HP: Can you tell me about your studio and working routine? Do you have any morning rituals or habits that contribute towards a fulfilling day in the studio? What is a typical working day?

RC: I’m lucky to get into the studio 4 days a week at the moment. The fact I have to commute to the studio is sometimes a great help as it enables me to plan out what I’m doing to some extent. One of the major difficulties, especially as I like to work on multiple pieces, is to maintain coherence.

HP: Is there a specific narrative that unite the paintings that are being exhibited with Hunted Projects? Or do you wish for these works to be viewed and interpreted independently of each other?

RC: They’re a group of work that sort of coalesced over the last couple of years. Some started a few years ago and others more recently. I worked on them alongside bigger, more formally abstract works in the studio, but because “I'd sometimes bring them home to work on when I couldn’t get in as much, I ended up viewing them as a fairly cohesive set of works..an extension of my earlier figurative works. They’re also largely taken from a series of images I found in places such as Deptford market..I’ve had them in my studio for years. I wouldn’t say there was any fixed narrative for them, although I thought there was a consistent sense of fractured space in all the paintings.

HP: What interests me about your paintings is that you simultaneously explore both abstraction and figuration. In regards to abstraction, there is a clear investigation of experimental techniques present in each painting, whilst the figures appear to act as ghosts, or the explorers of these abstract landscapes. The painting The Wanderer, 2022, seems to capture the essence of this observation. 

In your words, can you tell me about the interplay between abstraction and figuration, and what role do the figures play within your paintings?

RC:  I think the term “ghosts” is quite interesting in relation to the figuration in the paintings. In one sense the figures tend to be historical, whether they’re subjects of historical portraiture, or taken from found imagery such as slides etc.. In another sense I tend to view the figures as elements of abstraction in themselves. They're all paintings of images of figures, whether that means reproductions of society portraiture or figures culled from found imagery such as slides..but not from life or personal imagery. Like Beckett writing in French, that distance to the subject allows them to become a bit more abstract within the architecture of the painting. I think this is probably evidenced quite aptly in the series of works being displayed with Hunted Projects. The figures prominence are largely de-emphasised and they appear either obscured or fragmented. The painting you referred to in the question, The Wanderer, is probably the work where the figure manifests itself most conventionally, and was the first one completed in this series and was largely influenced by looking at William Blakes illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy. In fact looking at different interpretations of divine comedy has influenced the way I think about the figure in an abstract landscape generally. Whether it’s Arthur Flaxman’s minimalistic figures, or Dore’s spatially detailed etchings or some of Blakes sparse illustrations of purgatory, there’s a range of interpretations of space that either sustains or subsumes the figure. 

HP: In 2011, you held your second (of three) solo exhibitions at Marc Jancou Gallery in New York. The exhibition title took its name from the 1941 short story written by Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths. At the heart of the short story is Ts’ui Pens’s labyrinthine novel where all possible outcomes of an event are allowed to occur simultaneously. The story explores the idea of infinite endings whilst embracing contradictions surrounding space and time. Would you say that you approach the act of painting in a similarly minded manner? 

RC:  Yes. you could probably look at it that way. I think you can probably extrapolate a sense of the relationships between the works from that premise, if not a methodology. In some respects the process of working and re-working paintings lends itself to ideas about open or “infinite” interpretations..especially as you can look at it as not only being images overpainted, but intent and meaning also.

HP: It is evident that you embrace temporality and visual impermanence for you allow your paintings to be exhibited at various degrees of finish. Some paintings appear more worked, whilst others show signs of freshness. Can you expand on this for me? 

RC: I think the visual impermanence is a reference to an interest in conservation I developed when looking at 18th century’s portraiture and specifically that of Joshua Reynolds. Because of experimental techniques, the deterioration of the paintings were accelerated rapidly. It spoke to me of the object nature of a painting in the sense that it would change over time, outside the agency of the artist. I suppose what I’m getting at is it always made me consider at what point I would consider a painting to have finished. Although I wouldn’t say I’d ever shown a work that wasn’t ready to be shown, sometimes they’ve retained the possibility of myself being able to continue working on it, which in turn allowed me not to be too precious about it.

HP: Having visited you in your studio many times over the years, I have witnessed you handling your paintings in all sorts of traditionally unorthodox ways. I have seen you physically uproot a painting that had cured face flat to the ground, as well as use the edge of a painting to hammer metal nails into a wall. Such heavy handed occurrences highlight your non-precious approach towards painting, whilst affirming a genuine and experimental attitude towards painting itself. Would you consider your approach to painting as being unconventional or simply even more experimental than the likes of Joshua Reynolds? 

RC: I doubt its especially unconventional and its certainly not as technically experimental as someone like Joshua Reynolds. A lot of the most interesting developments have occurred when I’ve felt the need to approach the work in a slightly more physical way…whether that's because I’ve been sitting down too long or working too intricately on a painting for its own good or for whatever reason.

I think it’s helpful to create a space that can encompass as wide a range of approaches as possible, and one that supports a kind of cross pollination or controlled experiment masquerading as accident.

HP: I am interested in the notion of preciousness and at what stage you would choose to entirely discard or erase a painting. To you, is there such a thing as a failed painting or do you perceive a failed painting as another opportunity to further explore the temporal nature of painting?

RC: You can tell when a painting is not going anywhere interesting, or is becoming unresolvable, but there’s usually something there that prevents it being totally erased, so I wouldn’t necessarily think about them in terms of complete failures, but more of dead ends. It’s ended up being fairly important to my work to keep the paintings active over a long period of time. I’ve still got canvases from 15 years ago that I occasionally work on. I quite like having the texture to work with even if any trace of the original image has long since been subsumed. I think the concept of ‘preciousness’ is maybe slightly different but equally important on a practical level. It’s probably why I like working on multiple paintings..so one doesn’t become all consuming. When you’re unsure about the progress of a painting, it’s quite easy to displace that anxiety into a level of psychedelic detail I don't really have time for.

HP: When it comes to beginning a new painting, do you begin with preparatory sketches of some form or do you prefer to work in an improvised manner?

RC: It depends on the type of work I’m wanting to make really. Although, not in this current group of works, I’m also working on larger abstract works that tend to begin with a fairly monochromatic ground. I tend to let them sit that way for a while before adding many other elements. They tend to get scuffed up in the studio also, which offers up different possibilities. So whether they’re accidents I can use as departure points, or figures or references from things like Blakes illustrations, the works tend to develop a relatively improvisational cartography. On other works, like some of the ones in this series, I might start with a figure and work around it until the figure becomes redundant or abstracted. It’s quite rare for me to have a fully developed image of a painting in my head I’m working towards.

HP: The painting Riders, 2022, appears to be the most visually ambiguous painting in the show. The background figures are silhouettes, whilst the loose brushwork of the figure in the foreground remind me of your ‘after-image’ portrait paintings that were first exhibited at IBID Projects in 2012. Can you shed some light on this painting?

RC:  It was just one of the rare works I didn’t feel the need to add much to. Again, it would have come from a found image, and I probably envisaged locating it in a more conventional setting and then playing around with it,  but I got to the point relatively quickly where something reminded me of Vermeer and I thought i'd better not fuck it up so I moved onto something else. I’m glad I left it when I did as I think its got one of the most interesting spaces in the group. When I was younger I used to hate the idea of letting a video run past the end of the credits. I hated the idea of what was at the end of the tape. Obscure company idents in abstract space and scratchy blackness..This painting ended up reminding me of that.

HP: How regularly do you personally document the progression of your paintings? Is it important to take note of each individual layer of each painting? 

RC: I tend to document them fairly frequently, sometimes because the painting out races me and before I realise I like it, it’s gone. 

HP: Several of the key arguments that T.S.Eliot makes in his text, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919, come to mind when considering your work. One of the key points in the text is that the poet should be “impersonal,” acting, in effect, as a “receptacle” of past images, phrases and feelings so as to create “a new art emotion,” arguing that “The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”

If considering Eliot’s argument in relation to painting instead of poetry, would you consider it foolish for an artist to escape a dialogue with art history? Do you feel that artists have an inherent obligation to comment on, and simultaneously alter the course of art history?

RC: I think you tend to engage with multiple histories when you create anything, whether consciously or not. I don’t really know If artists have an obligation to engage with art history or whether they’d be foolish to try and avoid it. As painters I'd imagine it’s difficult to avoid it. You don’t really need to have any intention to change art history to change it either. There are many good artists today who, visually at least, happily occupy a space next to artists of the past, and whether its through homage, pastiche or interrogation, its difficult to think that kind of re-engagement doesn’t reactivate the earlier work to some extent. I’ve always wanted painting to be active and do something at its surface and to create a space that reaches out in all directions in time, whether it's referencing Reynolds paintings' glacial degradation, abstract expressionism or digital imagery.

HP: What are your thoughts on social media today? Do you feel it is important to engage in the community aspect of online social media? Or alternatively, do you feel that is dangerous territory given that the likes of Instagram is proving to cause cultural homogenisation? 

RC: It’s clearly important for artists. It’s certainly become more influential over the last couple of years, at least in terms of exposure. I’m pretty bad at it and not in a good way.

HP: Any last points or thoughts you would like to share?

RC: Other than to thank you for the work you’ve put in, I think thats all.