GOLD
The story behind an anti-monument
After some years of reflection on my body of work, I thought it would be good to revisit one of my personal favourite artworks and speak about the story of this artwork and about the history of my process. Gold (2017) was an artwork that brought together many of the concepts in my search for meaning in colour.
Continues below
Stratachrome
When the opportunity to exhibit at Wood Street Galleries came along, I had already been thinking for several years about colour and its contemporary symbolism.
I had already developed my layering work and had made a series of major installations I called Stratachromes, a word I coined from the Latin strata, meaning layers, and the Greek chroma, meaning colour. It helped me position colour as something existing through depth, pushing the possibilities of monochrome painting beyond a single surface.
After creating Stratachrome, Red and Blue, I wanted to work with yellow and its contemporary symbolism. For a long time, I couldn’t find a subject I felt strongly about. The change came when I began to think of the colour as gold.
The paint could still be yellow, but now the colour could refer to wealth, prestige and power. That gave me a much more interesting concept to develop.
The power of an icon
I started the piece by considering what I wanted people to experience and what I wanted to communicate. It was important to me that the work function with the power of an icon and be seductive, yet at the same time make people question it. The artwork had to be monumental and something worthy of public attention. A sense of grandeur would also make the values it represented seem established and important.
After researching the history of yellow and gold and their symbolism, often tied to worship and the sun, I was drawn more to the idea of the immaterial nature of colour. Gold can be traded without the physical metal changing hands, so in this sense it can become as much an idea as an actual material. The artwork became, among other things, about power and wealth.
I was drawn to the pediment on the façade of the New York Stock Exchange, the group of figures designed by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward. Its title, Integrity Protecting the Works of Man, describes a beautiful scene with figures symbolising various aspects of industry. The central female allegory is Integrity. In Gold, I reimagined the central role as Mercury, the god of commerce. It is a powerful artwork in one of the most significant centres for trade in the world.
Pittura infamante
The triangular shape of the pediment recalled the global wealth pyramid for me. What would happen to its meaning if I flipped it all upside down? Back in the Renaissance there was a practice called pittura infamante, a way of publicly depicting disgraced or condemned figures, sometimes upside down. It was a way of disgracing them through an iconoclastic gesture. The symbolic force of inversion still persists today. Here, for me, was the real identity of the concept for Gold. The inverted bodies would connect with pittura infamante and create meaning, while the artwork became a form of protest. Not only did the figures gain an inversion of meaning, but the triangular pediment also became a downward arrow, the symbol of the global wealth pyramid turned on its head.
Gold was not the first time I had used an inverted image in my work. Early works such as The Paradox of Power presented a flipped bull, and in Stratachrome we see a military uniform upside down. The downward arrow in commerce suggests falling value. This was a work about the present and the idea of a new gilded age, where extraordinary wealth and its display are concentrated among very few.
Gold without gold
The figures were painted in yellow, not gold. In fact, gold paint would have looked muddy in comparison. The work implies gold, and that is what matters. I was interested in how an artwork could seem precious and imposing without being made of precious metal. Yves Klein’s exploration of immateriality and the symbolic value of gold also influenced my thinking. I was interested in how something so materially precious could become associated with something intangible. In Gold, I wanted to explore this relationship through colour, creating the appearance of a precious substance without the substance itself.
I wanted the figures to have the presence of a monument, yet appear almost immaterial, as though the monument were there and not there at the same time. For me, this makes Gold an anti-monument: it overturns symbols of power while questioning the solidity and permanence through which monuments claim authority.
London, 1999
My experiments with layering began while I was studying at Central Saint Martins in London. One day, at the National Gallery, I watched someone painting a beautiful copy of a Rembrandt. It was so accomplished and so close to the original that it made me wonder what I could contribute as a painter. If someone could master traditional painting so completely, where could painting go next? I was interested in finding a direction beyond the idea of art continually referring back to itself.
I knew I could paint in a traditional way if I chose to. I had even made some of my own copies of Old Masters to learn their techniques. I still love painters such as Rembrandt and Van Dyck. But as a contemporary artist, I wanted to find a direction of my own, something that might extend what painting could be rather than simply repeat what had already been achieved.
Years earlier, when I was a teenager, some of my nature paintings had been published as prints. Through that process I became familiar with CMYK printing, where an image is separated into cyan, magenta, yellow and black components before being brought together again in the final print.
While studying at Central Saint Martins in London in 1999, at the age of 21, that earlier experience helped me think about an image as separate parts. Painters had always constructed images through layers of paint, but I began to wonder what would happen if those layers were physically separated through space.
There was a red pepper in the fridge, so I used it for my first experiment. I sliced it into sections, photographed each slice and printed the photographs onto transparent film. I then cut out the images and attached them to a sequence of plexiglass sheets, reconstructing the pepper through its separate parts. It was a small study, but I immediately felt that the idea had much larger possibilities. For me, it was almost like discovering another form of perspective, a way of constructing form in space that did not have to remain on a flat surface. View Red Pepper Study
Soon afterwards, I pulled out an airbrush that my parents had bought me years earlier and began experimenting with painting directly onto transparent sheets. Clouds and other atmospheric phenomena became some of my first subjects because they already seemed to exist somewhere between material and immaterial form. Unlike the pepper, there was no solid object to slice apart. I had to learn how to invent the layers myself, deciding where paint should appear, how opaque it should be, and how separate marks could gather into a form when seen through one another. It worked a bit like animation, moving back and forth between the cels to create the form.
The years that followed took this idea in many directions. The technique itself was never the final subject. Perception, the thresholds of form and space, surveillance, colour, time, movement, transparency and power became my subjects.
Colour also became increasingly important. Through works such as Stratachrome, Red and Blue, I began to think about colour not simply as something applied to an object, but as something that could itself become the object and the subject, something that could occupy space and carry cultural and symbolic meaning. By the time I began thinking about Gold, these different strands of my work had been developing for nearly two decades. Gold became an opportunity to bring many of them together in a single work.
Making Gold
The first pencil drawings helped me work out the composition. I then 3D modelled the framework and the positions of the layers digitally, to help measure the actual materials at full scale.
I was working with a very limited budget, so I went to a scrapyard and sourced metallic gold finished material for the framework and lightboxes.
At various stores, I selected the perfect yellow paint, lights, yellow lighting filters and all the other materials I would need. The impression of gold would depend on these things working together. I set up the studio to work on one part at a time and rearranged it for the next part.
My family
My whole family helps with my art. For Gold, they even posed for the figures. We used a special room with 50 cameras at director Neill Blomkamp’s studio, where my brother Ian was working at the time, to photograph each person from around the body at the same time. Those photographs were then turned into a 3D digital scan.
My mum posed for Mercury in my work. My wife and my brother Ian posed for other figures, I used myself for the side figures, and my nephew posed for the children. Fortunately for me, Ian is a world renowned 3D character artist, so he was able to clean up the 3D scans of the models and helped arrange them in sequence.
A body becomes a sequence of images
Once the figures were arranged, I cross sectioned them, dividing the composition into seven sections, each 24 layers deep, a total of 168 separate images that I would later have to paint.
The cross sections gave me the general outline of the figures and where I would have to paint. I still had to work out in my mind how to paint the details and shading so that the layers would form convincing bodies together. This came through my understanding of layering over the years, of what works and what doesn’t. It is more of an artistic process than a technical one, and I’m never sure what the piece will look like until it is installed on site.
Drawing
I projected the section images onto black craft paper and drew them at full scale using different colours of pencil crayon to represent each topographical layer, so that I could see the topography of the layers before and after the one I was painting. These drawings became guides beneath the transparent film.
168 images, painted by hand
The painting process is extremely long and laborious. I don’t think anyone really knows how much goes into this part. The amount of surface area is phenomenal. Imagine every sheet laid out side by side and stacked on one another; it would cover half a huge building. For perspective, it is basically 24 times the surface area of the face of the artwork. Each sheet was laid over the topographical drawing and cleaned on both sides with cloth and cleaning solution. I painted each image, dried it, cleaned it again, cut away the lower angles, numbered it, added the grommets for support and then rolled it up.
The painting was done with an airbrush, and I used many techniques to achieve different results. I spent a great deal of time thinking about how the images would look all together in space. It is a completely different way of working than on a single surface. It is painting through space.
After the painting, with my Dad helping, we completed all the metalwork and electrical work, then even built crates to send everything dismantled to Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh
I flew to Pittsburgh with my Dad to install it. With the gallery staff, we painted the walls black, assembled and suspended the framework, set up the lighting, then unrolled and attached the sheets in sequence. We used laser levels and made sure it was all perfect. My Dad was there working with me. He had been so much help.
Seeing it together
Walking into the completed installation was a powerful experience. After so much time spent on separate sheets, measurements and painted details, I could finally see how they worked together. The work had the iconic presence I had hoped for, illuminating the whole room with this beautiful glow. For me, it was like seeing the artwork for the first time.
20 January 2017
Gold opened with uncanny timing on the day of the presidential inauguration. Pittsburgh’s downtown is known as the Golden Triangle, a name that refers to its triangular geography and its long association with the city’s commercial centre. Its context in time and place gave the artwork additional meaning. The work was suddenly charged by a very important public moment.
In its own way, Gold was my statement at that moment.
The idea of a gilded age felt very present.
David Spriggs
