Steven Wilson – Sir Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy
A visit to Michael Craig-Martin’s retrospective
The Royal Academy is hosting a retrospective of Sir Michael Craig-Martin’s 60-year career until 10 December this year. Craig-Martin describes his work as ‘an observation of ordinary things, to bring people to a different… perspective on what’s familiar’. His work runs from brightly coloured representations of everyday objects like pencil sharpeners and corkscrews to more conceptual pieces like ‘An Oak Tree’, which most people would perceive as a glass of water.
Steve has been a long-time admirer of Craig-Martin’s work. When he recently visited the retrospective, we thought it would be a good idea to record his impressions and find out what he made of it:
Where and when did you first come across Michael Craig-Martin’s work?
As a degree student around the year 2000. I was about 19 at the time and used to go to the record shops to look at the album sleeves. I found the variety and level of design on the covers at that period to be such a high standard and it was a really exciting period for design in the music industry, so the record stores became my galleries. I actually discovered Julien Opie’s work first as he had done the Blur Album cover ‘Blur: The Best of’ and that led me to Michael Craig-Martin. I looked up Opie and read about him and discovered that he had been taught by an influential teacher at St Martins by the name of Michael Craig-Martin and so that was my first introduction. It seems a bit uneducated looking back that I wasn’t already aware of his work seeing as he had been an established artist for so long already, but I hadn’t grown up being educated about contemporary art so that period as an art student was a very steep learning curve for me.
Were you immediately drawn to it? What is it that attracted you?
I think timing in life is so important. When you make a discovery of something new, and how what you see and hear fits into what is going on in your own life at that particular moment can enhance its impact and your love for it. For example, I remember reading Grapes of Wrath by chance just after the birth of my first child whilst my wife was breastfeeding, and it really changed my perception of that experience.
The timing of when I first discovered Michael Craig-Martin was also when Illustration was becoming more and more digital, and Illustrators were pushing what these new digital tools were capable of. Much of Michael’s work is, of course, painted but the aesthetic was one that was achievable digitally for a young designer learning those tools for the first time and it was so exciting to be able to relate to an aesthetic. As a student you often mimic to begin with before finding your own look and feel and I certainly did that with his work.
How has his work inspired your own?
As mentioned above, I would say that from a practical, even superficial, point of view I learnt a lot about drawing digitally using vectors through studying his work early on in my career and, in particular, the importance of line weight and colour whilst I was developing who I was as an artist. As a young student at secondary school I spent a lot of time drawing still lives with pencil and one of the pieces of advice I will always remember from my teacher at the time was to change the scale of an object to change the viewer’s perception of it. I was never that good, or perhaps confident enough at drawing from my imagination, so I became interested in drawing everyday objects and the challenge became ‘how do I make that interesting?’. In itself, drawing objects could be viewed as quite boring and I believe Craig-Martin himself wanted to discard meaning when drawing objects, but when you execute them in such a way that scale, colour and situation are changed the viewer perceives them as something different altogether and can’t help but have their own thoughts and put meaning into them.
Do you own any pieces by him?
No. I was put up in a very nice apartment in Seoul by a commercial client a couple of years ago and I had an original Michael Craig-Martin in there, so I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days living with one at least.
Have you ever met him?
No, unfortunately not (from my perspective anyway).
What were your first impressions of the exhibition?
The sense of scale. I think we all spend a lot of time now seeing things onscreen, so it is such a different experience to not only see the works in person but to experience their scale. It’s a sensation I have had many times before, such as the first time I saw Monet’s water lilies or Cy Twombly’s work and it is always a reminder to myself that I must go and see more artwork in the flesh.
What pieces made the most impact on you?
I enjoyed seeing the sculptures for the first time. One of the themes that has run through all of my work is to test the balance of form and abstraction. I will often draw something everyday or recognisable but then push how far I can remove it from that state whilst allowing the viewer to still understand what it is. The thing I loved the most about his sculptures is that they do this in the simplest, most efficient way possible. Merely by walking around the sculptures and seeing them from different viewpoints they go from something entirely abstract to recognisable forms.
Could you explain his conceptual piece ‘An Oak Tree’? (ref image below)
The idea behind it is that he declares the glass of water on the shelf to be an oak tree and whilst it has not changed in appearance, by him declaring it an oak tree it has fundamentally changed through belief and his assertion that it is an oak tree. The concept was inspired by his Catholic upbringing and the belief that bread and wine are changed into Christ’s body and blood.
Image credits:
The Michael Craig-Martin exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (21 September – 10 December 2024). © Michael Craig-Martin. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry
Michael Craig-Martin, Common History: Conference, 1999. Acrylic on aluminium, 274 x 508 cm. Courtesy Gagosian. © Michael Craig-Martin. Image courtesy of Gagosian
Gallery view of the Michael Craig-Martin exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (21 September – 10 December 2024). © Michael Craig-Martin. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry
Michael Craig-Martin, An Oak Tree, 1973. Glass, water, metal and printed text on paper, 15 x 46 x 14 cm. Artist’s proof, shown with permission of the National Gallery of Australia. © Michael Craig-Martin. Image courtesy of Gagosian
