A conversation between Anthony Caro, Sheila Girling and Julie Summers on 6 october 1995 at the artists' studios, Camden TownJS: One of the things that fascinates me about you both being artists is how much influence do you have on each other’s work? SG: I don’t think he influences my work but I do watch Tony very carefully, how he paces himself, how he organises his work and time and I think that he has taught me a lot – how not to get discouraged when something is going wrong. AC: We live art most of our time and talk about ways to go forward and so on. I always want Sheila to see what I have done. No two artists could work next to each other without getting some influence from the other. Our studios are close enough to be able to say come on over and have a look at what I have done. J S: Have you always had studios next to each other? SG: Since I started to paint, yes. There were some years when I didn’t paint, when I was bringing up the children. At that time Tony had a separate studio at Loudon Road but I used to visit there most days. JS: Do you have very different working disciplines? SG: I tend to work better in the morning and Tony tends to enjoy working after lunch more. You learn to use your time in a way you don’t when you are younger. AC: One has to live a fairly disciplined life if one is an artist. You can’t make art in an amateur way, waiting until you feel inspired, you’ve just got to work it through. Like other jobs. The sculptor is a bit like a builder. JS: Where did you meet? SG: We met at the Royal Academy and married at the very end of 1949 and I stayed on for another year or so; then I started my first baby and had to stop for a while. JS: When did you go back to painting? SG: When the children started going to school full-time. It seemed too hard when they were young. Tony worked in the garage at home and I did a lot of painting of his sculptures for him. I felt as if I would be too divided to both paint and rear children. AC: However, we never lost touch with each other’s work and each other’s ideas in art. JS: So it has been a life-long working relationship? AC: A life-long working relationship is exactly right. JS: How long have you had the house in Dorset? AC: Over twenty years. We used to visit Dorset because our sons were at Bryanston, a school in Blandford Forum. We always thought it would be nice to have a cottage and in the end we were lucky to find an old coastguard cottage, primitive and very isolated, on the end of a cliff. It’s like the west coast of Ireland. SG: We’ve never regretted it. It has no running water. It’s quite primitive but we love it. JS: You were talking about how you take some of your sculpture down there to paint? AC: Yes, I am always taking sculpture back and forth. One of the conditions of building the studio was that I shouldn’t weld there; the neighbours thought it would blind them! That’s worked for me by forcing me into other materials. I did quite a lot of work in cardboard and wax which later I brought back to London to convert into brass and bronze. There’s a different working pace there, the light is excellent – it’s very peaceful. It was in Dorset that I coloured all the paper pieces I made in Japan. But I never complete a work there; it has to be seen in the final stage in my Camden Town studio. So there is always a going back and forth. JS: Do you think the environment in Dorset has influenced your work – the light, the atmosphere? SG: Yes, because I am surrounded by landscape and that is very inviting. I want to get out there and paint rather than work indoors. AC: There is a difference in work created in different environments. I used to work a lot in America. I remember years ago showing some American work in London [Hayward Gallery 1969] and someone told me which pieces he liked and didn’t like. I realised that without knowing it he was giving the thumbs down to all the American pieces. Whereabouts you create the work, the way the roads are, the houses, the fields, the skies – it does have an effect, even if not a conscious one. JS: It was interesting when you showed us your recent unfinished painted piece and said, I painted that and doesn’t it look different in this light. AC: Well, it does! The colour simply doesn’t look the same in London light. JS: What about you, Sheila? When you’re down in Dorset do you concentrate on your watercolours? SG: Yes. We started by dividing the studio, this little washhouse, and I’d have the end half and Tony would have the front half. He slowly took over my half because I was painting outside. I love painting landscape as a kind of relaxation. You know what’s there, you know what you’re going to paint because it’s all there in front of you, subject and colour. AC: The cottage is quite small but the walls are covered with paintings by other people. Many of the paintings have been given to us. SG: Our dining room is a mass of paintings, wall to wall! You can dine, looking at the walls and enjoying each one. AC: We live a different speed down there. JS: It must be a creative haven for you. SG: Yes, I think peace of mind is very fruitful. We get up late. We’d go for a swim, take a picnic and sometimes a bottle of wine, then we’d come home about 3pm. Tony would go into the studio and I’d go off and paint. The light gets better towards the end of the day, almost always for landscape painters. Morning light is sharp and hard. JS: Tony, you will be exhibiting drawings in this exhibition. Are they predominantly figurative or abstract? AC: Not abstract. I draw for the pleasure of recording my delights. I draw landscapes sometimes. If Sheila’s going out in the car we choose the view which is right for her, and I draw too. SG: Half the problem with direct landscape painting seems to me to be where you are sitting. You know, if you’re going to sit to get the light right behind you, there are all sorts of little problems, you have to manoeuvre the car round and then set up a sort of shelter against the wind. Then once I get that right I get started. AC: When we are on holiday in the Caribbean Sheila goes down to the sea and then I’m her assistant. JS: We were talking earlier about your influence on each other’s work. Criticism of one’s work can come as a good or a bad thing depending on how you are feeling. Do you discuss points – I mean what happens if Sheila doesn’t like something about a sculpture that you do like, do you argue the point or what? AC: It doesn’t happen like that. There are times when I really couldn’t bear to have anybody in the studio – Sheila knows when those times are and she does not walk in or say something about some piece I’m working on when I’m not ready. By and large it is a question of my saying, Will you look at this, and then she invariably seems to question the part that I have my own doubts about. There really isn’t argument. It can happen with me that I can go in and say something to her like, I don’t like that, and then she will say, Well that bit’s not finished. I am more inclined to do that to her than she is to me. SG: I don’t like Tony in the studio until the picture’s taken shape because he is so emphatic that it throws me a little. But when the picture’s almost there and I still have a little doubt then I like him in and he can say, Well leave it, or, Perhaps you should do something there, or whatever. It’s very helpful. AC: We do say to each other, What makes sense to follow on from this, I thought of doing this and this, what do you think? The point being each of us is interested in possibilities, trying to push our art where it has not yet been. SG: Sometimes we will be looking at a book in the evening and Tony will say to me, How would you think of doing this, that’s just like the painting you’ve done, could you go on to that? And that is stimulating and you start to re-think. AC: Or you’ll say, How about that for terracotta? SG: We both know each other’s mind so well hat we know what the other one would like and what you could suggest to the other one. JS: If you have an idea at the concept stage, do you discuss that? SG: No. AC: I do. JS: Do you think that is because of the nature of sculpture? AC: Not necessarily, but for instance when a project looms ahead, I get nervous – how do I get started? For example there’s a project I have in mind that’s been bothering me a lot lately. Once I start I’ll be all right. SG: So I have begun throwing ideas at him, and seeing if they excite him – some will be useful, some won’t. AC: For example, the first time I went to work with Hans Spinner [ceramicist] in the south of France, I didn’t have any direction prepared; I really got what I got from his way of handling the clay, from the way he picked up the piece of clay and what he could do with it. Also, I remember when I went to Emma Lake [University of Saskatchewan, Canada] years ago, it was in the countryside, 200 miles from town and I didn’t know what would be possible with so little equipment. The morning before I went I said, I really haven’t thought about what I am going to do, and Sheila said, work in light material. As soon as she said that I knew the way I would go, using tubes and rods. SG: I’m bad at taking. I have to come to my own conclusions first which may be a fault. I tend to want to discard received ideas or maybe I distrust them if I have not discovered them myself. AC: Most artists try to present themselves as all powerful, no doubts. But the truth is not like that. Everyone has feelings of doubt, most artists daren’t admit them publicly. But it’s not where you get inspiration that gives the work its artistic worth – it’s what you make of it that counts. JS: Sheila, when you’re being creative do you work entirely on your own. Do you have assistants? SG: No. JS: Do you work in silence or do you listen to music? SG: No, I hate any noise. I like to work in absolute quiet. Even the knocking and banging of the builders in the houses opposite annoys me. No, I like to be absolutely quiet, all alone and just get on with my work. But of course at the end I need help stretching my paintings. But the work is finished then, that’s just the technical side. Pat Cunningham’s wonderful at helping me stretch the canvas. JS: Tony, you can obviously put up with noise and you do work with an assistant. AC: Yes, and I like to work with music playing. I know Pat very well, he’s been with me for more than 25 years. We work easily together and he grasps what’s in my mind. I can say to him, I need something heavy, that sort of shape, and he can make helpful suggestions. I remember once working with a young sculptor in the studio. He had a different sensibility – I couldn’t do anything working with him; he couldn’t bring himself to think my way. Working alongside an artist is a special gift. SG: Painting is totally different. It is so immediate. Your hand is going to make the mark and you can’t say, That was wrong, and lift the mark. AC: What do you think happened with Rubens and his huge studio? Van Dyck and Jordaens and all the others helping him with his paintings. SG: Well, he trained the painters to paint his way and then he came along and put in the finishing touches. I can’t imagine doing that, but I think it could happen again, now that art is getting less to do with the personal touch – video art and so on. JS: Your watercolours are very immediate, but I think your abstract oils are too. SG: Well, they are immediate in the application of the paint and colour on canvas. I do collage too, and then it’s very immediate when I start assembling. It’s a concentrated process, I don’t like to be interrupted. JS: You said earlier you painted some of Tony’s sculptures when the children were small. Do you still paint his work? SG: No, he paints them himself, often after I’ve mixed the colours. AC: I find it hard to cope with colour. In the old days Sheila not only painted them but more often than not she would decide on the colour. I would say let’s make it green and perhaps that would be wrong. What colour should it be? Red, but which red? She would also put the paint on with me. The colour makes a lot of difference to the emotional impact of a sculpture. I’m not so much into colour now as I was then. SG: But you do choose your colours now. AC: Yes. But there’s one here that I’ve got wrong and I shall certainly say to Sheila, What should I have done there? How can we get that right? If we’re doing colour, we do it together. JS: Your abstracts are very large and ‘public’. When I was thinking about your watercolours, Sheila, I was wondering whether you felt private about them. SG: No, not at all. They’re just another part of what I do. I don’t feel a bit private about anything I do. Once you’ve done it, the world can have it or not as the case may be. It’s just that it happens to be done when I’m on holiday. I have shown them quite a bit. AC: We both have very much the same attitude about making art. Both of us feel good when we’ve made art, done a good day’s work and it’s gone well. Shows are important but they aren’t really the central thing. An exhibition is for the artist a sort of test or perhaps a celebration, but making the art is one’s life. JS: Do you make it for yourself? SG: You make it because it’s the only think you can do, it’s your job. AC: It’s what you like doing most, you do it to get it right. The word is pursuit. JS: And you are still pursuing? AC: Oh yes, I hope so! Not to do so would be to give up on life. SG: And there is always the masterpiece you are going to do tomorrow … You always feel a slight discontent when you’ve finished a work. You’re in love with it and totally involved when you’re doing it but then when you’ve finished and you put it up, you think perhaps there are other possibilities. Tomorrow I am going to do better, and then you may not but there’s always the hope. AC: After my Japan retrospective [Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo 1995] people said to me, How do you feel about the Japan show, what difference does it make to your work? Well, the answer is, it’s been very surprisingly unaffected. A big retrospective tells you what you were like 20 years ago but what I think about is what I am doing now and what I’m going to do tomorrow. That’s much more interesting to me. SG: It’s very nice when people like your work. We had a break-in at the studio in London and the policewoman, who came to take fingerprints, walked upstairs, stopped and said ‘oh what lovely paintings’ and I thought, how terribly nice that this person from a completely different walk of life should enjoy paintings. JS: Are you looking forward to exhibiting there at the Chesil Gallery? AC: Very much. I think this is going to be a very enjoyable show for us. In the old days I used to be sick with worry at my shows. Not now. I think it will be very nice too for us both, because it’s a kind of celebration of two artists and our lives together in art. We don’t make a big thing about each other’s involvement, but it’s there and this show will be a kind of mutual salute to one another.
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