Talking Painting with Winston Branch

Heading into the exhibition space of Goodman Gallery on Cork Street, you’re greeted by a cosmos of overwhelmingly large paintings by Winston Branch. They are sublime sweeps of colour, their delicate splatters of pigment and energetic brushwork creating expansive spaces and depths on the canvas.

The exhibition, Winston’s first at Goodman, and one which marks his return to large-scale work, is titled Out Of The Calabash. The calabash tree is the national symbol of St Lucia, where Winston was born in 1947. In the years since he’s traversed the globe in his work as a painter, first to London, then Rome, New York, California, Berlin. The calabash of the title takes these paintings explicitly back to his roots in the Caribbean. But looking at these works you would not root them in the reductive specificities of “place”. Or could even describe them as abstractions of landscape. The nature of his work forces you to bring your own interpretation to it.

“There’s nothing to explain. Explanation is a rational, secondary process, a justification of feeling. You don’t need to justify feeling. You embrace it.”

To stand in front of the paintings is to experience something close to immersion. Their scale refuses polite contemplation and comprehension. “The paintings are meant to envelop you,” Winston says when we speak, as the exhibition prepares to close. “That’s the point. In front of the painting the human is a grain of sand on a vast beach.” 

A response to one of his works should be about “finding your own way through the maze, because what I try to do is make a painting that allows the spectator to unleash their imagination,” he continues. “We live in a world intoxicated with ideas about what we should and shouldn’t do or think. It’s refreshing to stand in front of a painting on a wall and write your own story on it. There’s nothing to explain. Explanation is a rational, secondary process, a justification of feeling. You don’t need to justify feeling. You should just embrace it.” 

Winston is attentive to the way people behave around paintings, and especially to the difference between adults and children. In museums, he notes, children rarely feel the need to justify what they see, taking in colour and form without explanation. Adults are more hesitant, wanting to understand or decode or find meaning. “People are afraid to just take it as it is,” he says. “They’re looking for something to hold on to.” That reflex, he suggests, comes from a broader cultural anxiety about not understanding, about failing to explain one’s response.  

Abstract painting resists that impulse. Winston developed this way of thinking as something of a reaction to the art scene he found in Britain as he emerged as a successful artist in the 70s. It was, he describes, a very literal country then. He was raised in its traditions though, the education system in both St Lucia and London at the times drilled the classics into young minds, and he learned, in part, by looking and reading. But he was also part of the countercultural movements that changed society. 

“You learn, then you have to unlearn. Nothing comes from nothing. Tradition matters, I love Constable, Turner, Monet, Bacon, Freud. Painting is history, but it’s also alive. It evolves, like language.”

He studied first at the Slade, and was then awarded the British Prix de Rome in 1971 and attended the British School at Rome. “I looked at a lot of narrative painting back then,” he recalls. “My early works were very of the time, which was the 60s, the politics of the Vietnam War and race. The first painting I sold was called Liberty, but I was looking at everything then, too. I loved Rubens and the Baroque, I spent a lot of time in the Wallace Collection just looking. You learn but then you have to unlearn. Nothing comes from nothing. Tradition matters, I love Constable, Turner, Monet, Bacon, Freud. Painting is history, but it’s also alive. It evolves, like language.”  

Throughout his career he has remained resolutely mobile: he served as an artist-in-residence at Fisk University, a historically Black university in Tennessee, he lived in Berlin and California, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has exhibited around the world. But the work resists neat narratives of diaspora, even if those narratives are there in his biography.  

“In St Lucia I was raised in a British colonial culture and that stays with you. But I think that there is no universal art — there is French art, German art, English art. Those distinctions enrich us. Out of the Calabash can be about decolonisation but it’s also about the history of painting.”    

The move to abstraction in the 80s was in some ways a method that allowed him to resist a certain literalness from critics or viewers. But it was also a way to open his practice up to explorations of pure artistic kinds: colour, light, space, composition. All freed from “meaning” and having to be about something.  

“In America I realised I cared about texture, surface, sensuality, not illustration. America gave me freedom.”

“I realised I didn’t have to make paintings that meant things. Blue could just be about blue, not the colour of the sky. A painting of a bowl of fruit by Chardin isn’t interesting because the painting is of a bowl of fruit, but the way it’s represented, it’s about light and colour. I was always interested in light and colour but I had to make images first to understand that interest properly. As a civilisation we learn by images, we spend millions of dollars inculcating people with images through advertising, they’re very powerful things. But eventually I realised I didn’t need the image to explore the colour. I could go to the actual source of the colour, eliminating the humdrum narrative.” 

But you can see in his work a distillation of all that “history” he picked up from school in England, from the Slade, the accumulated works of civilisation from the National Gallery to the British Museum: Turner’s seascapes, Greek marbles, Constable’s countrysides, Monet’s water lilies. The transformation in his work came in New York, when he was exposed to the abstract expressionists, who he found to be, like himself, in between cultures, émigrés interested in a new kind of aesthetic and form of artistic representation: Rothko was born in Russia, Gorky in Armenia, De Kooning in the Netherlands, they, like him, were Europeans transformed through exposure to America. 

“Abstract painting had European roots even if America transformed it. They were immigrants. It was the first time a culture was built so visibly by immigrants.”

“Living in America mattered. I was surrounded by artists asking fundamental questions: why paint? What’s your agenda? I realised I cared about texture, surface, sensuality, not illustration. America gave me that freedom to think in a new way, and to see that abstract painting had European roots even if America transformed it. They were immigrants and it was an artistic culture built very visibly by immigrants.” 

But Winston was never a didactic painter, even when he was interested in figuration, and the shift came naturally as he matured. In this resistance to meaning, or narrative or explication, Winston’s paintings prove remarkably slippery to discuss. They are resistant to language. They are what they are: fields of colour, studies in the way colours modulate each other, expressions of aesthetic judgement. To an extent you could see him as confounding the stereotypes of Black art. It would be as pertinent to liken him to Howard Hodgkin as it would Frank Bowling.  

Winston talks about when a painting ends. There is no sense of resolution, or of arriving at something conclusive. He finishes one painting and that ending becomes the beginning of the next one. The process is one of accumulation of material rather than narrative development. There is no requirement that the painting “mean”anything in particular. In that sense, the paintings resist the categories they are so often asked to occupy. They are no more or less legible as statements of identity than they are as exercises in form.