This month, I have a pleasure to host artist Richard Frost at the Tavistock Centre. Etaoin Shrdlu is a collection of over 20 works in ink on paper, a visual history of a vanished civilisation, with preserved fragments of its script. I caught up with Richard for a chat just before the private view.

 

His artistic journey so far…

Since I was a child, I wanted to be an artist and exhibit my artworks, but didn’t know how that career path worked. I trained as a community artist and most of my work was with marginalized and hard-to-reach groups. I was facilitating them in making their art, and did my own in spare time, for my own satisfaction. It was never something that I imagined I would ever exhibit… And this led me to training as an art psychotherapist where I continued to use art with disadvantaged people to support them in their growth and recovery, still doing my own work in the background.

After a few years, I realized that I have created all these images, and I should really do something with it. Suddenly people started to look at my work and say, that’s quite good, you could exhibit that, or, I know someone who might be interested in exhibiting it. Someone then put me in touch with you, and here we are. This is my first show in London, so actually, it’s the beginning of a journey.

His inspirations…

I’ve always been interested in the kind of artwork that’s not exhibited in the galleries. Cave painting, outsider art, art made by inpatients, inmates, political prisoners… I guess what we call outsider art is a huge umbrella term for art that’s made by people who aren’t in the art establishment.

Cave painting, particularly Palaeolithic art, is this rich body of work made by people painting on walls 20,000 years before Banksy, and we’ll never know their names. And yet, we can see their handprints, fingerprints, we can see signature identifiers that show that they were humans. But we’ll never know who they were. I’m really captivated by this idea that we don’t know the artist’s identity, but can see their identity through their work.

What is Etaoin Shrdlu?

This lost civilisation is a fiction, a creation of mine. But I haven’t realized how realistic it might be, how authentic enough to be believable.

I was interested in calligraphy and cave painting, and combined these two interests into this figurative calligraphic semi-abstract human figures based on cave art. And I was interested in the idea of people looking at the pictures and not knowing who made them. There was something mysterious and elusive about that. I like the idea of the artwork being centre stage, and my name and personality not part of it.

I realized that I was using figures that looked like letters, and started writing my own poetry using this alphabet. It was a way of masking and hiding my own insecurities. What if someone read my poetry and thought it wasn’t very good? Now, people will never read it and will never know. It is a language, it is written, but nobody will be able to read it because the translation is lost. I’m quite fascinated by that.

His future plans

I realised that what I do is so different. Nobody else is doing anything like it, and I figured that maybe if I send it to galleries, I’ll get some more shows. Maybe I can put a price on it and someone will buy it. It’s switched a light in my head. I started to send pictures to galleries and I had a little bit of interest. I’m really grateful to you personally because this has been the start for me. I’m quite late to the party in that respect. There are people who come out of university and immediately think, I’m gonna exhibit my artwork and sell it.

I moved to London for university, so for me it was important to stay here, to pay the rent, and then to get a job. Now I’m in a position where I have a job, and now I can make art. Perhaps if I tried to make art first, there would’ve been something quite desperate about it, the cliché of a starving artist. Whereas now, I am fortunate in a lot of ways: I have a career, and I can make art and exhibit it. And that’s an exciting next step.

Etaoin Shrdlu by Richard Frost is running until 11th April at the Tavistock Centre (120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA). Visit Richard’s Instagram page.