Charlie Schaffer: “Painting for me is a privileged insight into people’s existence”
Charlie Schaffer (b.1992), BP Portrait Award 2019 Winner.
The ‘tortured artist’, a recluse tied to the parameters of his easel, is a trope reinforced by the likes of Art’s great Masters. With this ‘loneliness’ now seeping into the experience of the common man, artist Charlie Schaffer presents an alternative model; with his portraits standing as records of intense connection between artist and sitter.
Charlie Schaffer in his studio, black and white digital capture ©Alice Sharpe
Charlie, how do you build that connection you have with people through your portraiture work?
I've always been wary of using the term portrait because in my mind portrait insinuates that you're trying to capture a likeness or make something that represents that person, whereas what I'd say I do is I work with people.
People tend to sit for paintings twice a week for maybe up to six months, and they sit for three hours at a time. The first few sessions are always going to be a bit strange because you're both essentially trying to sell yourselves to each other. Eventually, you stop caring about that and it basically just becomes like low-level therapy for the both of us. I never know what I'm doing with the painting. I suppose I might start with some vague concept that usually goes out the window pretty quickly. If someone starts sitting for a painting, it is directed entirely by the relationship. And by that, I don't mean psychologically or emotionally, that inevitably comes into it, but more practically.
So imagine if you come and sit, and one day you're feeling really hyper, and I'm feeling very slow, I’ll make marks a certain way. The next time you come sit, the emotive roles may have switched, meaning that I will make marks or see things in a different way.Every time you come back to the sittings, something different is happening.
The painting is the thing that allows the experience to happen and the actual picture that's left behind at the end is more like the stain left behind or like a record of the experience rather than the point in and of itself.
What draws you to visually exploring these experiences?
I paint people because I suppose I have a natural inclination to depression and sadness and loneliness. And this is my way of dealing with that. And I want intense connections.
With the actual painting itself, you have to have faith that something's going to happen. Maybe the relationship gets a bit difficult at some points, and maybe you think you're going to throw the painting away. But you just have to power through, and inevitably, something happens. I suppose there’s probably a metaphor for life in there somewhere that I'm not sure of yet.
For me, the whole point isn't to make a painting for the sake of making a painting. There's enough images in the world as there are, there's pictures of every sort everywhere, you've got to have a reason for doing it.
How do you find people to sit for you? Do you have a criteria or is it like speed dating?
Yeah (Charlie laughs)... I do a lot of sitter speed dating. I meet a lot of people through word of mouth. What I need is someone with time and someone who has the desire to sit. They are here purely because for whatever reason, they benefit or think they benefit at least from coming and sitting twice a week and just chatting and taking that time out.
So I'm painting someone at the moment who's actually reading. I've never done that before. She just loves reading. And her life has just got too hectic. She doesn't get the time to read as much as she wants to. So now that she's here and being forced to sit down for two hours and just read, it means that the painting that I'm doing obviously takes a very different form because we're not talking. It's a way of just having a very privileged insight into people's existence.
If someone I knew closely was sitting for me, It means that they are doing it as a favor. And then it becomes more just like image making for the sake of image making. We both have to be gaining from the experience, not the result.
How do you feel about finishing a painting without a sitter?
If it has reached a certain point where it has taken form, and it has got to that level where I know what the picture is going to be, then it's just up to me to bring it out to its full focus. But if I'm finishing a picture for the sake of finishing a picture, I'm finishing it so it can be seen by other people.And that I find really hard, because that's not the reason I actually paint to begin with.
Charlie Schaffer in front of his unfinished crucifixion series colorised digital capture ©Alice Sharpe
You’ve spent a lot of time in the National gallery, how do these works inspire you?
In the past, I would get what I call spiritual experiences from going to museums in the past. I would argue that it's pretty impossible to have that now. They've got to draw people in and it's very much the cult of the personality. So there's always the big hitters that I don't really care about.
I guess spirituality, in that sense, is the idea that you can connect to something greater than yourself and transcend the ego, the individual. And I used to get that in front of paintings. It leads to other things. It is a spark. And I don't think that really happens anymore because it’s hard to feel like you’re alone with a picture.
The only time that I actually get this spiritual feeling in front of a painting is if I go into a church. I can sit in front of a really bad painting of Christ. But because of the atmosphere, you start thinking and feeling about certain things. It is a representation of something about being human.
Could you tell us a bit more about this new crucifixion series you are working on? It certainly diverts from your previous work.
They start as self-portraits. I wanted to try and make some paintings that could hopefully one day go into a church. For me, the crucifixion isn't about Jesus or Christianity. It is about that moment between individual and universal. The crucifixion is when Jesus, dies as an individual, as an ego, and becomes God again. And it is that moment between.
It happens in every religion as well, literally every religion is about trying to get the universal again. It's the idea that we started as the universe, God, whatever you want to call it. We all got broken up into individuals. The aim is to try and get back to the universal again.
So I wanted to try and make some paintings that explore that. They have to be self-portraits to begin with, because they need to go through what is essentially an ego death. They’re based on different positions of Christ’s head in various Old Master paintings. But they have to start as me, and I have to keep pushing and keep pushing these paintings, until hopefully they stop being me. Because only at that point do I know that they've done something, that something has then happened.
You do two self portraits every morning, has this propelled you to reach this ego death?
Maybe accidentally. I do two sketches in the morning before I do anything else. It means that when someone comes and sits, or you do that one bit of painting that day, you've already done something, so you're less precious. Preciousness is bad. The downside to doing these drawings is that I now apparently, according to my therapist, have something called disassociation. Because I just stare at myself in a mirror and just see shapes, colors and movement, and now I always feel like I'm looking out of my own eyes all the time. I find it hard to connect to the image I see in the mirror.
Weirdly, however, the sense of self then becomes much stronger, because I feel like I am trapped inside a body. It does mean that you can feel a difference between body image, what things look like, and maybe what a sense of self is.
What happens to the paintings that you discard?
They go in the dumpster at the end of the road. That dumpster's eaten so many paintings. Yeah, those big dumpsters, they've eaten at least 50.
There's a gallery that does a reject exhibition from the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. You could do an exhibition of rejected paintings?
They have that in the Salon des Refusés. I never will. It's not about feeling disassociated from the paintings, they just don't work. If I was to keep them and put them on show, then it would just be purely because I could try and make some money, or it would be for other people to have an intrigue in.
What doesn't work about them?
Overworking is the big killer.That's the thing that usually kills everything. Yeah. It's just going over and over, and it just reaches a point where you're like, what's it called? The sunken cost fallacy, is it called? You've put so much money in something, you're like, ah, we'll just keep going, keep going.At some point, you have to be like, no, you just call it quits.