10 - Viva Lewes

I’ve been at Paddock Studios about 10 years, but
I got lucky with a house in Lewes with a studio at
the back, and I’ve decided to leave. I’ll miss Peter
Messer dreadfully but my new studio has better
light, and I’ll be able to work whenever I want.
My security has been this studio. All my things
are here, it’s absolutely chock-a-block!
Every time I used to sell a piece of work, I
would buy a robot, but then people started giving
me things.
The angels and plastic virgins make me think of
a factory with crazy things on the floor - I think
that’s so weird - but they are an expression of people’s
faith, so you shouldn’t knock them… Someone
in Lewes gave me a whole load of cars, and I have a
new collection of candles that are fun to paint.
This is the first time I’ve made a concentrated
effort to paint the toys. I’m of a mind that whatever
you do, you do for a while, and then you’ve
done it.
I can’t resist a book. I’ve taken to reading stuff
like Lhasa the Holy City, about Spencer Chapman
going round Tibet in a Morris Minor in the
1930s: in a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, with a
brownie camera and a prayer book. I love vintage
travel books, the more extreme, the more ‘hopeless
English traveller meets whatever’, the better. When
I was first married I lived in Kenya for a while, it
W W W. V i Va L E W E s . C o M
my spaCe - Jo lamb
a r t s t u d i o
probably goes back to those days.
Sometimes I have to concentrate so hard on a
painting I can’t listen to music. Other times I listen
to African music, rather raucous rock or opera,
it depends. There’s nothing better than being in my
studio, listening to really loud rock music and dancing
around with a paintbrush.
I think the meat is a very good painting. I did
it just after my partner died, I was asked to do an
exhibition and just said yes, not thinking. I shut
myself in my freezing studio painting fish and meat,
watching it all disintegrating… I’ve always been
very fond of it, but it’s never sold and I don’t know if
I will sell it now, it reminds me of that time... It was
just white paper on a bench, two pork, two lamb,
bacon, chuck steak and a chicken, delicately going
off in the kitchen, in January.
I always say I should have a separate studio for
Fluffy. I can’t reconcile that about myself, I don’t
know if I’m a painter or an illustrator. I began
painting Fluffy because Robert had a thing about
Joseph Beuys’ Dead Hare. It started as a piss take - I
hate ‘art blurb’ - but they’ve become a way of sort of
talking to myself.
This Artwave will be my last. I am showing at St
Anne’s Gallery with Jane Merfield in October (8-
16th), but when I get my new studio I won’t open it
up, so this is the last. It’s a bit sad. Chloë King
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Photo: Chloe King