'One continuous accident

mounting on top of another'

David Sylvester: Have you ever had any desire at all to
do an abstract painting?
After that triptych, you started to paint in a more
figurative way: was it more out of a positive desire to
paint figuratively or more out of a feeling that you
couldn't develop that kind of organic form further at
that time?
Did the bird alighting suggest the umbrella or what?
It often happens, does it, this transformation of the
image in the course of working?
In painting this Crucifixion, did you have the three
canvases up simultaneously, or did you work on them
quite separately?
Have you been able to do the same in any picture that
you've done since?
Or extreme tiredness?
The will to lose one's will?
If people didn't come and take them away from you, I
take it, nothing would ever leave the studio; you'd go
on till you'd destroyed them all.
Can you say what impelled you to do the triptych?
But you do, in fact, paint other pictures which are
connected with religion, because, apart from the
crucifixion, which is a theme you've painted and
returned to for 30 years, there are the Popes. Do you
know why you constantly paint pictures which touch
on religion?
But why was it you chose the Pope?
But aren't there other equally great portraits by
Velasquez which you might have become obsessed
by? Are you sure there's nothing special for you in the
fact of its being a Pope?
But you've also done two or three paintings of a
modern Pope, Pius XII, based on photographs, as if
the interest in the Velasquez had become transferred
on to the Pope himself as a sort of heroic figure.
Since there's the same uniqueness, of course, in the
figure of Christ, doesn't it really come back to the
idea of the uniqueness and the special situation of the
tragic hero? The tragic hero is necessarily somebody
who is elevated above other men to begin with.
In a positive as well as a negative way?
Can you say why photographs interest you so much?
One very personal recurrent configuration in your
work is the interlocking of crucifixion imagery with
that of the butcher's shop. The connection with meat
must mean a great deal to you.
The conjunction of the meat with the crucifixion
seems to happen in two ways - through the presence
on the scene of sides of meat and through the
transformation of the crucified figure itself into a
hanging carcass of meat.
It's clear that much of your obsession with painting
meat has to do with matters of form and colour - it's
clear from the works themselves. Yet the Crucifixion
paintings have surely been among those which have
made critics emphasise what they call the element of
horror in your work.
The open mouths - are they always meant to be a
scream?
The Pope ... is it Papa?
And what were your feelings towards him?
So perhaps the obsession with the Velasquez Pope
had a strong personal meaning?
Most people seem to feel there's somehow a distinct
presence or threat of violence [in your work].
We've talked before about roulette and about the
feeling one sometimes has at the table that one is
kind of in tune with the wheel and can do nothing
wrong. How does this relate to the painting process?
And with the painting?
Your taste for roulette doesn't, as it were, extend to
Russian roulette.
Where did you go to school? Or did you not?
How did your parents react when they heard about
that idea?
You've often said that when you're painting you very
much prefer to be alone - that, for instance, when you
are doing a portrait you don't like to have the subject
actually there.

· Copyright 1975, 1980 and 1987 David Sylvester.

Reproduced by kind permission of Thames & Hudson Ltd,
London.