Julian Opie interviewed about his work by Life Weekly magazine.
Q: We all know the distinctive and recognisable visual language of yours. How was it born in the beginning? Did it happen suddenly for you or was it more after an exploration process?
A: I think like all artists, yes, it’s a long exploration process. I’ve been making artwork since I was young and professionally since about 1983. But even before then, when I was a teenager, I was drawing and painting every day. One work comes out of another and it’s a process, a journey. Any work you see now is the product of many works in the past, and I hope to continue that journey of developing ideas. But if I look back, I was already making drawings of faces with shadows when I was maybe 15, I was making landscapes on the wall when I was 17. You find that your ideas circle around what inspires and interests you.
Q: When did your work start to focus more on the heads with the circles and things like that?
A: The circular heads are something that I’ve used a lot – it’s a very useful technique. It’s taken from graphics and symbols in the world, for instance the lavatory symbols for ‘man’ and ‘woman’ use a circle for the head because it’s a very quick, easy, and understandable solution to depict a man and a woman almost as a word, like a universal language. I think drawing is a universal language, for example if you’re hungry, or you want to buy a beer, or you want directions, you can describe this with drawings to anybody. It’s that kind of approach to art that I’ve always been interested in. The circular heads are part of my language, but borrowed from the world – I don’t develop my own language, I just look around.
Q: Is it true that there is a connection between your work and ‘The Adventures of Tintin’?
A: Yes, I grew up with Hergé’s ‘Adventures of Tintin’ and they were a great influence on me. I love his sense of colour and his sense of line and the sense of narrative within his drawings. He turns drawings into language so that you read it like a book. It’s very engaging and really takes you into that world by using the combination of drawings, story and language, and that really fired my imagination – I was a great fan. Now that I'm older, I'm still interested in the way he draws, but I also see that he himself was influenced by artists like Hiroshige and Utamaro, and probably also Fernand Léger and Picasso. Artistic language has a rich history and story of one generation learning from another generation, so I’ve definitely been influenced by Hergé. At the moment, I would say Hiroshige is quite a big influence for my landscapes, but there's also a lot of influence from Egyptian and Roman art. A lot of the time I look at ancient art and learn a lot from there, and I think you can see that influence if you look twice at my work.
Q: Is that visual language specific to you? Would you say it’s your identity?
A: I grew up in the 80s, and people were really rebelling against the idea of developing a style. It was thought that each artist had a ‘style’ – it might be minimalist, it might be impressionist, etc. As a postmodern generation in the 80s, we wanted to break away from this idea of ‘developing a style’. We wanted to use style in the same way you use colour, and this postmodern idea that you can mix everything up, instead of staying strictly within abstraction and minimalism, which was more like the generation before us. We felt we continued to be this way, but we also borrowed styles and used them. For example, I was borrowing 1950s advertising style, I was borrowing from ‘Tintin’ and things like that – mixing them up and throwing them out in different ways. So now my work has a very particular look and mood which is just me and the way I feel. I don’t know how other people feel, except maybe for other artists because you can see how they feel by what they produce. If you listen to Bach, you can imagine that the inside of his head must look quite like the music he makes. Making art is a lot about trying to express how the world feels to you, and how you share that with other people.
Q: This purified and redactive style, is that just aesthetic expression or is there a deeper philosophical vision behind it? For example, your view of the world?
A: That’s a big question and difficult to answer quickly, but I’d like to think that it has some depth. I don’t set out trying to have depth, I think that would be a mistake. I set out to describe the world and how it feels to me – to engage with the things that interest me. If I see something in the world that captures my attention or feels rich, then I look at it, draw it, photograph it, and make work about it. I try to understand the world by drawing and making art. That is my way of living, my way of processing. I don't have a message for people, I'm not a politician or a religious leader. I individually approach things that interest me and have fun with it. For example, when I’m driving at night and I see cars coming past me and the way their lights are forming, I know I can barely see anything, but my brain is understanding the landscape in the dark just from these little lights. That’s somehow a very rich and dreamlike experience. So then I started to make a film (like the one behind us) where in fact it’s just black, there isn’t anything there only lights moving, but your brain is filling in the sky, the land, the surface of the road, the cars as they come towards you, but in fact they’re just lights, just a drawing.
Q: So maybe not a message, but there is a mood, no?
A: Yes, there’s a mood, there’s a way of understanding and sharing my impressions of the world – my attempt to describe how it feels to be alive. We think we communicate a lot: I have Google Translate on my phone, we can write, read and talk, but in fact, to really communicate what it’s like to be alive and what it’s like to be inside our individual selves is quite complicated and it’s difficult to get anything real out. One way is maybe to make music, and another way is to engage with drawing the world. Not just drawing as in pencil and paper, but drawing in the bigger sense: gathering, processing, forming, making. I gather information, images, and also different ways of making – tapestry, LED, LCD, mosaic, 3D printing, inkjet printing, vinyl. Many different methods all taken from the world and things I’ve seen on the street, in museums, etc. I try to bring all those elements together and cook a meal, so to speak. You buy things from the market and bring them to the kitchen, you chop and throw them in the pot and you try to make a good meal from it. It’s more like an experiment – It’s not that I know what to do, I don’t. I just have fun and I cook.
Q: There is a joyful feeling in your work, and it’s quite pure in the sense that there is only what you need and no excess. Everything is necessary, and that’s not an easy process: to redact to this degree.
A: That’s true, you can see it in that way. I also see it in the way that as an artist, you need to have a kind of logic; a reason for everything. I start with: ‘we have a gallery’. And then: ‘we have an audience’. So, what can I present? What can I produce? Will it be on the floor, on the wall? If it’s on the floor it must stand up. How do you make it stand up? It has to then have a wide base, it must be made of something that can survive. If it’s on the wall, it needs to hang somehow, and you need to be able to see something on it. I take these steps, and I have to understand each step and not make rash or lazy decisions – I don’t understand that. You can make art with anything: a camera, 3D printing, anything you want, there’s no limit. You can do it, I can do it, anybody can make something impressive. That’s no longer enough for me to be interesting. So, over the years, I always try to take little steps that I understand. It’s not so much that I’m taking reality and simplifying it, but rather that I’m taking nothing and slowly building something a little complicated – some of my images have many people, many colours, different surfaces, the materials are gathered from around the world. There’s a certain complexity there. But there’s also a simplicity around the work. They’re not highly detailed or messy, there’s a cleanliness to them but I wouldn't like them to feel childish in thea bad sense. I’d like them to feel childish in the good sense. In the sense that your eyes are open, without preconception. Children don't have all that information already given, they see what we’d like to think is fresh. They react in an honest way to a situation: if they’re hungry, they’ll say “I’m hungry”. If they don’t like your jacket, they’ll say “I don’t like your jacket”. They don’t think “she’ll be upset,” because they don’t care, they don't think about that or have that information. That’s a fresh approach that I like.
Q: Maybe the works have that simplicity because you think very carefully and clearly about what you want to present?
A: To be honest, I don’t think about those things. Only when I’m doing interviews and people ask me. Normally I don’t really talk about art – I don’t particularly talk about it with my friends and family, I just do it. I do think about art, and what I’m going to do in a more technical sense; every now and then I sit back and think, ‘what am I doing? What do I want to do next?’ But mostly I'm just engaged in moving onto the next project. I have a long list of things I want to produce. I won’t make them all but I try my best. I make a lot of work, so normally I don’t try to sit and think it through, I think whilst making. I don’t think first and then translate that into art. I think, maybe in the same way a guitarist will think of a song through listening, trying, playing, back and forth. It’s not like you think of a whole tune in your head and you write it down. Maybe some people work that way, but I’m not like that, I’m more of an experimenter. I work intuitively and mostly do a lot of trial and error. I have many assistants, between ten and fifteen, and when I have an idea, I talk to them and we develop the idea and how to do it. I give them drawings and directions and we start a process. It can take one year, two years to find a solution. We have to try different materials, different scales, until it feels perfect to me. It can be a simple object in a way, but it’s a question of going from nothing to a complex outcome.
Q: Some of these nighttime works feel less realistic, like an ideal world. For me it’s a bit like paradise.
A: It’s all the same process, if you look closely it looks the same. Some works are just much bigger. Sometimes I really go for it and we put everything in, there’s a lot of different things going on and it’s very full. But sometimes there are just a few lines of colour to depict landscapes and many birds flying across. But they’re not really birds, they’re just tiny flickering animations taken from reality, and then the computer brings them across the screen again and again. So these works might feel more simple, but in a way it’s all the same level of realistic. In the evening, the world becomes quite abstract. I like the evening and the night, because the world becomes quite simple, quite imagined. Your brain fills in the rest of the information.
Q: Will you ever exhibit older work?
A: I like exhibiting new work, less so with old work. Maybe one day, when I’m older. But for me, making an exhibition is not to make money, or to make myself more well known, it’s part of the process of making art. I make art in my head, on a computer, through videos, in factories, and then in galleries. It’s all part of the same thing: putting the works carefully on the wall and moving things around, getting the height and lighting right. That’s all part of making art, it’s not separate. The whole exhibition becomes one ‘group’ artwork. Sometimes I even paint the work directly on the wall, so they wouldn’t have even physically existed before the exhibition. Things are often made on sight.
Q: It seems like several years ago you exhibited some similar landscape work for the Tate?
A: Yes, I’ve done all of this many times in different ways. I just make circles, it seems, from when I was young and I keep going around and around. I may change direction, but it’s always around the same ideas. That’s the way life is. We don't change much. Inside, you're always the same person – that's my experience anyway. I always smell the same, I always write the same, I walk the same… you don't really change. The way that I make art is the same, it’s just that now I know more because I've been around longer, and I have more money so I can have more assistants, more materials, more factories and so on, which is nice – more resources become available. I also now have a history that I can look back on and learn from myself. When I look at my old work, I often think ‘I want to do this again, but make it different and bring it up to how I’m thinking now’. I can copy myself which I like, and it's easier than copying other people. But I do copy a lot of ancient art, like mosaics and Egyptian art – I buy a lot of Egyptian art. I have it in my studio and I look at it and think ‘how did they do it? What tricks did they use?’ And I learn from their tricks. For example, Egyptians used to carve into stone so that lines in a drawing were either sticking out or sticking in, which gave the images a kind of magic, a dynamic vibration which made them more than just flat paintings. I think they’re fantastic when I see them in museums, so I thought I could try to do that in my work using laser cutting and hand painting onto metal, for example.
Q: And you’re also a lover of Japanese wood prints?
A: I love Japanese wood prints, I think they’re a fantastic moment in the history of art – a peak in drawing technique, particularly Utamaro and Hiroshige – they are my heroes. I've curated a couple of exhibitions of their work for the British Museum in London. I also collect their work when I can. It's easier to collect Japanese prints because there are so many of them, so they’re not too expensive, even though they are some of the best artworks in the world. Van Gogh collected Hiroshige as well, not that I'd compare myself to Van Gogh, but as many artists have looked at Whistler, Matisse, Monet, a lot looked at Hiroshige. He’s a great innovator, although he was also quite traditional, which is an interesting mix, but when it comes to landscapes, he’s kind of the king. There's also Jacob van Ruisdael who is the great Dutch master of horizontal landscapes. Some of my work is very horizontal and maybe more indebted to this idea of horizontal landscapes that you enter visually. This entering of the picture through the road is quite a traditional idea – you have a path into the image and your mind and eye follow that path and you can inhabit the landscape mentally. Art often does this trick with three-dimensionality and with computers you can make it move, which is something artists in the past didn't have – Hiroshige did not have computers – but some of my moving pictures are very much in the shadow and footsteps of Hiroshige. He would often draw a flight of birds at the top of his pictures to indicate movement and to make your eye follow the birds and then come back through the trees and down across the light on the water. So here in my work, your eyes can follow the birds for a bit and then drop to the land then onto the sparkling water, and maybe back up to the birds. I’m using these tricks that Hiroshige used, but of course I can make them move using the computer and a flat screen. I’ve tried to present the TV screen like a painting – it has a very thin frame, it’s hung on the wall, and there are no cables or wires. It’s quite important to me that it looks like a painting.
Q: Is that why you used animation? To make the ‘path’ more obvious?
A: I use animation to make my work more realistic I suppose – the world is always moving: you’re moving, I’m moving, people move, cars move. The world is alive. The decision not to move is the strange decision. If you make a drawing that does not move, that's unusual. A drawing that moves is normal, because everything moves. If you want to draw a car, it's more normal that it’s moving, and that’s the same thing for people – if you want to draw someone, it’s more normal if they’re walking, so I draw people walking.
Q: Is that not because today’s techniques enable you to do this?
A: Well it is, yes – if the technique did not enable me to do it, that would be much more complicated and I probably wouldn’t do it. Although, when I was young I used to make animations. I put little battery-powered engines behind the painting so the pieces would move. I also used to use films, but it’s very difficult to present films in a gallery – I don't like the dark rooms with the black curtains. But for me, these moving images are like paintings – they work just how I want them to. Of course it is difficult to make the technology and I have to follow Samsung and their yearly screen change, and buy the warranty. It’s all very complicated but I think it's worth it.
Q: How are the LED pieces made?
A: LCDs (Liquid Crystal Display, like a TV) are really good small but if they get too big, they start to look too glamorous and luxurious. It’s a bit much, and after a certain size you have to put two next to each other, which doesn’t work very well. You also can’t put them outside, but with LEDs, you can have any size because it’s made of little lights – you can have ten lights, or a thousand, or a million – you can just keep adding more. In Hong Kong, I have a building that’s covered in LEDs, hundreds of metres high – you’re completely free with the size, you can put them outdoors no matter the time of day, and it has a very strong quality. It's like gold – it catches your eye, it's exciting, it’s sparkling, it’s so bright and clean and clear that you can't resist it, which is why advertising and safety signs use LEDs all the time. On the motorway the signs are LED, in shopping malls the ads are LED, and in airports the information boards are LED. The human eye is captured by this strong, flickering light, like fire or gold, so I like using it often. I get them made in Korea mostly, but the pieces are made in China. I use them particularly for outdoor/public works, partly because they're very bright and can be seen during the day as well as at night, but also because they’re engaging to the public eye. Public art is difficult – people sometimes don’t like it, or don’t understand why it’s there, or they don’t like art at all. It’s a bit imposing to put an artwork on the street because people see it but they didn't ask for it – not like in a gallery. But when the art is moving, it’s more fun. People seem to engage with it and enjoy it instead of feeling annoyed or upset by it. So I have a lot of LED people walking around the world: in Seoul, in London, in Phoenix, Arizona, in Zurich, in many places, and I've enjoyed doing that greatly. The other thing about LEDs, which the great artist Jenny Holzer has used a lot, is that they’re authoritative – when you see something in LED, you feel you should do it. If it says ‘STOP’, you feel you should stop. If it says ‘GO’, you go. If it says something about dollars or yen, you believe it. It has authority, and so it’s quite funny to show some fish swimming in a pond, or a gentle walk through the forest in the language of authority because on the one hand you have the personal, gentle, internal, dreamy, poetic aspect, and on the other hand you have the strong, powerful, authoritative world of passports and laws and rules and newspapers which is reality for me. Reality is both these things and finding a way between them.
Q: Last question, at the moment you seem to be limited to two subjects: figures and landscapes – why?
A: What else is there in life? Give me another subject, maybe I can use it. Cars? I have them. Buildings? I have them. Animals? I have them. When I was young, I used to use small objects like telephones and boxes and bottles; things you find around the house. I don't do that anymore. Still lifes, landscapes, portraits. This is art. Minimal, abstract, there's nothing else. Abstract art is difficult for me, but I sometimes make things that are nearly abstract or just spatial, but not really abstract. Like I said I’m postmodern, abstract is difficult for postmodernists.
Q: At what point do you think ‘okay, I’m fine with this, I'm satisfied’?
A: There is no particular rule, but at a certain point I feel satisfied and I just think it’s done.
Q: Which step?
A: There’s no rule, I just keep working until it's done. I don't give up. There was a piece I was working on with my assistant which took us six years. We didn’t work on it every day, but-
Q: But why so long?
A: It was complicated and it was not right but I didn't want to give up, I felt it should be right. Sometimes I give up, sometimes I just think maybe the idea is not going anywhere so I try another route – I go back and try again in another direction.
Q: I’m trying to understand what the right point is…
A: I don’t know. It just feels right; there’s nothing wrong, no more mistakes. As long as there’s something wrong, I keep changing it. And if I can't get rid of the wrong, I give up, that's the only way I know.