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Galleries with artist Mark Hearld
Teenage years spent on farms inspires artist’s lockdown work
CHRISTMAS is coming. In fact, it’s very much here, if the house of one of my neighbours is to be believed – and so, too, the collages of Mark Hearld at The Scottish Gallery, a wild and colourful scrummage of foxes and chickens, pheasants and ospreys, with the odd monkey thrown in for good measure.
It is a motley menagerie, a carnival of incongruous bedmates, but a joyful one, too, and just the panacea for the grey days and thin winter sub-song of the city at large.
Hearld spent the first lockdown in “splendid isolation” – difficult, he tells me, if you’re “an extrovert type who gets your energy from interactions rather than introspection”.
When lockdown eased, he went back to his shared studio in the centre of York, where he still works now, listening to baroque trumpet first thing in the morning, or some “lively Monteverdi” – “a bit of a studio joke,” he grins – to energise the atmosphere.
It has always been animals and birds for Hearld. Born in York, he moved to the outskirts as a teenager. “It was the 1980s, and there were still working farms there,” he tells me.
“I spent all my teenage time on farms with ponies, chickens, Muscovy ducks. I got fully involved in it. And I did lots of drawings from life of poultry.” He tells me about the painting, Remembered Farm, which is part of the exhibition, a chaos of chickens and corrugated iron, which alludes to those years and the place that, now built over, no longer exists as he knew it.
“It’s no longer the magical, ramshackle farm, with sheds put up in the 1930s, the 1950s, no longer the mysterious place to explore.”
And yet lockdown, and walking the new family dog – a lively whippet which he shares with his parents – brought him back to that time, taking him out into the countryside for a few hours a day, minutes from his parents’ door.
“It was a complete joy. I noticed snipe displaying – things I’d not noticed since I was a teenager.”
Memory plays a strong part in Hearld’s work, and his sketches, once made from life, are now largely done from memory. “I don’t sketch often enough, but I do look really acutely. I draw from memory mostly, and I do think you end up getting more of the spirit of the beast, whereas if you’re using too much reference material it can be too flatly naturalistic, too slavish.
But I’d love to find a fairytale farmyard and spend months drawing, revivifying. I look long and hard at things, but getting back to doing some spontaneous drawings again would be a good thing to do, I think. I should be more rigorous.”
Hearld’s work is collage, the intricate cutting out and putting together of disparate parts to make a whole, a rearrangement of material until the right form comes to life.
“It’s all about placement and flexibility. It’s a wonderfully improvisatory medium, a moveable feast. You just have to know when to commit,” he says. Hearld’s images are loose yet bold, full of painted splashes, cut-outs from exhibition posters, silhouettes.
“Collage is how I think creatively, but I didn’t do that at all at art college,” he tells me. Hearld studied illustration at Glasgow School of Art, where one