An interview and studio visit with Duncan Swann

1. Since moving to Tokyo, what aspects of contemporary urban life draw your attention most? Are there particular neighborhoods, scenes or types of people that inspire you?

Tokyo is so different from the cities in which I have lived. It is a vast megacity, but is made up of so many small interesting neighborhoods that roll into one another. I enjoy the atmosphere at night in a lot of these areas like Gakugeideigaku, Naka-Meguro, Jiyugaoka with their small streets full of places to eat and drink. But similar areas can be found throughout the city, very local and lively. As a big city though it’s surprisingly quiet in terms of noise, and the people are a lot calmer and less aggressive than in many other places in the world. In that respect, I find it a very easy city to live in. 

When I’m looking for people to put into paintings it’s really just a matter of curiosity.  Once you start to be interested in the way people look you quickly realize that everyone is interesting in their own way. For me it’s primarily more likely to be the way they’re standing, or looking, usually in a moment when they’re in their own world. I’d rather not have a posed photograph as source material. I’ve photographed a lot in museums, especially the Tokyo National museum, where you catch people looking intently at a piece of work, or in the second that something has caught their eye. Harajuku is a great place to photograph people because it is so full of diverse groups. Often I am interested in someone only to find that there’s another figure in the shot that I hadn’t noticed that is equally interesting. 

I don’t have any strict rules. I have literally thousands of images, and select them as and when I feel that they might work together with the others in the painting. But ultimately I want most people in the work to be someone who you might see anywhere in the city. I want the selection to feel representative of the population. One figure might be great because they’re dancing or pointing, but another might simply place their feet in a way that touches me somehow. 

2. Do you ever create stories about the people in your paintings? While working on a piece do you imagine their lives and experiences?

Yes and no. I don’t create stories or narratives as such but I do deliberately set up potential dynamics between the figures. Even though I imagine each of them as being in a personal moment and living entirely separate lives from the others, I do like to have figures looking down towards others in the grid, or pointing towards someone or a mark that might impact them somehow. I like to have at least one or two figures looking out of the grid, at whatever happens beyond the canvas. The numbers underneath the figures do suggest some form of selection or process or logging, but I don’t really consider them as being all part of some external singular event. I am more interested in creating a painting in which the viewer can read or interpret their own stories. There’s no overarching narrative - except perhaps life. 

When I’m painting the figures I feel a responsibility towards them and a sense of empathy or sympathy. I try to do right by them. Circling or crossing out a figure isn’t done lightly. I don’t enjoy crossing through a figure. But we are all subjected to the decisions of others in so many ways. I’m trying to create an alternative image of what it feels like to be human. The ‘decisions’ in the form of circles etc might be made by the state, by a job interviewer, by school entrance boards, by the guy at customs at the airport, or even by a deity, or by fate. Ultimately in a certain sense we all profile people all of the time, drawing impressions or conclusions that might be entirely wrong.

Within a city we are all inter-related.  We exist in the same environment, ride the same trains, cross one another in the street, share emotions, dreams and fears, a myriad interactions with subtle and nuanced consequences that effect and shape each of our lives, often in ways that are entirely beyond our control. 

3. Your work evokes complex feelings in viewers. When I look at your pieces, part of me wonders whether the people will ever know they are being painted, and I find myself imagining what they might be feeling in that moment, captured without their awareness. What emotions or questions do you hope your audience takes away from your work?

I started making paintings similar to these long before I came to Japan. Since coming though I have bought so many books on Hokusai, his 100 views of Mount Fuji and the manga books. I find them unceasingly interesting visually, but I also feel his interest in the people and his deep love and joy. The drawings are magical.  

He catalogued so much of his environment and so many of the people living in it and they’re just fascinating images. I’d love viewers to carry away a sense of this emotional response; a sense of timeless existence that is countered by a sense of presence and to relate to the figures in some way.

A lot of the imagery that I use comes from old photo compilations of the city, and from portraits in museums and books. In the paintings, I want to build a sense of ‘everyone’ that lives or has lived in the city. Conceptually if I could include everyone then I would. 

The viewer might not be present in the painting, but they could be. They might not have seen the people in it, but they might have. The titling of the paintings works this way. I took names of friends and people who have been important to me and my family while we’ve lived here. So Kyoko, or Keisuke or Yukiko might not be in the painting, but they could be. Again, a juxtaposition of the vast and the personal.  I think that what I’d like is for the viewer to leave with a sense that the paintings touched them in some unexpected way, that they resonated somehow. 

I make the paintings to help me to understand the world around me. I search for some meaning that rings true to me. But so much of making paintings is just problem solving. Trying to find a balance of colour and line, to retain an energy throughout the work, to make work that has a certain integrity. I am not trying to impart knowledge or teach anyone. The painting needs to function beyond its subject matter - to take you to a new place. But in making it I’m putting forms together, weighing this one against that, the weight of colour or line, like constructing a building. And its possible that when you look at a painting you see something that is to do with image and ideas, but if I look at the same painting its to do with physicality and form, because I made it, and this physical thing then became the idea.

4. You have an incredible ability to transport viewers back 100 years with your style, tone and atmosphere. What draws you to paint your subjects in this way?

The figures are actually painted quite simply. Sometimes I like to put a figure down as quickly as possible without worrying too much about likeness or details. I’m more interested in a sense of someone rather than a precise physical likeness. Because of that, I don’t think most of the people are recognizable, but hopefully they have something of the essence of the original.  

I love the aesthetic of old sepia photographs and even more the deep blues and purples of a vintage daguerreotype. I find old photographs endlessly fascinating to look at; the people in them looking back at you through time, and the imperfections on the surface, the way that these can change the apparent meaning of the image.  I like to include this type of visual imperfection in my paintings. Sometimes a blot of paint might look like a cloud or dust, or a detail from an MRI, and I am really interested in this almost ‘sub-atomic’ surface imagery. 

I also like the edges of old photocopies or xerox prints, and white noise on video or tv screens. They speak of an elemental level to the world, to seismic readings, or dust clouds in the desert, or a line moving up and down on a hospital screen. I also like the potential reading of a spilt bottle of ink on a page. I like to leave a lot to chance in the creating of the ‘environments’ that the figures inhabit. This surface information contributes as much as anything to the sense of transporting a viewer back through time. 

Rather than an image which feels old, I’m more interested in one that feels timeless, that might even come from the future.

5. On that point, your paintings often blend past, present and future, collapsing time into a single moment. When starting a piece, do you begin with a memory, a vision of the future, or something happening in the present?

The honest answer to your question is “all of the above.” I spend a lot of time on my own in the studio, so I have the time to listen to podcasts, and I read a lot. When I first started making paintings that used a grid of figures, it came from a visit to a toy museum in Germany. They had a display case of model railway figures, and they were arranged in a box in a grid, with their original prices written underneath them. Each figure was tied to this board, sometimes around the waist, sometimes around the neck. It wasn’t an artwork, just a way of displaying some old toys. I photographed this display, overexposed it in black and white so the background almost disappeared. The resulting images had a profound effect on me. They felt like a memory, something I’d seen, and yet simultaneously they seemed outside of time, or from some future. So in a way, I begin with the memory of that response, and I try to recreate the sense of it, probably over and over again. 

I’ve recently been listening to podcasts by Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist. According to him, outside of the rules imposed by gravity, there is no past or future in the universe. Time is something which serves our human needs and allows us to understand our existence. But in the same way as a ‘flat earth’ was an approximation that came out of our observed reality, time itself is nothing more than an approximation and is entirely relative. So maybe in this way, having figures from today, and twenty, thirty or a hundred years ago, all simultaneously arrayed in the same image, may actually be closer to reality as the laws of physics understands it, than a conventional image of a single time and place. And maybe at some level, we understand this and can relate to it. 

6. What is the strangest or most unexpected thing you’ve witnessed while photographing people for your paintings? 

I’m not sure there have been any in the conventional sense. I wander around taking photographs and don’t know what I have until later. Often I think I’ve captured someone who looked amazing, only to find I missed them, and its a strange feeling because they would have ended up in a painting but its like they wandered off set and I know I won’t have the opportunity again. 

Tokyo, and actually any city is full of interesting people, and sometimes you capture a moment that was completely unexpected and beautiful, and you find it in the pictures but had no real idea of it at the time, because it was just people being people. 

Once I was sitting at a cafe in Italy, photographing the street, when a pigeon walking down the road was shat upon from above by another pigeon. He looked devastated by the experience, like the victim of some cosmic role reversal. If he hadn’t been so down-hearted about it it would have been pretty funny.

7. Have you ever painted yourself, or do you more often channel your own emotions into your subjects?

I did a couple of self portraits a few years ago, with my face partially masked by small birds. 

I’m more interested in other people than in myself because I can’t witness myself doing something in a natural way. 

I don’t deliberately channel my own emotions into my paintings, but I suppose that in some way that’s inevitable. I know a lot of artists completely separate themselves from their art, but I don’t think I can say I’m one of them. I will sit for hours and hours just laying colour into the surface of a painting. In that time I’ll be thinking about all sorts of things, and I think that the subliminal nature of some of these things are going to find their way into the work. And the success of a painting is often not about a radical line or mark or figure. It’s something instinctive that often takes a lot of time, something to do with creating an atmosphere or a tone. And when it works, its almost like alchemy, as if the painting painted itself. 

So in a way none of the paintings are of me, and at the same time all of them are.