In Re: Found, Rupert Travis reimagines observations and moments captured on camera during his travels, transforming them into painted dreamscapes. Ahead of this exhibition Rupert Travis spoke with City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston. Re: Found opens 5.30pm Tuesday 10th September and runs through to the 30th of September 2024 at City Art Depot.
Moving Tides, Rupert Travis, oil on canvas, 300x240mm, 2024
Cameron Ralston: Did you paint these while overseas?
Rupert Travis: I did. I was overseas in total for a year and in the south of France for about ten months where I had the studio space I shared with Lucia [Sidonio] for eight months. That’s where all these works were painted.
Are your paintings scenes of France?
Not all of them. They’re a kind of merger of past trips I went on when I was younger. This most recent trip overseas, however, was the first time I stayed situated in a single location. The work is a bit of a journey through understanding how our perception or perspective of things change circumstantially. For example, considering the things you choose to photograph as a tourist in contrast to living somewhere day-to-day, or revisiting past images and trying to understand what your mindset was at the time you took it.
Your perception changes with age too.
You’re a different person. I think even more importantly is you forget the context around some of the images. You forget why you photographed them. But in sorting through and curating them, you start to pick out commonalities within them.
So are these paintings based off photographs? Or are they memories you have?
They’re reimagined forms of the photographs. The work is based off a photograph and then pulled into a dreamscape version of it. It is a combination of the source material and trying to understand and translate why I initially photographed it, the mood that might have initially sparked me to stop and even look at it.
With Europe being so far away, I think there’s still an element of fantasy when we think about travel.
Yeah. But I sometimes feel things have become less magical. I’m not sure if this is due to having since done a bit of travel and becoming familiar with the unfamiliar, or if globalisation and the internet have taken away the surprise element of travel.
I remember when I first went overseas, I went to Singapore. This was before Amazon and I remember being so engrossed by just the array of things you could buy or had access to. I don’t think there’s that engagement around retail anymore because you can get anything you want within a week now. The things that engage me now are the buildings and general culture, but I find even these shift from an oddity to the everyday when you’re living within them.
Does it become ordinary?
Familiar.
From Here To Sunday, Rupert Travis, oil on linen, 700x850mm, 2024
When things are new to you do you think you see things that local artists or people wouldn’t pick up on? Elements from these places that you pull out?
I think so. What’s funny about looking back on old photos is the ones that are most interesting are often these small things that the locals would probably pass by without even thinking. For my Master’s show, I did a series of work based on structures and forms that you might see a tourist looking at but, as a New Zealander, you would just pass by. Utilitarian buildings that blend into a familiar background for locals. I think it’s what you do as a traveler, you see something like a fountain or an old building that takes your interest because it’s something you’ve never seen before. For instance, the telephone boxes of London, which have become a bit of a tourist trope, but it’s something that is so ordinary to England and so interesting to the rest of the world.
I like the idea of painting the ordinary. Andrew Cranston refers to it as painting the anti-hero. For instance, Van Gogh’s painting of shoes. There’s something quite interesting about when you just paint what you see. But it’s how you perceive it, how you reimagine it.
Yeah, you’re not just it’s not presenting a shoe, or a chair. There’s more to it.
Exactly. It’s the context around it. With Van Gogh’s shoes, it was the idea that there’s a story behind them. I think sometimes less is more when creating a scene or a mood. For example, I love the idea of an empty chair. There is a suggestion of presence. David Hockney talked about how he did a picture of three chairs and only two of them had figures. But he said it was a picture of three figures because the chair represented the third figure that wasn’t there. Sometimes interest can be in what has been or is going to be.
Is storytelling, narrative building, an important part of your painting practice?
I enjoy narrative within work. But I think I’m still more interested in the painting as an object. When it comes to narrative, I prefer to leave it fairly ambiguous and open. I’m more interested in how deep the reading of the work can go than trying to tell anyone what the story of the work is. I think that kind of openness can create interest because it changes depending on who you are and what your background it. People can interpret and experience things differently.
I’m interested to know more about how the context of being overseas and painting there influenced the work.
For me it was being removed from what I’m used to here. There’s a confused feeling of being isolated from people you know, but at the same time connected to the rest of the world. Placing yourself in a different environment affects how you go back and reassociate yourself with ideas, thoughts and feelings you might have had. You begin to reinterpret them.
I also think we’re influenced more than we’re aware from those around us. Every decision we make is subconsciously guided by a friend or a loved one. In removing yourself from that, everything becomes very much your own narrative.
There’s a biographical element to the artworks. They’re moments of your life and your interpretation of these places.
I think so. When I went to Brussels in 2015, I visited an exhibition at the Comic Book Museum. The artist they were showing at the time, I forget what his name is, said while he was studying Fine Arts, a lecturer told him that there’s no one way to paint a nose. I think that’s very interesting, because in painting a picture, there’s always going to be the mark of the artist within it. It’s the artist’s interpretation. You can change an empty room to be quite a happy place, or you can change an empty room to be a quiet and lonely place, depending on how it is painted. And when you go back on your own past and you start to look at threads throughout your life, it becomes very biographical.
Below The Surface, Rupert Travis, oil on canvas (framed), 330x278mm, 2024
What do you find when you look back on yourself? Are there common threads that you see?
I’ve found the things that always interest me are kind of sad or quieter scenes. I was never engaged by a crowd. I was more interested in what was happening elsewhere. Strange things like crabs being tied up, waiting to be someone’s food. I remember wondering if they knew what was coming to them, if they knew what the future held? Smaller questions I suppose.
Quite contemplative things?
Yeah, the intricate clockwork of the world that often gets overshadowed by noise and business.
Art is a good vehicle for highlighting those moments and escaping the often over-saturated world around us. I’m sure you probably found that when you travel being over-saturated happens all the time.
Being over-saturated and almost directed to what you should be seeing. Although a place becomes popular for a reason – its buildings and culture etc. – sometimes it’s nice just observing the way people live. People watching. Even watching the speed in which people walk. You go to London and everyone’s always in a rush to get somewhere, and then you’ll go somewhere else, and they will be slower. All these things add up to your understanding of a place.
A photograph in a way is already a framed, composed and finished piece. Were there challenges in translating from a camera to the painting? Are the works influenced by photography?
Robin Neate, one of my lecturers, always asked why paint from a photo if the photo already exists. If the photo is magnificent, chances are it’ll always outshine the painting. The idea, at least that I work on, is to take a photo that perhaps doesn’t have the most interesting colour or composition. Take one aspect of it and build on that. When I’m looking through images, I’m looking for that detachment aspect. When it holds too many memories for me, I find myself often getting lost in trying to capture how I remember it. I prefer to have little connection to the source material which allows me to rediscover it through the process of painting. It becomes a merger of the real with the imagined. A dreamscape of sorts.
Plant Collector, Rupert Travis, oil on canvas, 355x300mm, 2024
A lot of painters have an intense attachment to the medium they use. That’s almost spiritual for some people. What’s the importance of the way you describe a subject or object with paint? What makes a painting identifiably yours?
I’m interested in the idea of how a painting varies when you see it from a distance and up close. They’re two very different things. Whenever I’m painting a work, I’m always trying to find a balance between the two. Where your eye starts to drift through colours and different textures. I also think hue has a lot of spirituality attached to it. There’s a lot of psychological emotion connected to whether something is red, yellow or blue… What’s interesting about being a painter is you’re taking pigment and you’re creating a mood that is your decision to create. I think there’s also a lot of calculation and problem solving involved in painting which isn’t necessarily spiritual.
In 2023 you referred to your artworks as ‘faded imprints’ – imprints or impressions of memories or ideas which you’re translating.
I think they’re imprints of a time. Small postcards that you might have sent when you were younger. As you look at any artist’s collection of work, you can almost start to read a biography of the artist through their work and how it has shifted over time.
Your paintings have a great relationship between quite geometric forms, a softness of line, and a murky quality to the colours.
I used to refer to it as a muddied palette. I quite like reusing the same containers to mix colour. This results in a muted cohesion between the colours, regardless of whether I jump from yellows to blues or to reds. I’ve also found that by toning the colour and contrast down, I can look at the work for longer as my eyes slowly adjust and begin to discover things. It’s quite mediative. I think the geometric shapes are more subconscious.
Perhaps it’s natural balancing that you’re doing?
Yeah, possibly a grounding method. For example, a horizon line tells you where you’re viewing the subject from. It acts as an anchor to where everything else sits.
After Class, Rupert Travis, oil on canvas, 1250x1550mm, 2024
Tell me about After Class. The figures in this piece feel quite defined compared to other works.
That work comes from a photo taken in India. I was having lunch in a rooftop restaurant and there was a group sitting on the rooftop over from me but at the same level. It’s an image I’ve always wanted to paint. It’s posed and theatrical but also very quiet. There’s a shyness to the scene.
Do you think there’s an element of documentary to your work?
I think so. Not necessarily because of the scene or the mood being depicted, but the process of ending up there. Why we’re drawn to certain things and not to others, and how our environment changes our views over time.
City Art Reader #74 is the 50th artist interview conducted by the City Art Reader. We’d like to thank all the artists for generously sharing thier thoughts and time. Thank you also to our readers and everyone who has come into our City Art Depot gallery.
