The Machine of Man: Le Bas on painting between screen and brush

Most of the work that goes into a painting is invisible by the time it hangs on a wall or dries on a gable end. In graffiti and street art that hidden part is often assumed to be small: a sketch, scaled up, transferred to a new surface. Le Bas does not work like that. The Dublin painter’s bright, fractured pictures come out of a long conversation between software and paint, and that conversation was most of what he wanted to discuss when he spoke to the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost in early 2016.

Wary of style

He began by saying he is uneasy with the word style. Too often, he thinks, a style is just what is left over when a painter settles into a formula, and formulas breed repetition, which quickly gets dull. What his painting shows at the moment is an interest in bringing digitally generated graphics into paint. He put that down to a couple of years spent in front of a computer, long enough to become properly fluent in certain programs. The instinct you develop working on screen is nothing like the instinct you feel holding a brush, he said, and what interests him is what happens when the two are forced together.

From watercolours to the wall

Asked how he started, he introduced himself in three words: Le Bas, painter, Dublin. He has painted since he was small, mostly watercolours, landscapes and portraits that he now calls cheesy. He is unsure whether the move to graffiti was progress or a step back, but he remembers buying his first can of spray paint for a canvas. He did not know how to use it, so he sprayed the paint into a cup and put it on with a brush, which still makes him wince.

Not long after, canvases stopped and graffiti took over, bad graffiti at first by his own account. For about six years he did no studio work at all. He tried nearly every kind of painting the scene offered, until one direction pulled him back to the studio.

Back and forth

His process, he said, is roughly this. A studio painting begins as an abstract composition, made quickly and on impulse, mostly in enamel with some spray paint. He photographs it and takes it into the computer, where the next decisions happen. Using graphics software and 3D modelling programs, he generates new imagery and builds a composition, then paints that by hand over the first layer. The cycle between screen and brush repeats several times until the piece feels finished, or until he realises he has ruined it, in which case it goes in the bin.

He gave two examples of the computer changing what he made. On a wall he painted the previous year, he used a single image eight times, distorting its proportions each time to fit the wall’s different projections and recesses. Once the idea arrived it took seconds to mock up on screen and a couple of days to paint. Standing in front of the wall, he said, he would never have come up with it.

The second was a studio piece. He had made an image on the computer and deleted its background layer, leaving gaps scattered through the composition. That set him wondering whether a painting needed a background at all, and whether he could make one that held transparency the way a PNG file does. The answer was to laser cut the image from aluminium, paint it and hang it off the wall. At a millimetre thick the metal seems to have no depth, but it throws a shadow on the wall behind. Again, he said, the idea came from the digital side.

Painter first

On the old argument over whether he is a graffiti writer or a street artist, he said he barely pays attention to it. He sees himself as a painter who likes painting walls and likes the studio. Many of the artists he admires and follows have nothing to do with either graffiti or street art.

From the mural and graffiti side he picked Conor Harrington, Revok, Roids, Pose, Pant, Momo and Aryz. From contemporary painting and art he named Jenny Saville, Tauba Auerbach, Wendy White, Trudy Benson, Clemens Behr and Yago Hortal and more, plus designers such as Konstantin Grcic, Karel Martens and the Spanish architects SelgasCano. Closer to home he mentioned the painters he goes out with in Dublin, Myne MSO and James Earley.

Why walls

As to what drew him outside in the first place, he quoted a friend who likes to say that, whatever people claim, everyone started writing graffiti because they thought it was cool. He thinks that is about right. But a teenager interested in art, he added, is usually in a minority with little in common with most people around them. He did not care much for drinking and had no interest in most social occasions, so going out to paint was something he could do alone and for himself. The thrill of heading out and finding new spots beat the alternatives, and after a while he was so used to painting walls that they were the only surface he wanted.

What keeps him going, he said simply, is that he enjoys it and wants to keep moving on to new ideas. Asked for three words to describe the work, he offered “Saturated. Digital. Collage.”