Cutie-Pie / An interview with France-Lise McGurn

France-Lise McGurn photograph by Amy Gwatkin

Rachel Howard: The lure of the 'cute' in your paintings is something I’d like to talk about, both in subject matter such as the recurring appearance of Bambi in recent works, the ultimate representation of innocence and your pastel palette and dancing lines, it feels like a Trojan horse for something darker, can you expand on what you’re smuggling in?

France-Lise McGurn: I think it’s a bit about the sweet ‘n’ sour. Like Tweetie Pie warming himself on a cigar butt, so that things aren’t straightforward. The fawn is sexy, nostalgic and sad all at the same time. Bambi was the first time there was any palpable depiction of grief in a cartoon for people in my generation for sure, so the big sad eyed sexy fawn has cropped up in my work in a few ways, the girl from Les Miserables or Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin. Then there’s these art deco statues that sit on fireplaces with half clothed women stroking a greyhound and a fawn, you know the ones, I like all these things, a dirty street and some sort of Disney Princess packaging trampled into the pavement. It’s the high low thing, to turn you on and off at the same time.

I’ve got brown eyes y’know and I lost my mum a while ago so there’s a kind of tongue in cheek self portraiture too, I like it not to be taken too seriously. 

The pastels make sense to me (it’s so funny how many men find my palette offensive) they are sensual and like the Emmanuelle movie, or Disney or whatever, I was born in the Eighties! But there’s also formal reasons, I paint wet on wet and so darker pigment can slice through a paler colour and not get lost.

What Everyone Wants, Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2024, installation view.

RH: Of course you were born in the eighties! The pallette suddenly makes sense in a way I hadn’t connected before. Can you expand on the 'formal reasons', how and why you paint wet on wet and the mediums you use?

FLM: My canvases are prepped with pva and clear gesso ‘til they get… well….. slippy. So that paint glides across the top…. and then I kinda scrub. I normally come into the studio and see everything I can’t live with! The walk of shame from the night before and so vigorously set about sort of obliterating whatever is there and coating it with a very liquined turpsed down colour, usually with some white in it to tipex out the image below. The white is there for its opaqueness and so everything gets pastel which I also like. Some of the painting below remains and any marker pen seeps through and then I can sort of cut into the surface with something very pigmented, a real deep Prussian blue perhaps, straight from the tube. And it all has to happen pretty quickly, speed is more important than getting it ‘right’ because it just has to feel a bit fresh ‘n’ alive. That’s what I’m looking for… I mean, amongst everything else, the endless search ha!

RH: Yes I can see the energy is important, you the artist is left hanging in the air, ever present, like you’ve just left the room. When I saw your show Sleepless at Tate Britain, in the Art Now space, a few year ago, the exhaustive energy was unmistakable, something that keeps returning to my mind is the Sydney Pollack film (and book) They Shoot Horses Don’t They, energy as an illness a metaphor of the relentlessness of life, I suppose this is what I meant as the Trojan horse earlier, where euphoria and hysteria meet and become inextricably entangled, life, motherhood, dancing, fucking the whole shebang. 

FLM: I love that film…. yeh it’s maybe something about trying to find meaning? What’s the point? Why fuck if not to procreate what is pleasure desire etc. I mean also things are funny and trashy and what am I going to make for the tea etc…. It’s a big mix. It’s why cigarettes are a great motif for artists ‘cos they are pretty pointless in fact, they are damaging, we know that… but it’s kinda the pleasure and the pain and a connection to pop culture and music and film and some kind of mild rebellion right? Like I’m gonna smoke this and nothing else matters but right now - this moment and it’s sexy and it’s killing me.

And I think that’s what painting is, I love looking at Old Masters of course but I’m not thinking about art when I’m making paintings, its just what it is right there and then, like sex or dancing, it can’t be planned.

That show was 2019 and I’d just become a Maw! So painting and figuring out this mad new thing was all mixed up and so that was what the show was…. I think you have to use whatever is at hand, if you’re going on zero sleep with cabbage leaves in your bra then that’s the battery! 

My mum was an artist, it wasn’t her job she also worked and had five kids and in a way was pretty ‘traditional‘ in that she kept house, she wasn’t traditional in any other way to be honest. Anyway it was how I grew up, you just go and get on and make and figure it all out and the washing still needs to be done and you still wanna party etc….. I had never contemplated the model of male genius with an impeccable palette laid out, so it’s not to reject any other ways of making but fuck it life is busy and should be full and that’s what painting is for me. 

Installation view: France-Lise McGurn and Rita McGurn, Matching Mother/Daughter Tattoos, Margot Samel, New York, 2023

RH: Is this why your work spills and slips off the canvas on to the walls, ceiling, light shades and furniture - an unconfined life?

FLM: I guess so, yeh bit chaotic always, restless and unprecious. I don’t like things to feel fussy, canvas is a bit fussy by nature. So I like to break out of it, there’s a bit of friction for me with the ‘subject’…. ‘figurative painting‘ isn’t so much of an interest as just being a person surrounded by people is, I’m a real city dweller and I think that my work is very much about intimacy and bringing in a city, I know nature really gives some of my friends the headspace or inspiration for painting but wandering a bit lonely round the city does it for me. It’s funny you’re such a mix, the intensity of the city and the countryside is evident in your work! I love that.

So I think whilst I am using this sort of short hand of drawing figures I am a bit at odds with it, trying to displace it or create noise around it so that it feels more ecstatic, like how it feels to be around people, the memory of being in a crowd or on a dance floor or in bed with someone or growing up or whatever, you’re IN it… but also intensely solo. Moving onto the walls or furniture or whatever I’m allowed to sort of throws any one singular image out the window. Ideally it makes it work a bit more like images do in your memory.

I know graffiti is it’s own art form, its own whole world but I love it, the more amateur the better, ‘tongs ya bass’ people just scrawling something on the world, direct and urgent, ‘the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls’ etc…… an artist once called me a graffiti artist as an insult and I thought it was a cool compliment… and of course frescos…. There’s just so many reasons not to feel restricted.

RH: It’s interesting isn’t it, cave painting, the Sistine chapel, Bobby Sands’s dirty protests and Banksy, mark making on walls is essential, direct, immediate, I suppose the canvas came about to make things sellable, portable, commodified and working directly on the wall is actually much more of a tradition and not really subversive (aside from Sands) at all in the sense that it came first - in fact for the people as opposed to for the elite. Does it pain you when the walls are painted over?

FLM: I guess it’s nice when someone lives with an art work, paintings on canvas are good for that, if it’s directly on the wall, well it’s gone or it’s there, which I also like….. zero pain when something is painted over. You can’t stay at the party forever, so it’s painted over and move on… unsentimental. Although I was thinking about images ye live with. I know that a lot of my aesthetic I can trace back to things that have just been around, Italian coffee shop advertising in big frames while you’re a kid waiting about on people drinking coffee…. or gable end murals in Glasgow or books and paintings around the house. So it’s good some images stick about, but not the wall paintings, they should and do get painted over with few exceptions, lights up time to go home style . 

I had to cheat myself a bit when I did a recent ceiling painting, it’s there for a while, in fact I think about going and redoing it, not to do it better just a restlessness. It’s kinda the walk of shame thing I mentioned before like joy but also a bit of dread, wipe it out building it up… abandon and unease. 

Painting is kinda about time isn’t it, rhythm, understanding all these things so it just dictates the metabolism… some things are slower or creep in and some in a heartbeat appear on the canvas… wall painting is pure energy and always a shock to me to look at after.

RH: Cigarettes have been appearing too, Sarah Lucas, Maggie Hambling and David Hockney would approve! 

FLM: Does he love snout? Fair play, I’ve always put them in the walls or painted them in pictures, I did a lot of marker pen drawings on cigarette packs when I was at art school. They are the perfect existential metaphor kinda, just a bit like painting, like it’s pointless, smoking doesn’t actually make you high nor does painting but there is an ecstatic kinda high, linked to decades of music and film reference to do with rebellion, crisis, freedom etc. A little bit death, a little bit sex… what’s the point except that… you are… here… right now… smoking a fag, up in smoke….

RH: in David Batchelor's book Chromophobia he discusses the cultural suspicion of colour in Western art and philosophy, often framing it as something excessive, decorative, even feminine, and therefore inferior. Can you expand on your choice of palette in terms of this kind of colour snobbery. Are your colour choices a conscious engagement with or resistance to those hierarchies? And to what extent is femininity, both as a visual language and a cultural construct, something you're exploring or reclaiming through your use of colour?

FLM: It’s so funny how offended people can be by palette… can’t tell you how many disdainful ‘pastels’ comments I’ve had from (mainly male) artists … they may as well say you have big tits and blond hair….. of which I have neither haha…. maybe I’m making up for it with pale pinks and peach, more fuckable. It blows my mind how much people take black ‘n’ white or greyscale more seriously, snore, but also I like that too! I use it all. I also think this is where the ‘joy‘ comments come from too, which sometimes is positive and sometimes reductive. To me there’s grief, longing, crisis, love… joy too but I think it’s maybe hard to see past the ‘pastels’, I feel my colours are seeping through from Glasgow’s Barras market in the 90s or the palette of 70s film, by the way have you ever seen Goodbye Girl, the Neil Simon film, I’m in love with that film, it’s great in loads of ways I always recommend it to single mums, ha, but the palette is perfect.

Head, oil and marker pen on canvas, 40 × 45 cm 2022.

RH: No i haven’t, I’ll watch it tonight. What are you working on at the moment?

FLM: I’ve been working on these new pieces which make so much sense to me and are dead thrilling. Very literal in a way, I’ve been getting some of the images I collect from movies, mags, music vids etc and getting them printed at the CAT studio in Glasgow onto canvas. It’s a whole different formal challenge but it’s kinda good to fuck about with how misleading it can be, some sort of blown up damaged pixelated image with painting directly on top, comes out chiaroscuro or whatever.

One of the images I’ve scaled up is a screen grab from a music video by an Italian disco group called ‘Fun Fun’ the two girls performing are models, not the vocalists or producers. They are clearly high as kites and have probably just been pumped by the producers, I’ve inserted that last bit of narrative but it’s relatable and you can tell a lot by the eyes as Cosey Fanny Tutti said… They each wear a t-shirt that says ‘FUN’. It’s a compelling video, and kinda funny not funny.  This image kinda fits in with some sexploitation films I’ve been watching and referring to... The palette from the printed background is different, darker and so that’s messing with my palette in a way that is natural.

I’m working on a few different projects, some on-site installations which is very exciting next year…. and some with studio made works, I’m showing some new stuff in Hong Kong at Massimo De Carlo in November, so working that all out now…… I don’t really work in series so a show is always a way to think through references and ideas and ruminate and I love that process….. finally sitting down with lists and lists of titles and notes…. some half written in sleep etc.

AUNTY anti

Scottish potatoes

Hysteric glamour

Dirty pound note

Yamaha intro

Roughies

Marching Backwards

Intense female friendship 

The rushes

Deal 

Dummy 

Bambi yeh, oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm, 2024