Article published in Epiphany Magazine Aug 2024

KATE WILSON Regarding the Disregarded

“The impulse to paint comes…from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model – even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.” John Berger*

I have lived in London since 1988 but until last year had never painted a bin. This is despite making paintings about the underground, parks and streets, all of which contain bins and rubbish. I suppose I prefer looking at urgent, restless things, picturesque things: buses, moving people, rivers, buildings, skies, trees.  As a Christian artist - a convert to Roman Catholicism in my late teens - I have imagined God appearing to me in fire, water and cloud, and angels walking station platforms. I like a bit of excitement.  But I have never depicted rubbish before because I had not wanted to see it nor to think about it. It was troubling and boring, definitely not picturesque. And probably I thought other people would not want to see it either. 

I teach art to adults and one of the most important things we talk about is looking properly – really looking - seeing what is really there, rather than what we think is there.  In this age of digital photography, we are surrounded by images, but when people first sit down to draw simple everyday objects, like a cup or a book, they often cannot do it accurately because they rely on their own preconceptions rather than paying attention. By training themselves to spend long moments gazing at what they are trying to draw, they learn what these familiar objects really look like.  This can be a revelation; many of my students say afterwards they now encounter the world in an entirely new way. They have learned to look.

I first began to notice bin bags after the first COVID lockdown while travelling into work by tube from my home in South London.  As we will all remember, this was a bit of a hazardous enterprise with the wearing of masks, the disinfecting of hands, and the need to keep a distance. So, each day I went in, I found myself standing on the platforms closer to bins than humans – and plastic bag watching rather than people watching.

By standing so close, I slowly realised these bins were far from boring. In actual fact they were absolutely fascinating. When empty, the translucent plastic blew and inflated as trains drew into the station, reminding me of wedding veils.  Half full, I could peer inside and examine their contents.  It was fun, a bit like scrutinising an x-ray of inside of the human body. When full, distorted by so many cups, newspapers, packaging and tins, these same bags took on the aspect of a stout matron, or a well-fed sturdy baby. I began to take photos and by the end of lockdown had hundreds of bin portraits clogging up my phone. Maybe it was time to have a go at painting them?

I, like so many of us, am deeply concerned about the impact our throwaway society is having on the environment.  I worry that plastics do not decay and try to buy wisely and recycle.  But through my daily encounters with other people’s rubbish on the underground, I began to realise I wanted to avoid thinking too much about what happened to the stuff I myself put out for the dustmen.  I just wanted it gone; out of sight out of mind. I did not value it at all.

In his book about still life painting “Looking at the Overlooked” (1990), Norman Bryson talks about how painting can give worth to the ordinary and the disregarded by “taking what is of least importance in the world….and lavishing there the kind of attention normally reserved for what is of supreme value”. These words appear in a chapter describing the still life paintings of the17th Century Spanish painters Cótin and Zurbaran. These artists deliberately chose to look at ordinary objects – cabbages hanging in a larder or a row of earthenware plates and pots laid out on a table – rather than presenting us with attractive, mouthwatering foods served on shiny platters of precious metals. Bryson says, as devout men, they painted these simple every-day items as a form of prayer and, in so doing, help us to appreciate the beauty in the every day.

The idea that painting can be a form of prayer makes sense to me, so I decided to start drawing and painting from my photographs of bins to see what came of it.  At first I treated it as a bit of a penance. The technical aspect of reproducing the transparency of the plastic meant I had to paint in an entirely different way.  I visited the National Gallery to peer at and take inspiration from painted veils and fabric by Dutch and Italian masters. Instead of my favoured coloured grounds of white or yellow, I began skimming and rubbing semi-opaque white over black. It was a bit of a revelation that I was able to manipulate paint in this way, and, gradually, these bags of rubbish began to reveal themselves to be worthy subject matter. In addition, I began to recognise we had quite a bit in common.

An important aspect of my work is it tends to be autobiographical - a way of exploring what it means to be alive .  For example, early paintings depicting figures on public transport meeting or departing mirrored my own feelings when deeply in love, while the river became a personal metaphor for the changes we all go through in life while remaining essentially the same person.  Most recently, sharply pruned bushes sprouting green shoots are a visual response to my Father’s death and Jesus’ promise there is life after death.

The act of painting is like writing poetry.  It has the power to evoke many feelings on so many different levels, and I began to find meanings in these bin bags other than their obvious call to produce less waste.  In their shape-shifting flexibility, I realised many of them reminded me of my own body; at times full, at times empty.  This caused me to reflect on my relationship with food and how I viewed my own person.  I find it hard to see my aging stomach as a thing of beauty, and, as a woman in her late 50’s, I sometimes feel I am no longer seen. Painting these bags reminded me that my body also has value.

Since recognising this human connection, I regularly notice and engage with rubbish thrown on the street.  I pick up coffee lids, juice and water bottle tops, paper bags, and plastic containers and take them back to my studio to draw.  I find that they are all beautiful to look at despite being squashed and broken.  At the moment, I am concentrating on images of food wrappings – those once pristine, white but now disintegrating sheets of paper dissolving into the pavement. Maybe it has something to do with getting older but I keep thinking of the difference between Michaelangelo’s early drawings of youthful bodies and his later, sparer sketches of Christ on the cross.  In the earlier ones, all are confident, triumphant and whole – perfection! In the later, Christ is broken, accepting of death; human rather than God-like. 

Unfortunately we live in a world where so many people are othered, ignored and treated like rubbish.  Despite or maybe because of the bleakness of the stories on the news, we may find it hard to see them as real people and, feeling helpless, are tempted to look away. Three years on from my first encounter with a bin, I am deeply committed to painting things that have been overlooked, thrown away or abandoned. There is so much I am afraid of looking at, so much that I feel it would be safer to not see and ignore. Drawing and painting these objects helps me to watch and pray.

*John Berger, Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible (1997)