Meet The Maker – Emerson Mayes

Can you tell us a little about your background and how you found your way into art?

I wasn’t born into a creative family at all, really. I was just the typical suburban kid. My dad was a structural engineer and my mum was a secretary. I think we had one picture on the wall, a reproduction of Constable’s The Hay Wain. My dad worked from home a lot, so there were huge amounts of paper around, old plans, propelling pencils and drawing paraphernalia. My mum would sit with us for hours, just letting us sketch away.

At secondary school I was heavily into sport, and it was a very academic school. Then, at 16, I made the shock decision to go to art school. The school wasn’t very happy about it. They tried to persuade me not to do it, and my art teacher said I’d be a miserable failure.

Stubbornness probably drove me to make that final decision, just to prove everybody wrong. My parents, though, were really supportive. My dad had wanted to be a carpenter, but he’d been pushed into engineering because it was seen as a better career. I think he just thought, ‘I’m not going to stop my son following his passion.’

Saying that, I probably did hoodwink him a bit because I told him I was going to be a graphic designer, because that sounded like a definite job at the end of it. But drawing was always my love, and that’s what I wanted to pursue.

What influenced your connection with the landscape and nature?

I don’t suppose I ever made a conscious decision about the subject that I work with. It’s something that has come naturally to me. Although I said I had a suburban childhood, there was a flip side to that. My mum’s dad, my granddad, was a farm labourer, and my dad’s dad was a gardener on a big country estate near us. We used to spend weekends on that farm helping out at harvest time and hay time, potato picking, stone picking, and all the things that you want to do as an eleven-year-old kid. But it did give me an affinity with that landscape and everything that inhabited it, and gave me a knowledge of it as well.

The working landscape is something that keeps me excited. I’ve come back to it many times, as well as the larger landscapes. Even just bird watching in the back garden was exciting, although it was only sparrows, starlings, and blue tits. It still gave me a thrill.

So it always felt natural, the natural thing for me to do.

Can you tell us about your artistic practice has developed?

Drawing is the essential part of my practice. Even though the paintings are very painterly, they are still underlined by a good sense of drawing.Becoming an oil painter was just a natural progression, really. When I first started using oil paint, it just felt right. I like its unctuousness, its materiality, and it’s just a really nice medium to use.

Printmaking is really just drawing transposed into another form. I’ve always been fascinated by printmaking. It’s that moment when you reveal the page after it has gone through the press, when you lift the paper from the plate and get that surprise. Some of those surprises are joyful, and some are disappointments, but there is always something exciting about that moment of reveal.

When I first started, I spent much more time working outside, painting plein air, and then bringing the work back into the studio to finish. Now, it’s probably around 80% spent in the studio, because it has become more about matching my subject, what I’m painting, with the materials I’m using and making sure both have integrity.

This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see the full breadth of your creative practise in one place. What are you trying to capture with this new collection?

What’s been really exciting about this exhibition is that The Biscuit Factory has allowed me to bring all the strands of my work together: the paintings, the monotypes and the drypoints. Very rarely does that happen, and it’s so good that people can now see it all together. There are probably people who don’t know that I make prints, and there’ll be people who know my printmaking through social media who don’t even know that I’m a landscape painter.

I hope when people see all the collections brought together, they get a sense of a fleeting presence in the landscape. The light passing across the water or the sea, a certain cloudscape, or just when a bird flies past or you catch sight of a fox.

These are really quick moments that happen in your life, but they burn into the back of your mind and become everlasting memories.

If I was to pick two works to sum up this exhibition, they’re both based on those quite small moments that have become very special memories for me. They both come from a recent holiday that my partner and I took on the North East coast.

One is inspired by Tweed Lighthouse. We had a lovely picnic overlooking the lighthouse, watching swallows swooping around and the seabirds just puttering about. Hopefully that painting captures the sense of that moment.

The other comes from staying on Holy Island for a night. When all the tourists have gone home, there’s something really spiritual about it. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but there is definitely a sense of something there. Waking up at first light, feeling like you’ve got the island to yourself, and walking out to watch the sunrise was something I’ll never forget, as a person or as a painter.

What would you like people to take away from the exhibition?

I just want people to stop. Slow down. If they get a bit of joy out of the work, brilliant. I’ve done my job. And if they want to take a piece home with them, that’s something I always really appreciate. Beyond that, I hope the work helps people recognise how important and beautiful nature is, and how important and beautiful the landscape is. We’re losing so many creatures, birds and insects. I’m not trying to throw anything political down anybody’s throat, but if people walk away with a deeper understanding of why the natural world is so beautiful, and it encourages them to pull on their walking boots, get out there and appreciate it, then that’s all well and good.

See A Fleeting Presence here.