Nick Mullaly’s desirous paintings

Nick Mullaly talks to writer (and boyfriend) Sholto Buck about playing the ingenue, '70s porn and romantic desire. Featuring cameos by Mariah Carey, Edvard Munch and Roland Barthes.

A response to Mullaly's paintings in the exhibition Be My Once in a Lifetime at Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery, Melbourne, through 9 April 2022.

Nick Mullaly, *Rush*, 2021, oil on canvas, 66 x 78 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Hello to you, my darling ;). I think it would be good, given that we are in fact boyfriends, to start with the theme of love and romance. How did this play into the way that your recent exhibition came together?

I had a call from David Sequeira last year, saying he wanted to put together an exhibition in the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery at VCA with Rachel Button, Nabilah Nordin and myself—with paintings, sculptures and video works. He said he wanted to draw together artists he felt were working with ideas and processes to do with love, which is an unusual organising principle because it’s so obvious and maybe even “daggy.” But I think that made it kind of exciting and sexy, working with this idea which might be written off in the context of fine art. It’s much more normal to think about love in music. I felt like I was making an album!

There was a list of keywords we discussed like “embrace,” “resinous” and “awkwardness” that ended up guiding me through the making of my paintings. The show title Be My Once in a Lifetime comes from a Lana Del Rey lyric, which again, is funny for this context. But I like it because it really delivers on the kind of earnestness we were talking about from the outset.

In an interview with her husband, Rachel Rabbit White—one of my favourite poets—says, “Even if we all are trained to want love, and we all do desperately want it, there is also a popular ridicule of love and romance.” Do you think of your work as romantic?

I do, because my work always features these tropes or elements which are lifted from recognisable imagery.

What is some of the recognisable imagery that interests you?

Anything stereotypical—any show of tenderness. Typical love iconography. For example, two bodies next to each other embracing, or an object like a perfume bottle.

So, you're gathering images and objects that have a cultural association with romance?

Yeah! I want to embrace imagery that is everywhere, from films, art, advertising, and experiences of my own. Everything is up for grabs!

Do you paint from real life?

Not always, necessarily. I like to paint from experiences, but heighten them. Some of the things I paint are based on experiences I’ve had, or made. For example, there’s a painting of you, which comes from a photo I took of you holding perfume samples. Sometimes, I paint things I want to happen, or they’re things I dream about, or see in other images out in the world. But I want them to look like they’re my paintings, if that makes sense? No matter where the references come from, I want them to have my signature. I’m daydreaming ideas for paintings all the time when I’m at my retail job, scribbling notes on empty receipt paper rolls. So in a way it’s real life!

I think about your paintings as desirous, and you’re painting scenes that are adjacent to experiences you’ve had, but I also think of your work as this process of creating highly pressurised images, in that you’re collaging a lot of different forms into one surface, and that creates this contrast of highly referential images/objects, with private detail.

I also happen to know that you’re a pop culture private eye—you know more about pop culture than anyone I’ve met. Why don’t you talk about some of the references you’re using in the paintings in the show?

Well, I do like to collect imagery from photos I take and films I watch…

Get specific, I know there’s Mariah Carey in there!

Yeah, [one of] her music video[s] appears in The Roof! There's this two-second image of her embracing her lover. Her arm is around his back. I love her, and I love that song and music video, and I’d had the idea for a painting with a similar gesture, and when I saw the video again I was like, “oh wow there it is.” And I used it as a reference image.

So, you used this Mimi image and collaged it with the spilling of the wine down the back…

Yeah, to make it this hazy kind of drunken spill of affection… A tipsy mistake or act of vengeance?

Some of the paintings incorporate more concrete references than others, like Tram Stop, where there is a dissolved homage to a mid-2000s Australian STI awareness campaign that merged an alarming PSA with sexy surfers, blonde and worried. I just thought, how chic! Or, the painting Golden Cushion directly lifts from a tiny velvet cushion I spotted at your uncle's house, of what I believe (but can’t confirm) is a Botticelli detail of the profile of a curly haired young man.

I want to follow from this and ask, how does music figure in the way you paint?

When I listen to music it can sometimes dictate what I want to paint… It’s gonna be a sombre painting if I’m listening to the blues! (laughs)

Alright, alright…

But if I’m listening to ABBA, which I very much was when making these works, it makes me strive to paint better?

Someone recently said that your paintings are lyrical—what do you think are the lyrical aspects of your work?

Hmm, I would say that the lyrical aspects of the work might be the organic forms. If it’s a body holding an object, it’s always leaning, there’s always a curvature and a suppleness. I think that creates a sort of lyric. Lyrical also connotes repetition, so if there are flower petals, they will mirror the form of, say, a body or a drop of spit. They all link up. The compositions house their own rhythms.

I want to ask you about cinema, and the cinematic in your work. I know that’s a field you draw from.

There's something about film that really draws me to it. Carrie by Brian De Palma—it’s so unsettling, but stunning. It has everything! Also, the split screen effect is an interesting way to think about images. I think this film comes to mind because, amidst all of the character’s angst and retribution, there is a desire to be loved. I find this really compelling, so I aim to embed, in the figures I paint, a sense of this desire. I guess this creates a kind of narrative.

Can you talk about how cinematic images inform the way you make paintings? If they do?

They do. I aim to make my paintings look like snapshots of motion, freeze frames and film stills… I need to bring up a piece of trivia I found on IMDb that I often think about, which relates to this idea:

“When Sissy Spacek was preparing for her character [in Carrie], she isolated herself from the rest of the ensemble, decorated her dressing room with heavy religious iconography and studied Gustave Doré's illustrated Bible. She studied ‘the body language of people being stoned for their sins,’ starting or ending every scene in one of those positions.”

I think film and painting have a symbiotic relationship. I’m interested in the cycle of repetition of pose and composition, how imagery gets retranslated all the time.

So do you think, when you’re making a painting you are evoking narrative?

More recently, yes. I’m trying to retain a sense of narrative. The direction of a pair of eyes, how two objects relate inside a composition, all of that creates a narrative. I’m not specifically making each painting part of a story, but I like that I can place the images in a sequence and it starts to evoke an idea of narrative.

Nick Mullaly, *Flower Seller*, 2022, oil on canvas, 117 x 101.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Do you have a current favourite painting in the show? And how did it come about?

One of my favourites is Flower Seller. I wanted to make a work where there was a ray of light down the middle third of the painting, with shadows on either side. I was thinking about a study I did a few years ago, of a coffin with a butterfly on it. There were flowers on either side in these warm jewel tones. I developed a few drawing ideas based off of that study and ended up with the image of a flower seller.

I’m interested in this idea that you knew you wanted to paint something with a very specific placement of light!

Oh yeah! Light placement is so crucial in my paintings, probably the most important device, in this body of work. It can alter the way a composition appears, but is also a subject on its own. I love to make the forms that I paint glow, almost like they’re lit from within.

In previous paintings there was more of a rainbow, kaleidoscopic colour palette. But with this body of work I’m trying to show that charge of energy through lighting. In Floodlight, two figures are partially lit by this band of bright light. The colour palette is controlled by how I want the light to hit.

You’ll actually see a similar palette, those oranges and reds and yellows, throughout the whole show. It’s dictated by the light. A friend of mine was saying recently how the work isn’t really orange, but more like amber.

So your paintings are stuck in amber!

Yeah!

That’s so beautiful…

Yeah, and they’re just frozen in this moment of action.

So it is like cinema!

Yeah, like film stills. Or like…an ancient ant stuck in sap?!

You often start your drawings from photographs, and work on the drawings on your phone, which I think gives the work an interesting relationship to the screen…

Yeah, it’s a process of sketching and collaging photographs which I take and find. Using my phone is another process that just helps smoothen the experience and it shows me the image through various translations…from the page to the screen to the canvas.

It seems to me that a lot of this work you do with different types of screens—the cinematic screen, the phone screen, IMDb or what have you—all translate into what’s really evident as a kind of glowiness in your work… A lot of people talk about the glowing quality in your work.

Yeah, it comes from using such thin layers, diluted with the medium, or the solvent. What hopefully comes through are these vivid under layers. To make them glow is, I think, a way to embed life into a still image.

I do agree that the light that comes from my phone, as I make my digital sketches, impacts the resolution of my ideas. On the phone, everything glows! My paintings aren’t backlit, but I have the memory of light from when they were drawings, and I have to approach it in a more tactical way and try to be clever with oil paint to get them to glow how I want them.

That’s beautiful. Now, I wanna talk about sex!

Let’s talk about sex!

Nick Mullaly, *Star Belt*, 2022, oil on canvas, 81 x 71 cm. Courtesy of the artist

There’s a lot to say about this in relation to your work, and how you’re positioned as a gay male painter…there’s definitely something more poetic in the way you depict the erotic in your work. Or, maybe what I mean is that a lot hinges on implication, rather than explicitly showing. This is neither better nor worse than other approaches, but I see it as a departure from some of your contemporaries. Maybe a good image to frame this would be the Star Belt painting…

In Star Belt, we see the crotch and he’s holding a glass of wine and the belt is undone. I wanted it to be this hot, foggy, sort of erotic evocation. It draws on more poetic, erotic imagery, as does Spit. That one has a guy leaning over and spitting in another guy’s mouth. Golden lava spit. So yeah, it is quite erotic! In these paintings, I wanted to evoke fuzzy ’70s soft porn imagery.

The ephemera surrounding porn…these images you’re interested in, which are about what goes on just outside of the sex act… It’s this frankly liminal space between explicit sex and fashion photography.

Most definitely. They’re enigmatic images. We know the context. They’re so posed, but also mysterious. Mysterious but…in an obvious way? I love how a paused moment can still be dynamic and imply story, and secrets… It goes back to my interest in the moment of action, and the moments surrounding action. And I don’t know how to say this, but the erotic work is also not erotic at all!

Yes! Your work engages with the erotic as it was understood by like, Roland Barthes who made the point in his discussion of photography—always to differentiate the pornographic from the erotic—that the erotic was always concealing something.

I love in your work how images slide into one another. You have the painting of one guy spitting into another’s mouth, and then the composition of that image slides into the one next to it—two flowers whose petals are falling down in the same arc as the spit. And to me, that aligns with this very 20th century way of encoding homoerotic desire into something that is maybe less embodied…

It’s a bit of a nod to that. Having the figurative moment bleed through to something semi-disembodied. Flowers leaking droplets into one another, there is an eroticism there. It’s meant to be kind of on the nose, which is heightened by the arrangement of the paintings in the show and their inevitable relations to each other. And I like to slip in more tender moments. Flower Seller is a tender image.

It evokes romance! Like, when I was buying flowers for you on Valentine’s Day, I was in this queue with all these young men buying flowers for their…girlfriends I imagine.

I think all my paintings are very innocent.

You’re playing the ingenue! Ok, who are some of your influences in terms of other painters?

I’m so drawn to the works of Edvard Munch…

That’s so interesting to me, because when you go to art school, it becomes almost outlandish to look up to such canonical figures as Munch, but I’m into it. I have to say, I really don’t know any of his work besides The Scream…

The Scream is amazing, but honestly, everything else he’s made, dare I say, is even better! He made a lot of works which do something I’m really interested in—relating to the togetherness of people. The merging of figures and lovers. He merged bodies through jealousy and desire and death and these huge ideas that I’m really interested in. Also, throughout his practice he would often rehash his same compositions and do them differently, which I find lovely. They’re just so rich and gourmand. The colours are sumptuous, especially when he goes in with browns, greens, red, and scattered vertical brushstrokes. It’s like water trickling over people. It makes the work blobby, organic and juicy. They’re very honest paintings, and they speak for themselves. He’s so underrated!

And this goes back to what I was saying about your paintings as these highly pressurised images. There’s something beautiful about how you're taking states of feeling, relating to existential anxiety and desire or what have you, and then casting these in relation to, say, a source image of Mariah Carey…

Aw, yeah, they’re the same thing!

That’s interesting. Say more about this…

I see a running thread through Carey and Munch, because they’re often speaking about the same things! It’s the same desire and love and, like, existential pain?? Those big ideas that I love, but expressed through different registers and levels of intensity. Maybe that’s something I’m projecting, but it’s kind of the reason I do what I do.

I want to take these huge ideas and show them through different levels of intensity, and that means I’m having to work with different references and ways of using paint, to merge those levels. To keep the images interesting, and dynamic.

Beautiful. I think we’ve got it in hand?

Great!

Nick Mullaly’s desirous paintings

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