Robert Montgomery

Q: Where are you from?

A: I’m from Scotland, I was born in Chapelhall, which was a mining village in Lanarkshire. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners, but life was hard in the mining villages after the mines closed down in the 1980s. So it was a pretty tough working class environment, but my mum was a very creative person. She always made things with her hands, and she loved beautiful fabrics, so I grew up with a sense of beauty that came from my mum and she always encouraged me to paint.

Q: What inspired you to be an artist?

A: My high school art teacher, John McKerrell. He was an incredibly inspiring teacher, and he gave me the belief that I could actually be an artist. It didn’t seem like an easy career choice for someone from my background, but his belief went a long way, and I think it has actually sustained me for my whole life. Passionate teachers can really change your life. John also protected me at school. I went to a pretty average comprehensive school, not particularly rough for a school around Glasgow, but the thing is by my mid-teens I had decided I wanted to dress in what I imagined was ‘the style of Oscar Wilde’ – I wore velvet suits and brightly coloured silk scarves from Oxfam charity shops to school – and if you went to a working class school in Scotland dressed like that in the 1980s, you needed a bit of protection. I was bullied and ostracised at school for being different, but I stuck to my guns. I used to spend lunchtimes in John’s classroom and he would give me extra lessons about art history - he would put up his slide projector and show me all the great 19th century French painters - Jacques-Louis David, Géricault, Puvis de Chavannes. I didn’t really have friends among the other children, and John really became my best friend at school.

Q: Was there a formative moment that influenced the direction of your work?

A: Yes. One day I picked up a book called The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry in the library at Edinburgh of College of Art and I read a poem called Free Union by André Breton. I was completely blown away by the power of Breton’s language to transform its subject matter, and to find magic in the everyday - to transform the everyday into something magical really. I put that book down and I thought “Oh Hell! Now I’m going to have to be a painter AND a poet.” And all of my work since that moment, all of my life since that moment really has been trying to find different ways to answer that question. How to be a painter and poet at the same time?

Q: What one piece of art had the biggest impact on your career?

A: The light work The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You, and Like This You Keep Them Alive, which I originally made for an exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion in 2010, along with Martin Creed. My best friend from art school, Sean Watson, had died just before that, and I made that work as part of my personal grieving process. But it really spoke to people, it became a piece people went to in times of their own loss or grief. And it became quite a big piece on the internet - people have shared it millions of times. And people even have tattoos of the text. That one work had a big impact because it has really resonated with lots of people who are trying to navigate the same grieving process. What the piece is about for me is that after Sean died I was still sending my love to him every day and I could feel him still sending his love back to me too. I could still really feel his love coming into me. Ultimately, I do believe that our love for each other survives beyond death, that love is somehow immortal, and that we still receive the love of our loved ones who have passed away. I have experienced that and so I know it to be true.

Q: Tell us about your artistic process. What are your artistic processes? And how do they vary with your different modes of work?

A: Well, I’m always trying to work out how the images and the words in my work resonate together - it’s a bit like how music and lyrics work in a song, in that way my process is a little bit like songwriting. Actually there are a couple of songwriters whose work I love, who also collect my work - Florence Welch, and Michael Stipe from REM, both of whom are truly profound artists and I feel deeply honoured to be collected by them - and I think a lot about the way they both write, or about how Nick Cave writes, and about how lyrics work with music when I’m trying to work out how words work with images.

In a way my work is all about taking the idea of Concrete Poetry (the concept in poetry that the way the poem looks graphically is also part of its meaning) and really running with that and expanding the principle of Concrete Poetry into light sculptures, fire poems, paintings, whatever medium I am working in. So it’s always kind of the same process, the paintings are more handmade obviously in that you can feel the hand in them, the gesture, and they are a sort of ‘frozen moment’ of gestures from the studio.

Q: How do the landscape paintings relate to the light works?

A: The light works look outwardly very contemporary, but I realised at a certain point that the way I often set them in the landscape and they come alive at dusk and sunset, was a slightly unconscious tribute to the 19th century landscape paintings I love by Caspar David Friedrich and Turner. I started out when I was very young, I’m talking between the age of 14 and 17, making landscape paintings in watercolour, and I realised somehow that had stayed in my bones.
And if you look at my paintings in the gallery you’ll see they are very much about light, about the luminosity of the sky and the way light hits the land. I use transparency, especially in the skies, a bit like how a watercolour painter would.

So the light works and the paintings are more closely connected than you might think at first glance. I think we are naturally uplifted by light, and I love paintings that have real luminosity. A great landscape painting brings the sky inside a house.

Q: Do you consider yourself an artist or poet first?

A: Oh, I’m an artist first. There is a great poet in our house, but that is Greta Bellamacina, my wife. She is the best living poet in the English language, in my opinion. I love the way Greta uses language, she transforms the ordinary world into something much more magical in her poetry, it’s actually not unlike the way Breton’s poetry transforms the ordinary world.

I love poetry deeply, and in a way poetry is my religion, but I’m a professional artist and an artist first. I was already an artist when I wanted to become a poet, so in a way I'm an artist who uses poetry as a medium.

Q: What is your philosophy, or at least your philosophy for today?

A: Well, I think at this moment in time we are almost in a state of collective trauma caused by our perilous ecological situation, and the rapidity with which digital media has taken over our lives. I see a contemporary world where our consciousness has been increasingly invaded by a particular kind of digital mass media that is designed to sell us things, but it also seems to have been designed to create conflict between us.

I think our psychological struggle now is to free ourselves from that digital mass media realm and put ourselves back into the natural world, back into real space and time, to urgently re-establish our kinship with nature – our connection to trees and sky – and to urgently re-establish our kinship with each other. As human beings there is so much more that unites than divides us and we have to become conscious of that again. We need to return to empathy.

If you are interested in adding Robert Montgomery to your collection, speak to one of our art consultants now - email us at info@halcyongallery.com