Danny Leyland won a Runner Up Award in the Jackson’s Art Prize this year with his work Hunters of the Black Swan. Here, Danny shares how his childhood years in the art class still inspire his approach to the studio now, as well as finding the value in unlikely materials, and how he tempers the speed at which his paintings are viewed.
Above image: Danny in the studio
Hunters of the black swan, 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm | 35.5 x 47 in
Danny Leyland: Archive of Sensation
Josephine: Could you tell us about your artistic background?
Danny: I’m not sure that there was a particular eureka! moment as a child. I always liked making art, and I definitely drew a lot, particularly when I was supposed to be doing other things, such as concentrating in class. I was never the best at drawing, and working hard to play catch up to those who were more talented may have been the most valuable lesson I could have learned.
With a group of other children, I spent a lot of time in the art classroom, even outside of lessons. We used it as a space to hang out as well as make work. We’d listen to music and play pranks on each other, like using glue guns to stick the chairs to each other’s butts, or scrawl messages on the back of each other’s paintings, much to the fury of the teacher. I think those times established firmly within me the idea of the studio as being a highly creative place, where you could let loose a bit, and create your own sense of meaning through materials, rather than have a set of prescribed meanings shoved down your throat.
I studied for an Art Foundation at Oxford Brookes University, a course on which I now teach as an associate tutor. Afterwards, I went to study Painting at the Edinburgh College of Art, from 2013-2016. I stayed in Edinburgh for a couple of years, working at a studio and then in my flat, exhibiting at artist-run spaces, until, in 2018, I decided to go into teaching. I worked as a teacher in Art & Design in Further Education in Oxford and then in Cambridge. After the Covid restrictions began to ease off, my partner and I decided to move to Sydney Australia. I had a studio in Sydney where I worked up until 2023 when I returned to London to study for my MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.
Digging until the end, 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on board, 24.5 x 18.5 cm | 9.5 x 7 in
Josephine: What does a typical working day in the studio look like for you? Do you have any important routines or rituals?
Danny: Not really. Like a lot of people I work best early in the mornings, or in the evenings. I try to eat healthily. Eating lunch is a particular pleasure and a great way to break up the working day. I always cycle to work. At the moment the route is about 45 minutes, which is a good amount of time to think through some ideas, pursue a couple of tangents, and generally fantasise about painting.
Pride of the vanquished, 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm | 35.5 x 47 in
Josephine: Which materials or tools could you not live without?
Danny: Generally speaking I am quite averse to settling upon one way of doing things, one system or “process” to employ towards making art. For that reason, I’m quite allergic to the idea of an ‘artist statement’, as if one piece of text could fairly summarise the amazing plurality and complex network of ideas that make up one’s art practice.
I enjoy gathering things around me and responding to the materials and surfaces I come across. Recently, for instance, I had some stretcher bars delivered, and I ended up making a bunch of paintings on the brown packing paper in which the bars were wrapped.
Since my undergraduate studies, my work has continued to evolve and change drastically. I find this incredibly exciting, at least in retrospect, where I can see how much I have learned, and just how much of the world I must have absorbed and responded to. I used to be afraid that the inconsistency of my approach suggested some kind of lack of artistic integrity, like the artist Stanwell in one of Edith Wharton’s short stories, who reflects that “he had never been very proud of his adaptability. It had seemed to him to indicate the lack of an individual standpoint.” But when I trained to be a teacher and read a bit of pedagogical theory, I came to understand that it is better to conceptualise one’s capacity to learn as something that is not fixed, but something that is fluid and ever-changeable.
I wonder whether I could truly live without images? We live in an age that is so dominated by images, and I think it’s important to think about how this shapes our work as artists. I have been trying to organise my approach to using images a bit more carefully this year, by archiving my different sources in ring-binder folders, and by allowing myself to revisit the same image across multiple works.
Danny in the studio, Balmain
Josephine: What are the stages of your work on a painting? Do you make drafts?
Danny: The paintings I make seem to require a solid starting point. This might take the form of a photograph, a drawing, or a film still. Sometimes I draft a version of the composition in a painterly sketch or a more detailed drawing, but I don’t always. Sometimes I work more directly on to the canvas.
I wouldn’t want to plan with too much detail what is going to happen across the whole painting. The process of painting is filled with problem-solving, a real voyage of discovery, and some of the most exciting results come out of taking a risk, trying something new, like introducing a new image, or erasing some of the existing forms in order to simply and unify the composition.
It seems to me that if the idea for a painting were too planned out already, then there would be no point in painting the picture.
Study of a swan hunter, 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on packing paper, 25 x 25 cm | 9.84 x 9.84 in
Josephine: Mark-making seems to play an important role in your paintings. Even when painting a flat plane, you employ a range of marks that add texture. How did you develop this semi-impressionistic style, and how does your subject matter work in tandem with that?
Danny: Paintings are like memory banks. Working layer upon layer, erasing and adding information, the painted surface becomes a sort of archive containing the sensations and experiences of the artist during the time of the painting. Often when I look at an older painting of mine, I am immediately reminded of the music I was listening to, or the book I was reading, the ideas with which I was grappling. Much of a painting’s time-travelling potential comes from the mark-making.
I find mark-making really fascinating. If a painted mark can express something to the viewer, then equally it can obfuscate or deceive.
Generally, I try to avoid the fatuous, florid gesture. The “exercise of the wrist”, as one of my tutors called it. Instead, I’m trying to find a form of mark-making that is restrained, economical, and light of touch. Recently, and to this end, I’ve been looking closely at the artists Mamma Andersson and Cecilia Edelalk, each of whom, in different ways, can conjure up a form or a space with tremendous confidence and spaciousness.
I always like it when there is a state of tension within a painting. A roughness at the edges, where it feels like the painting could get up and move off of the frame and walk around the room. A charge or feeling of potential created when a work feels unfinished. Phyllida Barlow spoke about this idea. This sense of “becomingness” is a really fruitful place in which to be as an artist.
I am led by a delight in painted worlds that fragment and vibrate, paintings that work to dissolve boundaries between the body-subject and its surrounding environment and to emphasise the material world of objects and things over the subjectivity of the human individual. In this way, the network of painted marks that constitute my paintings could be a sort of echo of ideas of new-materialism and object-oriented-ontology.
Felling the great gum, 2023
Danny Leyland
Oil on board, 50 x 40 cm | 19.5 x 15.5 in
Josephine: Do you regularly draw or keep a sketchbook? If so, how does this inform your work?
Danny: My sketchbook work is pretty sporadic. Most of my books are made up of written notes, helping me to reflect and explore new ideas, with little diagrams and stick-figure sketches breaking up the text to record ideas for paintings. I like to draw in museums, not just the paintings but the objects too.
There will be no other end, 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm | 59 x 47.2 in
Josephine: Have you ever had a period of stagnation in creativity? If so, what helped you overcome it?
Danny: I had a period in a studio from 2021 to 2023 where I was working in the biggest studio I have yet had. I didn’t have to work that much in my part-time job, and all the conditions should have lined up for me to create lots of new work. But it ended up being such a frustrating time! I hardly finished anything. It felt almost surreal, dreamlike, to be applying paint onto a surface day after day, but coming no closer to actually realising any of my ideas. Looking back at that time, I can see how incredibly un-disciplined I was. I was too stubborn to put things to one side in order to start something new. I was too hesitant to make the firm decisions necessary in order to change a painting. I think that being around a body of other artists who can support you, and to whose energy you can respond, is absolutely essential in helping guide you through the more difficult moments.
Waiting for the train to come (Aparajito), 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm | 35.5 x 47 in
Josephine: The marks in Hunters of the Black Swan appear quite chalky and matt – do you use the oil paint in a specific way to create this effect?
Danny: I don’t tend to mix my paints with any medium other than turpentine. Most of the matt quality of the surface that you observed comes from the paints themselves. Some of my paint tubes are quite old, and I leave them out on my palette for quite a long time before scraping them off, so they get all dense and dried out after a while. This serves me quite well because I often like to lay different colours over and against each other, creating a kinetic quality with a fuzziness and a sense of vibration, and you can’t do this with such immediacy if the paint is too oily. Likewise, if you’re scraping paint back, and painting things multiple times, then I find that drier paints mark the canvas with an interesting stain.
The chalkiness and matt-ness of the paint also contribute to the “slowness” of the painting, in terms of how it is read by a viewer. Whereas paint with a greater fluidity can reveal everything too quickly, can define a line too neatly, and can form boundaries too definitively. Gwen John was a master at this. I believe she mixed chalk powders in with her paints. And there is certainly a marvellous softness, a slow release in her paintings which rewards a sustained looking from the viewer.
Woodsman at work, 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on board, 19.5 x 15 cm | 7.5 x 6 in
Josephine: Are there any specific artists or mentors who have inspired you?
Danny: The two exhibitions which more than any other directly impacted my painting were the Bonnard exhibition at the Tate, in 2019, and the Michael Armitage exhibition at the RA in 2021. When I went to these exhibitions and looked deeply into the works, it wasn’t so much that I felt inspired to go on and paint in a different way, it was more I felt that I could already paint like that, that I already understood what they were doing – almost as if these artists were actually me, and that these were my works. I’m not saying that I am anywhere near as good as Bonnard or Armitage! I’m just trying to describe the feeling, that, when I saw the exhibitions, I felt deep down that I understood what those artists were about.
You’re the last, 2024
Danny Leyland
Oil on canvas, 140 x 110 cm | 55 x 43 in
Josephine: How did it feel to realise you had won a Runner Up prize?
Danny: It felt incredible to have my work seen and recognised amongst so many amazing artists, a real privilege.
Josephine: What materials are you looking forward to purchasing with your voucher?
Danny: I bought a whole range of Michael Harding paints. I have always gotten by with the budget options, and I still think that a good artist should be able to make a great painting with cheap paints. But I thought I should take this amazing opportunity to acquire some beautiful paints which I usually would not afford for myself.
Danny’s materials in the studio
Josephine: What’s coming up next for you?
Danny: In August I’m setting off to Portugal to attend the PADA residency. I can’t wait to meet the other artists who will be working there, and, with their critical support, to explore some new ideas.
Further Reading
Fine Art Restoration With James Bloomfield
Sarah Bold: Shifting Perspectives
Recreating the Colour Palette of Claude Monet
Shop Oil Painting on jacksonsart.com
