Gary Hume’s studio is overrun with swans. They don’t quite outnumber all the tins of Dulux gloss, his go-to paint, but it’s close. Avian necks and elegantly drooping heads, liquefying into abstraction and then curdling back into figuration, drift across the walls of his east London workplace. One charcoal drawing is echoed by a painting opposite, rendered in gloss and satinwood. Elsewhere, there are swan diptychs, Aubrey Beardsley-like affairs in black and white. Each has a horizontal line that bisects the swans, making them seem like winged Narcissuses gazing at their own reflections.
These are all destined for Hume’s new exhibition, Mirrors and Other Creatures, about to open at Sprüth Magers in London. While it’s true that there are paintings of other living things here – humanoid flowers and other natural forms – this place feels more like an aviary than a studio.
Why swans? “I use my dreams quite a lot,” replies the 62-year-old former Young British Artist. “If I’m having a problem with a painting, I ask my dream to solve it while I’m asleep.” And one night, his dream spoke to him. “It said, ‘If in doubt, put a swan on it.’ So in the morning I drew some swans, then I added another in paint. And I like the picture now. I’m not interested in swans in any big way, but I like being as open to the subconscious as I am to my conscious. I don’t treat it like a brand new world, like the surrealists would, somehow separate to my conscious life. I treat it as a bonus to my conscious life.”
And why the mirror theme? By way of answer, Hume tells me about a call from his son telling him he’d become a grandad. “I rushed into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I’d been looking in the mirror before, wondering who the fuck this is. Then I go to the loo and I look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh, there you are. Hello, grandad.’”
Hume wants his paintings to capture that uncanny feeling of self-recognition. “That space between the reflection and me contains all of me,” he explains. “That is what I think the paintings can do when anyone’s looking at them. I become conscious of me being the object that’s looking at this thing.”
Despite what he suggests, Hume’s swan fixation is hardly accidental: they represent for him the other. He tells me of an epiphany he had on a boat during a painting expedition to Antarctica. “We landed on this guano-covered piece of land and suddenly the whole sky was filled with screeching birds. It was as if our species was nothing.”
Yet “our species” has frequently been the subject of Hume’s work. “Obviously, I have a sense of empathy,” he once said. “But I don’t make political work. I don’t make work that criticises the state. I make as human work as I can.” That humanity was especially evident in the paintings made for his 2017 exhibition honouring his mum, Jill Henshaw, then 85 and suffering from dementia. He used childhood photographs to inspire works about how he felt looking at his mother while a little boy. Mum Twisting was inspired by a shot taken in 1968 in Cornwall: a swirl of lines mirroring his mother’s dress as she twirled in the wind, observed by her son sitting on a hill. Other works, such as Mum in Bed, were based on adult visits to his ailing mother.
“It was long goodbye stuff,” he says now. “But there was a paradox, because I set out to say that I love my mum – and in fact the paintings turned out to be about me. There was no real Jill Henshaw there. You know, her lovers and disappointments and struggles and joys. There was none of that. It was all me.”
Despite his claim to be politically disengaged, two recent projects suggest otherwise. For several years, Hume collected press images of schools and classrooms destroyed in conflicts. Even before the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza, it became a huge collection. He made 30 drawings and 14 paintings and called the resulting 2019 exhibition Destroyed School Paintings.
“Often in the background of the photographs collected, I would see fragments of murals painted by children. I remembered taking my son – he’s 37 now – to school, holding his little hand and seeing murals on the classroom walls and feeling that he was going to be safe. Basically, I was full of hope. Seeing that hope destroyed was very emotional. I was doing work about the terrible cost of war, the loss of hope.”
A series of paintings called The Archipelago followed, inspired by Britain’s refugee crisis and taking on extra resonance this summer as windows were smashed in hotels putting up asylum-seekers. “That series was really my response to people in lifejackets washed up on our shores – and the lack of empathy and fear they experienced.”
I wander among swans. Hume has long been a painter of singular obsessions. Before birds, he found himself an artworld niche painting doors in the late 1980s. The doors were MDF, the paint domestic gloss. Critics took it as some postmodern conceptual art gag, but it wasn’t. He just really enjoyed painting doors, although the results were more Rothko than Farrow & Ball. “I’ve never been a conceptual artist. What interests me is the space inside the frame, how to give it muscle and energy. Your responsibility is to fill an empty field with something you can bear to look at. I never get tired of doing that.”
Charles Saatchi bought the lot and Hume, the quiet man among the brash YBAs, became the first of the gang to become a Royal Academician. By 2001, he had been nominated for the Turner prize and had represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. Ever since, he’s managed to parlay his strange obsessions into hard cash.
Not bad for a small-town boy – he was born in Tenterden, Kent, in 1962 – who went to art school because he felt it was a place for kids who were “wrong”. He was raised, largely, by a single mum who worked as an NHS surgery manager. State support, in the form of grants, helped him leap through a door that is now shut on those from humbler backgrounds.
He left school at 16 with no qualifications, did odd jobs and enrolled in a life drawing class, eventually studying at Goldsmiths with the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, graduating in 1988. He was from the very start enchanted by the world of art. “I found out that artists existed, that they made amazing things, and I thought, ‘How lovely to be one of them. How amazing to be famous, successful and make great things! And nobody knows who you are!’” And it has all happened for him.
When the Guardian interviewed Hume a decade ago, he said all his paintings were inspired by sex. That is no longer the case, apparently. “What was it Socrates said? ‘So finally, I’m free of the burden.’ So finally, he can just wander around without following his cock all the time. For me, it wasn’t all cock. It was rather that the world is an erotic place and everything seemed charged with sex.”
As if to underline the point, he brushes some dust off the crotch of an old sculpture of upturned women’s legs. “I used to think that without sex being within the work, the work wasn’t true. I don’t think that now. I still have sex, and I still like having sex, but it’s not a constant drive any more. I have much less sex and I want to use it much less in my work because of that. Sex is not a prerequisite within a work – but that’s not to say the world is no longer an erotic place for me any more. It totally is.”
Hume considers himself lucky to be a visual artist. “One of the great things about it is that there’s no moratorium on making great work. It’s very difficult to be a middle-aged pop star, but not a middle-aged painter.” He’s even luckier than that, I suspect, having worked at a time when he could indulge his own obsessions (swans, mirrors, doors) without having to take fatuous commissions. “It was modernism that did that,” he says. “It freed artists from bending the knee to their patrons. But when I started I had no sense that I would be able to make a career doing what I am doing. I never expected to be so absorbed in painting and to be so happy working in this wonderful space.”
It is a wonderful space, an autonomous haven for art and making that is embraced by his friends and family. Marc Quinn, a friend and fellow artist, has a studio next door, while his photographer son Joe has the one upstairs. “I get to see his work. And he gets to see what I do.”
And the same now applies to his grandson Frankland although, being three, Frankland is more interested in the studio’s forklift truck than Grandad’s art. Everyone’s a critic. “We let him sit on it,” says Hume. But you don’t let him drive it, do you? “God no!”
Very sensible. Just think of the menace to bird life.
• Mirrors and Other Creatures is at Sprüth Magers, London, 13 September to 19 October
