Studio visit: Charles Fletcher

Tangled relationships between history, culture and place inform the multi-layered works of artist Charles Fletcher. Having studied as a historian and written books on social and legal histories in the Cairngorms, Fletcher makes work across painting, photography and film that pays close attention to the multiple subtle ways in which the present continues to be shaped by the past. For Fletcher, such histories take multiple forms: patterns of land ownership and use; ripples through art history; the traditions that linger in a place or culture and, equally, those people and practices that have disappeared or been forcibly erased, leaving behind hardly a trace.

Fletcher’s work is the result of expansive engagement with oral histories, archival research, walking, looking, making and developing speculative possibilities. Subjects have included the persecution of witches in East Lothian, post-industrial decline in Lancaster, and connections between Scottish landscapes, colonialism and slavery. His work explores customs that continue through a culture across time and the still points in a landscape around which change eddies and whirls.

The history of painting is especially fertile terrain. Fletcher cites Lucian Freud and Richard Waitt as influences in particular, as well as contemporary artists such as Alison Watt and Celia Paul. There is perhaps something of Pierre Bonnard too in his sun-bleached figures, a suggestion of Winifred Knights in certain stylised landscapes, and in Fletcher’s smaller-scale works, the atmospheric charge that hums through Merlin James’s beguiling corners of place.

When I came to Innerleithen, I thought I would make more work that responded directly to the area, but I haven’t yet. I grew up in Grantown-on-Spey, in the Cairngorms, and I find that somehow the further you go away from somewhere the more important it becomes. I live near the Tweed and I cross it every day on the way to the studio. In a while, it might make it into my work. But I find I need to let things gestate before responding. For me, it’s not about seeing something and reacting immediately; I need to know more.

Can you say more about this gestation process?

I’m interested in insights gained over time, rather than instinctive first impressions. That doesn’t have to be a sustained engagement with the same place or subject. It can be something I see once or twice, let it gestate, and then return to it another time. It’s not just a question of subject matter, it’s also about the painting process itself. I let quite a lot of pictures sit for a long time. They progress quickly for a while and then I tend to leave them before coming back.

For example, in 2021 I was out cycling near Mellerstain and saw a dead buzzard on the verge. It was so perfectly preserved that it looked like it might spring up at any moment and fly away. I’ve been thinking about it for three years, but only in the past few months have I started to make a work in response.

It was a striking sight because buzzards are such a part of the landscape here, and it really resonated with me due to my research. I’d read about farmers petitioning the laird to hire somebody to hunt the buzzards, foxes and all the other animals which they thought were predating on their livestocks. That’s where the title comes from: the petition requested for the animals to be killed “to the best advantage”.

At the same time, I also came across a section in Alec Finlay’s book, Gathering, in which he reprints a list of every animal slaughtered on a single Aberdeenshire estate between 1837 and 1840. It was done in order to preserve grouse for sport. I’m not sure whether the figures quoted can possibly be true but this fiction is interesting in itself.

Your studio also provides a loaded context from which to engage with these kinds of subjects. There’s a cabinet of stuffed animals across one wall and by the window you have paintings propped up on a gun rack.

Yes, this used to be the gun room for Glen House, although there is no commercial shooting on the estate now. I’ve recently been awarded a VACMA grant for a “stay-at-home” residency here at Glen. My aim is to explore what Lucian Freud described as “downward travel” – that is, valuing the familiar and the everyday as sources of inspiration and becoming more intimately acquainted with them through art making.

One thing I’ve found is a letter in the National Records of Scotland to Edward Tennant, the industrialist whose father built the house here. It’s from an ornithologist, named Robert Gray, looking to visit the taxidermy collection in order to study some of the rare specimens. It’s fascinating to me that this collection, which is really a way of bragging about the landowner’s hunting prowess, could also accidentally serve as a resource for natural history.

Returning to this idea of insights gained over time, you have a PhD in history and have written two books, Drawn from the Past: Voices from Dava Moor (2022) and Justice and Society in the Highlands of Scotland (2021). How does your understanding of history inform the work you make as an artist?

As both artist and historian, I’m interested in how history impacts the present day. I’m drawn to those grey areas where it’s useful to understand what happened before and how that continues to influence what is happening now.

My first book, which grew out of the PhD, was an academic study of the justice system under the feudal barons of eighteenth-century Scotland. And the second, commissioned by Grantown Museum, was a micro history of a stretch of moorland on the northern edge of the Cairngorms National Park which is home to around 30 abandoned crofts.

I also continue to work as a freelance researcher for Paxton House, in particular looking at the house’s links to transatlantic slavery, researching and writing on the material culture and history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I made two films loosely responding to this history during my MA.

I’ve also made a portrait based on Wilhelm Marstrand’s 1857 portrait of Justina Antoine, which is in the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen. That painting shows an enslaved Black nanny alongside two white Danish children at a time when slavery was still legal in the Danish colonies. It’s a fascinating portrait because usually enslaved people were depicted as ‘exotic’ novelties or as accoutrement for white people, but Justina is in the centre of the painting. There is an amazing dignity to the way she is staring down the artist.

Can you talk a little about what happens when you revisit a work like Marstrand’s from a different historical and geographical context? And also the changes you made: the tight crop of the composition, the colour palette, and the slightly undone nature of the surface. To me, it gives the impression of an image that remains bright even when glimpsed through layers of time.

It's quite a literal reframing of the original work. The act of revisiting a work helps you notice things you might not have seen before and I think that this gives you a glimpse into what Marstrand was thinking and his process whilst he was painting. In this case, it’s the woman’s gaze that is interesting. She is the focus of Marstrand’s painting, not the children, and I wanted to take that a step further. In removing the specific historical context, the work also becomes more ambiguous and the colours and surface are an extension of that too.

This direct engagement with art history feels like a distinctive part of your practice.

Yes, there are a number of people from the past whose work I’m interested in. I’m looking at ways of having a dialogue with what they’ve done through my own work. A good example is Richard Waitt, who was a portrait painter working around Strathspey in the early eighteenth century. He was employed by Clan Grant to produce portraits. Many of them are unusual for the time in that they depict ordinary people as well as those higher up the hierarchy. It’s interesting to me because so many of these people would have left little trace in official histories but here you can see their faces and get a sense of who they were. It's true that some of the work appears to be really naive but in others you can feel he was much more invested in what he was doing.

I think painting is unique in this respect, as its history is so long and rich. It really feels as though you can set up a conversation with an artist who has been dead for nearly 300 years. Another artist who works in this way is Alison Watt. I've been interested in how her conversation with Alan Ramsay has developed in recent years. It's a conversation conducted entirely through painting and looking. Celia Paul has also engaged in something similar with Gwen John, although the dialogue in her case also extends to Paul's writing and shared experiences beyond painting itself. I suppose I can relate to this in a way, as I have a shared sense of a place that Waitt and his subjects had and this adds an extra element to the dialogue.

There are two especially famous full-length portraits by Waitt which I’ve been looking at – The Piper and The Champion, both commissioned by the Laird of Grant in 1713. In the 1700s there would have been a clan piper. The role was hereditary and salaried so they were effectively professional musicians. I feel that I have something in common with these figures: it's like we share a space which extends across time. History and art can both provide a window onto that shared space. There is a common experience to be explored, however fanciful that may seem.

I’m interested in the performance of tradition that you can see in Waitt’s work and how that extends to the present day, often in a way which has become kitsch or stereotyped. You can see it in something like Compton Mackenzie’s Monarch of the Glen, in which a laird attempts to woo a rich American heiress by performing supposedly traditional Scottish customs.

The Highland Games are another good example. I've competed on the games circuit as a cyclist for fifteen years and the earnings have helped to support me through a few lean periods. Growing up, the people who I looked up to were the old competitors, who had done various things to support themselves through their lifetime - they might have had a croft and also worked building the hydro-reservoirs, whilst racing at the games at the weekend to earn some extra cash. I feel part of this tradition. All of those histories and memories become source material in the painting. There is so much nationalist imagery associated with games and piping and that creates a difficulty in engaging with certain images while avoiding being kitsch. In working with Waitt's paintings of the Piper and the Champion I wanted to create something more difficult to pin down. Hopefully it’s a lively dialogue with art history.

I think Waitt himself was also in dialogue with previous artists, like John Michael Wright, whose portrait of an Irish chieftain is now in the Tate and of the son of the Marquis of Atholl is now in Kelvingrove. Both of those are from the 1680s. It’s conjecture on my part – I’m not sure how Waitt would have seen them – but I’m interested in this idea of a chain of conversation running over the centuries.

Some of your work engages with landscape and related questions around management, ownership, use and access. Looking through your website, I was especially struck by your work Plantation: it reminded me of walking in some of the hills south of Peebles, where the land is so tightly managed. The title also made me think of Francis Bacon's essay ‘Of Plantations’, and histories of colonialism and slavery. As your work deals with the ongoing legacies of the past, landscape feels like a really clear example of how that manifests.

That question seems particularly pertinent as the drove road through Kailzie estate, between here and Peebles, was once owned by Mungo Campbell who was also the owner of two plantations and several hundred enslaved people in Grenada (he was friends with the Home family of Paxton House). I've done quite a lot of work over the past few years which draws upon the idea of landscape as an archive or form of collective memory, and it’s something I’m revisiting through my current research now.

I’m also interested in different types of learning. For example, my academic research is primarily archive-based, making use of records such as old court books, letters, and estate accounts. As an artist, I might ask: what can I learn by visiting the old villages and townships where the courts were held? What can I learn by walking the routes between them? Sometimes it works and you can begin to unlock these stories. But often it doesn’t. And then you have to imagine alternative truths instead, and this can be equally fruitful for an artist.

Many aspects of communal memory cannot be unlocked because they are reliant on forms of human knowledge that have now passed away. I’m thinking, for example, of the megalithic standing stones on Brotherstone Hill – these anchor points that have outlived memory. As symbols of power, they’ve been recycled through history, repurposed for different uses, and they are still there – older than the landscape that surrounds them.

You make films as well as painting. How do the two relate to each other in your practice?

There are quite a lot of formal elements in common across both. Framing and composition, for example, are similar. During the Master’s I tried to roll the two into each other but now I keep them separate.

Previous works I’ve made include a documentary on post-industrial decline in Lancaster, a sound piece responding to the old agricultural structures like stells that you can still see in the hills around the Tweed Valley, and an archival work telling of Joan Eardley’s visits to a sheep farm near Ettrickbridge.

From making films I learned what painting is not. Sometimes you can only define something in opposition to something else. One of the things I love most about painting is the ambiguity. Or where the touch is so light that it’s hardly there at all. That provides a lot of room for people to give their own interpretation. Painting as a medium has to do something that nothing else can do. Otherwise, why do a painting at all? Some of my works are quite experimental or require people to make a leap. Others follow a more well-trodden path. I’ve not quite reached where I want to go, but that’s fine. Dissatisfaction is part of any creative process.


www.charlesfletcher.co.uk
@charlesfletchr