Bucket’, ‘Triangle’, and beyond…<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD <\/strong>You started when, and how?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I\u2019ve always been an abstract painter, and I\u2019ve painted, whenever possible, on a large scale. I tried, but failed, to get into St Martin\u2019s: I went first to Cheltenham, and then to Exeter; I was 17 when I started. I was delinquent; I was in a lot of trouble with the police and the army; my father didn\u2019t know what the hell to do with me, so he sent me to art school and I walked in, and they thought I was one of the scaffolders working on the roof (laughter). <\/em>Nobody spoke to me for the first week, because I looked like a Teddy Boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first teacher was John Epstein, a wonderful man, who\u2019d been a student of Kossoff, Auerbach and Bomberg. He looked just like Leonard Cohen, and everybody was in love with him, women and men; and everybody wanted to dress like him, shabby overcoat, curly black hair. He was a very, very perceptive teacher, and he was doing one-colour canvasses, which he showed, I think, at the Whitechapel. He got me to paint the entire studio: we put hardboard up, we mixed our own oil paint, and I was just painting, free-form, all over the walls, and John Epstein sat there, smoking, just watching me\u2026he used to put me in a room with no light, and make me paint in the dark. I realise now that this was a very amazing beginning I had, at Exeter, between \u201967 and \u201969.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> If this is how you began, then you\u2019ve never painted a figurative work\nin your life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Like Stella, then, you started abstract. You had no figurative\nframework to break out of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I tried to do a version of a Matisse: it\u2019s a rose form, and I made it\nout of plywood, and it ended up as a relief, with enamel paint on it\u2026but it\nalso had a connection with Albers, because they had a book on him in the\nlibrary, and I was very much influenced by him, by Matisse, and by colour\ngenerally. Good beginnings for a 17-year-old delinquent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> So, after your studies, did you start exhibiting straight away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes. And things happened that are a lot to do with having a certain\nkind of confidence<\/em>. But to begin\nwith, I hadn\u2019t got into St Martin\u2019s, so I went to Cheltenham for my BA, by\nwhich time I\u2019d become catatonically shy, and couldn\u2019t speak to anybody. I\npainted very geometric versions of Magritte paintings; I\u2019ve still got some of\nthem somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> But surely those would have been figurative,\nno?\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> They weren\u2019t actually figurative: you need to imagine a cross between\nMagritte and Jack Bush, as far as the forms went. They had the peculiar\nillusionistic qualities of a Magritte- you know, the rain of bowler hats; they\nwere just funny shapes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got a second-class Degree from Cheltenham: I found it incredibly conservative, an army town; but we had an incredible Complementary Studies tutor called Nick Waite, who loved French cinema, and he was a Marxist, and he wanted all of us to become Marxists too\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I got\nonto the Postgraduate course at Birmingham, with Derek Southall, and Mick\nBennett, who had shown in the Hayward Annual; and he was painting these\nenormous, thick, eighteen-foot paintings, influenced by John Walker, even\nthough Walker had left by this point. Bill Gear was Head of Painting, and\nTrevor Halliday was very helpful to me too\u2026I had a studio on the top floor, and\nit was a wonderful painting space. We were all seriously into drugs and rock\n\u2018n\u2019 roll\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Was there a house style?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Well, I was painting as close to Larry Poons as I could; and the house\nstyle was something called \u2018Gut Bucket\u2019- <\/em>basically,\npouring huge buckets of paint\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> (Laughter)<\/em> Who coined that?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I don\u2019t remember; but I remember that Birmingham School of Art had\nthese big swinging front doors, and when you walked through them, the smell of\noil paint hit you.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Larry Poons, ‘Untitled’ (1981), mixed media on canvas, 248 x 71cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> And students were pouring the paint onto canvasses laid out on the\nfloor, \u00e0 la<\/em> Poons?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes, and \u00e0 la<\/em> Morris\nLouis\u2026but more physical. I think Birmingham was better than St Martin\u2019s,\nat that point, for painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> And was there a sculptural influence at work as well, as there was at\nSt Martin\u2019s?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Not as far as I was aware. I was gutted, though, that I hadn\u2019t got into\nSt Martin\u2019s, and when I was in London, I would go down to the pub they\nfrequented, at Cambridge Circus, and Alan Gouk would be there\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> This was while you were at Birmingham? You\u2019d make pilgrimages down to\nLondon? With a view to doing what?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Well, to get with what was really going on; and to buy Spectrum\nacrylics, in real bulk. I used to buy drums full of the stuff- huge quantities\nof paint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> And where are we up to now? The early 1970s?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Let me see..1973. In that year, Bert Irvin arranged for me to visit\nGrace Hartigan in Baltimore.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Grace Hartigan photographed next to her painting, ‘On Orchard St’ (1957), oil on canvas, 175 x 200cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> And how had you connected with Bert Irvin?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I\u2019d met him through my being a visiting tutor at Exeter: a job I got because I was rung up and offered it, saying that if I could be in a certain pub in Exeter at the end of the following afternoon, I\u2019d be interviewed there. Which turned out to be Market Day, and a lot of people had been in there since midday and were seriously hammered; and a Surrealist poet I knew called Ken Smith took me there, and John Lyle, the Surrealist bookseller, arranged the interview; and after several large brandies I was given the job, right there in the pub, by Alex McNeish, before any other candidates had even been considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Sidmouth Surrealists wangled you the job, during a lunchtime session in\nthe pub? Those were the days, eh? (laughter).<\/em>\nClearly you were ambitious; and clearly, you had a great deal of focus, you\nwere putting yourself out there and making connections, getting remembered,\ngetting put forward for things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Anne Truitt, ‘Elixir’ (1997), oil on wood, 206 x 20 x 20cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> So, from 1973-75 I was in Baltimore, at the Maryland Institute. When I\nwas there, you could buy a downtown building, in a spectacularly beautiful spot\non the harbour waterfront in the Chesapeake Bay, for a dollar. It\u2019s true, the\ncity was collapsing; but it was a wonderful place to be as an artist, though. I\nwas on what was called a Hoffberger Scholarship; I was given a studio space,\nand that was it. I couldn\u2019t afford anything on top of that. I was working as a\ncarpenter, and being close to Washington, there were other artists around, such\nas Anne Truitt, the minimalist painter\/sculptor. I had shows with the Osuna\nGallery, and the Henri Gallery, and what I should have done, but didn\u2019t do,\nbecause I didn\u2019t know of him, was try to connect with Kenneth Noland\u2026but\nFormalism was on the wane by then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> It must have been hard, it must have taken its toll, to have kept faith\nwith abstraction through these lean years; and to be aware that the culture no\nlonger acknowledged the primacy of High Modernist abstract painting and\nsculpture, and that the critical underpinning had been pretty much kicked away\nfrom under your kind of painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> There was a return to figuration in Baltimore in the mid-1970s; and of\ncourse, Guston was just embarking on his late figurative phase. I met him in\nBaltimore while he was lecturing there, and had a real barney with him over his\nuse of figurative imagery, because I felt he was letting the side down. He was\nvery funny: he just looked at me, and chain-smoked, and smiled. Guston was\nreally a prime example, I think, of an artist whose work had felt like part of\nmy underpinning, as you put it\u2026I\u2019d seen a most beautiful, delicate painting of\nhis, like falling leaves, in the RA back around that time; and a few months\nlater, I went to his new show, and suddenly it was all potato-headed,\nfag-smoking characters out of Samuel Beckett, all painted in greys; the\nbackgrounds were beautifully painted, I grant you: but the figures were\nanti-style, anti-beauty. Still, despite all his pushing back against Formalism,\nhe remained an interesting painter, one who had moved sideways, but\nnevertheless kept going forwards somehow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Back in London, in 1982, I met Tony Caro at an opening, and he said \u2018How are you getting along with your work?\u2019 <\/em>And I said, \u2018I\u2019m having quite a lot of difficulty with it.\u2019 <\/em>And he said, \u2018Don\u2019t be so fucking stupid. Don\u2019t you understand that sometimes you just get lucky?\u2019 <\/em>and stormed off. And I thought: \u2018I\u2019ve only just met Tony Caro for ten minutes and I\u2019ve already managed to piss him off.\u2019 <\/em>The next morning, I was sitting at home, still feeling pretty upset about it all, and the phone rang; it was Caro, and he said, \u2018I got hold of your number. How would you like to go to the Triangle Workshop next week? We\u2019ll see if we can get you a grant.\u2019 <\/em>And he got the Elephant Trust to pay for me to go: all of this, from having met him at an opening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Well, and from pissing him off; enough, obviously, for him to feel\nremorse at how he bawled you out\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No, actually, I think he must have just gone away and checked out my work somewhere. He probably thought, \u2018He\u2019s a young artist, I\u2019ll help him out.\u2019<\/em> Caro was very clever at manipulating people and situations; and I understand now that this was just his way of dealing with things. And then Margaret Thatcher went for the Falkland Islands, and I thought: \u2018I\u2019ve had enough of all this.\u2019 <\/em>So I took off for New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nTriangle Workshop was a totally Formalist boot camp: Greenberg was heavily in\nevidence, as was Larry Poons; Walter Darby Bannard; the whole nine yards of\nFormalism. I\u2019ve got a catalogue here somewhere, that shows Greenberg doing life\nclasses, him and Caro drawing from the naked figure; they had a figurative\nstudio. I was there twice; 1982 was the first year, and the best one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> I\u2019d like to get a sense of the place: it\u2019s just a name to me, really. I\ndon\u2019t know what its significance was, other than this idea that it was a\nFormalist summer school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Imagine a great big New York dairy farm, full of the most Formalist abstract artists of that time. John Gibbons, Peter Hide, all the heavy metal sculptors were there, at Caro\u2019s invitation. There were also a lot of Canadian painters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> And no-one was there unless they\u2019d been invited by Greenberg or Caro?\nAnd the price of admission was a Formalist vocabulary to your work, that\ndemonstrated that you were sympathetic to the ideas of the school?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes. Remember, though, my relationship with Caro was often stormy: he could be patronising, and he was very posh\u2026nevertheless, he helped me, or at least, tried to. After my time at Triangle, he arranged for me to make a sale of my paintings to Denis Lasdun, who\u2019d just designed the National Theatre, so that he could hang them in the IBM building. Susan, his wife, chose eight of my biggest paintings; and I\u2019d gone greatly into debt, not only in making the paintings, but in financing an accompanying catalogue. I sent them to the IBM building; but the Director of IBM, who was an American, refused, by phone from America, to select them; and they returned them, one at a time. I would have made well in excess of forty thousand pounds if they\u2019d purchased them; instead of which, they sent every single one back, and they bought a Gilbert and George photo-work of a rose instead, because he had asked the secretaries at IBM to tell him what they\u2019d like to sit in front of; and they turned me down flat, because my work was abstract. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> So there, in a nutshell, you have the \u2018changing of the guard\u2019<\/em> of the early 1980s: abstract painting\npassed over, in favour of Gilbert and George. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> And that incident led to my going seriously bankrupt; I\u2019d borrowed all\nthis money in order to make the bloody things. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But anyway,\nthe amazing thing about the Triangle Workshop was the facilities, the size of\nthem; if you think this barn we\u2019re standing in is big, well, the ones there\nwere massive, it was upstate New York, after all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I became\nvery close to a Canadian artist named Terry Keller. He had mobility problems,\nhe\u2019d had a stroke and various other things, and he could barely move; but he\nhad a wonderful way of painting, and what was so interesting about it for me\nwas that he didn\u2019t try to change the painting from one side to another, he just\nwent across with pale grey, trying to make the marks move across the surface\nwithout any tonal or colour inflection. Of course, what I\u2019d been trying to do\nin England was to make the most varied surface possible; and the idea that a\npainting could just be an expanse of a single tone of grey really affected me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Aren\u2019t you describing a Minimalist painting here, rather than a\nFormalist one?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No, there were thick lumps of paint, grey on a grey ground; and they\nwere quite beautiful, soft, muted greys\u2026the surfaces would catch the light. And\nwhat I loved about them is that they reminded me of the sea; they looked like\nwater. I was very taken with the idea that I might make huge sea paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Rough Rider’, (1982), acrylic on canvas, 70 x 284cms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Patrick Jones, angled view of detail of ‘Rough Rider’, (1982), acrylic on canvas, 70 x 284cms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> And now we\u2019re looking at a painting of yours here, \u2018Rough Rider\u2019<\/em>, that was made then. Was it fairly representative of\nyour output at the workshop?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> It\u2019s got more colour than most of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> A lot of close-toned colour, thick impasto, a feeling of geological\nstrata\u2026Was this,\nand the other works you made, critiqued by Greenberg and Caro? How did it go,\noffering yourself and your work to critical analysis by them, and by the group?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ <\/strong>Well\u2026it was serious, heavy shit (laughter). <\/em>It was very hot, it was\nAugust, we were all in shorts, in our painting gear; and all of a sudden,\npeople would start to congregate in your painting space, which would be at\nleast double the space, for each of us, of what I have here. All these people\nwould gather round, and Clem would appear, and he would ask, \u2018How can you possibly be doing this shit?\u2019<\/em>\nOr something like that. But bear in mind, not only was there criticism; there\nwere galleries sniffing about, looking to see who they could pick up. You had\nFormalist criticism, and you had career ambition, all mixed up together, and I\nloved it: I had a whale of a time. Admittedly, I had absolutely no idea how to\ngo about finding a New York gallery, whereas of course the Americans did; but\nwhat I was really interested in, and involved with, was the other artists\nthere, working alongside them, feeding off them. It was quite heavenly, really:\nthere was a big lake, we were having barbeques, there was fresh fish and white\nwine at lunchtime\u2026it all had a kind of Woodstock Festival feel to it; it was\npioneering, it was going to change the world\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones at the Triangle Workshop, 1982, with Helen Frankenthaler <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> So, it was really felt, in upstate New York in the early 1980s, that a\nFormalism blessed by Clement Greenberg was vanguard art? That this was the art\nthat would be continuing the lineage from the High Modernist period into the\nGreat Beyond?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes. But as I\u2019ve already mentioned, the Formalist outlook had already\ngone into decline: Greenberg was a heavy drinker, and Caro had been having all\nsorts of ups and downs in his career. I felt that Caro, and to an extent\nHoyland- and Frankenthaler and Motherwell too, for that matter- had gradually\nmislaid the spirit they\u2019d inherited from Pollock; so it was up to me to dig\ndeep into my psyche and try to keep the whole bloody thing going, because I\nfelt that their disillusionment with abstraction was wearing them out as\nartists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> A kind of fatigue? Rather than a lucid point of discovery, at which\nthey arrive at the secret, that abstraction has run its course? You didn\u2019t,\nyourself, feel that a terminal point had been reached?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No, not at all. I\u2019d already lived out in New York, in the years before\nTriangle; I\u2019d taught at Hunter College, in the centre of Manhattan, a wonderful\nmulticultural institution; and I was in the \u2018Carnegie\nInternational\u2019 <\/em>in Pittsburgh, the most impressive show I\u2019ve ever been in:\nmyself, Hoyland, Bernard Cohen, and Jennifer Durrant represented the UK. I have\nto admit, I was totally green, totally na\u00efve; I could just about manage to put\non a suit, in order to get into the place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Did you feel, by being in the USA and working at Hunter College, that you were going back to the cradle of Formalism, and that it would be a \u2018safe\u2019<\/em> working environment, as it were?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No, not in the slightest. Hunter had a terrific reputation- Ray Parker\nwas teaching there- but the work was geometric, not Formalist\u2026I remember\nOlitski coming in to give a talk, and getting a real hammering from other\npeople on the staff, most of whom were preoccupied with geometrical\nabstraction. The Head of Complementary Studies was none other than Rosalind\nKrauss\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> She\u2019d been a Greenbergian Formalist, but she\u2019d turned, hadn\u2019t she?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> There was a lot of that \u2018turning\u2019 <\/em>going on. But as far as I was concerned, I\u2019d left England, and I wasn\u2019t coming back, I\u2019d emigrated to get away from my work being rejected, and to get away from Margaret Thatcher, and from the sort of work that was presented in the \u2018New Spirit in Painting\u2019, <\/em>which had opened at the RA in 1981\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> But you\u2019re in the USA during the Reagan years. Was that much of an improvement?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> It wasn\u2019t an easy time: I had to sub-let my apartment, because although I was on what would have been a colossal salary by UK standards, it didn\u2019t get me very far in Manhattan. Eventually I ran out of money and moved to Brooklyn, and had to get a job, so I went into all the bars and asked, did anyone have any work I could do? And an alcoholic painter who\u2019d just lopped his finger off in a circular saw gave me carpentry work to do, and I fell in with a whole community of artist\/artisans, and I absolutely loved it; I became a tile-layer for restaurants, and being around those kind of building materials inspired the three-dimensional pieces I went on to make. But in 1991, my Dad died of cancer back in Sidmouth, and my Mum was all on her own, so I came back to look after her, as she had Parkinson\u2019s, and was in a bad way. I stayed in Sidmouth for five years, looking after her; and so my connection to New York faded. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones. ‘The Sublime’ (2109), acrylic on canvas, 257 x 135cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The Paintings<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> (pointing at \u2018The Sublime\u2019, 2018)<\/em>\nThis one has fragments of the landscape in it. This painting took a lot longer\nto paint than I like: it took about six months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> So this one is part of a group of- what? -five or six paintings that\nrelate to the same period of working?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Seven or eight altogether, if we include the long ones. They\u2019re made\nwith \u2018Interference\u2019<\/em> paint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> What\u2019s that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> It looks like nail varnish (laughter).<\/em>\nThe American company, Golden Acrylics, make it. It changes colour when you look\nat it, depending on the angle. I\u2019ve got all sorts of gels, thin and thick\u2026and\nthis \u2018Interference\u2019<\/em> paint just\ncaptures a bit of the light, so you can build\n<\/em>light into the painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> It looks as if you\u2019re combining pouring with scrubbing the paint in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes. There\u2019s no priming on the canvas: my \u2018style\u2019 <\/em>in these- if I have one- is to use heavyweight cotton duck, stretch it onto a wooden frame, and then \u2018free-form\u2019 straight on top of it. There\u2019s no process of laying down a ground, and then building the layers, or anything like that. Having said that, the paintings have a shelf-life, whereby if you work on them for too long, you fuck them up completely: you \u2018lose\u2019<\/em> them. That\u2019s what happened to that one. But with this one, <\/em>I was able to work on for quite a long period of time, and I actually saved it right at the end, and it\u2019s lighter now than it was when I began it, which is actually a very unusual result; and by \u2018lighter\u2019<\/em> I mean physically and<\/em> visually lighter. Normally, the more work you put into something, the more tortured it gets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> I know from your \u2018Brancaster Chronicle\u2019<\/em>1<\/a><\/sup>The ‘Brancaster Chronicles’ are live discussions on abstract art. Patrick has twice been the subject: https:\/\/branchron.com\/2015\/04\/28\/brancaster-chronicle-no-19-patrick-jones-paintings\/<\/a> and https:\/\/branchron.com\/2015\/12\/19\/brancaster-chronicle-no-26-patrick-jones-painting\/<\/a><\/span>sessions that you\u2019re very concerned to keep the raw weave of the canvas in as virginal a state as possible. Here, it\u2019s hard to tell from the finished canvas, but it looks to me as if, having applied your first stained and scumbled layer, you\u2019re not<\/em> trying to a great degree to make forms come through. Is it more a certain sheen<\/em> you\u2019re after? A glow? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I can show you a photo of this painting in progress that doesn\u2019t look\nanything like this. At one point it just looked like a pour<\/em>– like a great big Morris Louis; in other words, it was\ncompletely \u2018other\u2019- <\/em>and I had to wash\nit over with a silvery translucent wash in order to get a sort of delicacy,\nwhich I think is quite important; and you will notice that that\u2019s a feature of\nmy work; it\u2019s what I have in common with Frankenthaler. It\u2019s a liking for\nTurner, and for the softer effect, like watercolour.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Helen Frankenthaler, ‘Seascape with Dunes’ (1962), oil on canvas, 177 x 388cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Yes, and much as with watercolour, you\u2019re reliant on the radiance of\nthe white ground. You\u2019re leaving off a great deal, and then coming in with\nthese gestural marks and accretions of paint. And once they go down, they\u2019re\nnot coming off again, are they? You\u2019ve committed yourself, once the impasto\nlands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes. When I\u2019ve been up at the farm studio, I\u2019d leave things till the evening, till everyone has gone home, and then I would go for it, and coat the whole painting, and it would be dry by the next day, and then I would coat it again; but the problem with that process is that the paintings can die on you: they wilt like flowers that haven\u2019t been watered. Anyway, I felt that I\u2019d saved this painting from fatigue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Yes, it feels fresh: and there\u2019s a kind of antic spirit there, that comes out of Miro, I think. And the eye is drawn to these little \u2018graphismes\u2019<\/em>, to borrow a term from Tapi\u00e8s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> They\u2019re quotes: there\u2019s a moon in there, you can see, a pale yellow moon; and then it became\u2026well, it got a couple of little eyes, and then it turned into a figure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing\nis, they are living things to me: this one here has the title \u2018Moon Pull\u2019<\/em>. We have spectacular moons down\nhere in Devon, and the feeling is that the moon is pulling something; so\nthere\u2019s something being pulled into the picture. And there are areas that are flicked on, <\/em>and I really like what\nhappened when the paint landed; but then, for a long time, they just sort of\nsat on top, and they weren\u2019t integrated into the whole thing; they were just a\nsort of event. It took me bloody ages to get that to \u2018bed in\u2019<\/em> to the rest of the picture, and it became an obsession,\nreally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> What do you mean exactly by \u2018bed in\u2019<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Well, because these are flicked gobs of paint, and they\u2019re on a soft, luminous, atmospheric ground\u2026if the ground had dried, and then I\u2019d flicked the blobs on, and I\u2019d wanted it to be a serious, John Hoyland type of abstract painting (makes noise of a bomb dropping<\/em>) then I\u2019d have had to damp the whole bloody thing again, and lay in another wash, to have it all bind together; it\u2019s not just a technical thing, it\u2019s to do with how the painting knits together.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Moon Pull’ (2019), acrylic on canvas, 163 x 91cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
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Patrick Jones, detail of ‘Moon Pull’ (2019), acrylic on canvas, 163 x 91cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Do you mean that you\u2019re looking for a slight but perceptible bleed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes. And all these tonal changes throughout the picture\u2026well, we\u2019ll see, when you\u2019ve had a look at all my 1980s pictures, whether you feel that this is a signature of mine\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Technical questions aside, what strikes me about this work, and the work of yours that I know from the \u2018Brancaster Chronicles\u2019<\/em>, some of which is also here, is that you\u2019ve got an arsenal of framing devices; and in using them, it almost feels as if you\u2019re circling the painting, walking around it, waiting for the right moment to plunge right in, to attack the main area of the image. Thing is, I don\u2019t assume that all of this around the edges was necessarily laid in prior<\/em> to anything happening in the middle; but the cumulative effect is of a kind of topography, that invites associations such as lake and surrounding shore\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ <\/strong>I don\u2019t recall exactly where I found it, but I read something somewhere, Frank Stella talking about what happens when the painting arrives at its edge, before it gets to the wall; and in here (indicates centre of ‘Moon Pull’) <\/em>we\u2019re dealing with illusion, with atmospheric, imaginative space- but when you arrive at the edge, about four inches off the edge, all of a sudden it becomes real<\/em>, and once it becomes real, it becomes a three-dimensional object, and it hits the wall; and at that point, the nature of the thing changes; into sculpture, or something like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Stella talked of dealing with something in between two and three dimensions, didn\u2019t he? \u2018Two point seven dimensions\u2019<\/em>, as I recall2<\/a><\/sup>‘I work away from the flat surface but I still don’t want to be three-dimensional; that is totally literal…more than two dimensions but short of three, so, for me, two point seven is probably a very good place to be.’ Frank Stella, quoted in ‘Frank Stella Retrospective’ exhibition catalogue, p230, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2012<\/span>. And for you: do you feel the need to dispense with any lingering sense of illusion, of spatial quality, as you reach the edge?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> It definitely changes at the edge; and there\u2019s the decision whether to make a hard line\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this painting, (indicates \u2018Sidmouth’ )<\/em> I tried to avoid any sort of edge, almost to the point of there being just a shadow.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Sidmouth’ (2018), acrylic on canvas, 191 x 107cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> That\u2019s a very interesting way of looking at your work: as we near the edge, the depiction drops away, and you\u2019re left with a framing device that readies us for the literal truth of the side of the support, and the wall. That\u2019s a highly Formalist reading, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> It started to become crucial for me. These two paintings, ‘Moon Pull’<\/em> and ‘Sidmouth’<\/em>– and, I think, the ones downstairs- began to give the idea, which I think relates to what\u2019s going on in the middle, of my wanting something in my painting to be truly pictorial<\/em>; I can\u2019t think of any way of putting it better than that. It goes in and out\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Are you talking now about \u2018push-pull\u2019<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ <\/strong>Well, yes, it is \u2018push-pull\u2019<\/em>, and that\u2019s very interesting, because for me, it relates to what I saw in Frankenthaler, that she took from Hofmann\u2026their work, of course, is not at all alike; there are no \u2018slabs\u2019 in Frankenthaler, no great big blocks of colour, but there is the same in-and-out sort of space; and to me, it\u2019s not unlike naturalistic space. Just now, when we were driving along the Sidmouth seafront, and we were looking at the sea, and how brown it looked: that tremendous physical and emotional experience of seeing the sea, I\u2019d like that in my paintings. What we just saw, I want them to have. So there\u2019s a pictorial<\/em> quality to what are abstract pictures. There\u2019s nothing in them that you could point at and say \u2018Oh look, it\u2019s the sea, it\u2019s a cliff\u2019<\/em> or anything like that; but on the other hand, I love the idea that the paintings might have a sort of drama<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> You\u2019ve got some gorgeous light effects going on, and there\u2019s some sort of horizon being established\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Does that all make sense?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> It makes perfect sense. I\u2019m struck by the fact that everything in the world- including the forms in paintings- looks like something else. Nothing looks only like itself: it isn\u2019t possible to see a thing that doesn\u2019t in some way strike echoes. Having looked at a large number of Patrick Heron\u2019s paintings, grouped together, I\u2019ve realised that somewhere along the way, you could say he made peace with himself regarding the idea that certain forms coming through in his work were so unbreakably linked to real things seen- his garden, the cliffs at Zennor- that the effort that would be needed to suppress those associations just wasn\u2019t worth it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> And of course, why would you want to suppress? Obviously I don\u2019t want to illustrate; I\u2019m not a figurative painter. But on the other hand, where is it written that paint can\u2019t remind one of moonlight on water? I don\u2019t have that instinct to suppress; and besides, I feel that the things<\/em> in my paintings arrive there for formal<\/em> reasons, as much as anything else. When we\u2019re talking about the edges, the centre, I\u2019m being pulled or pushed by decisions made with the canvas in front of me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> I can recall a discussion thread on Abstract Critic<\/em>al3<\/a><\/sup>A forum for discussion around abstract art, now reconstituted as https:\/\/abcrit.org\/<\/a><\/span>, in which one of the contributors referred to the late Rothko paintings, where you have a near-black band, and a grey or brown one beneath it, and inevitable associations of land, horizon and sky: and this example of Rothko was used as an argument to justify abstract paintings that carry landscape reference; to which Robin Greenwood responded, well, people should stop making abstract paintings with a simple horizontal division in them, and then the problem- as he saw it- wouldn\u2019t arise. Is that where you and he part company? Because he is holding out for this notion of \u2018abstract content\u2019<\/em>, which is entirely free of associations with things seen in the visible world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ <\/strong>Those Rothko paintings you\u2019re referring to: I saw then in a show at the Hayward, hung quite high, and in the last room of the show, there were black and grey ones, the black above, the grey beneath; they were made late in his life, he was dreadfully depressed, and he committed suicide shortly thereafter. They were powerfully moving pictures: and what moved me most was that the black areas were exactly like my perception, when I look out of my windows at night at the moonlit sea, where even if there\u2019s very little light left, you\u2019re aware of a vast amount of space and depth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> You found the Rothko paintings spatial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes. There was a period of three months when I lived with Helen Frankenthaler: I\u2019d broken my leg, and she looked after me and let me stay in her house\u2026and we sat every night with a glass of something, looking out at Long Island Sound, at the tugboats going up and down; and what we were looking at, which is in a lot of my pictures, is that sort of space where you get one little red light and one little green one in the middle of a black space- and you know <\/em>it\u2019s a moving, fluid space, that it\u2019s not flat. And this is one thing that both Frankenthaler and I seemed to share: an instinctive appreciation of that kind of space. Do you understand what I\u2019m talking about? In this painting (indicates \u2018Helen\u2019)<\/em>, a great big, voided, open space\u2026so, to me, the centre of the painting goes way back, and that\u2019s what all the staining\u2019s doing; the thick lumps of paint are coming forward, and then at the edges of the picture they\u2019re beginning to come to some sort of accommodation with the physicality of the wall.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Helen’ (2019), acrylic on canvas, 169 x 98cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> That\u2019s very well described. But this painting also references another kind of space entirely. It seems clear to me that your tender care for the unsullied canvas surface, and the luminosity that you\u2019re obviously looking for with the staining and the initial putting-down of the liquid paint, enlivened by the highlights and dabs of paint you then touch in; in all of this, I\u2019m getting such a strong sense of the rectangle itself as a sort of backlit retaining surface for these various actions\u2026it can\u2019t help but put me in mind of the ubiquitous screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ <\/strong>Ah yes, the computer screen\u2026I have a huge problem with the internet, in that it induces us to live our lives in terms of one screen or another. I suppose it\u2019s inevitable, then, that my painting would have a \u2018screen\u2019 <\/em>aspect to it\u2026it almost becomes a political act, painting, in the sense that it remains important that they\u2019re physical, that they\u2019re made in the moment, and that you apprehend them fully in walking right up to the bloody things. None of that happens when I turn my computer on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> But I\u2019m really talking about subliminal influence here: I feel as if these paintings- and this one in particular- are the sum of a great many influences, and one that\u2019s really coming through strongly to me is the backlit world of the screen. And I\u2019m wondering if you\u2019ve been conscious of this or not? What\u2019s different, of course, between a painting and a digital screen, is the difference between evoked<\/em> backlighting, and being literally<\/em> backlit\u2026to my eyes, you\u2019re achieving a marvellous kind of illumination in these; but there\u2019s something in the way all the little incidents are distributed, atop the glowing background: on the one hand, we\u2019re almost in the presence of the romantic sublime, like Turner\u2019s storm at sea; but there\u2019s a whole other vocabulary coming through, which is the virtual non-space of the screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong>  Interesting that you should say that; because I often have the TV on in the morning before I go to work, and recently they\u2019ve been showing lots of wonderful films from the 1960s, with Burt Lancaster, Gina Lollobrigida, Tony Curtis\u2026and the colour film they used in those films, Cinemascope, is beautiful. When I switch on my computer, alas, that\u2019s not what I\u2019m getting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong>  The colour in those 1960s movies is astonishing, isn\u2019t it; that particular kind of palette, the kind that Rauschenberg described, when referring to his silkscreen paintings from the 1960s, as \u2018glamorous\u2019 colour. There\u2019s a lot of this kind of glamour, and an upbeat richness of colour, in these paintings we\u2019ve been looking at; you\u2019re clearly not fighting shy of beautiful effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No, no, not at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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MD<\/strong> In one of your \u2018Brancaster\u2019 <\/em>sessions, Emyr Williams says to you, in so many words, that you can do this sort of painting in your sleep. So, there you go, a hot potato. Are these in danger of becoming comfortable, easy pictures?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> They\u2019re certainly not comfortable to make. I find responding to them, bouncing off them as I\u2019m making them, incredibly challenging. You can see in ‘The Sublime’ <\/em>that there are lots of \u2018quotations\u2019<\/em> along the bottom, particularly from Miro\u2026but quoting doesn\u2019t make it easier. I don\u2019t think I find that there\u2019s anything about the painting process that one could call \u2018comfortable\u2019<\/em>. I find it extremely<\/em> challenging. But just occasionally, you get lucky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> But ‘Moon Pull’<\/em>: it\u2019s certainly not overworked. So would it be true to say of a picture like this, that there are distinct stages? The staining, and then, what? You live with the thing for a while?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I think that painting is one that happened quite quickly, and the reason is, that I poured the stain in the centre there, which has got that brown halo around it, and as soon as that began to dry, I put the line on it and began to recognise that sort of \u2018in-and-out-y\u2019<\/em> space that I talked about with Frankenthaler; and it\u2019s something I know I\u2019m interested in achieving. This green painting, ‘Green Monster<\/em>‘, which has got a central section with a funny little creature in it- this couldn\u2019t be described as \u2018easy\u2019<\/em> painting, or one that just relies on the staining; it\u2019s got a lot of different things in it- a spider, for instance; a section in the centre, that underwent quite a lot of changes\u2026I don\u2019t think<\/em> I\u2019m misunderstanding what you\u2019re asking: and my answer is, all of them are challenging. The fact that the darker forms in it started to look like a winged creature bothered me for a long time; it wasn\u2019t an easy \u2018hit\u2019<\/em>. I\u2019m aware that if you stain and re-stain a canvas, you can get some gorgeous visual effects.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Green Monster’ (2018), acrylic on canvas, 90 x 120cms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Yes, I\u2019m talking about the gorgeousness of it all. ‘Green Monster’<\/em> is harder to approach than ‘Helen’, <\/em>which <\/em> is your work at its most glamorous and pretty and beguiling\u2026I mention the question of the stages of the work, because I add it all up in my mind and I don\u2019t see embedded in the painting evidence of long, long hours of working and re-working the thing, and fretting over it. As you say, you feel that the work has a ‘shelf life’<\/em>, in terms of how much you can do to it before it spoils…I know it\u2019s very easy to confuse apparent ease in the final result with ease in getting there- we know that making a painting is often tortuous- but in terms of sheer man-hours of working the material, there\u2019s not a huge amount there, is there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Well, the top one of those two (indicates ‘Mirage’)<\/em> was on the painting wall for damn near six months, and changed every day, and has ended up with a \u2018seascape\u2019 in it-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> From this distance it looks as if you\u2019ve broken your own rules, because there\u2019s a great deal of overpainting. I mention this because you generally seem very adept at \u2018letting the painting be\u2019\u2026’Helen’<\/em> is very gorgeous, very beguiling indeed to look at, this column of colour swatches on the left, and these touches, blobs, and little distributions of pigment on the surface, it\u2019s gorgeous from end to end\u2026and perhaps the \u2018ease\u2019<\/em> I\u2019m talking about is not so much to do with ease of execution, but with the easy way that the parts of the finished painting live together, which is going to get you only so far, and then stop?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ <\/strong>It\u2019s a good question; but it feels ironic to be asked that, given what I know about their making, and the sequence, how it unfolded\u2026\u2019Flat Screen\u2019,<\/em> downstairs, was the very first, two years ago, and it set the tone for all of these, and all of them received the washes in the middle, and they all received the \u2018interference\u2019<\/em> colour\u2026and then they were dry-brushed, with the idea of creating edges. I thought they were all rubbish, and I was going to scrap them all; I put them up on Facebook, saying that I\u2019d just had a really bad spell in the studio, and that I couldn\u2019t seem to get anything together, and that I would be scrapping them the next day. And I got all these replies saying: \u2018Don\u2019t do that.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones’ studio, November 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> I can certainly understand that. But to me, they\u2019re almost too<\/em> lovely, and that\u2019s something I\u2019m interested to hear your reactions to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> If you twisted my arm, I\u2019d have to say there is nothing that I can think of that would cause a painting to be too beautiful<\/em>. I just can\u2019t see it. One thinks of Fragonard- beautiful pictures of ladies in lace\u2026as an aim, if I could do a drooling<\/em> painting, which caused people to faint from bliss when they saw it, I would do it\u2026(laughter) <\/em>because what tends to happen is the complete opposite: all sorts of shit happens in the painting. With ‘Sidmouth’<\/em> I was trying to make a quiet painting, a delicate painting, and it just kept getting busier, and busier, and more and more frantic\u2026I do feel that they\u2019re living things, and that they\u2019re separate from me; and to a certain extent, I\u2019d be happy to bugger off out of here and never see them again, because they have their own lives to live. The only problem is, nobody\u2019s seeing them; and I do think they deserve to be seen. The worse one could say of this activity is that it\u2019s a form of masturbation- a solitary activity, pleasing myself. I don\u2019t see it like that: I see it as a very testing<\/em> activity, testing myself, and testing the genre within which I work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Testing yourself how? Can you elaborate?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes, I can. I test myself in ways that we\u2019ve touched on: by working with notions that the thing shouldn\u2019t just be beautiful, colourful, that the colour should be there for a purpose. Like here (indicates ‘Moon Pull’)<\/em> \u2013 these yellows and greens down at the bottom, they have reasons to be there. I\u2019m very, very aware of painting\u2019s history: and I\u2019ve been accused of being a formalist, as if the only thing that interested me was the way the paint physically attaches to the canvas\u2026I was excited by the second-generation Ab-Exers, Jack Bush, Grace Hartigan; the people who were still alive when I was in America, and then, after them, the Colourfield painters. I went over there loving all these painters, and then I saw a Ken Noland show, where he was using the exact same paint, the \u2018Interference\u2019<\/em> paint, in his stripes, and he was putting it on in waves. And I thought they were bloody awful, purely decorative; all they were, it seemed to me, was a demonstration of what that paint could do on a striped canvas. In other words, the paintings didn\u2019t have any allusion<\/em>. Mine do.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jack Bush, ‘Blue Slant’ (1967), acrylic on canvas, 145 x 378.5cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Kenneth Noland, ‘Via Fill’ (1974), acrylic on canvas, 94 x 304cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Clearly, they allude to things outside themselves. But you seem to be interested in that tightrope walk, where there is nothing that could be singled out as depictive<\/em>. I think you walk the tightrope very well; whereas someone like John Walker, for example, has long since abandoned the attempt, if indeed he ever made it in the first place; he doesn\u2019t really paint abstract<\/em> paintings at all. The paintings that first made his name in the late 1960s aren\u2019t abstract; they\u2019re figurative <\/em>paintings of abstract shapes, as if he was painting a room, or a landscape, an illusionistic space, that happened to have a big plywood cutout of an abstract shape in it, if that makes any sense. And starting in the late 1970s, the \u2018Alba\u2019<\/em> paintings have this very distinctive form, covered with these lush, almost edible crusts of colour, on this very painterly poured and brushed field: as if Gainsborough had been commissioned to paint a portrait of a decorated abstract plywood cutout, rather than Mary, Countess Howe. And I mention all this because it looks to me as if you\u2019re aware of this trap, the trap of \u2018figurative abstraction\u2019<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n

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L to R: John Walker, detail of ‘Roundout Alba III’ (1980), oil on canvas, 195 x 150cm; Thomas Gainsborough, ‘Mary, Countess Howe’ (1764), oil on canvas, 244 x 152cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> In my paintings, there\u2019s a sense of building towards<\/em> a depicted space, and towards elements that have the weight and presence of a real thing, seen or remembered; but at the same time I\u2019m working hard to avoid overloading the surface, or letting narrative come through. I was very interested in John Walker: I liked him as a man, very much. He was immensely influential on me when I was a student; but I had exactly the same reservations about the whole \u2018Alba\u2019<\/em> series. I would go in to look at them in the Knoedler Gallery in New York, really dying for them to work, and dying to be able to like them; but I would look at them and just think, well, these are weird\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> What year was this?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I\u2019m pretty sure this would have been 1986\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> He\u2019d had the Hayward show in 1985, hadn\u2019t he, which was a survey of the work he\u2019d done since he\u2019d stopped making huge canvas collages and devoted himself to the \u2018Alba\u2019<\/em> shape. And I think that these works, from the middle of that decade, point to the sense of exhaustion of a certain strain of abstraction; and to a sense of a \u2018tipping point\u2019<\/em> around then, or even perhaps earlier, with the 1980 Hayward Annual, which Hoyland curated, and which looks more and more like the point at which British abstraction of \u2018High Modernist\u2019<\/em> pedigree stopped being the \u2018master narrative\u2019<\/em> of painting\u2026I was looking at the \u2018British Painting\u2019<\/em> section in the Middlesex University Library recently, and they have all these Hayward Annual catalogues from the 1960s and 1970s, all with the same look: the Helvetica Bold font, the clean lines, the clean abstract paintings; such period pieces now. They look like they belong to a lost world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes, sadly, it\u2019s all gone, all of it. In my imagination, I feel like I should have had a go at having a one-person show at the Hayward Gallery: but it\u2019s not the same place at all now that it was then. I\u2019d been very impressed by Frank Stella\u2019s retrospective there back in 1970; I knew Andrew Dempsey, the Curator there, and I knew all the people who\u2019d curated it, and that\u2019s all gone, the sort of things they did. So, with Walker, whatever the merits of the work, I was impressed then, and am still impressed now, with the way he went about it: painters have got to follow his example, and isolate their area of interest and just get on with it; and strive in any way they can to become known, because there isn\u2019t a big group to be part of, not anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Fez’ (2000), acrylic on canvas, 216 x 57cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

MD <\/strong>We\u2019ve looked at a set of paintings that address certain concerns that recur, and you see that as a body of work; and there\u2019s an older body of your work, which we haven\u2019t looked at, because there aren\u2019t any examples of it hanging here, but I\u2019m aware of it from looking online; in it, you\u2019re using shapes and tropes straight out of Miro, to give one example. You\u2019ve used the term \u2018quoting\u2019<\/em>; you said earlier that you\u2019re quoting this artist or that. Now, you\u2019re using quotation, much as Julian Schnabel or David Salle or Philip Taaffe or any number of \u2018appropriation\u2019<\/em> artists have used overt reference to other artists; and yet, from everything you\u2019ve said, it\u2019s clear your attitude to quotation is non-ironical. I\u2019m keen to know what you intend by the use of a mark or a form that\u2019s clearly borrowed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I\u2019ve given this quite a lot of thought. If you were to come in here and interrupt me while I was painting, you\u2019d understand my whole attitude is one of \u2018Help, I\u2019m in the shit\u2019<\/em>; it\u2019s all going horribly wrong, and I need all the help I can get. My quoting Miro is an invocation<\/em>, it\u2019s like a Native American invoking, I don\u2019t know, a bird spirit\u2026 it\u2019s introducing something into the picture that is a friend<\/em>, that is going to help me make the thing. There\u2019s no ironical purpose; and indeed, everything that I know about Miro as an artist and as a person, I find admirable. I would have loved to have been that sort of person, and to have straddled two generations, and to have combined surrealism and formalism as he did. I invoke him, in the hope of channelling him into the work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> It\u2019s a lovely idea, that you might have a guardian spirit coming to your aid in the making of the picture. It interests me that because of the way you paint now, you\u2019re not really editing much, you\u2019re not covering things up; so once these spirit guides have been introduced into the picture, they stay, you\u2019ve committed to them; so the picture incorporates quotation into its structure. I\u2019m thinking here of your vertical pictures that remind me of stacked totems, of modernist forms out of Miro, or there\u2019s a gestural black splatter out of Pollock \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Absolutely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> But presumably always with the intention that these spirits are going to be subsumed into the picture? You\u2019re not playing a postmodern game of \u2018naming\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No, I\u2019m not. With those series of tall pictures, I often split them in two, because they seemed to want to fall into two halves, literally a right and a left-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> How early on do they do that? Is the first decision when making the picture to divide it up?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> You\u2019ve got to start somewhere with a picture: and cutting it in two is one way to start, or into three\u2026 you\u2019ve got to make decisions. What happens then within the painting is that it begins to have tension: <\/em>it pulls in different directions. Hofmann shows me, quite emphatically, that you\u2019ve got to keep that tension, you\u2019ve got to feel it when you\u2019re painting, it\u2019s what will ultimately resolve the dilemma of the picture. It\u2019s got to be there right up to the last minute; you don\u2019t try to free yourself from it, you actually have to try constantly to aggravate<\/em> it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> But the working methods you\u2019re employing now, using very little overpainting, mean that once you\u2019ve introduced one of these- hard to know what to call them, really- known <\/em>forms, or given<\/em> forms from the history of art, then they stay, they\u2019re not digested by the painting process; they remain as clear, apprehendable<\/em> forms that carry particular associations with them\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Duality’ (2002), acrylic on canvas, 224 x 66cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

PJ <\/strong>They\u2019re not just quotations, they\u2019re an element of the painting\u2019s drawing. Drawing has always been at the beginning of my paintings, an essential part of them. If anything, I\u2019m a draughtsman rather than a colourist; I\u2019d rather be a colourist, and build with colour, but I always feel that I want to draw the whole thing to begin with. Introducing linear forms into the thing- as far as I\u2019m concerned, they don\u2019t remain as quotations. The painting you\u2019ve been talking about, it\u2019s 12\u2019 high, with 4\u2019 of red bar, a red stain, opposite a half of bare canvas. I was about to put the black line on the red area, and I was walking towards the canvas with the black mixed and ready- and boom, it landed on the white instead. The painting is called \u2018Duality\u2019<\/em>; the whole point of that group of paintings is that there were two things going on, and they contradicted each other\u2026and that in<\/em> the contradiction there was something exciting happening. That notion came from all the Dogon sculpture that I\u2019d seen, with Tony Caro, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was the first time I\u2019d seen African art; there was a double figure, \u2018The Eternal Couple\u2019, <\/em>a man and a woman, and they\u2019re twins. It was all to do with the concept of twinning; they\u2019re versions of the same person. It was stunning, that this one piece could say so much about the human condition, and yet remain so simple- a man, with his hand on a woman\u2019s shoulder, and very perfunctorily made, for that matter. Anyway, I was trying to make paintings that had those sorts of internal relations; and with that, I actually felt as if I\u2019d broken out of Formalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> It reminds me of those early Pollocks, where he was very consciously invoking Jungian archetypes: the \u2018Moon Woman\u2019<\/em>, the \u2018Sorceress\u2019<\/em> and so on. All of this that you\u2019re describing, because you\u2019re an abstract painter, you\u2019re talking about sublimating all of this symbolic and psychological content into very simple abstract forms, some of which reference abstract art that has already been made, by Miro and Pollock. In all of this, then, I\u2019m not sure what remains of Patrick Jones in the end product\u2026 it sounds like I\u2019m being unduly harsh, I\u2019m sorry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> No, no, not at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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MD<\/strong> In the written replies to the emailed questions I sent you before this visit, you wrote about your complete lack of cynicism. I can see that very clearly in the work. I\u2019m interested in understanding how this lack of cynicism might operate- and again, I don\u2019t mean this to sound harsh- as a block to self-criticism; meaning, that freedom from inhibiting scepticism and cynicism might come with a hefty price tag, in the sense that one might settle for something in painting that a more self-critical sensibility might identify as pastiche. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, I took Gary Wragg to task a while back4<\/a><\/sup>Matt Dennis on ‘Transformations’: Sculptures by Robin Greenwood, Paintings by Gary Wragg’, Instantloveland.com, May 2018<\/span> for showing works on paper that looked like isolated individual tropes of High Modernist abstraction, one to a sheet, pretty much; here\u2019s a bit of brush-scribble, here\u2019s some overlaid splattering lines, and so on. I couldn\u2019t see what was being attempted, other than repeatedly stating the obvious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m\ninterested in how artists face this problem- or indeed don\u2019t<\/em> face it, turn away, run away from it- the problem of living\nin the \u2018after times\u2019, <\/em>after all the\npathways for painting have, seemingly, been explored. I\u2019d like to ask you, in\nwhat way you believe originality, newness in painting is still possible? Or do\nyou say to yourself, you know you\u2019re moving in an ever-contracting spiral of \u2018endgame\u2019<\/em> painting, where all that\u2019s\nleft to do is make tiny movements in an endlessly-drawn out terminal phase? Do\nyou dispute this state of affairs? Or do you acknowledge it, and live with it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I mentioned Samuel Beckett earlier, in relation to Guston; he, Beckett, could be seen as someone who moved beyond poetry, beyond theatre, into a grey imagined world of half-figures, an isolated mouth, saying next to nothing\u2026what you\u2019re describing has something of that bleakness, I think. I choose not to go there, however compelling the art-historical arguments for it might be. It\u2019s very important for me that I remain optimistic, even to the point of naivety, perhaps; I honestly don\u2019t know what the alternative might be. How does one put all one\u2019s sophistication to good use? I try to be useful<\/em>, through painting, and teaching painting\u2026even if a lot of the people I try to teach think that abstraction began with what\u2019s-his-name, the German, you know, with the squeegees\u2026(laughter)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> It\u2019s interesting- I\u2019d even say it\u2019s refreshing- that you had to root around for the name there; because for pretty much anyone under the age of 50 with a serious interest in contemporary painting, Richter is the very first name they\u2019d come up with, if asked; he is considered the painter par excellence;<\/em> whatever you or I might feel, he is seen as defining where the limits of painting lie, by a huge number of people. His procedures, his attitude to painting, are seen by many as exemplary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Certainly by Nick Serota, Director of Tate (who has been to one of my shows, by the way, so he at least knows I exist). Because of two things- his use of photography, and his being German (laughter)<\/em> he, Richter, seems to slip effortlessly through a sort of mesh, strung up to catch the likes of me\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> This mesh, presumably, is a net woven by art criticism to catch what Matthew Collings dubbed \u2018authentic\u2019<\/i>5<\/a><\/sup>Collings, M, catalogue essay in ‘British Abstract Painting 2001’ Flowers Gallery, 2001<\/span> painters such as yourself trying to swim upstream, against the critical current?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Yes, and it\u2019s such a shame. I have to say, though, that I\u2019m getting a lot more tolerant of artists that I didn\u2019t quite understand first time round\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> What do you make of Richter\u2019s abstract paintings?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Gerhard Richter, ‘Abstract Painting’ (1986), oil on canvas, 300 x 250cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I think that they\u2019re interesting enough\u2026not that I hadn\u2019t already seen plenty of that at the Triangle Workshop, there everyone was doing that kind of thing, piling up the paint and then spreading it around; perhaps not with a large rubber blade though. The point with Richter, though, is that the painting is always tied onto something; a blurred photograph, something that he\u2019s seen. It has another reason for being, other than the bare fact<\/em> of its being; whether one looks at<\/em> it, or looks through<\/em> it, whether it\u2019s beautiful or not, it\u2019s always got some other reason for being hovering near.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> He has actually made countless paintings without a photograph as their point of departure, which simply begin with pigment being laid on, and then moved around by large brushes, and custom-made squeegees. Whatever the methods, they begin as- you\u2019d have to say- \u2018pure painting\u2019<\/em>. What seems to distinguish his practice from what an artist like yourself is attempting is the mindset<\/em> behind it. He\u2019s someone who has talked over and over about the impossibility<\/em> of painting, the absolutely played-out, exhausted state of the medium, and of abstraction in particular; and yet he still makes these things. Now, I\u2019m very curious to know what a painter such as yourself- I know the label is crass, but if we continue to use \u2018authentic\u2019<\/em>– what does an authentic painter such as yourself, whose approach to painting is non-ironical, make of all that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I take the\npoint that your idealism, in the political and social sense, feeds into an\noptimistic attitude in terms of the work. The fact remains, though, as Patrick\nHeron took frequent pains to emphasise, the core of a Modernist art practice\nwas the instinct-driven search to find the places where it was still possible-\nand therefore necessary- for art to go. So, unless one is happy to become a\nsort of professional mimic in painting, to say \u2018Oh, I do knock-off Pollocks and Miros, and I\u2019m fine with that, it\u2019s\nwhat I\u2019m good at\u2026\u2019 <\/em>and ignore all the ethical questions as to what the\nmission of an artist might be, and instead, remains true to the ethos of\nModernism, that art must evolve, and seek out fresh territory- what happens\nwhen the recognition of that duty comes up against the apparent impossibility\nof finding anything new to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> Well, quite. How will I work out where the next thing- the new thing- will go? I haven\u2019t got a clue, is the straight answer. I don\u2019t see my quoting other painters in my paintings as a problem; I don\u2019t think it rules out the possibility of making something new. But I know what you\u2019re driving at, and I want to do my best to answer you\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Maybe, if I tell you what I<\/em> think, that might help make the question clearer, more answerable? For my money, ‘Duality’<\/em>, <\/em>which we discussed earlier, which you told me was going to receive the black down one side- because each of the individual forms is so closely aligned to forms that feel like other artists\u2019 signatures, such as that light red there, the scumbled area inside the colour field that makes me think of Gottlieb, or the vigorous splatter on the right-hand side, that puts me in mind of Pollock or Miro, because of all of that, it feels to me as if Patrick Jones isn\u2019t really here, isn\u2019t really in the painting. Whereas, this painting- \u2018Flat Screen\u2019,<\/em> which I\u2019ve only ever previously seen on a piece of digital video- I was delighted to discover when I walked in here earlier that it\u2019s even better than I\u2019d thought it was; and I had already thought that it was very, very good. I genuinely don\u2019t think that I or anyone else has seen anything quite like it before; and so, it affirms<\/em>, it functions as a little object lesson in how new things are still possible in painting, through the coming-together of new combinations. Not the forms themselves, necessarily, but through new and complex sets of relations between forms; which, I suppose, are in themselves new forms by default\u2026 ‘Duality’ <\/em>has so relatively few clashes or juxtapositions going on, that it exists for me only as a set of recognisable emblems; but \u2018Flat Screen\u2019<\/em> has so much invention, and so many surprises, that it feels amazingly fresh. We were standing in front of \u2018The Sublime\u2019<\/em> earlier, and I threw you a hot potato- that you can do beautiful and gorgeous paintings like that in your sleep, almost; and it strikes me how \u2018Flat Screen\u2019<\/em> shares parts of its format with \u2018The Sublime\u2019<\/em>, such as the use of a decorative framing device, but gives me the strong sense that you didn\u2019t know what you were doing until you\u2019d done it. The other paintings grouped with \u2018The Sublime\u2019<\/em>– all of which I really do like very much- feel like they contain an achievable<\/em> prettiness that you don\u2019t struggle all that hard with; whereas I think \u2018Flat Screen\u2019<\/em> took you totally by surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Flat Screen’ (2017), acrylic on canvas, 98 x 180cms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> It was a difficult painting at a difficult time in my life. I\u2019d hate to have to relive the circumstances of its making; it wasn\u2019t made at a comfortable time. I don\u2019t think I or anyone else should be afraid of doing as beautiful a painting as one possibly could; and in fact, ‘Flat Screen’ <\/em>was singled out by Andr\u00e9 Fautaux, the Canadian sculptor, as the best painting I\u2019d ever done, in his opinion. Because of the way it looks, it isn\u2019t at all apparent how much trouble it actually gave me\u2026there\u2019s also a sweetness, that I am very much aware of; it\u2019s a Colourfield painting. We talked about John McLean, and he was a huge supporter of what I was trying to do\u2026I was aware, too, of what he was after, through the use of very simple shapes. This<\/em> is a different kind of thing: it has quite a lot of ingredients in it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> You could say that having a lot of ingredients is good, in that it increases the likelihood of unexpected collisions or overlaps; when Robin Greenwood talks about \u2018abstract content\u2019 <\/em>he often bangs the drum about the need for the \u2018re-complication\u2019<\/em> of abstraction. In a way, all the good things that are happening in \u2018Flat Screen\u2019 <\/em>seem to bear out Robin\u2019s view: it really does seem to be a matter of being prepared to try a huge number of things on for size, rather than fall back on an autographic mark that feels as if\u2026how to explain it? As if it can\u2019t be prised out of Pollock\u2019s hands and used with conviction by anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> One might argue, that the longer-format paintings of mine we\u2019ve viewed, that I\u2019m not so happy with, probably do allude to landscape painting; and in that sense, they ought<\/em> to fail. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> Yes, but there\u2019s a whole category of great paintings that come under the heading of \u2018It shouldn\u2019t work, but it does.\u2019<\/em> Maybe that\u2019s true, in fact, of all<\/em> great paintings? They have to defy conventional ideas of what makes for \u2018success\u2019<\/em> in painting, in order to achieve the sense of freshness<\/em> that all great art shares\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Flat Screen\u2019 <\/em>interests me because in it there\u2019s a great deal\nof the sort of overpainting that you\u2019ve gone on the record as being so\nuncomfortable with\u2026you\u2019ve got right away from the unsullied, pristine canvas\nhere. How do you feel about this one- \u2018Mirage\u2019<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones, ‘Mirage’ (2018), acrylic on canvas, 172 x 78cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I think it\u2019s problematic; It\u2019s overpainted\u2026and what it\u2019ll be like in the fullness of time, I couldn\u2019t tell you. I\u2019m 70 now; I\u2019ve been painting for more than 50 years. One does develop a lot of knowledge over that span of time; but what do you do with that knowledge, so that it doesn\u2019t curdle into an all-knowing cynicism? Heron, towards the end of his life, became dreadfully cynical about his life and about life in general; but happily, not about his painting, which stayed fresh. There are some fucking awful artists around Devon who base their sense of their own importance on how much they know\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> You\u2019ve talked a lot about keeping the freshness in the work; and the paintings upstairs, especially, read like object lessons in not allowing an image to clog up. <\/em>Something like ‘Mirage’ <\/em>where there\u2019s a great deal of texture and overlay, seems to be inviting in all those problems you\u2019ve done your best to avoid?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think \u2018Mirage\u2019<\/em> is unresolved; I love parts of\nit- having those glowing pink tones there; but then this central lower section\nseems to fall away, and I\u2019m not sure where it is exactly, within the space of\nthe painting. Everything on the top layer seems much more firmly located, but\nthe lower part feels generalised, and I\u2019m not sure how it could be best\nresolved\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> I was aware of that while I was painting it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MD<\/strong> I enjoy looking at work in which everything\u2019s up for grabs, where nothing\u2019s settled\u2026and this is also tasteless<\/em>, in a way, ‘Flat Screen’<\/em>, which is a great joy to see. I haven\u2019t used the word \u2018taste\u2019<\/em> yet today; and I certainly don\u2019t intend it as a particularly vicious put-down, but in your more overtly beautiful paintings there\u2019s a tastefulness there, I think, whereas in \u2018Flat Screen\u2019<\/em>, if you look around it area by area, it\u2019s not an ingratiating painting at all; the colour is quite shrill in places, and the paint application is cursory, slapdash even; and then you\u2019ve got this constant recurring use of the dark blue line, which should, by rights, kill the whole thing stone dead; but it all feels absurdly alive, and freshly minted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PJ<\/strong> What scared the shit out of me at the time was that I had an infection in my aorta where it had been repaired; and so my body was busily overheating something terrible\u2026and I felt my painting had overheated too. It went so bad<\/em>, that painting: I\u2019d walk into the studio and just not believe what was going on. I was making things that I don\u2019t think I could call paintings at all. I realised that painting is connected as much to the heart as to the head\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Painting-\nif it\u2019s to be any good- must, despite one\u2019s preoccupations with formalism, the\nshape, the colour and so on, be connected with something called life<\/em>. The fact that it rained today; the\nfact that my fucking car\u2019s been breaking down, and that I\u2019ve had to leave the\nengine running while we were looking at the work in the farm studio, for fear\nthat it wouldn\u2019t start again if I turned the ignition off, and we\u2019d be stranded;\neverything that\u2019s happened today all feeds into the painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I felt\nthat what happens in the studio when I paint was only expressed in its own heirarchical\nlanguage, entirely unconcerned with the day-to-day shit, it wouldn\u2019t be of any\nuse whatsoever. There has to be some sort of connection.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patrick Jones’ studio, November 2018<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The veteran abstractionist opens up about art, artists, and ‘resolving the dilemma of the picture’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3012"}],"version-history":[{"count":153,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6354,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3012\/revisions\/6354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}