As soon as I got back yesterday, we returned the truck and I came back here and I started rearranging everything, because I wanted my couch and table back. Daks : How have you both coped with the lockdown, has it affected your sales? Susan : People are still buying art. I had my best year this year that I have ever had. Stephen : That’s all down to the several hours a day she spends in marketing and posting on Instagram and talking to collectors. She’s really ambitious and she’s really dedicated to the business side of it. Which again is very different from me, because I have a few collectors buying my work and I’m not very productive, and I like it that way. I couldn’t work any other way so there’s a complete difference between us. We manage to co-exist in the same life and in the same space together and accept each other’s differences. After 20 years, you tend to figure it out. Daks : So, I was interested in just how your work has developed over the years. The first stuff I really saw of yours, Stephen, since college, was when you did the West Bay show at the Rocket Gallery in London, and I came over from New York. It was the first time I’d been back in a long time. I actually came back to get my guitar and my Rolleiflex and the guitar was long gone, I think one of your ex-flatmates sold it for drugs or something. And then with the Rolleiflex, you said ‘interesting you should mention that.’ Then you opened this hamper, in the middle of your apartment living room, and got out this Kodak box and started showing me the contact sheets from West Bay in Dorset, which were absolutely incredible pictures. As a photographer, I thought, this guy has a good eye. I mean, I always knew you were a good artist, but I’d never
CLASSICAL ACTION by Stephen
really seen your photographs before, and then you said. “Oh, and I have an exhibition of my photographs at the Rocket gallery in Mayfair next month!” Stephen : I trained as a painter, but earned a living doing commercial art. So I didn’t have much time for painting and didn’t have a studio. Photography became the output for me and with a painter’s eye, looking for expressive mark making, going to building sites and photographing cement drips and paint spills and all that. I didn’t know Siskind’s work at the time. I was photographing cracks in pavement and going to billboard sites where people ripped off the old billboard posters. Daks : You did some of those pictures in New York when you were staying with me. You documented where the synagogue is now on the upper west side, and they just had the hoardings up. It was like ‘there’s a battle going on between the bill posters and the construction people,’ because they kept painting everything grey and
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