Interview: David Shrigley - Top Draw

Published on Monday 14 September 2009 19:02

IT'S not easy to get David Shrigley excited about twinsets. In fact, right now it's not easy to get him excited about anything much.

The 40-year-old Glasgow-based artist recently hurt his back on a yoga retreat and is currently hobbling around his enormous West End flat trying to keep his spirits up while trying to remember not to fold his arms, as per explicit instructions from his physiotherapist.

As unlikely as it may sound, however, we are here to talk about twinsets. Shrigley – famous for his humorous, childlike drawings annotated with witty observations – has been commissioned by luxury knitwear brand Pringle of Scotland to design posters for the company's flagship London store, celebrating the twinset. Launched as part of the celebrations for 25 years of London Fashion Week which begins on Friday, the posters will be displayed on the London Underground until the end of this month and the illustrations will also be used on T-shirts.

Shuffling stiffly, Shrigley leads me up to the top floor of the flat he shares with his fiance, Kim, which acts as his studio space. Bright and airy, it has pleasant views over the Botanic Gardens and has a feel of neat disorganisation about it. One wall is lined with books; a yoga mat lies on the floor facing the window; Shrigley's hi-tech drawing board sits in the middle of the room, and scribbled notes are pinned sporadically to walls. One is covered in French verbs; another reads: "Remind yourself that you are ill."

Shrigley himself seems a little weary, but is polite and accommodating. His voice is steady and measured, his answers to my questions sometimes serious, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes deadpan. He makes a loose attempt to appear semi-enthusiastic about the project I'm here to discuss, but knows he isn't really pulling it off.

"It's quite a good brand and it's Scottish and they asked me to do a poster for them and it paid quite well," he says in his steady, neutral tones. "So I said, 'Yeah, OK, sounds good, I'll do that …'

"It's slightly hard to be super-enthusiastic about something that's just a job. It's a commission and my ambition in life is not to do posters for knitwear companies. But it's good knitwear and it's all right and that's fine."

Then he laughs, as if to suggest there's little more to say on the matter – but we're just 90 seconds into the interview, so he offers up a little more. "They said, 'Do drawings of twinsets' and I said, 'What's a twinset?' I thought it was underwear or something. And they were like, 'It's a cardigan and a sweater that ladies of a certain age wear with pearls.'" Is he at all interested in the fashion world? "Not really, no." He did get a free sweater out of it though. And his Mum got a twinset.

Despite his lack of enthusiasm, however, Shrigley's work for the campaign is typically witty and surreal. One image features the line: "Public notice: Cashmere cardigan and sweater twinset is now only acceptable outfit. All other clothes must be removed by order the authorities." Another depicts seven nude figures, arms outstretched, appearing to worship a twinset.

Shrigley's latest book, Red Book, a collection of around 250 drawings, is published this month by Redstone Press. He worked at the rate of 30 drawings a day, having taken 1,000 sheets of paper with him to Stockholm, where he worked on the book, aiming to fill each one. He managed about 850, less than a third of which made it into the book.

"I don't ever come up with a theme for the work," he says. "What links them is the fact that they're all done in a compressed period of time. The drawings were all done on a certain size, A4 originally, and then they're reduced slightly for the book. I then edit them so they have a certain flow, but there's not a defined narrative."

What there is is Shrigley's distinctive "style". It's a style so instantly recognisable that even if you don't know his name, you almost certainly know his work. It appears everywhere from postcards and mugs to a weekly cartoon he draws for the Guardian. His work appears incredibly stylised and carefully thought-out, but Shrigley insists it simply arose from the process of reduction. It is, of course, neither here nor there whether he is any good at drawing in the traditional sense.

"I probably became an artist because I was quite good at drawing as a child," he says. "But then I got to art school and relative to (the other students] I wasn't actually that good at it. The thing is, I can't really draw very well so my work is somewhere between graphic comic book art and conceptual art. I decided deliberately to draw in a certain way that was just as easy and direct as possible.

"The navety hasn't come about because of stylisation; it's just doing things as simply as I possibly can, and as crudely as I possibly can because the craft isn't really important to me. So it's not like I'm being faux-nave. Rather than pretending to draw like a child, I just am drawing like a child."

&#149 For more information on David Shrigley's work for the Pringle of Scotland campaign, visit www.pringlescotland.com

&#149 Red Book by David Shrigley is published by Red Stone Press, priced 11.95 ( www.redstonepress.co.uk)