Campbell (1953-2007) was a prolific painter ‘who placed performance and symbolism at the heart of everything he created’ [1], and whose imaginative work enhanced the reputation of Scottish art and culture on the international stage. He was interested in the ‘fictional structures of art’ [2], and was inspired by a wide range of things: from historical events and eras, to performance, literature, film and poetry – and he used the painted figure as a means to express his curiosity about all of this.
Since his time at the Glasgow School of Art, Campbell was deeply fascinated by the figure. One of the first ways he approached this, was through performance. Above is a photograph taken in 1981 of a performance called Poised Murder, in which Campbell created an artificial and stylized environment, based on the glamorous aesthetic of black and white Hollywood movies in the nineteen thirties and forties [3]. The actors in the performance dressed in clothes of this era: the men wearing black polo necks, medallions and Brylcreem in their hair; the women in silver skirts, fishnet tights and high heels.
The performance lasted 15 minutes, and the actors adopted murderous poses in time with music. In the middle of the scene, a detective crawled around on all fours, trying to solve the murders as they were taking place. You can see here that Campbell was interested in fiction, in theatrical actions and gestures – in danger and murder – and in creating characters that attempted to solve, often completely unsolvable, mysteries.
This interest in performance and theatricality continued on into Campbell’s paintings: his work becoming a stage where characters could inhabit an unreal world of painted scenery. As in his ‘Poised Murder’ performance, the figures that populate Campbell’s paintings adopt exaggerate poses, fixed in the centre of compositions that have their own mysterious, bizarre and self-contained narratives.
The detective crawling around on all fours in Poised Murder, transformed into other characters that he would use in his paintings: characters that are detectives, hikers, hunters and travellers, and are comparable to artists in the sense that they’re always searching or hunting for something, attempting to discover and unravel some sort of truth. Campbell liked to explore the role of the artist as detective, but like the detective in Poised Murder – crawling pointlessly around searching for clues and uncovering nothing while murders take place all around him – Campbell was very much aware of the often ridiculous, comedic and futile nature of such a grand search for truth. The predicaments his characters find themselves in in his work, reflects this.
During his final year at the Glasgow School of Art, Campbell created a character called ‘Hunt’, inspired by a 1940s-style murder magazine [4]. Hunt is a very shady, ambiguous character, whose personality seems to be in a constant state of flux. The painting Third Fire Today shows Hunt standing on the edge of looting and violence, and we’re unsure whether he’s been participating or not. He’s dressed in a brown shirt – the uniform of a Nazi foot soldier. He’s also got a Hitler-style haircut, and we’re unsure what terrible crimes he may or may not have committed.
Hunt, as a character, seems to represent the temptation of evil. The writer Duncan Macmillan describes him as a sort of Doppelganger, ‘a personification of the hidden dark side that exists in all of us’ [5]. Hunt isn’t entirely evil, however, and he’s not a straightforward villain: he’s just a very impressionable character who gets drawn into bad things. In this sense, this makes him far easier to relate to. Hunt makes us consider what we’d be capable of in certain circumstances, and the potential for wrongdoing that exists in all of us.
The above painting is called Hunt Falling. Falling is an in between state: you’re neither up nor down – and in a sense Hunt is always suspended like this, between good and evil. According to Campbell, Hunt got drawn into Nazi-ism because he was misguided, and his ‘Fall’ is his moral despair when he realizes, too late, his mistake.
Campbell was interested in this ‘in-between’ state in all of us, in our constant crisis of identity, and liked to explore the idea that art itself is a sort of in-between state: a state of flux between ourselves and our own interpretation of the world around us; and falling is like inspiration, stumbling forward into the unknown.
Hunt then transformed into various other characters in Campbell’s later work. When he left art school, Campbell’s paintings began to feature Abraham Van Helsing, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The above painting shows Van Helsing inhabiting a dark, gothic crypt with a stained-glass window behind him, and like Hunt, we’re not entirely sure what Van Helsing’s intentions are. He’s suspended somewhere between the darkness of the crypt, and the light of the window, and though there are flowers sprouting from the ground, we know a corpse might be buried beneath them. As the writer Duncan MacMillan says in his book on Campbell, Van Helsing’s engaged in the pursuit of the strange and bizarre, attempting to pin it down with a stake through its heart [6], just like an artist trying to discover the illusive goals of painting. Van Helsing haunts dark places, and like many artists, is obsessed with the ‘Undead’ – or, to put it another way – the history of ‘great’ painting.
The Trust hopes you’ve enjoyed finding out a little more about the intriguing cast of characters that inhabit Steven Campbell’s paintings, which we’ll be exploring further in future posts.
Footnotes:
[1] -The Herald/ Published Date: 16th November 2019
Jan Patience, ‘Artist aims to stretch our understanding of the human body’
[2] – p.13/ The Paintings of Steven Campbell: The Story So Far/ by Duncan MacMillan/ Publisher: South London Gallery/ Date Published: 1993
[3] – p.12/ The Paintings of Steven Campbell: The Story So Far/ by Duncan MacMillan/ Publisher: South London Gallery/ Date Published: 1993
[4] – p.13/ The Paintings of Steven Campbell: The Story So Far/ by Duncan MacMillan/ Publisher: South London Gallery/ Date Published: 1993
[5] – p.14 / The Paintings of Steven Campbell: The Story So Far/ by Duncan MacMillan/ Publisher: South London Gallery/ Date Published: 1993
[6] – p.16 / The Paintings of Steven Campbell: The Story So Far/ by Duncan MacMillan/ Publisher: South London Gallery/ Date Published: 1993
A major source used in this blog post was The Paintings of Steven Campbell: The Story So Far/ by Duncan MacMillan/ Publisher: South London Gallery/ Date Published: 1993 (p.12-16). If you’re wanting to find out more about the work of Steven Campbell, we would highly recommend getting this Duncan MacMillan book, which looks at Campbell’s work in a great deal of depth.
The Steven Campbell Trust 