I met Clare when I went to the JSS in Civita Master Class program with Israel Hershberg in 2017. She is one of my favorite living painters. You can read more about her and her many accomplishments on her website here.
Laura Vahlberg: Hi Clare, thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. My first question is how did you get started being an artist?
Clare Haward: I remember I wanted to be a Gymnast but wasn’t very good, so I drew gymnasts a lot. I drew them in all kinds of impossible positions and by a river with a waterfall, because I liked to draw the water flowing over the rocks. My grandma would keep off cuts of cardboard and a box of pens, and I would spend my time drawing these gymnasts. She was an artist and it was at her house that I saw real paintings. She had been a primary school teacher but she had attended art classes throughout her life; she copied flowers and landscapes in oils, some of which ended up on her walls.
Art School wise, I did a Foundation Course at Camberwell College of Art. I worked on big canvases and loved playing around with surfaces and life drawing, but then I took a wrong turn, spending four years on a Fine Art degree program being told painting was dead. Several years later, I got myself a little studio, but rarely spent time there as I didn't really know what to do and my paintings seemed pretty terrible.
I broke my right hand in my late 20’s and after a year-long recovery to get my fingers moving again, realised it was now or never if I was going to paint. The opportunity arose to take redundancy, so I sold my flat, had a bit of money in the bank for the first time, and ended up at the Cyprus College of Art, a fantastic little college in a village outside Paphos, set up by Cypriot/British artist Stass Paraskos. It felt like breathing space, I was encouraged to draw and paint and not to over intellectualize what I was doing. Later I spent time at Hatahana School in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Studio School, where I felt like I was making up for lost time and even started selling some work. Nowadays I balance my week between teaching adults painting and drawing with Dulwich Art Group in South London, and painting. It works pretty well, they both feed into each other.
LV: It’s so great to read this and learn about your background. I remember talking with you in Italy about the importance of making copies from the masters and I remember reading a great article with you talking about the same subject. When did this become an important practice for you?
CH: You are right, I wrote an article about copying when I got elected to the New English Art Club and was asked about my practice. At Camberwell, we had a 'transcription' project, which I thought sounded very grand, we had to draw from a painting in the National Gallery in London and use those drawings as the basis for that terms’ work. Other students took 'drawing' to mean all kinds of inventive things, but I loved the fact that I was allowed to draw with pencils. I drew details of Titian and Rubens, not really to get 'into' the painting, but to use it as a starting point. I remember the drawing of an armpit got blown up to a large-scale kind of abstract landscape in the studio. It was quite liberating to have worked directly from paintings, rather than other imagery. Years later, the value of copying was shown to me during my time in Israel, where it was a core part of the curriculum. I didn't really get it at first, why students spent several years drawing and painting from these old paintings, rather than making their own work, but overtime I realized they were looking at something beyond the image itself, at a visual language, exploring a line, composition, structure, edges etc. There was an intelligence and complexity to their work that made sense when I understood how they were learning. Again, I realized it could be liberating and a brilliant way to learn. For me now, it is a way of looking and engaging, mostly recently it is small sketches in a sketchbook. I love finding things I hadn't noticed before, or finding commonalities between paintings, noticing how a whole composition comes together.
LV: What is a typical studio day like for you?
CH: During term time, ideally I am in there four days a week, but it can take me a while to get started. I have to get the life admin out of the way before I can focus on my work, but once I am in the studio, it is usually really focused. Though I do have this habit of going in there with good intentions but before I have even taken my bag off, I am scratching back into whatever painting I was working on yesterday, making a little 'improvement' here or there. If this happens, I can find myself three or five hours later having completely repainted the whole thing. Sometimes it is a good thing, but often I'll regret it. I have been trying to train myself not to do that, setting a rule that I won't touch anything for the first twenty minutes but just be there looking or thinking. I have also got better about leaving paintings facing against the wall at night, and not allowing myself to look at them for several days so that I can get some distance from them. On a good day, I’ll be making some drawings/sketches first thing, and then moving on to a focussed period of painting in the afternoon. If I am working on a larger painting, the pace can really change, I can spend ages trying to resolve a small part, looking at it, making one or two careful adjustments, and then suddenly a problem appears and before I know it I find myself totally redrawing or reworking an area. I often do a quick painting from observation or imagination at the end of the day. These days I also try to take a walk to the nearby park to see the ducks and leave in time for dinner.
LV: This is something I've been thinking about in my practice lately-- when you start a painting do you have an intention about how long you will spend on it? You mentioned that you will often make a quick painting at the end of your studio day. Do those paintings ever turn into long term pictures or do they generally stay sketches? Do you ever start a painting that you think will take a long time and then finish it quickly? How do you know when a painting is complete?
CH: I would love to have a beautifully ordered process, but no matter what my intentions, it doesn't seem to work like that. I wouldn't want a clear beginning and an end because I like to play about with things and be responsive to the painting as it progresses, but each time I start a new one I convince myself it will be easier this time. At some stage, when the painting is hanging around in my studio, causing me trouble, I know that I have to either paint over it and get rid of it, or commit to it.
Until recently, I worked on smaller scale works, and would start a whole load of paintings, some of which would feel resolved pretty quickly, others would be scraped back and reworked, trying things out more instinctively, oscillating between observation and invention. Some of those would fall by the wayside and others would start to feel like they were getting somewhere. I would always have one painting that I work and work on, which would end up overworked and awful, but allowed some of the other paintings to survive.
Recently I have been working on larger paintings, which I find harder to deal with. It can go on for months and still not seem to work, or I can undo a month’s work in an afternoon if I am not feeling it. Instead of always making new starts, I realize I've got to commit to it and just trying to keep it alive. I like planning for it, drawing and trying out some small compositional ideas, but it always ends up going in a different direction. As for when it is finished, I guess I am learning to find that place where I know that I am just changing it rather than improving it, but I have killed a lot of paintings this past year so I don't think I have worked that one out yet.
The quick painting at the end of the day can be a way to get that excitement into the studio, of fresh eyes or a distillation of the days work. I don't always do them, and most get painted over, but occasionally something comes out of it that I like and they often reappear in a different way in a later painting. I can't do it first thing in the morning, as I would end up working on it all day.
LV: Do you have some criteria or goals that you keep in mind for how to make a painting work?
CH: Hmmm, good question. I feel like I am constantly changing the goal posts, and particularly this past year or so, as I have been trying to push my paintings further, to see what happens when I do this or that. Maybe the pandemic allowed me to try things out a bit without worrying about the results too much. It has felt like a leap into the unknown and I am finding I need to take time to look and reflect and work out where I was trying to get to. Questions of have I gone too far, am I just obsessing, is this improving it, when can I go no further with it? I have several paintings that have ended up that way, they have gone through so many changes and got to a point where there really is nothing more I can do with it. Then the question is whether it is finished or just dead. I try to remember what it was that got me started on the painting in the first place. In general, I want the painting to feel unified, I want to be able to get lost in a small area yet still see the whole, I don't want it to be too literal, I want some ambiguity, it has to have a sense of presence without specifically detailing everything and it needs to be a bit awkward.
LV: I just have one more question. What do you use for reference material? Do you work strictly from observation?
CH: I often used to start from observation, then later work away from the set up to try to resolve what the painting needs. Recently I have been trying to work out how to work with the figure and larger compositions without always having access to an actual model. I have been drawing a lot from life, from TV, from paintings or just kind of intuitively. Drawing from photos seems to be the least satisfying. I have a table full of books open in my studio that I glance at when I am painting - just to keep looking. I haven't worked out what works for me yet, and I am currently enjoying finding out how other artists deal with this. In Lennart Anderson's interview with Jennifer Samet in the recent catalogue, he talks of being uncomfortable with hiring models and having them hanging around the studio, and how he used the mirror and polaroids to work out his figures, or he 'makes figures up, which is always bad'. This sounds familiar. I draw a lot of compositions in my sketchbooks, often quite intuitively and from imagination, and I am trying to work out how to translate these into paintings. I recently dug out some drawings from some classes I had taken at the Royal Drawing School back in 2015, and there were all these multi-figure sketches from a group of dancers who had been moving around the space. I suddenly realised that one of the drawings of two figures ‘locked’ together has been appearing in my recent work and it was like a little ‘ah ha’ moment of realisation that all my drawing is from observation even if it was observed before.
