STILL INSIDE THE YELLOW HOUSE: A Conversation between Rachel Howard and Martin Gayford

Martin Gayford: In 2009 you were the curator of an exhibition called Black Dog Yellow House. That title brings together, intriguingly, Churchill's name for his chronic depression, and the home Van Gogh and Gauguin shared for nine weeks in 1888.

Rachel Howard: Yes, when I'd read your book, The Yellow House I thought; that's a really good title for a show, because painters spend hours on their own. You have to trawl the dark recesses of your mind to come up with something you connect with. These particular artists who I worked with in that exhibition all spent a lot of time tucked away like that. You have to put the hours in - probably fuelling your insecurities in a highly unfashionable painterly world. The idea of the Yellow House seemed to sum all that up, with these two men, these two minds, trapped in a room together. Hell for them, but amazing for us.

MG: So, in a way, not that much has changed in 133 years.

RH: Yes, when I read the book it was fascinating to discover how much that went on between those two all that time ago is still pertinent now. For example, when Vincent is writing to his brother Theo about prices, saying we mustn't set our prices too low otherwise people won't take us seriously. And they had the paranoia of not being understood or looked at. There were exactly the same neuroses that painters have in 2011, as if they were endlessly on a loop.

[3] Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), The Yellow House, 1888, Oil on canvas, 72 x 91.5 cm

MG: Of course the question much debated in the Yellow House was colour, which is still a potent factor in your own work.

RH: I almost see colour as a weakness, a trick that can pull people in like moths to a light. The challenge is to paint without colour, almost. I especially liked in the paintings I did for Naples, Repetition is Truth - Via Dolorosa, the way the colour is peeping through. [i] You have to look through to the shards of colour. But I still can't stop myself sometimes from going back to colour. I've got to stay away from red.

MG: Vincent thought that you could express emotions through colour.

RH: Yes, but when I think about Van Gogh or Soutine, the way they applied the paint is the essence of the emotional charge. I went to see the Soutine exhibition in Paris a few years ago, and thought it was absolutely brilliant. You can see his mind slipping in the way the paint is slipping, it's just clinging to the canvas. He uses a lot of red, amongst everything else, but it's the red that drags you in.

MG: Do you think red is a particularly compelling colour?

RH: It is, but it's good to try and say it without the red. The palette for my show in London in October uses fluorescent yellow, whites, black, and layering, knocking back the yellow and keeping it under control. The show's called Folie à Deux- the madness of two, a psychological disorder. [ii]

MG: Folie á Deux is a delusion or paranoia shared between two people, isn't it? Psychologists also talk about folie à trois, even folie à plusieurs - the madness of many - which you might say is the most prevalent of all.

RH: I like painting these subject-matters of madness. I'm reading Foucault's Madness and Civilisation at the moment. He describes how the definition of madness shifts, what is thought of as mad at one time is normal at another - he talks of unreason.

A friend came over the other day and I was going on about the yellow. He said, never mind the yellow, how about the way you apply the black, that's the insane thing. The way the black is inscribed over the top.

MG: In what sense is the yellow fluorescent?

RH: It doesn't shine in the dark. I'm using it to come through, as the bottom layer. I think it gives it that extra punch. Yellow's a horrible colour isn't it? Horrible, but lovely. It works for me to express a state of mind.

MG: Puts your teeth on edge.

RH: Probably the difference is that it refers more to the mind, and red to the body. It's more of a pensive colour.

MG: And it's light.

RH: Yes, exactly, whereas red is internal. The yellow sits on the surfaces of these canvases, as opposed to being part of the canvas. The exhibition Folie à Deux is going to be a mixture of abstract and figurative works, but actually the abstract paintings feel quite figurative to me. They feel like landscape in their mood. I spent a lot of time in Tate Britain looking at the Turners. The one called Regulus is named after the Turner painting that's about a Roman general who was tortured by having his eyelids cut off and was then forced to look at the sun. Obviously mine isn't like a Turner, but it's inspired by that feeling - it's my interpretation.

[i] Repetition is Truth-Via Dolorosa, Museo MADRE, Naples, 16th April-4th July 2011.

[ii] Folie à Deux, 2011, household gloss and acrylic on canvas, 9x11 inches (22.9cm x 27.9cm) photograph Peter Mallet

[4] Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) Regulus, 1828, reworked 1837

Oil on canvas, support: 895 x 1238 mm

MG: The sun was a subject of Vincent's of course, and Romantic landscape painters generally. Several of the new paintings in the studio here do have a slight feeling of Turner and perhaps more of Caspar David Friedrich. They've got that sense of confronting something vast.

RH: I love all that, I love the Romantics. With the abstract paintings it's the way the paint is tearing apart. These were painted upside down. The colour and the black and white are pulling apart ... to infinity. I can do a lot of brushwork at the bottom, and when I'm happy with it I can use the varnish to drag it down. That's why they have a landscape feel. The bottom horizontal is where the action is, and I feel the painting is pulling away from that.

I've often wondered what painters like Van Gogh or Gauguin, who were colourists, would do with modern materials. Would they use fluorescent yellow, or would they still be painting in oil and being very proper whether they would have painted at all?

MG: Which new materials do you use?

RH: Well, household gloss, and I use acrylic as an undercoat on a lot of these pictures, because very little comes through. I'm a bit of a pig, I use everything. I'm not a purist at all in that sense. Household gloss is so gorgeous, it's almost edible. You want to dive into it. I started painting with vast swathes of household gloss colour in 1994/95, making pictures with bands of colour that would run up against each other and splurge, smear - so they created a world where they met. I've always used gravity to make the paint travel; I push it around but eventually gravity creates the smoothness of it.

MG: So in a way, the tension and drama in your paintings is within the paint itself. That happened, I suppose to the Romantic tradition, as it developed through Van Gogh to Rothko and Pollock. The drama becomes more and more a matter of how the picture is painted, not what it is a picture of.

RH: Abstract Expressionism was the art that made me say, "Oh my God I want to paint!" That was all about the belly and the heart, they were just doing it. It was very macho wasn't it? I liked what someone else said about the Abstract Expressionists: that they liked to have long lunches, so they painted fast.

MG: Are you a fast painter or a slow painter?

RH: It depends. The figurative ones are much slower and more considered but the abstract ones are quicker although I destroy a lot of work. Even though I have always painted figuratively, I only started showing figurative work in the last decade.

MG: Do you think of them as two categories, or does one grow out of the other?

RH: I definitely think of them as one, not separate. But it's nice to traverse between the two because it keeps my mind tuned in. Figurative painting can become very intense and navel-gazing. You can become immersed in a painting for many weeks, then lift your head up and think, "What the hell was I doing", destroy it and start again, whereas with abstract painting it's much more immediate and freer. It's emptying your mind and going with the flow, which I really, really enjoy.

MG: But you must have a bit of a plan.

RH: Not at all.

MG: Don't they involve drying, and working in stages?

RH: Yes, they do. In that sense, there is a plan. There'll be a month between each layer. So I suppose that subliminally during that interval, I might be thinking: "Perhaps I could do that next." But when I approach the canvas, it's purely in that moment I'm working on it.

With the figurative ones on the other hand, I spend hours scribbling things down on paper, over and over again. It becomes very intense, and the release of abstraction is highly enjoyable.

MG: There's an emotional quality, a sort of content, even in your abstract work.

RH: I'm definitely not conceptual. I feel I'm painting my way out, to make some sort of sense. I like a picture that hits me in the guts. Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents did that, for example. When I was at school doing A-Level art history I never liked Rubens, he seemed too dramatic and too swirly. Then I went to the National Gallery to see that amazing exhibition Rubens: a Master in the Making in 2005. I was walking around it, and I stopped and actually cried in front of that picture.

It is an unbelievable painting, with the soldiers swinging the babies down onto the broken column, and the dead babies at the bottom, the pallor of them, everything. In many ways society hasn't changed at all, these atrocities still occur today. I felt ashamed to be human. But you couldn't paint a picture like that these days, be that literal, the modern materials of television and the internet have that covered.

MG: How do you find the figurative subjects?

RH: My sister is a wealth of inspiration. She's ten years younger than me, and we're very close. She'll undress for me and I can draw her. I couldn't have a better relationship in that way. Even though the figurative ones are based on her, they're really about me I think. It's not personal, but in a way it is in the sense that when people write books, they always have an element of themselves in them.

MG: So that's art about a relationship and shared identity, if not exactly folie. Do you work from the model?

RH: Sometimes, but I also make lots and lots of drawings and redraw from drawing to drawing. For the small figurative paintings I make a drawing then photocopy it - displace it. The drawing is a work of art in its own right but in that way I can zoom in mentally on bits I like, play round with proportion, things like that.

MG: Are your figurative paintings always smaller than the abstracts?

RH: Yes, I haven't painted many big figurative pictures. All painters have rules, and then you break them, and think: "Why did I break that rule?" And then: "Why shouldn't I?" It's ridiculous that the rule existed in the first place. But I wouldn't paint a nude like that on a huge scale because it's about the person being very small, alienated and isolated. How the world is big and you can feel so lost.

MG: Of course, scale matters enormously in painting, but huge isn't necessarily more forceful than tiny.

RH: I went to the Sickert exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery a couple of years ago. It was absolutely amazing, I felt he was standing behind me - the hairs were standing up on the back of my neck. I felt, this painting is so small I could put it in my bag, but it's so powerful. To achieve that is amazing, to have that impact on a small surface. It's the dirty grubbiness of it as well. He gets right under your skin. I like it when you can see the paint, and feel the paint and the paint is different from anything you'd see in life.

MG: I suppose that's true of Vincent's work too, it's a combination of how he saw something very ordinary, the park outside his house, the railway bridge along the road and the galvanising energy of what he does to the pigment with his brush.

RH: This painting of a lampshade came from my being in a cafe in East London. I saw it, and thought: "Oh my God, I love it!" I took some snaps on my phone, then squiggled around with it. Once you choose what you are going to work with, it becomes about the paint and for me the subject matter becomes almost a secondary issue. I become obsessed with the shapes of what is there, and then the way the paint will fall. Then I'll shift it around using the varnish over the top. It becomes about paint, then you step back and it becomes about the bigger picture.

MG: With Vincent you get the feeling that he could make a painting out of just anything, five objects on his kitchen table.

RH: He was painting his environment. You can paint in two ways, looking outwards and looking inwards. As the years go by, I'm much more enjoying looking inwards. Everything seems to have gotten much smaller and closer, painting my sister or these objects. As you get older, you realise you are experiencing plenty just by existing - life, death, children, madness. It's all very, very near.

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic