At Home With Graham Little

When we arrive at Graham Little’s home-cum-studio in south London, the rain is coming down in thick, unending sheets. He welcomes us in, dripping wet, with a much-needed cup of tea. His kitchen, which contains paintings by friends alongside an almost-convincing fake Picasso, still bears the traces of three sons just departed for school: drawings stuck to the fridge, homework scattered around the kitchen table.

Graham’s own books are piled up nearby, overflowing from their shelves and taking over the house. There are books on art and society, the Renaissance and the Baroque, modernism, interior design, architecture, fashion, history and photography. They form a kind of catalogue of human creativity and taste, and of the many ways we have looked at and recorded the world around us. These visual histories also inform Graham’s own work, which draws on and reinterprets the images and objects that have shaped our understanding of the world.

“I've never lost gratitude for having a roof over my head and a dry woolen jumper.”

Many of the books currently in use are on the artist Prunella Clough, the subject of an exhibition he is curating. He opens a photographic history of his native Dundee and shows us the streetscapes and vistas of his youth. Although he has lived in England since moving south to study at Goldsmiths in the 1990s, he retains a soft Scottish lilt and charm.

When we visit, he is putting the finishing touches to an exhibition opening at Alison Jacques Gallery on Cork Street during Frieze week. The show brings together work made over the past two years, primarily in gouache on paper. The paintings are intensely detailed, painstakingly crafted and almost fragile in their precision.

Each of the dozen or so paintings in the exhibition is a carefully observed arrangement, the product of sustained looking. They often take months, sometimes years, to reach their final form. The compositions are first assembled in Graham’s studio from cut paper, found objects gathered from the streets around his home, images of friends posing as models, and elements drawn from his personal collection of books and magazines.

Graham’s youth was divided between the outdoors, where he adventured in the Highlands and climbed mountains with his family, and the quieter world of painting and drawing. “All I remember is that I always made stuff,” Graham says, “always doing drawings of objects, or making sculptures of things that were out of reach.”

“My mother always gave off the impression that if I lived in London I wouldn't manage, and I sort of presumed I would have to live in a bush when I came here.”

“Cosy is a valued word in Scotland,” he continues. “It is cute but it is also the miracle of being out of the freezing rain and vicious wind. I've never lost gratitude for having a roof over my head and a dry woolen jumper. My mother always gave off the impression that if I lived in London I wouldn't manage, and I sort of presumed I would have to live in a bush when I came here.”

His gratitude for the comforts of domestic life seems to have stayed with him, though the outside world continues to supply much of the raw material for his paintings. He walks the streets around his home, collecting objects that catch his attention, which join things gathered from the house and garden and may eventually find their way into a painting.

There is potentially too, a close relationship between the small scale of his work, and the space in which it is made. The studio occupies an upper floor of the house, with good light, a large table and a white carpet. “I love my studio,” he says. “It's a work space that I keep tidy so I can think in peace. I have a huge table to work at, and often decisions are made while I work. I talk to good friends about my thoughts and ideas and that helps. I believe in community as a part of the creation of art, and studio visits are so funny and awkward and revealing. I like that.”

He shows me some of the arrangements he has been working through: objects assembled, moved around, reconsidered and adjusted. Others wait for the right moment to become part of an artwork. The process is less about a sudden flash of inspiration than allowing an idea to develop until the point when it feels right. “Most of the things I do are ideas I've been dreaming of for years. I just keep thinking till it makes sense.”

“I believe in community as a part of the creation of art, and studio visits are so funny and awkward and revealing. I like that.”

Graham’s work has long drawn on the language of fashion photography, a relationship that began with a formative encounter with Vogue in his youth. The magazine offered a world of images to absorb, but also introduced a more complicated relationship with beauty, superficiality and the social codes that underpin them. “I used to treat fashion photography as food,” he says, “but now I want to hold it further away, and that distance and all the strings and wires is what I am painting.” And so their construction and artifice are increasingly difficult to separate from the beauty they project.

The rain has stopped, and Graham takes us outside to look at the tree in the garden, a view that features in the exhibition. He is interested in the act of looking, but also in its limitations: in the distance between what we see and what we believe we are seeing.

For Graham perception is never entirely separate from imagination. A tension that extends to the technologies through which beauty is produced. Mirrors, cameras, brushes and screens recur throughout the work, objects that shape how we see ourselves and others. In one painting, cameras cluster around a mirror in an intoxication of reflections, seemingly oblivious to a fragile twig of apple blossom on the other side of the glass. The apparatus of looking has become so absorbed in itself that it fails to notice the living world beyond.

When I ask where he places himself in this chain of looking, between the painter observing his subject, the mirror reflecting a person, the person looking at themselves and the viewer looking at the painting, he offers a characteristically oblique answer.

“I am like a cat watching all these angles as if a fly is buzzing in front of its nose.”

It is an apt description of the paintings themselves: alert to every movement, attentive to the smallest detail and unwilling to settle on a single point of view. Little keeps watching, even when he cannot quite say what it is he hopes to find.