John Virtue (Paintings) British, b. 1947

ML: Paying attention to the edges of the support seems like a sculptural approach. Do you still see these primarily as paintings?

JV: At the beginning of my career, when I had to be a postman, working on a tiny table, in a tiny weaver’s cottage in north east Lancashire, I told people “I’m painting”, but I was using pencils, graphite sticks, then mapping pens and dipper pens, and black ink with shellac. It’s the same ambition now: they’re paintings, but they’re not paintings. How do you describe what you’re doing? I’ve no idea. All my life, I’ve seen painting as a paradox and a contradiction.

ML: They make sense as a continuation of your painting practice, but there’s also an affinity with Minimalist sculpture, like Donald Judd, or in painting, Robert Ryman. Maybe I’m thinking of Minimalist series because, the way they’re hung, it’s difficult not to read them as a group. Are you still thinking of them as individual paintings?

JV: Yes, they’re individual works at the moment. Lately, I’m excited about these long, thin panels. They go up to seven feet tall. I had such trouble with them, how to hang them, and then I found that they work best hanging in very thin spaces.

ML: What about the square ones? Do they have a fixed orientation, or could you turn them ninety degrees?

JV: I do that all the time. There’s no top or bottom, no left or right.

ML: The surfaces are so glossy, they look wet.

JV: Yes, but they’re dry, you can touch them. I don’t always use brushes, but when I do, I use 6 and 8 inch brushes. I also use J-cloths to paint with. These are painted again and again and again.

ML: Is the paint acrylic or oil?

JV: The only paint I use is heavy bodied carbon black Golden acrylic paint in gallon tubs. I've used acrylic for over twenty years. I used carbon black and titanium white, but this year I stopped using the titanium white. You’ll see vestiges of it on these, but only pared right back to the edges. I’ve also been making these.

[John gestures to a large number of sketchbooks, seemingly filled with page after page

of heavily built up black oil pastel. He invites me to have a go, using a giant oil pastel to

add to an already heavily worked page of oily blackness.]

JV: Press hard with the oil pastel. It builds a texture. You build on it and build on it and build on it.

ML: Why did you switch to using only the colour black?

JV: In my work, I have never seen black as a colour, or a non-colour; I see it as a medium for expression. It’s very early days to be talking about these paintings. I’ve come to this way of working after nearly fifty years. Now I’m staggering about like an old man, but the last time I was able to travel was 2019. I was in Spain looking at Picasso, El Greco, Zurbarán, Goya. When I

look at Goya, what am I looking at? Black. In the Toledo cathedral, Goya’s The Taking of Christ, it’s ten feet by seven feet, the white gown against all the black, it’s like an inverted scimitar. In abstract terms, it’s sensational. In the El Greco museum are El Greco’s apostles; they’re all approximately 100x120 cm rectangles, but brilliantly suggestive for me, when thinking about my black squares. But I’m nervous about people seeing these. I don’t know what anyone will think of them. Probably meaninglessness.

ML: I suppose those criticisms have always been levelled at modernist reduction, monochrome painting, Minimalism, that whole tradition. Especially when the colour is reduced to just black, or just white.

JV: I went on a scholarship to America in 1965 as a 17-18 year old. I went into the Met and saw a giant early flag by Jasper Johns. The whole thing’s white, an assembly of canvases, so the stars are individual canvases slotted into the big canvas, and the stripes are made of canvas slotted in also. I went to MOMA and there was a recent acquisition by Ad Reinhardt. This is a 5ft square black painting made of nine different blacks. I’d never seen anything like it. I thought it was so inventive.

But this work I’m doing now has nothing to do with Ad Reinhardt. This has nothing to do with Malevich. This has nothing to do with Franz Kline, although I think all these artists are terrific. However, to me, my work has a lot to do with Goya, and, for example, Rembrandt’s late work. That’s what I look at. El Greco was not rated at all after his death, and then in 1904, around about the beginning of the last century, he reappeared again as a great Spanish artist. Before that, he was under the rubble, so to speak. I quite like the idea of being under the rubble. Still, the more I say these things to you, the more I think how utterly pretentious.

ML: Pretentious how?

JV: Because I believe there is something in it, relating to these recent paintings I’ve been working on. One or two of them, the tiny two inch ones, one or two of the heavy paper ones, that big seven foot work, in them, I believe, there is a truth. What on earth do I mean? What do I mean by truth? I mean a feeling, where you have a totally empathetic mute response to the

work, instead of hostility and negativity acting as a barrier, as a rhetorical response.

ML: Does it take time to recognise? Do you have to live with them for a while, to know if they’re doing what you want?

JV: Yes, I’m not letting much of this out of the studio yet. I’m keeping them in here. I feel this’ll be it. The black, it’s not about depression, but an exhilarating finale.

ML: But you’re still enjoying painting.

JV: Certainly. If you go on a long time doing it, and you decrease in physical ability, the mental ferocity of the pursuit must increase. Look at those films of Henri Matisse, when he was dying. He’s in his bed, cutting the paper and using a big stick to point with, and there’s a young assistant pinning the paper in place. Those works, they’re terrific. The drive is still there. It’s a

visceral compulsion, like an addiction. I’m totally addicted to this.