Katy Moran is right to be concerned about the way she is portrayed as a female painter — you just have to keep your eye on it, she tells Ben Luke, make time for your painting and compartmentalise your life
By Ben Luke
Katy Moran's workplace, not far from Kensal Green in north-west London, is everything you'd expect from a painter's studio. A hive of messy activity, it's bathed in light from above, and against the walls, on shelves and on the floor are stacks of unfinished paintings and books. Everything is covered in paint: chairs and an easel are dotted with splats and splashes and a metal trolley, clearly used as Moran's palette, is absolutely caked in the stuff.
She is in the midst of preparation for next week’s opening of her biggest London exhibition to date. The venue is Parasol Unit, the smart not-for-profit gallery in Shoreditch run by curator Ziba Ardalan, and the show is a retrospective of around 50 works completed over the 10 years since Moran left the Royal College of Art. In that time her small, intense pictures, which hover between figuration and abstraction, have made her one of the most sought-after painters of her generation, with collectors on both sides of the Atlantic (James Franco and Elton John among them), yet she’s never had a corresponding public presence. This show should change that.
She deserves wider recognition. She’s immediately likeable as well as talented. I love the fact that she asked our photographer, as he took her portrait for these pages, not to make her look too “meek”. She didn’t want to be seen as a stereotype, she tells me, a woman engaging in craft. “It pisses me off. I hate that the way people perceive your work can be influenced by your gender, or what you look like, or even what comes out of your mouth… It’s human nature, I think, you can’t help it. But it worries me that people will then judge the work differently.”
Does she feel women painters are taken less seriously? “I don’t think I would feel that way if I was a man,” she replies. “I wouldn’t be that worried. It’s clearly because I’m a woman: it’s still more difficult, it’s still not equal.”
The bare facts support what she says — as the Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, Eileen Cooper, pointed out last year, despite 62 per cent of art students being female, only 31 per cent of exhibitions in London feature women artists. Tracey Emin recently prompted controversy on this subject by suggesting that motherhood was incompatible with being a great artist. But Moran thrives on being a mother and a painter — she has two boys, and lives with them and her husband, not too far from her studio. “It’s really good,” she says. “I’ve got [artist] friends who don’t have kids, and they’ve got the luxury of tootling around in the studio for hours before they get started. But when you’ve got kids, suddenly every part of your life is compartmentalised, and you’ve got to get results from those hours that you’ve allocated to certain things. I have this need every day to just get enough out so that I can go home and feel happy.”
The simplicity of children’s art also appeals to her — a view she shares with great modern artists such as Picasso, who quipped that it had taken him his whole life to learn how to draw like a child. “I know it’s a cliché what Picasso said about children’s art,” Moran says. “But it’s so good. I walk around my four-year-old’s school and I just love the art on the walls. At the same time, it’s missing the expertise of artists who’ve trained. But it’s that energy of the marks and the power of the paint.”
For the same reason, she’s also interested in the rawness of untrained outsider artists. “I’ve had an art education but at the same time I like to sometimes pretend that I haven’t, to try to tap into every place.”
It’s this commitment to drawing every last drop from her medium that makes speaking with Moran so energising. In the recent past, painting has been dismissed by certain champions of the avant garde as dead or outmoded. “That pisses me off as well,” she says. “I mean, I don’t know why painting has such a hard time, why we have to justify it when people who work in other media don’t.”
It’s been a busy few months for the 39-year-old. As well as putting together the new exhibition, she had a more modest show at the gallery of her London dealer, Modern Art, just before Christmas, and more new canvases will be shown in New York at the end of this month.