Considering Art Podcast – Sandy Mallet, personalising aerial paintings

Introduction to Aerial Art

0:00Hello, Bob Chawndy here with another Considering Art podcast in which I talk to an artist about their work and something of their life. Aerial art, that is paintings of land seen from above in various forms, has been practised for many centuries, going back to artists such

0:32as John Darby in the 16th century, through to more recent ones like Georgia O'Keeffe's aerial abstractions, Pete Mondrian's works on New York City, Peter Lanyon's glider paintings, Emil Cam Canguire's land paintings recently shown at Tate Modern, and of course you've had aerial photography from the 19th century to now. One of the latest on this list is my guest today Sandy Mallett. Sandy makes specific paintings of people's land, aerial views of gardens, farms and estates that he transforms into abstract works. He describes them as a

1:08celebration of the ways that land can be enjoyed and understood. As we shall hear, they involve a detailed amount of research to give them a personal quality. Alongside his art practice, Sandy has enjoyed a successful career working at Sotheby's and as a gallerist at Messam's and Jonathan Clarke, and he's written books on the British artists Ivan Hitchens, his son John Hitchens, Kenneth Armitage and Rose Hilton. Sandy spoke to me from his London studio.

Sandy Mallett Interview

1:37Sandy, welcome to the podcast. Nice to see you. It's lovely to be here. You were born in Scotland, I believe. Yes, way up north in Caithness, on the very north coast of Scotland, the room I was born in had a view of the Orkney Island. That sounds very picturesque. And are you from a creative family at all? Yes, I mean, there's lots of writing and sort of collecting and painting. And both my father and my grandfather painted, although they weren't officially painters, and my mother and my

2:13grandmother were potters. And there's lots of sort of aesthetics and art in the family going back, certainly lots of writers and novelists. Going back a little bit further, there's Beatrix Potter who's in the family. And there are also sort of chemists and quite a lot of interesting people in the background, political journalists and those sorts of things. So writing and communications are definitely part of the family, yeah.

Art Education and Career

2:44And what about your art education? Did you go at all to art school? I didn't go to art school. There were lots of, there were arts people around. So I had an uncle who was a deputy director of the National Gallery, and he wrote a lot. And a cousin who was a teacher at the Courthold, and she was a great collector, and had a magnificent collection of modern British paintings. So that was sort of all around there. I wanted more from school to be a writer.

3:20And although I, in university, I went to UEA, Norwich, to do art history. It was a famous for its art history course at that time. And I caught it at an amazing time with some brilliant professors and lecturers there. I was very lucky. And I sort of did half modern and half sort of classic, the sort of 18th century and Renaissance stuff there. So that was a sort of background that launched me into wanting to be a writer initially. So I leapt at the chance to be,

3:56I sort of pushed myself to be a copywriter in advertising, which was the sort of classic thing to do initially. But I went, bounced from that, going to publishing, arts publishing, first of all. And then sort of gradually, I was pushed, pushed myself into the world of arts. Yeah.

Art Administration Career

4:18Right. Well, you spent a lot of your art career, if you like to call it that, in art administration, didn't you? You headed up a department at Sotheby's. What did you do there? I sort of created my own department there. It was about working with the top end of each of the departments. It was at a time when the departments were trying to grab the biggest collections in competition, sort of impressionists and furniture and old masters. And they were

4:49sort of competing against each other, Sotheby's and Christie's and Bonham. And I thought they were doing it in a slightly amateur way. So I went, I posited the idea of a special department that specialised in creating presentations and proposals, specifically for presenting to collectors and their professional advisors, the very best reasons why Sotheby's should win this business, gathering together sort of all the presentational skills and ideas and the

5:21best reasons. And the chairman bought the idea. And so I set up a department in Sotheby's for doing that. And it was very soon copied by Sotheby's, New York, and then by Christie's and then by the other auction houses. And today it's a vast department in all of the major auction houses. And it was about understanding the qualities of collections and working with the collectors themselves and working with each of the expert departments. So I learned enormous amounts about all of these expert departments, about silver, about furniture, about contemporary

5:56art, about old masters, about untouching the objects, working with the actual objects themselves. And I got taught by these experts who knew extraordinary ways into understanding objects. And it was an incredible education about looking and about finding the real qualities about how you understand objects, different kinds of objects. So it was all grist to your artistic mill. Yeah, it was. And I think there's a theme that runs through that early part of my career,

6:32and it was about communication. It was about turning these understandings into communicating to the collectors and to their advisors, just what it was that we could do as a company and turning expertise into strong language and things. Later, you worked for the modern British gallery, Jonathan Clarke, and briefly as gallery director at Messams in Cork Street. Yeah. What were the duties that you had to fulfill there?

7:06Well, it was about working on exhibitions, curating exhibitions, pulling together catalogues, finding out about what were the key interest areas of a particular artist's career or the particular oeuvre of an artist that were going to be fascinating or intellectually important about an artist's career. For instance, there were aspects of, as we may go on to talk about,

7:39Ivan Hitchin's career. There were parts of his work in the pre-war career when he was working in Suffolk that were little known and were sort of often disregarded, that were absolutely fascinating paintings, sort of 1930s paintings that were much underappreciated. And we had exhibitions about his work that rarely revealed the sort of lyric qualities, the sort of wonderful way, the sort of much more sort of relaxed way he was approaching

8:12paintings in the 1930s before he escaped London. And those revealed, they completely repackaged the idea of him presenting his art in these sort of broad canvases with wide brushstrokes and much brighter colours. And exhibitions of the work of Kenneth Armitage, who was widely known for his 1950s and early 60s sculptures, but not remotely known for the later work in the sort of 1960s and early 70s. So we looked strongly at his later work and revealed extraordinary facets to this later work,

8:48which feeds not only into the sort of the gallery world, but also into the academic appreciation of his and sort of rebalanced an appreciation of his work. So those were important exhibitions for understanding artists' careers and repositioning aspects of those artists' academic appreciation. But one of the jobs, obviously, for galleries, the main thing is to sell these works. Yeah. It's often said by younger artists trying to establish themselves that they complain that there's a clash

9:26between their artistic vision and the commercial viability. Did you ever come across that problem?

9:36I think with Messons, there were works sometimes that artists dealing with contemporary art. With Jonathan Clark, we were dealing with really major artists and a few contemporary artists we were working with as well. But luckily, those artists were producing works at the top of their career. I don't think we came across that problem. Sometimes with Messons, we were dealing with artists who had produced work at the height of their career. And then sometimes the later work towards the end of their careers was work

10:11that hadn't achieved the sort of prices they were achieving earlier on in their career. But I think you're then appealing to different people who perhaps might not have been able to pay the sort of prices for those artists at the top of their career and they're hunting for a different sort of work. And artists are bringing experience to those later works, even if not producing sort of dramatically powerful work at the height of their career.

Painting Career and Inspiration

10:43While you were doing all these jobs, were you painting as well? Yeah. At different times and different phases. Sometimes the work was really, really quite difficult and took up a lot of time. But there were different phases and I was exploring at different times ideas that were really coming at me like waves of fascination and appreciation. And I was doing small works, doing sketches, doing larger works. And there was a phase at Sotheby's

11:20where I was playing at home with ideas where paint was coming straight from the tube onto canvases. These were really thick, exciting paintings. And a few of my friends have got these works and they're interesting and difficult paintings. But I like them quite a lot. But they don't appear in public very much. So which ones did appear? Because you did exhibit at places like the Commonwealth Institute, didn't you? Yeah. Those are paintings where I had already entered a phase where I was quite seriously working

11:55on ideas that have formed a basis that still is fundamentally used in a lot of my paintings. And the start of those ideas was something that I called square dancing, my square dancing paintings. And that was based on the idea of going right back to a fundamental idea of the most basic thing an artist can do, which is the fundamental mark on a canvas, is dipping the brush in a piece of paint

12:28and stabbing it on a canvas and just making the artist's mark. And that's about recognizing the artist's action and the way a painting can tell you about the artist's moment of making. So I did a series of paintings quite early on. This is 2004, I think, was the first phase of these paintings. So you're just making a series of paintings where there's a stab of paint. In fact, layers and layers and layers of different versions and different colors of these stabs of paint all

13:02over these paintings and they're square dancing paintings. There's a whole series of these where you end up with a sort of vibrant buzz of stabs of different colors of paint. And it's about just making the artist's mark. And these developed and developed over a couple of years so that they became slightly more sophisticated and engaging, but always to do with that touching the canvas with a single brush mark. And all the way through my works, even the sort of more sophisticated

13:36versions of making the aerial paintings, whenever there's something that is to do with a moment of particular importance, like when I'm coming across an archaeological point of significance or a particular important location of a village or a person or a field or a tree, I will be making a particular stab of a stab of a mark. And that is not just a moment of paint that tells, that is a highlight in

14:12the painting to point something out. It's also a moment that tells the person looking at the painting that I am present as an artist. I have made an action, a point of action. It's a communication between the audience and the artist. So you began your aerial views in art when you moved to Dorset, didn't you, in the early part of this century. What gave you the idea in the first place?

14:45It was walking around. It was going to Dorset and then going for walks around Dorset, just within a few miles of where I had settled. I had a column in the ATG, the Antiques Gazette, the trade journal, and I had written an article in it saying, I really think it's time for me to move out of London. What I'd really like is a farmhouse deep in the heart of the country in Dorset surrounded by cows and miles from anywhere with a barn where I can paint. That would be

15:20lovely. And then within two weeks, I had an email back from someone saying, I think I've got what you want. And then within a couple of months, I was there and this guy rented me a farmhouse and I bought a Land Rover and I moved lock, stock and barrel down there. And it was absolutely brilliant. So there I was with my paints and I moved to paint and write down there. And so I started going on these walks and it was right next to Egerton Hill, this Iron Age fort,

15:53from the top of which you could see the sea. And within this sort of circumference of walks, I went on these sort of daily walks, marking out particular points of archaeological and geological interest. And then I was making paintings of these walks. But it was sort of common sense to treat them as maps because I was making a sort of mapped out journey and then just tracing my journeys and then marking out mapped out points of field systems and archaeological points of interest and

16:30those sorts of things. Yeah. I mean, what does aerial art, in particular, the ones you do of gardens and land, what do they say about the way that land has been used in the past?

16:47I think initially, I was tracing my own particular point of journey and my own vivid experience of that day's moment's walk. And I was keeping in mind my own visceral experience of it. But as I was sort of immediately progressing with those, I was researching those points that I was coming across. And that brought me right up against ideas of geology and archaeology. And within the expression of the paintings,

17:26there was immediately room for me to express ideas that were geologically time-based and looking at reference to things that were eons old. And I was then immediately thrust into ideas of mapping fields and then consequently ideas of field systems and the history of field systems. So I had a sense of seasons, but also

17:59historical seasons.

Historical Land Use and Enclosure

18:01But that brings in historical things like enclosure, doesn't it? Yes. I came across those sorts of ideas, or I willfully explored those sorts of ideas later on. So there were things that I explored later on to do with disappeared villages. So there were things to do with the idea of land and the development of land and disappeared and enclosures and the development of land, for instance, in the 18th and 19th century. And particularly from my position in

18:37Caithness and in North West Scotland and in Sutherland and the way that the population in the early 19th century was moved in North West Scotland. You mean the Highland Clearances? Yes. So I've made paintings about those. But I've also made paintings about disappeared villages. I mean, there's one in a daughter called Tynum, which was taken away by the army in the Second World War on the promise that it would be given back at the end of the war, and it still hasn't been given back. So there are things like that.

19:15And there's one in... So they're what, just abandoned buildings or...? Yeah. And it's used by the army today for exercises. Consequently, the environment in terms of butterflies and small mammals is beautifully untainted, except for bombshells and the noise of tanks and that sort of thing. And there are other villages on Salisbury Plain that were also supposed to have been given back at the end of the Second World War that are still claimed by the army. And there are other villages

19:51that I've made paintings about that were taken over for reservoir use and that were sunken and sort of drowned villages and those sorts of things. So I'm interested as well in the way that land has been taken away on short timescales, as well as populations being shifted away. I think Sutherland in North West Scotland is a particularly interesting example because before 1800, the North West Scotland

20:25was pretty populated and was quite an industrial area in terms of crofting and the amount of population there was. And when those people were driven off the land by the Duchess of Sutherland, the Duke Duchess of Sutherland at the end of the 18th century, early 19th century, to create what would be a romantic wilderness for their visitors coming up to see it, the sort of wilderness that has been shaped

21:00since the early 19th century up in Sutherland is exactly the sort of romantic wilderness that is now claimed to be a great, romantic, perfect wilderness. It's a complete false ideal that people look at and say, ah, that's the great wilderness of Scotland. But these things, it's a very, very typical example of just how man-managed nature is. And that is so true of the way that nature inevitably has been

21:40since, you know, for the past 5,000 years. Inevitably, the pollarding of the woodlands and the way that since field systems first arrived 3,500 BC, the way that the land has been inevitably managed by man. And indeed, the way we exploit minerals and so on. Exactly. Everything about, you cannot avoid man's impingement and management of nature. And I think,

22:13underlying my paintings. And when I do my commissions, they're always to do with working with clients about their own relationship with their land. On a grander scale, it's always about man's relationship with nature. Well, let's talk about those commissions, Sandy. How does it work? You are, in a sense, being asked to give a personal interpretation of the land and estate owned by various individuals.

Commissioned Paintings Process

22:50How does the commissioning process work? A lot of it is by word of mouth, and people sort of find me, and I prefer it that way. And when someone gets in touch, they say, I'd like to find out about having one of your paintings. And the first thing is really about size, whether they want something quite large, which can be about five foot high or five foot across, or maybe about two and a half foot wide is usually the sort of smaller size. So we get down to those sorts of brass tacks.

23:24And then I'll say, well, I'll come and visit you. That allows me to come and visit the land and the place. And that might be, sometimes I've done places in cities or in urban places, which might just be a garden. But most often it's someone's estate or it's a small farm or someone's, you know, it can be a 2,000 acre estate or something like that. So we'll sit at a table and we'll work out

23:56what the history of their relationship with the land is, and what they like about it, how they behave with it, whether they walk the land, what their favorite places are, what their interests are, whether it's sometimes people are into their sporting, their fishing, their shooting, and those sorts of things. How they use it, whether family uses it, whether they use it every day, and whether it's involving other people using it, and those sorts of things. And what the history of it is with their

24:30family, whether their grandfather dug a lake, and that's particularly important. Whether they're, you know, they wander around the garden. Is the garden important? What are the favorite plants? Are there colors involved? Did you plant this? Are these your favorite flowers? And all this sort of thing. What's the most important thing? What do you love about it? And then I'll encourage them to take me around the most important parts, and then I'll go for a wander. So it's a sort of personal tour, a personal visit, and a discussion like that. And then there's

25:08as many research tools as I can find. So sometimes historic maps are very good. They'll be sort of as old as old as I can get with ordnance survey maps, and then new maps. Google Earth is a very handy thing. And I can zoom in and find out about those sorts of things. And then sometimes drones, especially if it's a large place, and we can sort of zoom around a bit. And then I will take,

25:38in some circumstances, I'll take soil samples for colors of the earth from different places, just because the mineral qualities are important, especially if someone's into the geology of it or the history of it. And with some places, the field systems might mean that the field sizes in one area are quite small and might have sheep or particular other animals involved in it. And those animals

26:08might be quite important. And in another area, it might rise quite high up and involve different sorts of minerals or rocks and those sorts. And those rocks might be important. Those minerals might be quite important. In the past, I haven't done it with these commissions, but I've involved those actual minerals, those actual things in paintings. When I was in Dorset, I'm using the cow dung on the farm in the actual paint. I've made paint out of cow dung to be in the painting.

26:41That really is personalizing it, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. I mean, you mentioned the minerals and cow dung, and that influences the color. I'm interested in how you represent things in terms of color. I mean, for example, you've done one of Langerbride, which has had a dominant red. Blickling has a dominant purple. Hestakum, a dominant green. What's determining those colors? There's a counterintuitivity about this, because there's a point at which I will gather the material,

27:18all the information and the material together in my mind and in the studio here, at which everything is packed full of information. And I will bring it to mind and to the tables here. And I know in my mind and logically and informatively, and on the canvas, everything will be, there'll be sketches on paper and even to the point of laying ideas out on the canvas. And there will be a point at which

27:54that needs to be jettisoned, because there's a point at which the painting needs to become a painting. And I need to almost rid myself of logic, information, and everything like that, in the knowledge that it's all there.

28:17But it switches to become intuition, so that it can inform me, but without my finding it, going to find it. So that enough of it is somewhere within me, and enough of it has laid down the guide tracks. So the format is enough there. And knowing that that is done, then I willfully discard

28:49my reaching for it, so that colour values then become overridden. So that the painting then responds to itself, so that an initial aspect of painting can be done. But by the time I'm actually in a process of painting, then the painting is responding to itself. So if I'm laying down a colour here, that will cause me to respond by laying down another colour there,

29:19which might be me responding to change a shape over here, and to lay down another colour here. That is the painting working with itself, and me responding to the painting itself. So the painting is then telling me how to paint it. That becomes me working with the painting. Then I'm painting. And that's nothing to do with anything else. That's me starting to paint. You mentioned before that you've written books on Ivan Hitchens, who had an abstracted

29:52vision of the landscape, didn't he? And he used blocks of colours like you do. His son, John, he actually still, I think, represents plough lines and harvest lines. Yes. Do any of these influences come back on you? I don't. In that process that I've just outlined, that's not something I have formulated. It's just something that I've inevitably found as being the only way that I need to release myself

30:24to get into a moment. When I was working in Dorset, in my barn, I didn't wear a watch, and I knew, I had the faintest idea what time it was. There were times when I thought it was two o'clock in the afternoon, and it was a ten at night, almost. I just, there was an absolute zone of being able to paint like that. And you get into a moment of a zone of being able to paint, and that was it. And I can do that almost here. You know that now I'm painting, and you're just doing it, you're doing it, you're doing it. And it's a deep, deep pleasure, but you're in a totally

30:58nervous situation, and it's wonderful. And you can, the point is, you can, you can take decisions, not by deciding, but by instinct. If you were taking it in a decisive way, you would be able to say, no, that's too brave, that's too silly. But if you're in a proper painting mode, you would do it anyway, because by instinct, you would trust yourself, because that is the way that you do things. So if you say, oh no, don't be ridiculous, you couldn't possibly do that, because it's too

31:30strong a colour. Or you would, no, you can't do that, because you're destroying the bit that you've just spent ages doing. But no, you just do it, because you know that you're in the mode. You know that you're doing it, because you're doing, you're doing, you're doing, you're doing. It's interesting hearing you describe that process, because as you say, you've done all that research, you've looked into the history, the field systems, anything of archaeological interest, bringing in the personal details from the families that the land is owned by. And you have all this

32:06stored information, but suddenly your artistic sense, that feeling that you've got to put a stab of paint here, it is kind of, in a way, it's kind of fighting the other, isn't it? Yeah, but I think, you trust that the information that you've got is knocking around with its guidelines. And I've done so many of these that actually it works. All I can do is I can say that actually, because there are lots and lots of these decisions, not decisions, but changes that you make,

32:42and it's a sense of progression. And it's about achieving harmonies. Because what you're saying is, I know that I want a blue here, I want a sense of lines of blues here, and reds here. But no, that's a bit too obvious. Let's take that one away, and we'll have a white, a few dotted whites or whatever. It's lines of harmonies that themselves suggest, but don't describe the rivulet that comes

33:16off a river, or a set of barns that suggest the other set of barns over here. You know that those might suggest those things. They link up with the things that are happening, but they are also to do with colour harmonies that are in your mind, that are making up the harmonies in the pictures. But there are layers and layers and layers of reasons why you're doing it. And they're in your mind. But while you're doing it, you're thinking of other things as well. Having studied other artists

33:54doing these things, and studying other paintings and how they're made, there are so many different ways of how artists making painted. Ivan Hitchens, his great bold streaks of paint are made in a very studied way. He prepared very carefully those big, bold streaks. Whereas John Hitchens spends all day just thinking about how to make creative compositions out of everything, out of the little bits of carrot

34:29peeling windowsill and out of the cutlery left in his drawer. He's constantly making creative things out of everything that he sees. And he never stops. All day, he's making creative things out of everything. Ivan's not like that at all. Ivan is preparing to make a painting, and he's very, very careful. There are very different sorts of creativity. And if you're looking at someone like Roger Hilton, he's very visceral, how he's putting the plasticity of the painting or the crayon or the

35:10paint on, it's very matters to him, the plasticity of the physicality of the paint, that he's so concerned about the suggestion of what the image might be. And hovering between, ooh, that brilliant suggestion about whether this curve of the edge of a boat might also be abreast. And trying to hover between, I say it's a boat, but if it's abreast, then that tells you something about you.

35:45And all this sort of clever psychology about, you know, it's such a brilliant sort of suggestion about you as an audience finding out more about you when you're looking at one of my paintings and all this sort of thing about that. And how you hover between these suggestions about the image and the line, that line I'm putting down. All these different ways about what you're doing when you're making on those things. I find my thing is pumping a lot of information in and then dumping it and

36:21being as intuitively to do with color balance. It's got a lot of color balance, but knowing that there's something else behind. But it's very different to other people. Well, everyone has its own way of doing things. Sandy, that's been fascinating listening to you. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, it's lovely. I don't know about myself until I talk.

36:48Sandy Mallett there, giving us a good insight into his painting process. Thanks for listening. Join me, Bob Chaundee, again next week. Bye.

37:07Bye.

37:20Bye. Bye. Bye.