LES RAMSAY
Interview Nathalie Agostini
Art Les Ramsay
The Adventures of Atrevida Reef, 2019. Exhibition view, Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal. Photo credits: Paul Litherland
A conversation conducted between Montréal and London with writer and editor Nathalie Agostini and Canadian painter Les Ramsay on the concept of “weird,” collecting, and language.
Let’s start with a quote of yours from a previous interview: “I’m big on trying to outweird myself… I need that challenge or else it’s easy for things to become just decorative.” Around the advent of photography, Walter Benjamin defined the concept of “aura” as the quality essential to an artwork that cannot be mediated through techniques of mechanical reproduction. How do you see the relationship between the concepts of “weird” and “aura” when it comes to a quality that cannot be mediated technically, and mass-produced?
I can see a relation to the advent of photo, but I’m often looking at craft, especially needlepoint and embroidery, which in themselves are activated by the tropes of picture making—be it painting or photography. Part of my practice is collecting, which mostly comes in the form of thrifting, garage sales, and beachcombing. I’ve been collecting second-hand embroidery since 2010. My collection is quite extensive at this point: I have three storage tubs full of unframed pieces, and roughly 40–50 framed ones. I’ve used some of them as direct references for my paintings. This collection inspired me to begin making my own embroideries, and I’ve been doing that since 2016.
Pasteurization Station, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 48” x 36”. Photo credits: Colleen Heslin
You are a collector as well as an artist: thrifting, beachcombing. When did that start?
I started thrifting as a teenager. I grew up skateboarding and going to Value Village for oversized clothing in the ’90s, when skateboarders would wear huge clothes to rebel against the jocks and the homies. I started picking up weird, folky knickknacks and keeping them in my room. Even then, there was this striking quality that I liked about thrifted old paintings, and I didn’t ever really question why.
Then, when I moved to Montreal with Colleen [Heslin, the artist’s partner] in 2011, we got rid of all our stuff. Sewing became more prominent in Colleen’s work at that time, and I was working on incorporating quilt patterns into my oil paintings. There were brand new thrift shops to check out, and we were both interested in collage and the potential of using fabric as material for our paintings. When we returned to Vancouver in 2015, my collecting intensified and I made some works that directly referenced quilt patterns, magnified and stretched as paintings. The thrifting became a bit obsessive, and once I started collaging with fabric and using a sewing machine, I began to pay more attention to texture as a surface quality and using fabrics like coloured burlap and patterned towels in my work.
Night Fever, the Asylum at Dusk, 2020. Oil on canvas, 72" x 54". Photo credits: Laura Findlay
Because the fabrics are prefabricated?
Because there is basically no paint. Some of the fabrics I use will be scraps and cloths from my studios, or rags I wipe my brushes into and collage with, which brings my hand back into it. They easily jump out of the category of painting when there’s no paint, but I like that.
Do you display your objects, curating your collection? Or do you incorporate them back into your work?
I often incorporate thrifted knick-knacks in my sculptural works, and I’ve made paintings from photographs of studio objects, taking a picture and cropping it to find something humorous and interesting. That’s the outweirding myself—I take something I’ve already done and find what’s weird about it. This weirdness is what I’ve always been attracted to when I look at paintings in galleries and museum. When there’s something a bit strange or off, it makes me want to look at the picture longer.
« I’m big on trying to outweird myself… I need that challenge or else it’s easy for things to become just decorative. »
The Mystery of the Midnight Moodies, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 72" x 54” / Local Cherries Sweet Corn, 2020. Oil on canvas, 72" x 54". Photo credits: Laura Findlay
Who are some artists that you’ve had a weird response to, historically or recently?
Oh, there’s lots! There’s an interesting lineage of weird painters. I’m a big fan of Ida Ekblad and Charline von Heyl. I’ve been fascinated by von Heyl’s paintings ever since I saw them in Art in America back in 2009.
Von Heyl is married to another “weird” painter, Christopher Wool.
True, I had seen a Wool show in Valencia in 2006 that gave me a new perspective on contemporary painting. There were huge silkscreens of off-register paint spills, which included many happy accidents. I enjoyed and was entertained by the slippage of methods and the oversized sloppy text paintings.
The other link is that I believe von Heyl met Albert Oehlen. Many of his paintings can be considered weird. I’ve seen a work of his in a private collection. The painting seemed to be about the value of currency with pennies glued to globs of paint, littering the canvas. The painting felt super rough compared to his current works that are more slick and use digital printing. Going back, Oehlen and von Heyl were influenced by the European avant-garde movement CoBrA and expressive artists like Asger Jorn and Karl Appel. There’s a fun lineage there, where you can see where everyone is looking and getting their energy. I love that kind of stuff, knowing who looked at who.
9 Patch River Showdown, 2019. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 54”. Photo credits: Paul Litherland / Special Thymes, 2020. Oil on canvas, 48" x 36". Photo credits: Colleen Heslin / Fowl Play, 2019. Oil on canvas, 62" x 48". Photo credits: Laura Findlay
Jorn and Appel had peculiar senses of humour, with their often-grotesque figures painted in vivid colours. You seem to share some of that sensibility with them. In several of your paintings, we see an artist making fun of language.
I think it’s teasing it, yes. Art language can be stuffy sometimes, and I think my work might acknowledge that as well as take part in it. Being tongue-in-cheek is a good way to poke fun at things. I’ve just recently started to think of that context.
Towel, 2019. Oil on burnt sienna canvas, 30” x 24”. Photo credits: Paul Litherland
That sense of humour in your work is refreshing!
Thank you, yes, the alphabet and number pieces are a tad rash. “Proto-Sinaitic” is the name historians gave to an early source of the current English language. Using basic language symbols without words gives me a subject to paint (ABC/123). The end result develops into a mise en abyme type of message.
I went to school at Emily Carr [University of Art + Design in Vancouver] where photo-conceptualism was popular and part of the curriculum. There were plenty of painters as well, some of them using text in their works. But I was most drawn to works with a visual sense of humour, pictures that winked or nodded at you. Some text-based works can appear austere at first glance but once read can give a thought or a chuckle. An early memory of this feeling was seeing Wool’s black and white text-based paintings in a museum, and also when discovering Ron Terrada’s Jeopardy! answer paintings in a private collection.
What do you think are the potentials of embroidery when considering the possibilities provided by hypertext?
It is interesting, because compared to the speed of technology, embroidery is slow. I think there’s an attraction to seeing something contemporary that someone sat and took a long time with because of people’s lack of attention span. As soon as I started doing embroidery, I loved how portable it was and that it would get me outside. When I was living in Vancouver and going to parks and beaches, I would find a sweet spot, a log or a bench, and needlepoint in the sun. Strangers would come up and talk to me sometimes, mostly older women with some type of connection to the medium.
Did they give you tips?
No tips, but they were so fascinated that I was doing needlepoint work. They would often reflect warmly on personal matriarchal relations as a strong connection to the craft.
Moss at Midnight, 2015. Gilded framed needlepoint, 23” x 19”. Frame by Jonathan Syme. Photo credits: Paul Litherland / Stuff & Things, 2019. Needlepoint, 20.5 x 18.5”. Photo credits: Les Ramsay / The Little Lush, 2015. Gilded framed needlepoint, 23” x 21”. Frame by Jonathan Syme. Photo credits: Paul Litherland
The decorative arts have historically held a very distinct position from the so-called fine arts like sculpture, painting and drawing. Is that distinction something you think about a lot?
No, I think it came up more in grad school. I was in a condensed painting program at Concordia [University] in Montreal, and “decorative” was one of those dirty words, as though it’s like a mass-produced “giclée” artwork. My professor would say to me: “I like it but it’s too nice. It needs some vomit.” Some of the paintings I made at the time referenced craft and quilt making, and I found myself in a sea of squares and triangles… it’s easy to get fussy about corners. There is somewhat of a curse upon the freshness of a work if you project in your mind too much of what the final painting will look like. I find it more rewarding as an artist to find something new that I wasn’t initially looking for.
You suggested that engaging in the “weird” is a way to keep your works from having a decorative destiny. The word itself has a historical relationship with fate, as the Anglo-Saxon “wyrd” is an esoteric idea related to our modern understanding of destiny.
There’s always a fate for a blank canvas, as with the viewfinder of a camera. It’s not always how you do it, it’s what it is. The banal can be distorted, the twisted can be reduced. Projecting in one’s mind the final outcome of a painting can be somewhat of a curse upon the freshness of the finished work.
« There’s always a fate for a blank canvas, as with the viewfinder of a camera. It’s not always how you do it, it’s what it is. The banal can be distorted, the twisted can be reduced. Projecting in one’s mind the final outcome of a painting can be somewhat of a curse upon the freshness of the finished work. »
Local Cherries Sweet Corn, 2020. Exhibition view, Towards, Toronto. Photo credits: Laura Findlay
Les Ramsay is opening a solo show in the coming weeks with The Bows in Calgary, titled Special Thymes. He is also currently preparing for a solo show at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG) in February 2022.