Margate-based painter David Shillinglaw’s thought-provoking paintings

Q: Sketchbooks seem central to your way of working. Are your ideas formed mainly internally or are they triggered by physical observations or settings?

A: It’s a mix of both. I draw things I see, a view from the beach or the table top at dinner, but I allow other elements to interrupt the composition. I paint and collage into the sketchbook in the studio, then continue working on it at home.

I work on the same page over a number of days, and eventually when there is enough information, the page is complete.

My sketchbook serves as a starting point for a studio work or murals, almost like the sketchbook is the hum of a tune that I try to make into a complete song later on.

I often think my sketchbooks are the best things I make. The space of their pages is so intimate. I carry them around with me and they collect time and traces of where I have been. My daughter scribbles in them too.

There is a freedom I find in sketchbooks that I don’t easily find on a canvas or a wall. Maybe it’s because it’s not for sale or even able to hang on a wall, this takes away the usual values we place on an artwork and places a new set of values just for me or who I choose to show it to. My sketchbooks are maps of where I have been and where I want to go.

Q: What is the current driving force for your work? Are certain themes brought to the fore with the fact you now have a daughter and concerns about the world she may have to grow up in?

A: Yes I think about the world slightly differently with her in mind. I am more and more concerned/influenced by the climate crisis and trying to unravel the landscapes of planet Earth.

I made a painting recently that hints at wildfires and imagined futuristic Martian landscapes. Both wildfires and Mars play on my mind a lot. In general, the collapse of ecosystems upsets and disturbs me and I can’t help but include it in my work.

The new fashion for space tourism also seems absurd and finds its way into my thoughts. My work often attempts to describe my place in the universe and maybe having a child has moved me toward this direction.

It’s hard to know, it’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing. I do know that a lot of my past work was about me and now it’s more about people in general or the planet we all inhabit. I am trying to speak in a universal language, of colours, shapes and lines.

I want to make things that don’t really require an explanation but are felt universally. After all, if you explain a joke it stops being funny.

It is interesting to me that a child of two is able to access art on a very basic level like that’s a tree, that’s the moon, that’s a rainbow and so on. My daughter also influences my work directly by scribbling on drawings with pens.

I encourage her to do this and I have begun to include some of these marks into my work –  it’s a love letter to her but also a way to free up my own mark making which can become a little too ‘designed’ sometimes. Children are incredible mark makers, they just go for it. I envy that freedom and immediacy.

Q: Which artists – contemporary or past – inspire you?

A: One artist who I think about a great deal is Jean Dubuffet, partly because of his work, but also because of the outside artists he championed. I'm very interested in outside art, or as he called it ‘Brut Art’. He’s a big deal to me.

I also run an account on Instagram called @the.dirty.paradise. Initially, it began as a way for me to publish zines and organise exhibitions. But, for the past year, it’s changed a bit to become a place where I point to art and artists that I think are great.

Q: Words seem important to you: Do lyrics, music, poetry inspire you?

A: I have always enjoyed playing with words, either within the work, or the title of the work. Marcel Duchamp once said, ‘The title of a painting is another colour on the artist’s palette.’

I love how certain words have double meanings or puns, or sometimes words and numbers just have great geometric form. As time goes on I use words less in my work, but I’m still interested in how compositions can be read like hieroglyphics.

My aim is to speak to as many people as possible so using English words will ultimately limit who can access the meaning of work. My favourite writers are Richard Brautigan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino.

As for music, I am always listening and discovering new things. For me, top lyricists are Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, David Bowie, and Paul Simon. I like a mix of heartbreak and humour, comedy and tragedy in equal parts.

Q: Back in 2014, we read that you ‘hope to open a restaurant in the middle of a forest that cooks pizza and serves coffee in ceramic pots’. Is that still true?

A: Haha, yes I’d still love to do that. Food and art are two planets revolving around the same sun. I cook and draw every day. I’d love to open a restaurant someday...