Phyllida Barlow

I think there are lots of factors, but I think the kind of expectations at that level, the expectations of what you must produce.

And I think particularly, and this can sound like a grumpy old unsuccessful artist statement, when that happens to people very early on in their career, it's really worrying because I think see somebody like Phyllida Barlow or... rose wiley to some extent where actually that blue chip gallery thing didn't happen until they were so long in the tooth that they've got decades of work they know how they're going to make things and actually they're not going to be pushed around and told it's got to be like this they're like no i'm not making it like that i'm making this now plus anyway there's decades and decades of works in there so if the gallery wants to show stuff there's enough stuff already made but i do think that there would be something about that pressure, that expectation, that external pressure to produce the things that you need to produce and not the thing that you want to produce.

Maybe that's just an optimistic way of looking at not being very successful is to say, oh, that's better.

I think it's about pricing your work.

Yeah,

I think so.

So Phyllida Barlow is really important to me.

She was an extraordinary artist, obviously extraordinary teacher as well.

One way that we can perhaps think of painting that might help students is as a lens.

And it has this really beautiful anecdote about Phyllida Barlow.

One memorable moment that was worried me since was something that artist Phyllida Barlow said in one of these events.

We were talking about space, about the cultural and political context of how work is seen, and she described the floor as anarchic and the wall as authoritarian.

As a painter, this irked me, for I understood exactly what she meant, but I also knew it couldn't be true.

Authoritarian, perhaps, full frontal, certainly.

And then the last bit is this amazing bit about Jessica Stockholder.

So he's talking about how Jessica Stockholder and Phyllida Barlow, if you look at their work, you might think, you know, there's like a big similarities.