Colin Self POST 1990 WORKS | 16 June - 17 July 2004
	CV | essay | show 1 | 2 | 3

Creative inventors and artists whose committed lives are a quest beyond 'boy band business' usually have hard lives in Britain. Society abuses them. William Blake, Turner, Constable – Barnes Wallace, Frank Whittle – Dyson, Mike Burrows, Trevor Baylis… Consider also the case of many of the pioneering British Pop artists in their formative years. At the Royal College Peter Phillips was moved out of the Painting School into Media and TV, (apparently, his paintings weren't art), Allen Jones, thrown out of the RA, Hockney threatened with failure. At the Slade, Self was told he'd "probably fail." They did fail their most dynamic student thinker, Terry Atkinson. William Hayter's London 'Gravura' open exhibition systematically rejected all prints suspected of having been photography influenced. There was a sort of war going on.
 
Pop Art was conceived and born here and its name coined in Britain. It changed the aesthetic and rules of fine art, of tradition – Redefined post industrial classicism – the commercial stance and sense of values of fine art's 'U-turning' controlling moguls. It took the cultural world by storm – globally influencing popular culture, design, dress, packaging and media. This British art movement has never been given the respect it merits in this country. Pop Art remains the only art movement to have evolved in this country and to have truly spread its influences worldwide (the Pre-Raphaelite and Vorticist movements were only national and mimicked foreign movements). Regarding British Pop Art the political manoeuvre was, in its early development, to 'divide and rule' its exponents, yet its founding members in the vast majority remain lifelong friends. Pop Art's UK inventors are always presented in the shadow of kindred US artist friends. True, there is finally a brilliant first ever British exhibition at this minute - but you must travel to the Italian city of Modena to see it.
 
Colin Self's exhibition at the James Colman Gallery, Hoxton, is his first London showing of post 1990 works. The English can have a taxidermy like, specimen collecting obsessiveness for pigeon-holing artists and for bashing square pegs into round holes - arrogantly promoting these distortions as fact. Colin Self simply feels he is an organic, always evolving human with heart, high emotions, vulgarity and sensitivities. No work period of his, to him, has ever been halcyon and none meaningless. The French say, 'It has to change to stay the same.' The Russians, 'Standing still - it goes backwards.' There is a Jewish expression, 'Nothing happens - all the time...' In fact this is quite likely our true human make up, with literary roots going back through Hermann Hesse's 'Steppenwulf,' through Jonathan Swift's 'Gullivers Travels' back to Homer's 'Odyssey,' all portraying that each person has more than one true but changing metamorphosing identity. Self has always perceived these life changes and fought for the artistic right to give them a philosophical expression, creatively seeking to expose and replace grey monoculture’s traditional specialising, constricting, living lie. He has always worked naturally, fluently in drawing, collage, painting, watercolour, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics. The core climate of conservative monoculture marginalized him for his explorative vision, usually only recognising his early 60s drawings (the only period of his work in which dealers invested). But Self, a whole generation ahead of his time, in fact did machete a path through the jungle of prejudice for the next generation of multi media talents like Damien Hirst to, in his turn, be readily acclaimed for his brilliant works, also spanning across more than one medium.
 
In 1973 Colin Self visited Ronald Alley and Richard Morphet at the Tate with a carload of his German Zusammenarbeit fine art creative ceramics. "But we don’t collect or exhibit ceramics Colin - not even Picasso." Thirty one years later, they awarded their Turner Prize to an extremely worthy ceramic artist, Grayson Perry. Metropolitan thought has always used Colin Self as a stalking horse and ignored his visionary capacity to have often had a seminal bearing on future art. His philosophy is to not live in an ivory tower, to not put business or career first. What is paramount in him is to be at all costs the exploring master of his own inner vision and be able to follow it; to place that, way, way above any commercial, contemporary or critical concerns, to be a vessel reachable and exposed to the flow and forces of life and change. Art and science are like day and night - where one ends, the other begins, each an equal and essential phenomenon. Self is as driven as a research scientist and sets about his work in a not too dissimilar fashion - with issues, of life experience and the inner world, not preconceptions. New problems - new results.
 
At the Slade his work was placed into their 'worst three students' category and he was told he would, "probably fail". Later, Slade visiting Blake and Hockney found only his work original. They swapped, purchased, became friends. Three months after Self left the Slade, Hockney introduced Kasmin to the new talent. From 'worst three students' to the Kasmin Gallery in months. What is gained by the English disease of critical pigeon-holing? It could be proposed Self's inclusion as the 'final member' of British Pop Art's 'Seven Samurai,' was for his inventiveness, originality, willing never say die attitude. It was arguably he who uniquely, uncompromisingly resisted what was to him the intellectual limitations of 1950s/60s bullying, tub thumping Abstraction and who turned the tide. Royal College Pop Artists were influenced by the grunting, constricting domination of Abstraction, whose power then to take over young minds, to Self, far outstripped its true cultural value. Surprisingly, even Peter Blake has "two dribbly ones" in the cupboard. Hockney was an Abstract painter for 3 years. Allen Jones' broad brushed, semi-abstract figurative paintings and Hamilton's 'Homage a Chrysler Corps' can read either as abstracted figuration or as figurative abstraction. To the younger Self, then, they were like late 50s English Rock 'n' Roll singers faking American accents. Self didn't need to do that and once he had uncompromisingly rebuffed abstraction, evolving his new look post-nuclear coloured, shaded drawings with their overtly subversive subjects and head on full frontal attitude, many in the movement perhaps gained momentum to become blatantly subversive in subject and blatantly figurative in approach. They didn't have to fake the 'American accents' anymore. The coloured shading graphite drawing responses to the tones of colours was how he had drawn as a child and pre-teenager, as his signwriter father had done before him. This personal regressing, creative innovation turned its back on drawing history, like Lichtenstein turned his back on subject and method and completely upset the apple cart in artistic America. It was a very good idea. There is an expression, 'good ideas are simply thought to have always existed.' Provincial Self never really got credit from the Metropolitans or art's establishment.
 
Hokusai, through his life, had an equally multiple, evolving, 'sensitive to Change' outlook. But in Hokusai's case it was more to do with the (at least) 24 names he invented for himself. One of his last interprets as, 'Old man crazy about drawing.' This could very adequately apply to Colin Self.

© Ian Collins with Colin Self: Norwich. From conversations and letters.