Anne Rothenstein in conversation with Katy Hessel 2024

Katy Hessel: Your works are like nothing I’ve ever seen before; they are mysterious, joyful, stark and expansive. They feature landscapes with trees, clouds and often a single character. They feel unrooted from any time, space, location or movement. Which is why I think people are so drawn to them. How do you hope people feel in front of your work?

Anne Rothenstein: I suppose I want people to feel how I feel in front of a painting, I get a physical feeling when confronted with work I respond to, which moves me, when my intellect isn’t asking anything. I want people to feel drawn in and not quite know why they keep on looking.

KH: Your landscapes or figurative works are on the cusp of something – whether it is the day changing from light to dark, suddenly having to exit this dark space at the end of the movie, changing clothes or taking a leap of faith – going over a threshold. Do you think about that notion of change within your work?

AR: I do. That movie painting, for instance, started off with two figures walking into the distance, and then the cinema grew around them. The painting changes and so my feeling towards it changes. I don’t think about it as a painting about change, but the process of change while painting is very important and can be disconcerting. Sometimes I lose my thread, suddenly I’ve muddled it and as a consequence feel quite lost.

KH: I remember Siri Hustvedt talking about this idea that painting is like a symphony or a piece of music. Because when you see an artwork, it has everything, from start to the finish. I see your work at the end, while you’ve seen its complete evolution.

AR: Maybe the idea is that within a painting there is a story of an experience that is revealed in both the painting and in the looking. Listening to music can be just such an experience, but of course music has three stages: the composing, the performing and the response. Painting only has two: the composing and the response.

KH: What draws you to painting? I know you work with colours, but your primary medium, I guess, is everything.

AR: I really love paint. Oil paint. Colour. I don’t often draw. Maybe that’s my lack of training. It gives me huge pleasure when I do draw, but it’s rare. I think in colour. A beautiful drawing can nevertheless move me hugely. Early Hockney drawings and etchings, masterly.

Oil paint, however, is just extraordinary. I love the feel of it. I reckon if I were blindfolded, I could tell which colour was on the end of my brush, as they all have their own feel. Black feels completely different than white when you lay it down. Combining colours to exactly the right mix is such a joy. Sometimes I physically need to use a particular colour; after painting a dark work I will have a craving to go pale, to use white.

KH: I love this idea of what you said about thinking in colour. That makes me look at your work completely differently. Especially when I look at figurative work, I tend to start with the line. Now looking at your work I’m starting with the colour; when you put it on its head you see the picture in another way. Because colour evokes feelings, changes in the red suddenly feel more pronounced because it’s not about the subject but about the colours that we’re looking at.

AR: When talking about colour people will automatically think that a ‘colourist’ is someone who works with bright, contrasting, zinging colours, like Hodgkin for instance. Whereas I think that grey is one of the most beautiful colours there is. Some of the most beautiful paintings are all about tones, Hammershoi, Gwen John, Vuillard. Not many will say about any of them, “oh what great colourists!”, but they are the greatest. Matisse of course crosses all barriers; his cut-outs are some of the most brilliant uses of colour imaginable. But colours can alarm me. There’s a red and a green that people are currently using that makes me unable to see the whole painting. I’m very interested in red, but I will spend time trying to mix a red that doesn’t glare at me. The same with green. The whole experience with that iPad green is a sort of hell for me – colours can literally make me feel quite ill.

KH: Coming back to that idea of change, I’m fascinated by this idea of storytelling in your work, because I feel as if they catch a moment, a flash or a leap, mid-air. They’re a kind of threshold to another world, and you’re just pausing. Do you think about that storytelling aspect?

AR: When young, I wanted to be a writer and it’s important for me to know what’s happening in a painting – that a story starts to unfold. I made a painting of someone carrying a child, which started originally from a photograph, and I suppose that making the painting I ask myself why this photo has caught my attention. So I’m painting to explore why an image has leapt out at me and a story will reveal itself. If I can’t settle it within my imagination and the painting I get terribly uneasy, depressed even, and probably destroy the work.

KH: So you actually know what's going on in all these scenes?

AR: Sort of, by the end, but that’s all part of working through the painting. Of course I love it that other people see something completely different. My story is only mine and becomes irrelevant once others are looking at the work. That’s why titles have little meaning for me.

KH: But in a way your titles open up to something, whether they’re the name of a person or they’re purposefully left unnamed.

AR: I give many of the figures androgynous names as I don’t know their gender. I like this sort of lack of identity, which is what I feel within myself.

KH: In what way?

AR: I have absolutely no sense of identity. I’m not terribly interested in where I belong, in terms of family, place or community. I have little interest in history. I feel I’ve sort of landed here, in my own little domain. I suspect it’s from having been sent to boarding school when very young. Everyone experiences these things differently, but I turned this kind of abandonment into something particular, losing myself in my imagination, creating my own world. At boarding school, the despair wasn’t about being away from home, it was having to be with others every minute of the day. I took piano lessons because the piano room was the only place where I could be alone. I like feeling that I’m this little thing just floating through. When I was a child, I could very easily have been a boy. I’m not saying I wanted to be a boy. I simply didn’t identify with any gender, and I still don’t. I didn’t have any desire to be a mother, never thought about it, but it happened and having children came as a wonderful surprise, the ultimate act of creativity. It blew me away.

Being a mother brought out my creativity rather than hindering it, but I can see that women have a really difficult time trying to combine children and work. I was incredibly lucky that I could afford to be at home looking after the children, rushing up to my studio the moment they slept and later when they went to school. I don’t know what role to allot myself now; as a woman, a mother, a septuagenarian, even as a painter. I don’t feel part of anything. Never have done.

KH: Looking at your paintings, so many different artistic styles and movements come to mind, but they are still totally unique. I want to start with surrealism, because your work exists in a space that feels on the periphery of our mind, with these dreamlike landscapes.

AR: Don’t you feel that with quite a lot of paintings?

KH: I think more so with yours. They feel as if your figures are ageless. They’re sort of sexless, genderless. They’re not placeable in any particular country, background or anything.

AR: I’m an incredible magpie and steal lots of things from lots of artists. Although I’ve actually never been terribly attracted to the surrealists. Perhaps because their paintings have so often been executed with a particular kind of shiny skill that I don’t apply. I like rougher edges and a more everyday kind of ambiguity. My figures and landscapes may be dreamlike, but they are very grounded in reality. You wouldn’t catch my people flying!

I don’t know what I feel about where these paintings come from, I really don’t, and what keeps me going is trying to find out. Maybe one day I'll suddenly go, “Oh, that’s what I've been searching for!” But they are as mysterious to me as they are to you. And that’s what excites me, and keeps me thinking, “I wonder what I’ll find out next…”

KH: It’s so interesting hearing about this lack of identity, because in a way, that’s kind of what applies to them, even though they’re dressed up as a bride or they’re called The Painter. They’re totally in their own space. I love that they are solitary.

AR: I suppose if someone pressed me and said, “What do you think your painting is about?”  I would probably say, “A search for something… other paintings… paint itself… and solitude.” I think some people find it odd that I like being on my own so much. It’s not because I don’t find people interesting, quite the opposite, they have a profound effect on me. But I find them disrupting and disturbing. I’m very much on the Sartre spectrum. And now we can of course socialise without being present. I’m addicted to my laptop, endlessly looking things up, discovering new artists, with access to contemporary art in a most extraordinary way. This virtual life suits a solitary existence.

KH: When I look at your works, their solitariness comforts me. It’s rare that you see solitude as a happy thing. In front of your work it’s, “OK, it’s me and no one else.” With your landscapes as well, I feel like I’m sort of in the middle of and I don’t really need anyone else.

AR: I’m not trying to express some terrible cry from the soul. It’s a peaceful aloneness. I think aloneness is a wonderful state.

KH: These figures are obviously painted from memory. Do you feel like you’re in dialogue with them when you’re making the work?

AR: It’s funny, because occasionally I chat. Especially now I’m painting much larger works. I think of them as people. I suppose, they are all myself in some way. I don’t have long conversations with them, but I might occasionally go, “Everything alright? You OK?”

KH: Even in the works that have multiple figures in them, it doesn’t feel as if they’re talking to each other. There’s also a solitariness within crowds.

AR: All I know is that I created this imaginary world when I was very young. I suppose it must have come from not wanting to look at all the unhappiness in the real world, and turning it into something magical. But I could only reach that on my own. I painted and made-up stories and spent a great deal of time digging in the ground – I lived in the countryside both at school and home. I found lovely things: china, coins, crystals. That joy of exploring, uncovering, revealing treasures was one of the great adventures of my childhood. And now I’m still digging, because for me painting is an endless search, waiting to see what will be revealed, trying to find that elusive moment when shapes, colours, a story all work together and give me a wonderful little punch in the gut. I have returned to that childhood world now that I’m allowed to be alone again. The downside is that I need to be very grounded, I need to be very still in my life. I don’t travel, for instance.

KH: It’s rare that paintings evoke sounds or silence, but when I look at your work, I get a sense of this fourth dimension, where you have the flat surface but become immersed in the whole scene. In a sense, they are quiet or have this soft sound of water or something.

AR: I love that. A great compliment. I’m incredibly sensitive to sound. Loud noises really disturb me, despite my being quite deaf. A violin screeches. I find opera impossible. I don’t listen to classical music. Give me the deep twang of a country guitar, soul voices, or Bob Dylan’s rasp! Rough edges and storytelling.

KH: Looking at your works on the dancers I was kind of thinking of Debussy. They don’t evoke country music for me, more soft piano sounds.

AR: You’re right of course, different paintings have very different moods. But Smoking Bride is straight out of a country song, “He left his hat on the bench and my heart in the cigarette smoke!” Music is hugely important to me, but I’m limited in my taste. I can listen to Dylan forever. I have a narrow taste in everything, which is useful to me.

KH: This storytelling aspect in Smoking Bride is from one of my absolute favourite series of yours. What I love about looking at this work, is the fact that there are companion pieces.

AR: I get rid of quite a lot of work along the way. With The Bride I started painting from a photograph of a figure sitting. I wasn’t happy and wiped it out, some white paint went across the face and I immediately saw it as a veil. I always feel with a new painting that it’s incredibly precarious. So much happens by accident. So I often do another, when I know what I’m doing, I have a template, and therefore can make a more certain move. But each one is a very different experience. I made those two bride paintings when I was going through my divorce.

KH: It’s almost as though the bride’s not there anymore. The figure that we knew has now gone. I also felt this with the dancers because of that beautiful work of them all together. But then a new painting has the dancer with her back towards us. It’s almost like the performance itself, you suddenly see this dancer is a real person.

AR: That you have connected some work that I hadn’t is the highest compliment, hugely pleasurable. There’s definitely a thread through these works that I think will go on, but I would never have thought of that. Sometimes I feel the work is like some rambling story of my life.

KH: Let’s go back to your beginnings. You were born in 1949. And until you were seven, you grew up in a small village called Great Bardfield, which was full of artists. It must have obviously seemed normal, but retrospectively it feels incredibly romantic to me.

AR: It wasn’t at all romantic. There were many artists in the village, but to me it was simply everybody’s job. Three generations of my family, going back to my grandfather, were artists. As you say, it was just normal. But there wasn’t any going to museums or galleries or discussions of art. I wasn’t aware that art was ‘art’; it was the everyday stuff of life in the way that food and water are. What dominated for me was that my parents were unhappy and separating from when I was about four years old. I think the atmosphere in the house was terrible. And of course there was the pram-in-the-hall syndrome, so my brother and I were sent away to school very young. Being sent away was possibly a relief. I do realise though that however complicated and difficult artists are, it was an extraordinary privilege to grow up among them and be part of a lineage.

KH: I’m really fascinated by the fact that these people are not around anymore, but their works still obviously are. So what is that like? When artists like Lisa Brice see your grandfather’s works and sort of revisit it, does it teach you something about them that you may not have realised?

AR: I was so surprised seeing the painting that Lisa reconfigured, realising how beautiful the original was. My grandfather was a very skilful draughtsman, but I’ve always been slightly dismissive of his paintings in a way that I’m dismissive of Victorian paintings, or even the impressionists. Occasionally, I’ll see a painting of his and am bowled over by its beauty and power. He died before I was born, and my father didn’t talk about him often so he is a shadowy presence. My father was a printmaker, a different kind of artist altogether, and I really didn't get his work for a long time. Now I find his woodcuts just wonderful. Such energy and life they have! As my work and life change, I certainly revisit them with different eyes and much greater admiration. But I feel very separate from my family and my past. I’ve never been back to Great Bardfield or explored my wider family history.

KH: How old were you when you started painting?

AR: I consider myself as having painted all my life, but I suppose I started tussling with it seriously just before I had children. So when I was about 33.

KH: What was it like coming to London?

AR: I started living in London full time from about 14. London as a teenager in the 1960s… need one say more?! I’m still friends with the people I went to school with then, which was called Town and Country and where the headmistress was a psychoanalyst and took on rather troubled children. I didn’t do much learning, spent a lot of time roaming the streets and going to coffee bars, a very new thing then. My life took on a kind of wildness. I left school very young, having had absolutely no education.

KH: Was art something you always knew you wanted to pursue?

AR: It was like joining the family firm, I didn’t think about not pursuing it until later. But I hadn’t stayed at school to take A levels, so I had to think about what I was going to do between 16 and 18. With my mother I took a stall in Portobello Road and sold second-hand, now called vintage, clothes and antiques. Then I went to Camberwell but found it dull and left after Foundation year. In those days the world really was your oyster, everything was open and available to explore. I worked at Editions Alecto for a while, where my stepfather, graphic designer Eric Ayers, was working on David Hockney’s ‘A Rakes Progress’. I went to many private views of contemporary art shows at that time. I was at the Indica Gallery when John Lennon met Yoko Ono.

KH: What was it like?

AR: I was just a young thing. I was obsessed with Lennon and Dylan. There were no selfies then and it was not cool to ask for an autograph but I kept the butt of one of John’s cigarettes, lifted from an ashtray, for a very long time!

KH: I can imagine that as a teenager, Pop just burst onto the art scene, America was coming up, everything was changing…

AR:  I’m not sure I contextualised art in that way, although Andy Warhol was a figure of towering importance I didn’t see him within a new movement, not in the way I did with music. Because I have no art history basis, I didn’t set Pop art against anything else – it was simply what was going on at the time.

KH: So you never went to museums or anything as a child?

AR: No, I didn’t. My father used to come up to London to teach and I do remember him talking to me once about having gone to see a Monet exhibition. And I would look at Monet and think, “What is he talking about?” I remember my mother taking me to a Bonnard show once and being very bored indeed. But I’ve never been a good pupil, I don’t like being shown what to like or be interested in. I have to discover things for myself.

KH: You dropped out of art school…

AR: I did indeed. I went to work for a photographer and a few years later I got into acting. I’m never quite sure how that came about, except that I met Clive Goodwin at an ICA opening. Clive was an agent to many of the most interesting writers and directors at that time, and he’d been married to artist Pauline Boty, who had died a few years earlier. Anyway, Clive was Stephen Frears’s agent, and he had been looking for an actress for a television film. He was very taken with a girl called Zouzou, who wasn’t an actress, in a recently released French film, ‘Love in the Afternoon’. Using a non-professional actress was suddenly fashionable and Clive introduced me to Stephen and I auditioned…

KH: And you got the job.

AR: Yes, although I had no idea what I was doing! Funnily enough it had a screening at the National Film Theatre the other day. They were screening early films by well-known film directors, such as Ken Loach, etc.

KH: And who did you play?

AR:  I played a guest at a wedding who thought marriage a very degrading affair. I remember a line calling marriage ‘legalised prostitution’. This was 1973! It was just a half-hour play, and I never thought anything would come of it… But it was shown, and whoosh, an agent called and I went off into that world for the next ten years.

KH: So, what did you star in?

AR: I just became a jobbing actress, playing a lot of gratuitous pretty girls, with the occasional interesting part. I did a couple of more things with Stephen, one film about the day that Elvis died.

KH: The Dylan thing surely was before that?

AR: Quite a while earlier, in 1966 when he was here during his Albert Hall concerts. I loved his music, his voice, his appearance. From 1962, when I was 12, I had been completely obsessed with him. When he came to London I knew he was staying at the Savoy and that he felt a great affinity with the Irish. I said to my best friend, “Let's pretend that we’re reporters who’ve come over from Ireland to interview him.” We went, bold as brass – we were 16! –  and told the woman at the hotel reception that we were journalists from Ireland, she rang his room and up we went!

What was extraordinary was that he was really interested in what we thought about music. In retrospect these meetings were remarkable. We could have just been groupies but he had a real curiosity about what we were interested in, musically. He wanted to know what we thought of Donovan, a supposed English Dylan. What we thought of Marianne Faithful, everybody who was around at the time. When it was time to go he said, “Leave your name at the desk, come back anytime you want.” I left my name and visited again. The one and only regret I have ever had in my life is that when he invited me to go along with him to meet up with Lennon that evening, I said I had a train to catch as I was going to see my dad!

KH: You didn’t hang out with Lennon and Dylan, but you were acting. When did you get into painting?

AR: Being an actress really wasn’t for me. I began to be very unhappy when I was around 30. Then I just started to paint again in a little bedroom in a flat where Stephen and I lived in Bloomsbury.

KH: Has your studio always been in your house?

AR: Yes. I painted in bedrooms for a long time, where I taught myself to paint.

KH: What were the works that you were making at that time?

AR: Very small, interiors, still lives, figures on beds. I was finding my way, starting from scratch really, After I had children I became much more serious about what I was doing. And I was able to fit it in with the children; that taught me discipline, I really had to use my time well.

KH: It’s interesting, this idea of an artist being up all night, working by themselves and never having someone distract them…

AR: That idea is about men, they were allowed to do that, women rarely were. Certainly if you have children, you can’t do that. I am perfectly happy thinking about what I’m going to have for supper while I’m painting. I like that, on the surface, painting is a rather basic, simple activity. It’s what children do after all, its what people did in caves. Painting seems primitive when you come at it from scratch, while at the same time being entirely mysterious and complex in how it unfolds.

KH: Do you see clear shifts in your career? Here we are obviously focusing on work from 2018 to the present, but you have been painting for decades. Mary-Kay Wilmers has commented that your people are something else after 2003, and then around 2014 you start doing pinkish or yellow landscapes.

AR: I don’t think I notice changes as much as observers do because one painting always leads to another, so I see a continuum. Changes happened spontaneously as I put into practice what I was learning. I did, however, see a big change when I separated from Stephen, no doubt about it. That relationship had of course allowed me the freedom to paint while at the same time not being able to fully give myself to it. Alone again I began to experience the joy of real concentration. I can see I’m contradicting myself here from when I talked about not minding the distraction of children earlier, but children don’t require the kind of attention that living with another grown up requires. Especially one as worldly as a film director. I’m not very at ease in the outside world and I needed to be alone in order to find out how to explore my own intensely personal take on life. Then there was Brexit and turning 70, so much to question. Time itself. I had been tied down to many things: children, a husband, ageing parents. Suddenly I was free. That’s a really amazing thing for a woman – to suddenly be free and able to become absorbed in something you really want to do. It was the start of a really big adventure. I see painting as my life now, something I can’t live without.

KH: I remember when first visiting you, you said you hadn’t had anyone to the studio for years.

AR: I really hadn’t. I didn’t like it. I felt uncomfortable. The studio is quite a secret, personal space. Like a diary. Exposing. And I work in chaos. I have to tidy up before letting others in. I’m still uneasy with people visiting, it can be constructive, but it still feels quite intrusive.

KH: To go back to some of the work that you’ve been making recently: there are some really emotional works, but at the same time there’s a sort of hardness, they’re very solitary but they are clearly also somehow damaged.

AR: I’ve always been deeply affected by the work of Nan Goldin. I've got all her catalogues, the photographs had a profound effect on me when I first saw them. I may have seen images of damaged faces and wounded people, but not someone exposing their own face bruised and battered. I think letting in physical and emotional damage has been a huge step for me.

KH: You paint a lot of backs, and there’s something about backs being turned towards me that makes me want to reach out. You don’t often see them in art, do you? There’s no communication, it’s like a blocking of communication.

AR: You’re right. I’m entranced by backs. They’re a wonderful way of not saying anything, the visual opposite of words but they also open up some kind of communication, they raise questions about the people whose backs these are, who we can’t see… Are they smiling or crying, getting dressed or undressed, what gender are they, are they going somewhere or have they just arrived…?

 But for me, a painting is about the painting and very often it is simply about the paint. Sometimes there’ll be a black shape because I want the black to emphasise the surrounding colour, not because black signifies some deep, profound metaphorical darkness. I may want to include a figure in a space, but I don’t want anything to be read into it, so painting a back is a very convenient way of doing that. In the end I reckon it says something about me and my turning my back to the world…

KH: This is going to be your first exhibition in New York. How does that feel?

AR: I’ll be 74 by the time I get to New York, if I get there. It doesn’t feel quite real at the moment and I really dread the travelling. But actually all I think is, “Will it be good enough, will I be happy with it?”