Last October, Katy Moran had her first solo exhibition at Modern Art in London, where she is based, and she is currently participating in group shows at Gagosian Gallery in New York; Mead Gallery in Warwick, UK; Engholm Engelhorn Galerie in Vienna; and Vamiali’s Gallery in Athens.
01 MY M.A. People think that artists make their work in their spare time. They don’t. Art is like any other career in that it requires complete commitment, a lifetime of improvement and refinement. The pity is that such time is often afforded to young artists today only when they’re in college, as I experienced when awarded a place at the Royal College of Art in London. There I was surrounded by talented, original people who challenged me to improve.
02 FRANCIS BACON ON NONILLUSTRATIONAL FORMS Bacon’s analysis of nonillustrative painting remains a guide for my own method of working and for the type of art I seek to create. As he once said in an interview with David Sylvester, “An illustrational form tells you through the intelligence immediately what the form is about, whereas a non-illustrational form works first upon sensation and then slowly leaks back into the fact.”
03 RINGLEADER OF THE TORMENTORS I grew up in Manchester. I have walked the same wet streets of Stretford once trod by a teenage Morrissey, the artist who would one day write “The More You Ignore Me the Closer I Get” (my favorite song of his). I saw him perform at the Palladium in London last year. There was some serious devotion in the front row: One girl sobbed from beginning to end and still managed to sing every word.
04 KENSAL RISE, NW10 This tatty little strip of London is my home. We’re close enough to Notting Hill to walk to the carnival, but, thankfully, we don’t have to share our streets with members of the Conservative Party elite. There’s a great new delicatessen that looks like the top of an air-traffic control tower, and there’s also Paradise by Way of Kensal Green, a pub whose name comes from the closing line of G. K. Chesterton’s 1914 poem “The Rolling English Road”: “For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen / Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green” (referring to the nearby Kensal Green Cemetery).
05 NORMAN ROCKWELL I love paintings that manage to combine comfort and warmth with a sense of awful kitsch sentimentality, and Norman Rockwell, a great storyteller and formal master, is exemplary in this respect. Tapping into the American nostalgia for a time that was kinder and simpler, his idealistic and innocent paintings are good only insofar as they’re bad, like those terrible, tasteless paintings that you can’t take your eyes off in a cheap hotel’s lobby
06 LISA MILROY I empathize with Milroy’s love of paint, which takes precedence in her work above all else. Her canvases feature ephemera like shoes, lightbulbs, tires, and shirts, but all of them are so emptied of meaning and treated in the same evenhanded manner that they are made utterly abstract. Everything is subjugated to the act of painting.
07 URBINO, MARCHE REGION, ITALY I visited Urbino on a university exchange and, overnight, went from living on the most burgled street in Leeds to residing in a Renaissance paradise. There it became clear to me that Italians can appreciate the beauty in an ancient, distressed building; they recognize that decay can add to the luster of a place. I was struck by the anachronisms of daily life in Urbino, like an Italian sports car parked outside a medieval church or a pair of designer jeans drying on the line in a five-hundred-year-old courtyard. Occasionally, to save money on shopping, I would pick, wash, and eat the rocket that grew in the cracks of the town’s crumbling walls.
08 KIT WILLIAMS, MASQUERADE An illustrated book and a treasure hunt for children, Masquerade (1979) held clues to the location of an eighteen-carat golden hare buried somewhere in Britain. I loved Masquerade as a child—the richness of pictorial detail, the depth of Williams’s imagination. Williams began his adult life in the navy, and then spent the next decade working in factories and developing his painting style before he was asked to illustrate a children’s book. Three and a half years later, Masquerade was published to great acclaim.
09 FRANZ HALS This Dutch baroque painter captured detail like no other: the features of his sitters’ visages, the ruffs they were wearing. Looking closely at his many paintings in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I was impressed by the speed and economy of his brushstrokes, something I aspire to in my own work. By virtue of skill and disposition, it seems, he did not have to pore over his subjects and paint as meticulously as his peers. He was a brilliant technician and could capture every area of light and shadow in a fold with, say, four judicious strokes.
10 NOAH’S ARK WHALEBONE Last year, I visited the American Folk Art Museum in New York, and one work, featured in a grouping of prisoners’ art from the permanent collection, stood out from the rest—a nineteenth-century sculpture of Noah’s Ark carved out of whalebone. It might sound like a seaside gift-shop knickknack, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Although the artist, living in such grim conditions, did not expect his art to ever be exhibited, the work was beautifully rendered in almost obsessive detail. Such attention to quality, however, may have been a necessity—the prisoners made these pieces to barter for food.