Peter Linde Busk

“For some reason this painting reminds me of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rilke. I read this book while I was living in Paris for a month doing all the bohemian things a young artist does in Paris. I remembered Malte describing a man he encounters in the street on his walks around the city. This man has the most violent tics; his whole body jumps and his posture becomes distorted by the onslaught of these uncontrollable cramps. But still he tries to keep up his appearance. The distorted figure, as a way of expressing or signifying dysfunctional inner workings, is a key feature in my work. It also reminds me of Egon Schiele (I’m not sure that’s a good thing though) and a photograph I once saw by Josef Koudelka of a gypsy playing the violin (which I do think is a good thing). The character in the painting also appears to play the violin, only he doesn’t have one.”

“I saw an exhibition at the British Museum about manuscript illustrations from Persia around the time I did this painting and I think it shows; I can’t remember which one, I have seen a few over the years. The first one was when I did my degree and a teacher urged me to go and see the show at the V&A Museum about the Book of Hamza, which was very good. The painting also reveals my interest in medieval icon painting. The title suggests a kind of posing. Clothes (and costumes and armour etc.) express identity, social belonging, cultural relationships and financial status and I have always been more interested in these cultural signifiers than skin. He looks a bit puzzled though, our divine impostor. I like how the character almost disappears in the bottom – and the legs.”

“I went to Dahab, Egypt with my girlfriend to scuba dive. The Blue Hole is one of the most beautiful and dangerous diving sites in the world; if you descend too quickly you can get Nitrogen Narcosis, or ‘the martini effect’, a disorientation similar to drinking 1 martini every 10 metres. The collage came together quite quickly. Everything was ready like the ingredients for a stir fry. I stuck down the first batch of paper and canvas and rolled yellow printing ink onto all the squares, leaving the horizontal bands in the bottom white. Then I stuck down some more squares and inked these up in black. In the end I added the vertical bands around the sides of the top. I wanted to create a kind of eerie descent. I didn’t struggle with this one, which always makes me suspicious. The title is taken from the Carol King song of the same name. I only know it in Mark Eitzel’s interpretation, but why would you need another? The bitter sweet paradox just matched the collage.”

“I still remember exactly where I was sitting on the floor in the studio when I painted this painting. The character looks a bit like a messed up Mumi troll and a character from Deadwood. The last makes sense since I was watching that show obsessively at that time. Maybe there is a bit of the drunken Calamity Jane in there. Or Trixie. It’s one of the few portraits I have done of a female character. She appears quite sad, but why wouldn’t she be? The title is from the song Big Louise by Scott Walker. I was listening to him quite a lot around that time. It was quite a difficult painting to make and I remember going through one disappointment after another whilst making it. I was quite embarrassed by it, could see it only as a testimony of all my failed attempts and lacking skills, but then I realised that might be a good thing and in fact the strength of the painting. I think it was Hitchcock who said that work is never finished, it’s just abandoned. That’s true I think.”

“This title I stole from The Wire. Two characters are talking about an out-of-scene character and his father whom they both know. The father, now incarcerated, was a real streetwise badass and the son now desperately tries to become like him, even though it’s obvious to everyone (except his mum) that he isn’t and will never be. Trying to become something or someone you are not because of outside expectations or your own desire must be one of the most painful experiences most people have felt I think. The character in the painting is also placed in a kind of pictorial limbo; he almost disappears into the chaos of the surroundings. Or maybe he is dislocating himself from it. I like the scarcity of the painterly techniques: the black gesso, the drawing in cadmium red, and the yellow crayons. The title just made sense instinctively, so I haven’t really thought about it before. Maybe the painting, like the son, pretends to be something it isn’t or maybe it has realised its own strengths and abilities and found its own place.”

“My girlfriend saw this homeless man on the subway in Berlin. She described him and showed me how he was standing isolated on his own in this very self-deprecating way. It moved me quite a bit and I used the posture my girlfriend had described as the motif for the painting. When I see homeless people in the streets I always wonder what they did and who they were before they became homeless. All the patterns and scribble was a way to show the chaos, I imagined, in his mind and the cacophony of the noise and impressions surrounding him. The title is of course Bowie. The lyrics have always captivated me. Also, somehow, the character ended up unintentionally to look a bit like Slash. He probably didn’t end up as homeless. Or a rock and roll suicide. Have to check though, but no, probably not.”

“I painted the background for this painting in a very long session one night and then left it sulking in the corner of my studio until I did the black drawing on top. The figure looks a bit like a falling angel, or a dandy. I was probably thinking about an etching I had done and maybe Peter Doig’s incredible painting Man Dressed As Bat. The title is a quote from Verlaine. He wrote a poem about the rise and fall of Rimbaud, about how his genius and ambition led to arrogance and stubbornness and in the end to his decline. This was the first time I used a new gesso which is very matt, coarse and absorbent and I like the occasional watercolour-like effect which occurs. As with all my other paintings the area surrounding the character is very important. It’s not so much a space as an atmosphere, a mood I want to achieve where the character belongs, emerges from, or is subdued in. The emotionally charged space is often quite chaotic, dark, visually challenging and maybe even pictorially dysfunctional but it’s theirs and they inhabit it.”