Peter Greenaway / biography

The public knows Peter Greenaway (Newport, England, 1942) essentially as a film director and the author of some of the most important works in contemporary cinema (The Draughtsman's Contract, 1982; A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985; The Belly of an Architect, 1987; Drowning by Numbers, 1988; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 1989; Prospero's Books, 1991; The Baby of Macôn, 1993; The Pillow Book, 1995, 8 1/2 Women, 1999).
Yet, by his own definition, he is a hybrid artist whose process of artistic creation is compelled by the necessity of making images. His own self-definition is indeed that of an image-maker:
"I do not feel entirely a director. In a sense, I am a 'hybrid'. What has always interested me is literature and painting" ;
"It is always only about making images, whether they are on a screen, on canvas or on a stage. But, whatever my medium may be, my main interest is translating ideas into images, into visual terms [...] I am an image-maker."

Peter Greenaway, photo: Ralf Emmerich

Art School Education
Greenaway actually started out as a painter. He enrolled at the Walthamstow School of Art and, in the 1960s, began to produce a great number of paintings inspired by artists such as Kitaj, Paolozzi and Peter Blake.
From the outset, he was extremely interested in landscapes and is influenced by the "Land Art" movement and its attempts at solving the problem of how "to invent a new way of considering landscape" and thus revitalize the ancient English tradition of landscape painting. This interest explains Greenaway's love of maps, which in themselves represent a way of reading landscape, an attempt at expressing the tension between disorder and the reality of the world (or Nature, in a Romantic sense) and a rigorous, classical construction.
As his points of reference in this approach to landscape and the "clash" between classic and romantic, Greenaway quotes Tolkien, William Morris, Thornton Wilder and the Italo Calvino of Invisible Cities who actually creates a utopian "system" by way of an accumulation of fragments.
"I have always been fascinated by maps. A map is an ideal metaphor to me: it expresses a three-dimensional space in ideographic forms, and it expresses the three different times of where it comes from, where you are and where you will be…Maps fascinate me. I have rather a good collection of them, of various origins. The ones that fascinate me most are those I cannot understand: Chinese maps, for instance, which become, for me, not so much the description of a landscape but rather an object in their own right".
His started making films at a later date: Windows, which he indicates as the beginning of his cinema career, dates back to 1975, whereas The Draughtsman's Contract, his first film to achieve international fame, came out in 1982.

The Relationship between Painting and Cinema
In Greenaway's production there is a constant exchange between the making of paintings and that of films: paintings belong in an itinerary that leads to the films, whereas many paintings are integral components of the films, etc.:
"The paintings, collages, drawings and photographs in this exhibition represent a small portion of speculative research which, in my opinion, develops within a wider working context together with the making of films, operas and novels". (Peter Greenaway, text for the Lindau catalogue)
Thus, for instance, the series of paintings "A Walk Trough H" and "The Draughtsman's Contract" precede the similarly titled films, the first of which is centred on a picture gallery, while the second revolves around the figure of the draughtsman himself.

Pictorial references and influences
Greenaway's oeuvre is pervaded by pictorial references. The director himself has often quoted Vermeer as an inspiration for his own vision of landscape, the study of light and the ability to fix the extreme intensity of a single moment. Also significant is the work of the English painter and photographer Edward Muybridge, who based his research on movement and anticipated the cinematic use of the freeze-frame effect.
Greenaway's approach to landscape, a central feature in his paintings and films, originates from his own knowledge of, and fascination with the classical English landscape painters and from his later encounter with those contemporary artistic currents that have attempted to develop a new language to represent landscape.
" My fascination with landscape began when I was about fourteen or fifteen. Painting meant landscape to me. The classical English landscape painters - Wilson, Constable, Gainsborough, Turner, Palmer - were my main interest. Most of my earliest attempts are a paltry imitation of their works."
As soon as you get to art school you realize that England has been painted, drawn and photographed perhaps more than any other place in the history of the world. Then you realize that the lexicon has been exhausted. How can you paint the landscape without imitating those who have come before? The artistic movement of the 60s seemed to offer a way of doing it, and it was a movement which might be associated with my love of maps, plans and aerial views. A great many of the works in this exhibition are related to my attempt at representing landscape - such as stellar landscapes - using a modern lexicon."
The late-60s English movement called "Land Art" represents landscape through forms derived from the sciences rather than from a personal experience of empathy with nature, employing diagrammatic representations and lists of data such as those found in atlases and maps.
Many of the works in this exhibition are instances of the collage technique which has a special significance for Greenaway. Indeed, this technique gathers together fragments of different materials, mostly torn flyers or posters, which, put together without any logical or narrative reason, stimulate a free association of images in the viewer and an effect similar to that of dreams. The work's unity is achieved through colours, tones and shapes.
"The beauty of collage lies in the magic of an original page, sheet or object, which has the power of giving life to the finished work. This is something I learnt from R.B. Kitaj's earliest works more than from anybody else's".
As far the use of collage is concerned, besides Kitaj, Greenaway quotes artists such as Schwitters, Rauschenberg and Braque as his points of reference.
Like Rauschenberg, Greenaway rejects any hint of perspectival illusionism, enacting a series of strategies that emphasize the painting's surface, and this emphasis has given rise to the definition of flatbed picture in which the field of vision is horizontal.
Moreover, many of his pictures feature themes connected with cybernetics which may be traced back to the work of Mary Bauermaster, who used a rational system to organize her disparate materials in the form of a grid, only in order to then contradict the same system with illogic, absurd or random elements.
Similarly, many of Greenaway's works in this exhibition are evidence of an attempt at ordering the universe with a clarity and an obsessive precision that are indicative of a kind of steadfast obstinacy.
Finally, Greenaway's attention to the ephemeral and the contingent relate him to French "Nouveau Realisme" more than Pop Art and its concentration on consumer goods, as the English artist tends to focus on "plain" matter (the horizontal plane of flatbed pictures itself harks back to, and is indicative of a fundamental materialism).