Artist Duggie Fields RIP
With a heavy heart, we share the sad news that our beloved friend, artist Duggie Fields, has passed away. Duggie was a truly original human being in everything he did. He drew no division between his art and his life, and every single day held a reason for him to be creative. Where he lived, where he walked, how he dressed, what and who he painted, creativity fueled every molecule of the man. Like all great painters, he made it look effortless. His precise brushstrokes, his mathematical proportions, his balanced compositions and his colour schemes all seemed so simple yet held the key to his magic. His work is instantly recognizable. As with all originals, his vision was crystal clear. He didn’t need accolades or approval from the art establishment, as long as he was creating, he was fulfilled and happy. He was never shy of trying new adventures in his art and was prolific. He worked in music, film, fashion, anything that piqued his interest. In so doing, his work stayed fresh and relevant and still feels ahead of its time. He leaves behind a tremendous legacy of important work.
Duggie loved art and life, and we loved him. He will be greatly missed.
The long read.
In honor of Duggie, we would like to share the fascinating conversation we had with him recently as we interviewed him for the upcoming HUE issue. He talked about his vivid use of colour, his process and an artistic legacy that spans five decades.
So Duggie, as you know this issue is all about HUE…
What is your color of choice?
It’s a tricky question because I don’t see colours in isolation, that’s the first thing. And then I love colour. I love to have saturated colour. But if I had to pick one colour, it’s not actually even a reluctant choice, RED. It has to be red and the brightest red imaginable. I guess I’ve always liked red and I don’t always paint with red in every painting but most paintings have at least a red highlight somewhere and sometimes huge areas of red too. So it’s going to be red. I'm sitting in bed—I have a red sheet on top and a red chair nearby. I’ve got a painting across from me that’s got quite a lot of red in it. So red.
Redhead
Can you trace your love of red to anything specific?
I don’t know about that. I was actually thinking about it. My childhood was spent in the country and there was a lot of green around, but also red plants and a bit of red for danger. This was in the post-war period... I was born in 1945 and we lived in a little village, but the village was in the middle of an army base and there were soldiers around and also prisoner-of-war camps. And there were soldiers who wore red ties and the red ties meant they were wounded in some way—they were signifiers. But we were told not to talk to the soldiers with red ties... I remember that but I don’t actually know why. I think it was because they might have been sick. So red stuck out in a childhood of khaki dressed people. It’s an early childhood memory, but I have no more clues about it and no one to ask either. Red plants I guess as well. Red is more than a contrast to green, it’s the opposite colour. My parents had a shop and we lived above the shop, and opposite it was just a green field. It didn’t really grow colorful plants—it grew wildflowers and stinging nettles, but mostly green plants, so any red was a real attention catcher. So that’s it, it catches one’s eye. I’ve just started a new video today and the primary colour on the screen is red.
I like colours in context. I use a lot of red, yellow, blue, and I have pink and white and black and flesh as a regular palette. Definitely black and white around red, yellow and blue if I’m simplifying, then I add in the flesh. And grey. I actually like a lot of grey because grey sets everything off.
On Stage
Have you always been an artist?
I remember making things in childhood, not necessarily just painting, but I always made things. I started painting around eleven, twelve, and it was just something I did every day. I never thought I’m going to be an artist, it was just something I did. And at the same time as I painted, music became a big passion too and dance. I used to dance from a very young age. When pop records first came out, they were 78 rpm records and it was the first time one could choose something oneself, and then 45’s (records) came out quite quickly after that, when I was about twelve or thirteen. So I collected records and painted. I never thought I was going to make music, which I do now, but I did start making tapes when I was thirteen.I have no idea what was on the tapes but I had a tape recorder at thirteen, so I’ve always had a bit of technology even as a smaller child. I have an older brother and we used to be together a lot—he’s only a year a half older and we had what we always referred to as a playroom, but it wasn’t really just for us. My parents had a chemist shop and the room that we used to hang out in was a store room for the shop and it had lots of old adverts and some were animated, and things that were battery driven that we used to play with. And then we got this plastic mould-making machine, where you’d pour in granules of hard plastic and they would heat up and melt and you’d pour them into a mould and make little figures. Children wouldn’t be given something as dangerous as that to play with now. It was really quite fabulous.
Lots of brick-building, but mini bricks with cement, not lego—real tiny mini bricks with cement, lots of architecture, early architecture. So I remember making things before painting things even. I made a film called “Always Making Things” because I’m always making things, and I haven’t actually made a painting since I had this chemotherapy, but hopefully I will before Christmas.
How did your art making process develop, tell us about your art making process now as an adult?
So I never thought I’d be an artist, there was no plan. I just did it every day, made paintings. I had an abstract period when I was still a teenager, when “abstract”...oooooh, the word abstract was so frowned upon in England, in the country in rural England. Even the TV made jokes about abstract art. One film I remember was about Jackson Pollock throwing paint on a canvas and the presenter was making fun of it, and I started throwing paint on a canvas, not exactly like that—I would actually go outside and put what I was working on onto the ground and pour paint on it at different heights and let the wind blow it onto the canvas. Then I went to architecture school. I was good at maths and I was good at art and my parents thought this would be a nice career for me.
My first day at architecture school, they sent us out sketching. We had to sketch Soho Square and all the work was put up around the studio, there was all the staff there and there was a big public discussion of everybody’s work and everyone got slated, it was really quite vicious. And I was left till last and they got to me and said this is a fabulous picture, it’s really very special but it’s absolutely useless for an architect. You should be at art school. That was my first day there and I didn’t think wow thank you that’s what I should really be doing, I thought that was really humiliating. I left before the end of the year and did go to art school, but when I got to art school I thought I was actually going to be a sculptor because in my final year as a school boy I had made this life size sculpture in the school grounds in concrete and steel and I’d never finished it. I had never gone back because it was such... really hard work—it was really life size. So I went to the sculpture department and started painting until they threw me out.
Then I had a very conceptual phase when I got very minimal. And I thought that the blank canvas contained all the possibilities and that any mark on it was a limitation but I had a dilemma because I enjoyed making marks. So I started using a mathematical formula, which I do not remember to this day, but it showed me where every mark should go and and it was supposed to be very abstract, and I was in this abstract studio and they all thought I was quite special. And then I got stoned I think and gradually started seeing things in what was supposed to be abstract... And then one day I had a painting that was so minimal it was just squares and triangles, and suddenly I put a figure of Donald Duck in the middle and I got shouted at by the staff. Then the head of school got brought to see the painting. And that set me off in a direction.
Gradually, I started making studies off the canvas before working on the canvas because I found that once I made a mark on the canvas, I couldn’t really change my mind—because the marks kept on showing. I already wanted flat and clean-looking for some reason, so I started making studies on graph paper and tracing paper using rulers and set squares—all the equipment and materials that I had used at architectural school. And I had really enjoyed technical drawing there, so that carried on as my means of making a technical image. I’d construct it on layers of tracing paper over graph paper using a grid and a ruler, and then in the 90s I got a computer and found that the computer put up layers and a grid. It wasn’t my intention, when I got the computer, to make work on it. I thought I was just going to archive the past and maybe make collage with it. But when I saw the layers and the grids, then math kind of took over and I saw the possibilities of making work that didn’t take up your real space. I’ve been in the same flat for a long time and it’s pretty crowded, so the idea of having this virtual space to make work in was very attractive.
Then that led to things just existing on the computer, which then led me to other software. I’d been making music before on a tape recorder and suddenly I started learning music software on the computer. And the same with film—I had made films on Super 8 before that and editing was a real issue, so I started learning software on the computer, which I’m still doing. I’m learning both. It’s an ongoing learning process which I’m really enjoying, and especially at the moment, because physically I haven’t been able to paint. Painting is much more physical than you think. I can’t actually lift one of my canvases at the moment, so the idea of even starting another one is a long way off.
It’s interesting listening to the progression of your desire to have the flatness of the surface. I was really struck by the beautiful flatness when I saw your work at Frieze, the beautiful strokes...
It’s really hard to make the strokes disappear. The paint naturally doesn’t want to do that. I don’t use masking tape, it’s all by hand and I don’t use any mechanical process, but I do on the computer, so it’s strange.... Painting is actually very sensual and that’s another reason I can’t paint at the moment because I can’t hold things properly... yet.
Brompton Cemetry
It really struck me, being close to the surface of your paintings, just how striking your technique is. And I don’t think people realize that, because it has that graphic quality, it looks printed. But actually, seeing one of your paintings, the reason I think they are so vibrant and so powerful is because of your painting technique.
There’s a lot of layers that go into the painting. I always think it’s a bit like a matte lacquer, what I do. Lacquer is glossy and it takes layers and layers to get the depth of the gloss, but I’m building up layers to get the depth of the colour. I don’t prime the canvas, so it is stained with the first coloured paint that goes on it and the colour builds up reflecting through onto itself the whole time, which is why I have to do studies, because I can’t even change a colour or a shape.
Did you instill that mathematical process, this rule for mark making, did you just apply it to yourself and your work?
I am very organic. I don’t really know what I’m doing next, ever. I have an instinct which I follow. I know how to let things build but I don’t always know how to start them. Somehow, I wonder where the start comes from and it comes, and then it’s like you have to suspend yourself, and yet not really because you’re completely following yourself. It’s a weird process. The mathematical formula, I do not remember it. I remember my Geometry A level, so I must have been fifteen, coming out of the exam with a smile on my face knowing that I got 100 percent, and of course I don’t know that because they didn’t give you marks like that at the time. I know I got a first in it, or an A it was in those days. But I enjoyed it. I’d been creative during it. I actually made something happen that I thought—Oooooh, I didn’t know you could simplify that. So I was having a bit of a revelation in the exam was how it felt. And no other exam affected me like that, that’s for sure, and now I haven’t got a clue what it was, and algebra has completely gone out of my life and so has geometry as well, but there’s obviously some kind of structure deep down because I still do straight lines the whole time.
The computer is very good at drawing straight lines and I’m not so good at painting them. At the moment I am looking at a canvas and I can see where I am with a straight line all the way down it, about 72 inches, and it’s just perfectly straight. The big job is when you are looking at the top of the canvas painting it close up, your eye cannot see the bottom of the canvas and you can’t see how wide the line is, so trying to keep it consistent because a paint brush doesn’t paint an even line, it’s how you hold the brush and especially when it’s layers, and every time I paint up to an edge, I obliterate the edge and have to re-paint it, that’s why it takes so long. I’m looking at this straight line and I’m thinking it looks pretty straight from here, but I would be unhappy leaving a painting with something that didn’t look the way it was supposed to.
They take months now. I think the one you saw in LA took the best part of a year on that one canvas.
Syd… (no use trying)
I hadn’t known you had lived with Syd Barrett...
I still live in the home that I got with him. So that was a life changing thing to happen. It was a random find, this flat that I’m still in. So when I did that painting, I had all that history in the subject and I’ve tried painting Syd before and it never worked. I gave up, I just couldn’t think, why am I doing this and yet this time something special happened. It worked.
It’s a very special painting that one. Was that a real moment for you meeting Syd and having him in your life?
Not especially. I had lots of exciting people in my life at the time. Syd was one of many. I lived with Syd in a group flat before this one and yes he was special, yes he was magnetic, yes all those things, but I had other friends who were equally, maybe not equally but they had something special about them too and some like Syd didn't have a good ending and some are going strong. Syd and I getting this flat together was a bit a force of just circumstances.
We had started hanging out together after we’d both lived in another flat, after he had left the band and before I went to America for the first time. We’d hung out in the summer with just a random group of friends who you, I don’t know how groups coalesce, you’re in the same neighborhood or whatever... And then when I came back from America I needed somewhere to live and he needed somewhere to live and there was a third friend who needed somewhere to live and we looked together and I was the one who found this flat and it was a random find. It was in the time when you looked in the Evening Standard for property and it came out first thing in the morning in South Ken and I’d gone to the South Ken tube station to get it early. The flat in the paper was in a building that Syd had once lived in, so I actually knew the building. So I rang up the agents and they said there’s someone with keys in the flat now and I said I’m right outside it, so she said we’ll see if they’ll let you in. They did. I called the agency and said I loved it. She said well, you’ll have to be second in line because they were first, but I also have this flat in Earls Court that we haven’t advertised yet and I said great, I’ll have it. So it literally happened like that. I never wanted to live in Earls Court, I was quite happy to live in South Ken, but now I’m very happy that I found it.
Early 70’s bedroom
And it’s where you have lived for how many years?
Fifty years now. But I don’t own the flat. I’m a sitting tenant. So there was a time when I thought I was trapped, because I thought you’ve got nothing to sell, you’ve been paying all this money out and you’ve got nothing to sell, but the reality is I’d never be able to rent anything as good as this or ever be able to afford to buy it. I was always thinking, well, what’s going to happen to my future, well, now my future is the past, there aren’t so many years left you know. Fifty here, I absolutely can’t complain about that. And I have some neighbors who have been here for that long too. Upstairs I have some opera singers who have been here the whole time I’ve been here. And it’s kind of nice having that sense of continuity.
Early 80’s
How does that inform your work because that’s your studio as well isn’t it?
It’s my everything. Every room is a work room. Every room is home at the same time. It does mean I don’t entertain anymore. I stopped entertaining a long time ago because when anyone comes around, my attention is still on whatever I was working on. So now I say let’s go out for a cup of tea.
Sofa 2017
I’m a 60s child. I was on the Kings Road in 1963-64, if I’m really accurate, when swinging London was just starting and when tourism was just starting. There was no tourism and people were just starting to come to London because of all these media stories about the beautiful people on the Kings Road. And that's where my art school was and I ended up living off the Kings Road. I had a very “60s” 60s. Then, in the late 60s, everybody else was getting very psychedelic around me. I can’t say I did. I did partake but I didn’t think that acid would “change the world man”, whereas I did live with people who thought that. I lived amongst people who were spreading that message when it was first being spread, even in England, with American draft dodgers. The first time I ever met Americans, they were young people coming to England to avoid being sent to Vietnam. So that was my 60s, way before the Blitz kids. I went to Blitz (infamous London nightclub), I loved it. They were not my generation but they were my ilk at a later date, if you see what I mean. I always felt at home there and comfortable but I was definitely a lot older by then.
My real creative excitement started earlier when I was at school still. I moved from the country to the suburbs. Two miserable years I was in the suburbs. I was sixteen, seventeen, and I started coming into the city on my own and discovered clubs. I went to this grotty basement behind Leicester Square which started doing a rhythm and blues night with an unsigned cover band who had never made their own music, called The Rolling Stones. So I was seeing the Stones with maybe fifty people in the club. Eventually they had a residency and there was a queue around the block and they became The Rolling Stones. They were The Rolling Stones, but nobody had heard of them at that point, they didn’t know what they were doing even, they were a cover band. So I was supposed to go to architecture school in Liverpool and I refused to go. I said I can’t leave London, and that’s when I left home. When I went to architecture school the first person who spoke to me, his sister was a fashion designer called Alice Pollock who had Quorum, which was just starting and which became such a focal point of Kings Road with so many amazing people. So that became my world, just by chance almost...
Yeah that stretch of London... the Kings Road..
And it really was an extraordinary period. As a late teenager and in your early twenties, you don’t know any different. I didn’t really know how special it was. And then I had the seventies on the Kings Road of course too, when punk happened. So I was at The Rolling Stones shows before they made records, I was at the Sex Pistols’ second gig. And in between, my flatmate’s band was Pink Floyd. So I had a strange...um... those three periods, not many people would have been where I was at all three of those. The punks thought they were very different from the hippies, which they thought the Floyd were.... I saw a lot of change, but it was the same. And Blitz was just another place that I felt quite comfortable in too.
It’s almost like you are in these incredible energy vortexes of art history and cultural change...
Well, in the late 60s, in ‘68, I came to America for the first time and America was a real eye opener for me. I don’t know what it was like for you the first time you came. I landed in New York in the summer and I got a traveling scholarship. I hadn’t applied for it, I’d been put in for it and I had to go to this interview and there were all these other students saying they wanted to go and study such and such, and I just said oh well I’d like to go to Paris but there’s riots, 1968. So I don’t want to go there because of the riots, and I said I don’t want to go to Rome because of the riots there. I’d really like to go to New York, but there are riots there too. So I really don’t want to go. She said “You just want the money don’t you?” and I said yes and I got the money as a result, and I went to New York and the first morning there was a riot in the street of the building I was staying in. And literally it was like, oh New York was so dirty and sweaty and sticky and hot and noisy and oh I couldn’t stand it. I met some people and we drove across the country to LA. Half fabulous, and half a nightmare. In LA I stayed on Balboa Peninsula. It was supposed to be that someone had a house on this private island and they did. It was suburban, massive houses, but as far as I was concerned you’ve got the next door neighbor a foot away. That was a real shock.
Then I flew up to San Francisco on my own, which was the summer after the summer of love—1967 was the summer of love and this was ‘68. I stayed right on the Haight Ashbury, which had been the center of it all. I thought it was a real knife-in-the-back territory and it was terrifying. But I saw the Jefferson Aeroplane, went to New York, arrived in New York, and I thought this is home. I just loved New York when I got there. I was taken to Max’s Kansas City and I’d never heard of it, and there was the whole Warhol crew who also I had never heard of, hanging out there and it was like hey, this is great I don’t want to leave but I had to as my money ran out. I thought I was going to go back but it took me five years before I got enough money to go back. So in any case, I had a love affair with America as a result. Great eye-opener, New York in particular.
So with all of that, I was going to ask you, where did your aesthetic come from, in terms of how did you become you? But really that history all compounds together, is there a point where the curl arrived?
Yes. Not the curl. But the painting arrived during my last year in art school. From ’68 on, you can see paintings that look just like my paintings still. There was some core of them that was formed at that point, that’s still there. Appearance wise, more mid 70s. And again, I’d started going back to New York, and I lived with people in the 60s who were very into dressing up, dressing as a way of self expression. But it wasn’t self conscious like that, it was just a way of being. There was a whole explosion of a new generation making their own style. A lot of my friends had clothes shops and that became an ordinary part of my life, that you changed how you looked a lot. And my hair grew long—I had curly hair at one time, I had very long hair at another time. The curl actually fell into place in the mid 70s, and was post New York. I’d fallen in love with the city, I’d fallen in love with somebody in the city, it had a great impact on me and somehow I’d already started getting lots of media attention. And I can look back and the curl was there about ’75 and more permanently about ’76, and ever since until this year. And I’ve thought of getting rid of it often, but then I thought why? Why? Why? It’s very organic. Until this year. I like to be clean shaven and at the end of shaving... Well, I have a shower every day and I just pull the curl down when I am drying my hair and that’s it. It takes a second to do. So this year has been a change in that the curl fell off and I stopped shaving. Now I have started shaving again and the hair hasn’t grown long enough... yet.
Well, we look forward to that curl at Christmas.
Yeah, I do too.
Do you have a particular time of the day that you are more creative?
My routine at the moment is completely organic because my body is not brilliant. So I get up and I sit at the computer before I get dressed and I do some work at the computer. I do something creative for about an hour or two hours. Then I have a whole routine, I do exercise, which I couldn’t do for a while but I’ve started doing again, and then I shower and get dressed, make the bed, and then I usually go out for lunch to get me out of the house, then I come back and work again. Last thing at night, I work too. At the moment I have got someone living here and they are in the room with the computer, but I’m doing lots of things on the phone, the track that you’re going to listen to, mostly done on the phone, even my phone recorded on the phone, so in bed I do quite a bit of work. I do Instagram and Facebook in bed too, the last thing at night. And set up things for collages for the next day on the computer itself.
First thing in the morning, last thing at night, and the afternoons are my most creative times.
And lunch in between...
Lunch in between, not so much for the food. It is for the food but I have to get out of the house. I have to be in the world at some point. I don’t have to talk to anyone but I just have to be in the world. At the moment, I go for walks every day too. I’ve gone for walks every day for a year. At the moment I’m just getting back to being able to.
Who has been the biggest influence on you as an artist? Is there anyone?
I don’t know. That has varied over the years. My first love in childhood, my first loves, were comics. I used to say Walt Disney, but it wasn’t just Disney cartoons. But Disney cartoons had a big impact as a child. I lived in a little village, no art around and we’re talking before television and obviously before social media, but before much print media as well, print media was very limited. The first artist I ever saw was Leger and he was a big early influence. And then obviously Picasso, you couldn’t escape Picasso. I like looking at things so I liked looking at lots of things.
I used to say Mondrian, Miró, Dalí, Arp... lost on names these days.
London city boys
Is there anyone who excites you right now? Someone contemporary in whom you see something new and interesting?
I just watched a documentary on Yayoi Kusama the other night, who I had been rather dismissive of quite recently, thinking why is she suddenly the flavor of the moment. Then I watched this documentary, which had a lot of her young, a lot of her different phases, her problems, and I got hooked. I think she’s amazing. I’m good at reversing myself on people too. I didn’t like Bacon until the 70s and now I think Bacon is fabulous. I reversed myself on Gilbert and George too. I can be like a lot of people who hit my prejudice button when I first look at them. Which is interesting, I like that, but I can hit my reverse button, which is good.
I like the idea of the underdog rather than someone who’s been patted on the back. So sometimes, when I come across someone who has been patted on the back, I think well, they’re not that good and then afterwards I think, yes they are.
Icons & Ideals
What is the best advice you’ve ever been given?
I’ve had lots of negative advice. Lots of advice that says you might as well give up. I don’t know what the best advice I’ve ever been given was. I’m not going to give you an answer about that right now.
I’ve got examples of other people where I think their behavior is exemplary and that’s not them actually giving me advice, it’s me observing and thinking I’d love to be more like that. There are people I know who are much better with other people, they are very good at being warm to people they don’t know, being tolerant of other people’s foibles in a way that I’m not. I think I’d like to be more like that. That’s not advice I’ve been given, that’s just observing. It’s such a nice quality to have.
Annunciation & Temptation
What excites you about today and what’s next?
What excites me about today is continuing whatever I’ve already started on. And there is always something I’ve started on. I’m always making notes. Today I finished off one video and started making two others. Both the music tracks I already got and I had kind of forgotten them, not forgotten them, but not gone to the next step with them because my computer can only do one at a time. But I started two today, tying my computer in knots, and it’s still processing at the moment, so next is a little look before I go to bed to see if it’s finished and see if I can watch it because what I do is take it from my computer onto the mobile phone and then watch it in bed on the TV. And then in the morning, I go back to the computer and carry on.
The last canvas I did is the graveyard around the corner, which is where I walk every day. And then this year it’s been a struggle to get there. It’s always been a fabulous place ever since I discovered it. I lived here for ten years ignoring it. It’s a wonderful place. And in the chemo summer film, when you think I might be in the country, I’m not, I’m just around the corner. It is just beautiful. That’s the last painting I’m working on and I only managed to struggle to finish it during the chemo.
I‘ve got a new project next year which is a stage show in Paris, doing a thirty-minute act. I did one minute live at Olympia in Paris in December, and the man who had me do that is a very serious musician who is a big star in France, and he said I should be doing an act of my music and he’s got a venue in Paris. So I’m going to learn to do it. I don’t want to be doing it live, I don’t want to be doing it for a live audience, that’s not me, I’m not doing that. I know I can do it on film, but a live audience is another thing, you know. Also having the energy to do it for as long as is required, right now I’m a long way off. I can’t concentrate, but it’s in my mind, I’m going to do it next year. It’s a big challenge. At the same time, I want to get back to painting, so there’s a certain dilemma because the state of mind that you’re in to work in a studio, isolated, on your own, is very different from walking on stage in front of a live audience. When he asked me to do it, I said no way. It took a year of thinking about it and realizing I’ll never be asked to do this again, so I said yes.
Thanks Duggie, it has been a great pleasure knowing you.