In his latest exhibition Standing Still, now at Wolverhampton Art Gallery after launching Ed Cross, Eugene Palmer (b.1955) paints two recent family events. These images of his family – modern, blended and extended – can be reproduced “a thousand times all over the UK”, sociologically substantiating the changing structure of the family in the 21st century, dipping into multiple narratives about identity.
By depicting four successive generations, Palmer's figurative paintings allude to the increasingly multicultural landscape in Britain and pay tribute to the generations of Black Britons immersed in British culture whilst being perpetually kept on the periphery. Political but non-polemical, Palmer’s exploration of personal and historical memory offers an understanding of life in a highly racialised society, all while resisting didacticism.
In his striking shift from single-subject figurative paintings to double portraits, Palmer experiments with the spatial and tests the relational dynamics between artwork and spectator.
The paintings in Standing Still were all painted in 2021 and 2022, which is impressive given their size and intricate details. How long does each painting take?
It’s to do with deadlines. Have you heard of Parkinson’s Law? Time expands to the task, which means, if you have a fixed amount of time, you will adjust your pace to meet the deadline. So far, that’s worked, and it’s stopped me getting bogged down, meandering and changing things just for the sake of it.
It’s like asking “how long is a piece of string”?
It is, really. I’ve spent months on one painting, and I’ve spent days on an equally successful painting, so it varies. The first three paintings in Standing Still took about four months, but the last five didn’t take any longer. After trying out ideas, playing with colours and searching through imagery, it’s easier to get going.
You’re known to use oil paint in your figurative works. What does this medium allow you to achieve or express that others don’t? Are you married to the medium or do you dabble in others too?
Now I only use oils, but I painted in acrylic for most of my time at art school and for a while after. I only started to use oils once I’d decided I would be working more figuratively, although I have used acrylic paints as an underpainting sometimes when using oils. I find [oil] quite a luscious, seductive medium and I appreciate the time you have to work the paint, more than with acrylic.
What inclines you to portray your loved ones as repositories of personal and historical memory, as opposed to portraying famous figures, like Kehinde Wiley does, or the ambiguous imagined figures exemplified in the works of Kerry James Marshall? Is it intentional?
I think it is intentional. Some of the issues that I, and lots of other Black artists, have been dealing with, about identity, belonging, the dynamic of being from somewhere else, is a big subject to wrestle with. It dawned on me that my family is a physical manifestation of a lot of these discussions. Painting them frees me up to think about the compositional aspect of the artwork, as opposed to constantly struggling with the subject [of racial identity] and whether it’s responsibly asking the right questions.
In a previous exhibition, I had a series of nine paintings of my dad as a young man in his early twenties – just before he came to England. When he first arrived, he was a bus driver and my mum was an auxiliary nurse. It made me think about the thousands of Jamaicans who come over and start a family and do these jobs, which are essential, but they don’t have a lot of status. So, to accompany these photorealistic paintings of my father when he was young, I had nine canvases of the same size just naming those jobs. It made me think of this idea of the “heroic” with a small “h”. At that point, I concluded that I could paint the sort of people you’ve just described, but these characters – these heroes with a small “h” – are just as worthy of my time, and they exist inside my family. It’s more of a reason to spend my time using art to celebrate and document their contributions. My paintings are still political, but they’re political without, I hope, being agitprop or protest-y, or giving the illusion of offering answers to complex problems.
A significant portion of your artworks are figurative paintings, yet you rarely describe yourself as a “portrait painter”. Do you intentionally resist this label?
Portraiture has a privileged place in artistry, which is sometimes problematic. My generation has it fixed in our heads that portraiture specifically involves being in the same space as the sitter with that dynamic communicated visually, whereas I work from photographs. In the Grand Manner portraits of the 19th century, the sitters were very important, “worthy” people who were deified and immortalised in these paintings. I am using those conventions, but not for their original purposes.
In your older paintings, you tended to focus on one subject. Why use two figures in these paintings instead of one?
It changes the dynamic between the viewer and the work, doesn’t it? If you have two figures, that mental space is occupied in a different way.
I commissioned the poses in the wedding paintings. I paid the photographer to take these images of these particular members of the wedding party in that specific pose.
Were they photographed together?
No, they weren’t. I know a lot of artists who work from photographs will have a shoot and set up scenes. However, I knew that I wanted to have pairs, but I wanted to leave open what the combinations would be; who stands with whom and how that generates a “false” narrative that invites the viewer to make assumptions.
How did you choose the pairings?
On one level, there wasn’t a fixed reason; it was partly compositional. However, Kath and Owen was quite deliberate: because Owen looks white, I decided to place him next to someone who is white. There is a hidden playful element here, as I thought it might speak about a potential relationship between the two figures. Play is very much part of this process.
One painting that particularly sticks out to me is Ann. Surrounded by a collection of double portraits and paintings that reveal the kinship and closeness in your family, Ann is the only single subject painting on display, cultivating a sense of, not loneliness, but aloneness that is much more apparent in the context of the other paintings. I’m interested in your thoughts on the contrast between Ann and the rest of the exhibition.
In a way, even in the double portraits, all the subjects are alone. They were photographed alone, and have been put in this space in the double portraits, alone. The pairing is completely artificial. So, in a funny sort of way, they are just as alone as the single portrait – and you could also argue the opposite.
The averted gaze is a provisional thing, isn’t it? We will all objectify people and will be objectified ourselves, but we don’t habitually live from that position. I think that’s how we interact with each other. We interact on levels which are, at times, temporary, inhabited for only a second, and then we adjust our position. So why is that painting still worth making?
Your question reminded me of how the painting came into being. It took a while to make this one, and there were a lot of moments where I was going over in my mind whether I should put another person in or whether I should have chosen another image where she was looking at the viewer. In several of the photographs, I am actually [beside her], and I wondered whether I should put that in. But I decided not to.
That could’ve been a very different painting with a very different atmosphere. How did you come to that choice?
I think it’s because I can relate to the sentiment coming from the painting when I look at it. It’s pensive. It’s very much someone who is thinking, reflecting on whatever. It’s relaxed. It is an image that, to me, seems very at ease. That’s one aspect, but I probably haven’t worked out what I make of it yet, which frequently happens to me. It’s her party, so she’s the centre of attention, and maybe that’s partly why I decided to paint it like this. Isn’t it the case that, as humans, we are always alone – that in a crowd we are still alone, we come into the world alone, we leave alone? It speaks to that part of what it is to be human.
[The portraits in Standing Still orbit two moments]: first, the sad event of our dad passing away, and then this follow up event that Ann organised for the family. So, somewhere in all of our heads was this memory of the recent passing, that sadness, and the idea that we had just seen dad buried alone.
A painting is just an artist’s expression of their feelings, their sentiments, their thoughts, their reflections. So, the image of Ann becomes a cypher for all those things that I just said, which is a part of the artist’s process of externalising through mark making.
Tony is another double portrait, but differs from the rest in that the figure beside Tony himself is unnamed and facing away. A sense of closeness between the subjects is still hinted at through their overlapping proximity. What does this compositional difference reveal about familial dynamics and personal identity?
I didn’t even think about that until you mentioned it. But they are the only figures that are compositionally overlapping, which is quite interesting. I think, in figurative paintings, we try to work out narratives, but there are also just decisions about painting and composition [that have to be made]. Initially, it was meant to be just Tony in the painting, but I wasn’t happy with the composition. I had to put something else in it, though it needn’t have been a figure – it could’ve been something else. When I put those two images together, the result was visually compelling, and it stopped Tony from visually slipping off the left hand side – a sort of punctuation. So, a lot of that was about trying to make decisions in order for the painting to succeed compositionally.
When you look at Tony now that the painting is done and you don’t have to worry about the composition anymore, what do you think the presence of this second figure adds?
I think there is something similar about these two characters – because I know them, and, to me, the way they are in the world is just fantastic. Tony is my older sister’s husband and Cynthia is my kids’ mum. They are very kind people and they take up space unapologetically. It was good to put them together – it made a very positive painting, because they’re so positive and I like them. They are really important people.
You left Tony’s as the only name in the title, even after you chose to include Cynthia. What does this choice mean for the painting?
I suppose because the painting really is about Tony. What I said is true about how I feel about them both, but the painting is about him. “Tony and Cynthia” or “Tony with Cynthia” didn’t fit because the Cynthia character, in my mind, is playing a supporting role for the composition. However, what you said is true, because now the painting is there, it is a completely different thing.
You can almost see her role in this dynamic as an echo of the Grand Manner portraits you mentioned earlier, where they would have companions or props that would function as a testament to their character.
Yes, she is sort of reinforcing.
Late Evening shares similarities with some of your earlier figural paintings, in the sense you have this vast Great British landscape in the background that you don’t have in the other paintings in the exhibition. What does the return to landscape in Late Evening mean to you?
In a lot of the photographs I looked at to make this painting, you can see the Surrey hills behind. I was initially going to paint the actual landscape, but, in the end I made one up because it was going to take too long to paint convincingly. There is a spatial element: area, perspective and so on, that uses the paint differently. The work was a summation of the event of coming together, and it seemed important to have this expansive background. And also, like you mentioned, it was partly a reference to the European landscapes; the Last Supper was also in my head. It was about being playful; the composition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to classical art.
Speaking of composition, I had these canvases divided in two, one darker to show night and day. The landscape embodies this notion of “place” that works with the idea of a late evening. It symbolises time passing, turning the page and narrates the story of my Dad, who was the generation that came to England, finally, sadly, passing.
Racial themes in your work are subtle and buried, albeit definitely present. Do you think it is harder for others to pigeonhole your work into a singular narrative or burden it with the task of representing ALL of black people and black history? Does it seem to you that by resisting didacticism, you are then overlooked by larger art institutions who look to use the work of black artists as a virtue signalling performance of inclusivity?
First of all, it’s really good to be another Black artist amongst a whole group of artists who are looking at these issues as well. As a body, we are using different voices to approach the same issues from different positions and that’s great. It’s true that by my age it would have been nice to have gotten a bit further with a career, but I couldn’t say that’s made a difference to the way I work. I don’t know what it is, but all I’m interested in is the work. After that, it’s just luck. If you get a lot of satisfaction from making art, if you have managed to do all the things you want to do in life and still participate in that discourse, then that is great. The way I see it: it’s never over until it’s over.
Do the interests of public art institutions have an effect on your esteem as an artist – seeing big exhibitions like Life Between Islands pass by, and so on?
I was annoyed [about not being included in the show]. I didn’t think of it as the institution, because then I wouldn’t have been particularly annoyed. It was selected by other artists who I know, and for a short while I did think “that’s ridiculous – surely it would have been a better exhibition if I’ve been in it” because of the points of views I have. Those were slightly irritating things, but only briefly. At the same time, [Richard Hylton] wrote this piece [titled 'Eugene Palmer: a Black British artist you need to know about'] and I’m sure it was to do with the fact that I wasn’t in it, which was quite flattering.
I read that essay at University! I think having your work shared with students studying art history, and in solo exhibitions like Standing Still, is valuable in a different way – although I can imagine that, for you as an artist, it might not feel like that. It is interesting to notice in big survey exhibitions about Black art who is included and who is excluded.
Yes. I know, because Tam [Joseph] was in it and I went to see it because he invited some of his friends to come to the show. It was interesting hearing from him how the exhibition came into being – and the curator David A. Bailey was saying, just as you are, why not include this person or this person? Specifically, he suggested me, but I just wasn’t what they wanted. So, you have to just leave those things. I just do what I’m in control of, and hope!
What are some of the ways the past has influenced your paintings? For example, are your experiences as a child in Jamaica, of moving to England, reflected in a way your audience might not see?
My paintings don’t really point to any specific experiences, but my experiences have affected the way I see things. For example, racism in this country, the way I chose to deal with that as a child, whether my dealing with it worked... Then there’s the experience of being abandoned I suppose, because that’s how you think of it as a kid when you’re left in Jamaica; how that was coped with as a sense of responsibility for my siblings. Those are all important experiences that have shaped me – that’s true for everyone, but I think in my case they’ve resulted in a person who is quite positive, optimistic and realistic. In the work, that is reflected in my not wanting to “fix” anything permanently, not looking for answers but being much more interested in articulating questions, even if those questions have been asked many, many times.
You currently live and work in St Leonards. Has this influenced your work in any way?
No[t in Standing Still], but I have some new work that will be exhibited in Hastings in the spring!
Eugene Palmer’s Standing Still is currently on display at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery until 8th May 2023. Palmer will also be one of six Black British artists exhibited in Hastings Contemporary’s We Out Here from 1st April - 4th June 2023.
