We photographed Per Kirkeby in Copenhagen in 1996, when he was a recipient of the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award.

Per Kirkeby

‘Painting for me is the only reality,’ says Per Kirkeby. And most genuine painters would agree. There comes a point when the artist’s eye tires of the everyday, the seemingly endless round of things, and creates visions and worlds of its own. Not because of dissatisfaction but because he knows that there are other worlds.

Kirkeby’s style finds expression in many forms – collage, sculpture, poetry, teaching, but he comes back again to painting which centralises his being. He refers to it as ‘an inner scaffolding, an inner structure’ to all he does.

He sees himself as a very typically Danish artist. To him, this means one born and brought up in the Danish landscape tradition. Nature, space, the vividness of natural colours are all valued realities to him and yet, when once he broke open a stone which was a definite ochre colour, he painted it in shades of purplish-blue, something his fellow artists upbraided him for at the time. But he explained this as not simply painting the world as it was but how he saw it.

Kirkeby first became interested in archaeology when finishing high school, a fact which seems obvious when looking at his entire output today. Due, however, to his lack of Latin, which was a requirement, he decided that geology might be more practical. The former dealt with dwellings and materials of ancient people; the latter was a study of the very stuff those dwellings were made of. This resolve resulted in several trips to Greenland lasting three or four months at a time. During this time he worked on sketch pads and engraving plates, studied rock forms and soaked in the essence of nature.

Looking at his paintings, something very interesting has developed. His canvases are segments of elemental things – portions of rock, sky glimpsed through cracks, or pools of shimmering water perhaps. There is a distinct feeling of looking in or out of caves, rock formations, chunks of land. But one can never decide whether one is in the cave looking out or vice versa.

Painted edge to edge, the colours bleed into each other – more natural moss greens and forest browns suddenly brought up against a splash of teal or violet-aquamarine. Despite the painting’s’ initial freehand, haphazard nature, very soon and after looking at more work, one realises that there is a method and indeed a pattern developing. Kirkeby himself speaks of being like a gardener when he is painting – going first here, then there, planting some colour in this dark area, uprooting another hue to take it somewhere else. This freedom he instills on himself is responsible for the expansive nature of the work. Kirkeby has conjured a segment from the world and dragged it into a viewing space. It is like a chunk of earth on a gallery wall. He shares perhaps the view with many artists that paintings are somehow magical; painting itself, a kind of alchemy. You must bring the ingredients, measure, consider, discard, create and try and discover the gold that always eludes.

Having been exposed to the vastness of the world, it comes as no surprise to learn that Kirkeby’s canvases are huge too. He finds, he says, large canvases easier to do having ‘an intrinsic value’. They also need to be large. This is a slice of the world that is being presented, not a polite landscape. Nature is uncontrollable, haphazard, jumbled, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, ‘spare, strange, fickle, freckled – who knows how’. Nature is in chaos with countless examples of exotic flora and fauna. But that chaos is its order. Kirkeby seeks not to soothe or calm but to present it as it is- like the ochre stone turned blue, as he sees it.

The way Kirkeby works is also slightly erratic. He doesn’t work on one painting until it is completed but, instead, he goes between all four of his working studios creating works in progress. If he leaves one studio he may not return for almost a quarter of a year. Thus refreshed, he goes back, renewed with other inspirations and ideas and, having forgotten exactly what he accomplished the last time, he is able to breathe new life into each canvas.

These are bold songs of nature sung by one who feels their timbre.