Your illustrations are vibrant and rich with colour, have you always had a natural eye for balancing opposing colours or is this a skill you’ve developed over time?
Actually I’ve always felt unsure about my sense of colour. Even to the extent that, for a while, I would only work monochromatic. But then I slowly started to reintroduce colour – a bit here and a bit there – and I’m feeling slightly more confident about it now. Back in university one of my teachers made fun of me by saying that my paintings were sort of ok given that I only ever used two pigments. Maybe this made me push my use of colour more. It’s a struggle, but one that I certainly enjoy!
Your work is charged with political themes and figures: can you expand upon the way it reflects your personal political feelings, both inside and outside of your artistic practice?
The field of politics, it seems to me, has an aspect of grand mythical drama. John Howe once said that he did fantasy art because fantasy is the stage upon which mankind has always fought its battles of good and evil. To me this is also true for politics. It is for the same reason that I like to play with allusions to religious themes and motives. My personal political beliefs are somewhat stitched together and keep changing, but in general I think that politics is an important way for human beings to make sense of the world. The everlasting quest for the Truth with a capital ‘T’ – this is exciting stuff!
Where would you like to be in 5 years time if you were free of all limitations?
I guess I would like to do my own books. I would also love to do lots of work for the music industry like album covers and gig posters. And I would like to have a studio that is large enough to do some really large scale paintings that would be something like 5×3 meters. And it would be on the moon (to get the most out of the ‘free of all limitations’ bit).
You clearly have a wonderful ability to create enticing textures and marks, what are your favourite methods of production?
Thank you for saying this! My favourite material is oil paint. Oils are extremely versatile and you can use them with all sorts of tools, which helps in achieving interesting textures. They also have a beautiful surface feel once they are dry. Lately I’ve also become very interested in gouache and charcoals and I combine them with the oils. What I do a lot is lay down flat colour and then lift off or rub out light areas. Working from dark to light is much easier for me than working the other way around.
When living and working in Basel, do you have any places of inspiration that our London readers should check out if they visit Switzerland?
In Basel when you are north of the river Rhine and look south at the row of old houses that are built right by the water and form a kind of man-made cliff it creates a most wonderful mediaeval feeling. If you like mountains then you should go to Zermatt and check out the Matterhorn. It is the most intimidating mountain I’ve ever seen and I can only marvel at the fact that people have actually climbed it.
