Andrew Cranston: To go back a wee bit, was there art around you when you were growing up? Was it shock horror to your parents that you wanted to go to art school?
Max Boyla: They weren’t against it. I went to quite a shit high school, and the art department wasn’t very good, but art was the one thing I was good at. It was the only time I wasn’t daydreaming out the window or watching the clock. I imagine you were the same.
AC: I was a daydreamer until I accidentally became the world’s worst joiner, but then I paid attention and came back to my daydreamer side. I would have met you in your first year at Gray’s [School of Art], but it wasn’t until the third year that we knew each other better. The course, for context, is a four-year painting degree in Aberdeen, the first two of which deal with quite traditional conventions and grammar of painting – composition, tone, colour, space, that stuff. The third year then questions these things, turns them upside down, and makes you consider alternative ways of making paintings. You seemed to take to that like a duck to water.
MB: I did struggle a bit with the first two years. I enjoyed the life drawing we had to do, and I appreciate that old-school approach – learning about light and dark, composition and negative space. Those fundamentals stay with you – they give you the foundation to think about painting. But in that third year, it was like starting all over. To an extent, I felt like I didn’t know what painting was, while a lot of other folk had an idea and were going along those lines. I had to understand what painting was in my own way.
AC: There’s a certain giving up of something that some people find really difficult. They’ve got quite strong ideas of what painting should be, and other people are naturally more inclined to sacrifice things or throw stuff out. It might be like that in our lives as well – some people don’t necessarily form strong attachments. I can see your space as almost a jump shop full of found objects. You’re quite an analogue animal.
AC: Can you still walk past a skip and not not look in?
MB: I could for a while. That practice got beaten out of me a bit in terms of the practicalities of not being at art school, and not having the storage facilities. I started focusing more on painting during that period. But there’s now this alleyway between the train station and my studio that goes behind an estate with loads of stuff. I’ve slowly, over the last couple of years, been accumulating a bit more. I enjoyed what I did in Aberdeen so much, but I lost touch with it. I was wondering if there would ever be a return to that way of working, but it’s taken eleven, twelve years since I graduated from Gray’s before I’ve had that intuitive feeling of seeing something and being like, I need that.
AC: It was quite exciting for me to come into your space at Gray’s every week, because it was hard to define what you were doing. It was somewhere in between things; it had some painterly qualities and involved paint, but whatever you created ended up as a hybrid object. That’s how it also appeared in your degree show. I remember you had objects that were more readable as paintings and others that were kinetic.
MB: I had a big, black umbrella in a canvas that, as you walked into the room, switched on and spun to become this black hole kind of thing. It’s interesting how you saw what I was leaning into early on in the course, naturally, just by playing around with stuff. I remember you recommending people like Boyd Webb, John Latham, Richard Tuttle, who used material in a painterly way. These had a major influence on how I thought about changing the perception of an object’s temporality and playing with the physics of understanding it by transforming it into a painting.
AC: There’s something absurd about your approach – is that something you would recognise?
MB: Yeah – I think Magritte was one of the first artists I got, even though getting it was about not getting it. It’s that paradoxical inversion of something that’s stuck with me when I’m making things. It’s that balance, as you mentioned earlier. I like everything on the tipping point of meaning.
AC: People like Samuel Beckett are also a big influence on me. I could connect things about your work to absurdist theatre. Part of it is not dealing with things directly, but through metaphor or analogy. Among surrealism and other things, chance seems to play a big part in your approach.
MB: It’s like how the studio was, and still is. It’s organised chaos. It’s about accepting, not controlling, things, but just facilitating the environment in which things can emerge. I always think of that thing Guston said, about how, when you’re in the studio, you’ve got the voices of all the people you went to school with, all your teachers, all of art history and, one by one, the voices leave, and you’re left with yourself. Eventually, you leave as well, and something takes over the spontaneity of what you make or how you make it. You get transfixed. I imagine you’re similar.
MB: The way I’m making these certain paintings, they’re very much about that controlled chance thing. They don’t always work. I try not to have too much of a recipe, but I’ll fold the satin into a bundle, then submerge it in a hot dye bath. Then, when I take it out and it’s wet, I’ll fold it and make creases in the satin in different patterns. When it’s in those positions, I spray it with dye, liquid acrylic, or bleach, and sometimes I’ll do something on top, like a dollop of oil paint or enamel that’ll seep through all the layers. It’s not that the gesture is repeating, but it emanates through the material. I always think of Munch and how there’s a reverberation as everything bleeds into each other, how the people echo into the landscape and the landscape shapes around them. But because I’m using satin, I’m thinking a lot about synthetics. The work’s always these three-dimensional paintings that get washed, dyed, soaked, spread, folded, and twisted. They live this weird life, just grabbing onto things in a way that’s intuitive, though certain choices – like palate and colour, when to do something and when not to do something – are conscious. It’s quite a wet process, then when things dry, I have to look at it and reassess. That three-dimensionality of the object’s material is flattened when it’s stretched over a canvas. Painting is this weird truth. Even though it’s a fiction, it holds this strange distance that we can look at something because shifts of dimensions have been compressed into it.
MB: But that’s the thing: the more I do it, the more I understand what might happen, but the best works are the ones that I’m surprised by. Or sometimes I’ll be really focused on trying to make something, and I’ll make something on the side at the same time that I’m not that bothered about. I’ll overcook the one I’m working on, and suddenly, the other one is everything I was trying to do, but without having consciously tried to do it.
AC: You’re avoiding a representational image.
MB: I guess it’s the sort of thing where I don’t really have a grasp on it. The gesture of the hand isn’t very visible in the work. I’m quite detached, but I’ve noticed that the more removed I become, the more involved I am.
AC: Do you consider tradition in relation to your paintings – rug making and tapestry, more like what you’d call craft? Things like silk and this pattern you’re referring to, I find myself relating them to different kinds of traditions.
MB: I grew up with lots of Turkish rugs. My dad is Turkish, and we used to go on holiday every year to his relatives’ spare home. It wasn’t luxurious – there was barely any power; it was just a shack – but looking back, it was great. My mum got a rug every year while we were there. But I grew up in Musselburgh, Scotland, and this heritage isn’t usually something I try to riff on. But I do feel like it’s in there.
AC: I’m thinking of this in a period of modernism where Matisse was working in Morocco and was influenced by traditional Islamic art that was not image-led, but that looked to him like modernist abstract painting. It’s a conceit of the Western way of thinking that what we consider modern has actually been going on for thousands of years elsewhere. There are entire centuries of non-representational art, but it was claimed as something revolutionary here.
MB: That’s so true.
AC: The title of your new show at Palmer Gallery, Spooky Action at a Distance, is great, and I suppose it connects to these patterns. How did you come across it?
MB: I don’t remember. I think I was reading an article about quantum entanglement and the debatable linearity of time – that the future actually has an effect somehow on the past on a molecular level. Once these two particles become entangled, they cannot be separated. One still affects the other over vast distances, even on opposite sides of space; if something happens to one, the opposite happens to the other. The luxury with painting is that it plays with time in such a way and exists as a kind of singular entity that you see as one, but that you digest as looking at all the hundreds of different marks. In theory, in relation to the show, because I started touching on the sculptural aspects we talked about in Aberdeen, it felt like a weird connection to something I used to be very much into but had forgotten about. The pieces in the show are ones I loved when I made them, but I didn’t feel were part of a particular collection. They all went to the side and then, subconsciously, even though they were never intended to be paired together, they had an alignment, a kind of distant connection. They also interacted well with the space; one of them has green squares emanating from it, and it looks very close to the window in the gallery. I always think of the show as a work. The installation is the final painting. It’s that thing where you put on a show and it feels like an album.
AC: I could see that even back at Gray’s. There were things which seemed less consequential, but somehow played an important role in the whole. There are some people who think that every work has to carry the same weight. But, of course, it’s sometimes these little works that are not demanding that can be key to holding the whole thing together. I mean, one of the things about science is that it’s so stimulating. I’m speaking for myself here. I don’t understand it, yet it isn’t any less stimulating. Actually, Einstein was asked why the public was so fascinated by him and by physics in general – it was maybe the nineteen-twenties. His answer was something like, it’s the magic of incomprehension. There’s a whole field that only a few people really understand, and in the absence of religion or God or that kind of thing, there’s this great mystery and there’s a magic in it. It must be something that doesn’t die easily. But I find that, with a lot of subjects, not knowing or not fully understanding means you need to be creative with it.
AC: When I was growing up, we had this record player that had four speeds on it – seventy-eight, forty-five, thirty-three, and sixteen. We used to slow records down to sixteen and listen to them. It totally transformed the records. You’d play something which was really high-pitched, and you found this other life in it, this other form within the thing itself.
MB: Yes, it’s that alteration of time, somehow interjecting, stretching time out. This track becomes the soundtrack for the show. The gallery space was once a manufacturing factory for tyres used in World War II planes or something, so it’s a slight homage to industrialisation while also being about the death of someone and its impact on the atmosphere.
AC: There’s bound to be ghosts in there.
MB: It’s a funny place – interesting to play with and riff off.
