Tags: artist | Peter Bill | profile

Peter Bill's Prague city-scapes are done in oil paint on canvas...

They are rhombus shaped. His works were regularly shown at the Globe.

THINK: How do you see your paintings fitting in with Western art generally?

PETER: hmmmmmm, ah-

THINK: Well OK, not that: Let's start with something easier.

PETER: Alright

THINK: Zoltan bez Kalhoty speaks of "re-parametrizing the image space". Is that why you have these asymmetrical paintings? They are not square or round or anything.

PETER: Are there many perfect right angles in Prague? Anyway I hate squares, and I want to get away from the idea of the painting being a view or an interpretation.

It's more of a fragment.

THINK: But what's it a fragment of? And shouldn't this interview be a little bit more irrelevant?

PETER: It's just a fragment of a day when I was out painting. But then that can lead to Why do you paint outside? And the answer is that it's nicer sitting outside than sitting in the studio.

THINK: But some people would say figurative art is pointless anyway.

PETER: Painting the life around you isn't pointless. Isn't painting dead anyways? Yeah, my father was at art school in the 70s, and he told me that back then painters were killing themselves.

I mean, they were jumping out of windows because they thought painting was dead. Modern art has brought itself into a cul-de-sac because of the cult of the new, and because people think the only purpose of art is to shock - to disrupt bourgeois values. But I think that's kind of boring.

THINK: But don't you think art should be boring? Don't people expect it to be boring, actually?

PETER: There are con-ventions of figurative painting that go back to the Renaissance; you can't just re-invent them. It's like writing a novel: you can't just re-invent the English language every twenty years for the sake of having something new.

And anyway, "quiet" isn't the same as "boring". In New Haven, where I grew up, there are three Rothko paintings hanging in a small room with natural light...

THINK: Yawn.

PETER: They're just abstract color fields; maybe that's the answer, abstraction, but abstract art is so inaccessible, and I hate drips. especially. You know, paintings done with drips.

THINK: What do you feel about post-conceptualism generally?

PETER: Yawn.

THINK: Well how do you like the Prague art scene?

PETER: Prague is a great place to paint, especially for what I paint, but the "scene" here has its nose too far up New York's arse and figurative painting is quite out here. It's some sort of back lash against socialist realism... .

THINK: Anything else you'd like to say?

PETER: Look for guerrilla theater of the absurd this winter, not all art belongs in a gallery...