This interview with Marlene Dumas was done in 1998.

Marlene Dumas

Your work has been described as centring on people at the intersection between experiences, feelings, ideas and their connections with the world around them. Is this a fair description?

Not people but images of people. Especially the tension and differences between actual people, photographic images and painted images.

I used to call myself a sort of abstract expressionist. I wanted to paint something abstract - like love, hate, evil - and that’s why I liked words so much. In the earlier work I didn’t actually use the expressions on faces. How can you paint someone crying without making it kitsch or without just being ironic about it? I was jealous about the fact that in movies you can do it, in books you can do it, but how can you do it in a painting?

When I was young Francis Bacon seemed to be the only painter who could deal with all the turmoil of human emotions but then his form could not be mine, although we all imitated Bacon at a certain age. The problem is trying to find a new form when you’re a different generation with different influences. I didn’t just want to paint my type of subjects with this enormous tortured look. I wanted a sense of humour, a sense of distance, as when you’re sad and you cry but, at the same time, you can stand back and smile a bit at yourself.

In Chlorosis, for example, the title of which is taken from the Greek word for light green - relating to lovesickness or pining from unrequited love, I knew there was a danger of this kitsch aspect. But then there have been beautiful paintings made of, say, St Teresa’s ecstasy or Mary Magdalene’s yearning for Jesus. And so you think, why can’t you find a form in our time where you also work with such emotions? In a sense, that is what I am trying to do. That is the challenge.

How do you choose the subjects for your paintings?

In the old works I used snapshots of people I knew. Then I started to use people who were not often portrayed, for example not Freud but his wife. Now I use all kinds of photographs - fashion models, photographs of people from asylums, images of all the different types of people who have ever been photographed. I need photographs to give me some guidelines, otherwise I tend to make cartoon-like figures. It’s very hard to get rid of your own mannerisms.

I have never worked with so-called ‘artists’ models’ because they usually take on classical Greek poses which are irrelevant to my work - they are not the models of today. In the old days it was different: when Titian painted women with red hair everyone wanted to make their hair red, but today it is the fashion models who are copied. Because they have a certain type of beauty and style, they are the new models. This became a challenge for me: could I make a painting of this different type of woman. Could it also be an interesting painting of the subject and not just a distorted, unrecognisable figure. Can one make a painting of what is a supposedly beautiful woman of today without it becoming a stereotype?

The Model, on the other hand, is not about this portrayal of personality, which I so often make a point about. The painting is more of a mask, more of an empty form that can be filled in.

In The Painter the source material was my daughter. This painting is partly a statement about being a female in a tradition where painters are predominantly male. However, instead of me standing there with a brush, it is a picture of my daughter who painted herself - one hand red and one hand purple! There are many things one can associate with this image. I like the fact that instead of the man and woman as painter and model, you now have the female and the young girl both as painters. I think of it as a self-portrait.

How does the fact that you grew up in South Africa influence your work?

In Naomi, the fact that she is a dark model attracted me. Because of the politics of South Africa, one’s experience of colour and race is very acute, important and problematic. Painting someone who is laughing or crying is very difficult because it almost inevitably tends to look false or contrived. Painting an abused person, while one is alive and well oneself, also makes one feel uncomfortable. It is as if the subject gets misused twice. It is as if to be respectful to certain situations you cannot depict them, as if to avoid the voyeuristic illustration of sorrow. In the early ‘70s in South Africa I could see that the theatre dealt with apartheid, writers and photographers dealt with it, but never painters.

Eventually I came to realise that if one sees the fact of someone’s blackness only as negative and always connected with racism, then one has a problem. One can portray someone for all kinds of reasons and relationships. Also because you find them beautiful. If everything is a problem, then you can paint nothing but self-portraits. I paint men and I’m not a man, children and I’m not a child. Because of these things, Black Drawings is very important to me. It was a conscious attempt to free myself from the wrong problems. For my source material I started with a book of old black and white postcards. How and why are certain individuals grouped together? It was the expressions of how the people looked at the camera that interested me. There was a lot of ambiguity, a lot of fun, a lot of curiosity, lots of all kinds of different emotions. I felt that, as a painter, this was something that I had been able to do for the first time.

In ‘Young Boys’ you have added a new style of drawing to your work. Please explain your thoughts behind this addition to your portraiture.

These days I tend to lay more emphasis on how a painting is made, while in the ‘70s when I started I always wanted to talk more about what things mean. The visual content of a painting has got a great deal to do with how large it is, how thick, how thin, the method of painting, and so on. You can’t just read the subject matter without looking at what the paint does. You can make a lively painting about death or a terribly dead painting about a living person.

In 1996, for the first time, I made the larger scale vertical drawings of standing figures, of which Young Boys - a drawing for Japan - is an example. Using water and ink on a large scale, these drawings are not painted with a brush or coloured in, they have to flow. In a way they are similar to Japanese calligraphy; you have to be quick and be concentrated. You have to make a decision and you don’t have too much time. You can’t go over your mistakes - it’s now or never!

I put a lot of water, with a brush, on to the paper. Then, in the wet, I look at a picture. You can’t let it run around too much but on the other hand you have to let go with the ink because you have to be surprised yourself, you have to react to what’s happening. The best ones have got a skin-like quality. They are like a photograph being washed in a dark room. It’s very meditative, very nice to do - unlike a painting which is almost never nice to do in that way. In the end there is a tension between the abstract form and the suggestion of realism or illusion.

Some critics say my work is half conceptual and half painterly and what do I really want. I want this ‘inbetweenness’.



Fetherstonhaugh is a multi-disciplinary consultancy, working in the Arts, Higher Education and Finance. For more information on who we are and what we do, please explore the rest of the site or contact us on (0)20 7580 7227 or info@fetherstonhaugh.com.