An interview with Philip Dodd, in Dennis Creffield: A Midsummer Night's Dream, exhibition catalogue, Goldmark Gallery, 1989
PHILIP DODD, DEPUTY EDITOR of New Statesman and Society, interviewed Dennis Creffield in his Brighton studio in December 1988. The studio was filled with work-in-progress for the present A Midsummer Night's Dream exhibition. What follows is an edited transcript of the tape-recorded interview.
PD: What led you to take on the subject of A Midsummer Night's Dream?
DC: You have to remember that the paintings are a response to a private commission for a bedroom. I can't stress enough how much I've kept that before me. Given the size of the room, I've deliberately chosen not to make one large image, but to make a painting which has in some ways the feel of a collage one over which the eye could rove, and which would provide opportunity for reverie.
PD: How did you begin work on the subject?
DC: The problem with making a painting of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that it has got no or very little iconographic history. I mean the only serious paintings that have ever been made on the subject are Fuseli's. For the rest it's just illustration. If I were painting a crucifixion or a mythological subject like the Rape of the Sabine Women, I would have a historical sequence of work that I could look at for reference. But there isn't anything for this subject. So I went to the actual text of the play and all I could think of was a wood. The very first drawings I made were just of a wood; but it wasn't enough, because of course there are people in this wood. The key, for me, to the whole thing was when I read seriously the stage direction which, when one first reads the play, doesn't seem to have much importance. Why is it set in a wood outside Athens? What significance does Shakespeare see in setting it in such a place? From these questions, I began to have a vision of the figures as archaic Greek ones and so I took as my first source material archaic Greek sculpture. And then, in reading about the play, I discovered that it was probably written for a private wedding and that Queen Elizabeth was present at the first performance. Since she was feted as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, and was a patroness of Shakespeare and the theatre, I also began to think in terms of the Elizabethan portrait and those of the Queen in particular. So that gave me my visual dramatis personae archaic Greek sculpture and Elizabethan 'fantastical' painting, both of them rooted not just in my thinking, but rooted in the text or context of the play itself.
PD: The one element you haven't mentioned so far is music. Given how important music is to the play, and your own love of music, did you use Benjamin Britten's opera of A Midsummer Night's Dream?
DC: All the time. I found Britten's opera a remarkable work. I think it's unique in the history of music. It's a work which is the equivalent of its mentor. There's not a single word in it that isn't Shakespeare's. He has occasionally redistributed the parts, but only in a very discreet way. It's not a very long play but of necessity he had to reshape it for a two-act opera; but his work is totally true in its mood all the way through to the original. As the nature of the play is to do with transformation and music, and Britten's opera is music, he can actually do what Shakespeare suggests in words. It's extraordinary how Britten can move across the different groups of protagonists – the Duke and the court, the lovers and the artisans, and the fairies – and can actually modulate the sounds so that you are moving in another frequency of sound. Shakespeare, of course, does it with the language – the fairies think in a different way than the mechanicals or the court – but in the music it's an extraordinary way that he's come to do that.
PD: How did you try, then, to find a visual equivalent of the play and opera?
DC: The biggest difficulty that people find in approaching painting at all is that they don't realise that painting stands to nature in exactly the same way poetry stands to nature. Painting is nothing to do with simple description like giving evidence in a court of law. You make a metaphor of your experience. The painter is making an image of reality, not copying reality, whatever that is. You may know the story about T. E. Lawrence and Kennington in Arabia, and Kennington, a very academic artist, drawing some bedouin chieftains and those chieftains finding the drawings quite incomprehensible, although they were the sort of drawings that we would say were utterly lifelike.
Let me give you another example. When I was drawing cathedrals last year I had mental idea of a cathedral, but what I was trying to do was identify myself with where I was in relation to the cathedral and let the cathedral show me how to draw. In the same way I am trying to find out how to paint A Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm not a graphic designer who thinks an idea up for a subject and then puts it down. I work from an image like Billie Holliday sings the blues, and she says she never sings the same song twice. That's what one wants to do. You don't want to make reproductions of what already exists. It's an absurdity. One is opening oneself to this; the image itself has to be evocative and mysterious to start with, and then you find things that you wouldn't have dreamed of. That's the interest. The terrible thing is when you can't open that door. When all you do is you make banal comment. It's dreadful.
The imagination, after all, is not something distinct from experience, it is the way that you experience the world. We speak about visionaries when we talk about people like Blake or Van Gogh; we think that these are people set apart. But in fact each of us is a visionary in the sense that what each of us is able to perceive is an emotional experience. It was the thing that opened my eyes as a boy; I thought I wanted to be an artist; I didn't know what it meant, but I thought it was impossible to be an artist because an artist was someone who had the capacity to think things up. A fertile imagination, an original mind. I could think of nothing at all, and so I thought I couldn't be an artist, and I think that this is a characteristic of many people. Thank God, I was brought to study with David Bomberg when I was only sixteen, and he made me realise that you don't have to think things up; that one lives in a world of imagination. This brings us back to the most marvellous example of all – Shakespeare, who never once in his life thought up an original story. Every single Shakespeare play, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, is based upon someone else's play or an historical record. What he does is see what others have seen but see it in a new way. But he still needs a story, something that already exists. He has to have it, otherwise he would have no imagination, and that collaboration with nature is what imagination is, and if you can feel that, then, of course, the world becomes a different place. It becomes rich and full of potentiality, and you don't feel like someone who is bankrupt.
PD: Does this sequence of work differ radically from your earlier work?
DC: I have spent the best part of my life working from nature. What I mean is just literally that: working from landscape or still life, or a vase of flowers. But I realise that I am not really that sort of person at all. Increasingly I become more interested in the subject, that is why 20 years ago I would no more have dreamed of trying to make a painting of A Midsummer Night's Dream than fly. It would have been impossible. It may still be impossible, but now I am interested in it. It intrigues me that no-one else has tried. The paintings are much more self-conscious than earlier ones. For instance, in all of these images you will find, in the top right hand corner, Shakespeare, who also masquerades as the moon, and these are the presiding creatures in the Dream itself. I didn't think that idea up; I discovered it through a process of drawing. Take another example. In a number of the works, I give them a frame, which is a thing I very rarely do. Quite why I did that don't know. I always very much work to the edge of the page, but in this instance I did it almost as if it was a manuscript. I wanted to be very artificial, make something that one is reading almost. I just drew within that framework, or I loosely divided the page into a number of areas. Such things just allowed me to get something going.
PD: The room in which we are sitting is full of related images, and it has been one of your characteristics to work very frequently on a series. Can you say what leads you to that so persistently? In fact it's more rare to think of you making a single image.
DC: I used to make single images – but over the last ten years I've begun to work in series. Bomberg, although he didn't do it himself, always encouraged us to make a number of canvasses so that you could work on something and put it aside. One is always looking for a freshness and you don't want just to hammer at a painting. After all, there is no ultimate painting of a person or a landscape. It is the painting which is the unique thing; it doesn't sum the subject up, otherwise that would be the end of painting. You would have made the summation of a nude on the bed, or something like that. With a subject like A Midsummer Night's Dream I need to work on a lot of approaches to it, because I am discovering it. I hope that the work will hold as individual works, but I think that it's a very thrilling thing to see how someone is working at an idea, attacking it from every angle. I think that it's very much a 20th century approach.
PD: What were some of the problems involved in orchestrating so many figures within one painting or drawing?
DC: Philip, don't say 'were', say 'is, are'. Because the paintings are still under way. But I think that the drawings which are already resolved do have all the separate parts in them the relationships of the figures, one to another. I suppose I've tried to resolve the relationships in a very naive sort of way. Like a medieval thing, I've used the top for the metaphysical, and placed there the attendant and overriding spirits of Oberon/Titania and Theseus/Hippolyta; the bottom half I've kept for the humans.
PD: What guided your choice of the figures to be included in the paintings and drawings?
DC: Obviously, if you're making an image of A Midsummer Night's Dream you've got these three different parts – the lovers, the fairies or supernatural, and the rustics. There's no way that I could deal with the rustics any more than I could deal with the shepherds in a nativity. The only way I could deal with the rustics was through Bottom translated into the ass.
PD: One of the most haunting parts of these works seems to be Elizabeth. Can you talk about why this so fascinates you, as it seems to do, because to me she appears as this yearning woman, with her nose pressed against the window?
DC: For me there is the extraordinary idea of Elizabeth as Titania – she is present as the presiding deity, as the Queen and Shakespeare's patron, but she also becomes the deity of Titania as well. And there is in the Elizabethan images of her, and in everything you read about her, this strange unnaturalness and etherealness. She is the nearest in post-Roman times to a divine person, isn't she? And the fantastic idea of her virginity, Gloriana, Queen Mab. Indeed they worshipped her in terms of a Goddess and she would act up to it.
PD: In only one of the paintings are the figures given bodies. Why?
DC: When you think of the play the bodies are really not there. They're persons; everything is to do with the look, the head; everyone is looking at each other or talking to each other, aren't they? It's not physical, or rather the physicality of it is like that. They lose each other; there's fog, night, darkness. Most of the play takes place in the dark. If I made a production of that play I think I would probably do the whole thing in blackness. There is only a little bit of dawn... It is an extraordinary play of darkness.
PD: In the catalogue of your last show of drawings of medieval cathedrals you make a connection between Southwell Cathedral and Shakespeare's play. Can you talk about how you think the experience of drawing the cathedrals, if at all, has fed the experience of making these works?
DC: As you know I worked on the Dream in 1986 and then the cathedrals in 1987 and 1988. I have now returned to the Dream. I was astonished at the Chapter House at Southwell. It's so much like a storyboard, it's unbelievable. But I knew about it, and people know about it, as the leaves of Southwell, but when you go there it's full of these wonderful heads. Heads with coronets of flowers, the rude mechanicals, and even a lion. What's a lion doing at Southwell? A funny lion? It's exactly the lion in Pyramus and Thisbe.
As I've said, the first idiom I chose was derived from archaic Greek. Having been in Southwell, I've realised the idiom is even closer to hand. I oughtn't to say this, but I hope you'll see some very different paintings in the show by my experience of the extraordinary imaginative world of Southwell.