Artist Feature: Interview with Gray Jordan
Aaron Lelito: Can you provide a little bit about your background in art? What have been the formative experiences of your creative journey so far?
Gray Jordan: I was always a bit of a magpie—wanting to try every shiny thing that caught my eye and every new technique, just loving the thrill of making and trying new things out to see what was possible. I was still very much that way when I finished high school, which I had the privilege to do at an English language school in Paris, France. I am from the US, though, and always assumed I would return there. After high school I headed to New York and did a foundation year at the School of Visual Arts. There they informed me I would be an oil painter. I enjoyed painting but it felt too restrictive at the time, and NY was not my place, so I headed to the UK as many of my friends from my high school had returned there. I did another foundation year in London, and this time I insisted I wanted to do mixed media. I don’t think they knew what to do with me so they put me on a conceptual art course. It was very heavy on all the traditional “serious” art school teachings: that art was superior to design, that the decorative was worthless, and that painting landscape was the epitome of boringness. At that point, I wasn’t thinking of painting landscapes at all, but the general tone of the course could not have been more wrong for me. I wanted to celebrate all the amazing ways that every aspect of culture uses visual signs and symbols to try to construct stories of the human life. To investigate how very dear and fundamental to the human soul communication is, and within this, I include visual communication. I wanted to sing about how sofas and shoes and soda brands created this sort of theatrical backdrop that signified our life both to ourselves and others. Art didn’t seem to want that though, so I fell into a career managing various creative businesses while mostly keeping away from the creating myself.
When I had my son, however, I found myself questioning so many of my assumptions and realising how important it was to follow my own truths. I went back to oil painting as it was one of the few mediums I really knew how to use, but I had a very loose style involving a lot of solvents and didn’t feel happy exposing my family to that, so I began looking at other options. Considering the health and environmental implications of art was totally new for me. Our young family had also moved out of London which was the first time out of the city for me in over 20 years. I spent a lot of time wandering on the nearby Otmoor bird reserve feeling like a baby myself as I needed to learn again how to put a life together. I could have sofas and shoes and brands of soda all I wanted but I had no audience apart from myself and my infant.
I started trying to get to the root of what I was trying to use those things to tell the world about myself and why. I started thinking about who humans really wanted to communicate with and whether we had developed such complex ways of doing it that we had forgotten what we were trying to say. My ideas about identity became more interested in place, in community, in ritual and, inevitably, in landscape. My family is now based in Norfolk where we live near the east coast of the UK on the North Sea. My abstract landscapes are the beautiful places I see while questioning what my tie to them is, how my identity sits within them and how simple and basic materials can be used to convey complex ideas and feelings.
AL: What inspires you? What is it that draws you into the type of art you do?
GJ: I am inspired beyond words by the gloriousness of light and of nature. Its lines and movements and colours are the epitome of elegance to me. Trying to pin down what this spark of joy is all about, and what it tells me about myself and about the human condition, is what draws me into the type of work I do. It often means my work is following several different leads at the same time. I am now drawn to mark making at its most pure and basic, exploring what drives the desire and instinct to do this. I still have a deep love of storytelling and how that feeds into the work of identity building for communities and individuals, and this goes back to the human “place in the grand scheme of things” interest. And, of course, because that basic spark of joy comes partly from a very innate urge to communicate with other humans, so I want to capture and describe those lines and scenes as my own way of reaching out to people and communicating my joy with them.
AL: Can you describe your use of natural pigments? What led you to this technique?
GJ: As I talked about above, it was a gradual move away from man-made/processed materials. It was about finding out how to create without consuming and also was healthier for my family and the environment. A very basic thought of “what did people use to communicate these ideas about themselves and the world before we learned to communicate through shopping?” Because if we keep communicating through shopping then we will lose the power to fashion our own language as well as trashing the planet and wasting resources. We will be contracting out the job of creating narratives to the advertisement and marketing sector rather than treating it as a spiritual question.
AL: As I read the artist statement posted on your website, there were a few lines that stood out to me. Maybe you can expand on them a little bit here. Here’s one:
“Picking up a seashell may seem unremarkable and yet, perhaps it allows us a small window where, completely unconsciously, we are humble in the face of the majesty of nature.”
I’m interested in the connecting point between the “unremarkable” and “majestic”—I feel that I’ve experienced what you’re talking about, even in the specific example of picking up shells along the water’s edge. Can you give some of your thoughts on your own engagement with nature? (…big question, I know, so you may take it wherever you’d like!)
GJ: Unremarkable and majestic are all about the human perspective. The natural world makes no such distinction—only what is useful and what is not. Only humans have this self-reflective quality that questions our place in the grand scheme which is fascinating. That relationship to a shell is our humanity encapsulated in an encounter. The fact that our relationship to a shell feels like something beyond a measure of its suitability for sustaining us is remarkable even if it might be based on traits in our genes or instincts. The existence of the concept of beauty feels like a little miracle that should be interrogated and celebrated at the same time. I love to witness myself feeling that awe, that little spark of joy whether it is while I pick up a shell or put a bright red coloured soil on an image. I think that we create art and story out of the same impulse that makes us wish to view a sunset with another person or makes us show a new discovery to a parent when we are children. Humans want to share, to communicate. It seems to me that one of the first and most fundamental things we want to communicate to each other and ourselves about is our existence in our world. Like a form of echo location, we feel that if we experience then we exist, and we want to confirm that with others.
AL: How about this one:
“Coming back to nature as I feel I am starting to do now, I am also finding myself more drawn to the elements of various spiritual practices that use objects as a way of harnessing the energy of a place or of nature to bring power, beauty or other desires into the human realm.”
For many (if not all) of the nature writers I admire, the natural world is more than something to look at, to protect, or to gain some sense of well-being from. There is a sacredness, a significance beyond the physical tree or mountain or stream that we might find beautiful in its own right. I’m curious to know your thoughts on this—what has led to your deeper connection with nature that you’re referring to in the quote above?
GJ: I had been so successfully distracted by the things that people were trying to sell me and by the man-madeness of the city (I lived in London for 20 years) that my field of vision had become very narrow. My vocabulary was stunted because I could only discuss myself in relation to other humans and our cultural symbols rather than thinking about myself (and everyone else) as an animal within the systems of nature. When we realise that we are a part of the natural world, it shows us our own humanity. We can use it like a mirror. Our ancient stories about the natural world were our stories about ourselves because relating to this ‘other’ makes us ourselves. That echo location thing again. When we stop telling stories about nature, we stop telling stories about a huge part of ourselves, the foundations of our cultures and the interconnectedness of the world. When our stories are only about the things that are man-made then we start telling a story with only one side of a conversation.
AL: As our journal features literary as well as visual art, are there any authors or poets that are favorites for you? Anything goes here–classics to contemporary.
GJ: Virginia Woolf is my favourite which may seem rather unrelated to my other interests but what I really see in her writing, particularly my favourite novel Orlando, is her willingness to question the assumptions about how reasonable many human behaviours and rituals are. All writing that asks the question “what are we all doing here in the world and why?” is something I enjoy and she often does it with wonderful humour, although sometimes very dark humour.
More directly connected to the themes of my work, the poetry of Wendell Berry is unsurpassed at expressing the deep peace and fundamental grace that nature can show us.
AL: What are you currently working on artistically? What are your goals for the near future?
GJ: I have two parallel paths at the moment. One, where I allow myself the sheer joy of discovering the colours that new plants, rocks and other objects are capable of creating and just celebrating that colour on smooth watercolour paper making abstract natural shapes that often mirror landscapes I see without any conscious decision on my part. It is my way of going into flow state. Sometimes I add text that is almost stream of consciousness prose as I try to articulate the humanness within those landscapes and within the act of witnessing.
My second path though is a more practical task of still pushing at how I can communicate without consuming. What can I create with just my hands, basic tools and what is offered to me by the natural world within walking distance of my home. I am looking at egg tempera or cherry gum mixed with local clay soils or chalks and then added to either handmade plant papers or wooden supports of various types as my painting surfaces. Finding my way through the very artisan process of making paper or woodworking is something I’m having to be patient with myself on. I want to know everything now, but that isn’t how learning these kind of processes work, of course!
- View more of Gray’s work at grayjordanart.com and on Instagram @grayjordanart.