Allistair Walters
Allistair Walter (b. 1994) studied painting at Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. “My creative endeavors circle around an examination of the processes governing my own memory and perception. Using my personal photographic archive, I manipulate images through a combination of digital and analog techniques. This allows me to mix and reinvent methods to capture fleeting moments. By deliberately distorting the relationship between surface, content, and form, I try to challenge the limitations I had previously attached to the medium of painting, exploring a nuanced tension between intimate and dissociative states. The deconstruction of scenes from my everyday life result in a compilation of fragmented impressions that blur the boundaries between figurative and abstract representation. Through this work, I reflect on how these elements shape our understanding of reality and our place within it.” (Statement courtesy of the artist)
Allistair invited us to his new studio in Charlottenburg. He primed some paper, and while we waited for it to dry, we had the majority of our conversation. Then we painted, without setting any guidelines, flipping the paper back and forth while layering and abstracting each other’s work.
Artist’s Website
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Allistair invited us to his new studio in Charlottenburg. He primed some paper, and while we waited for it to dry, we had the majority of our conversation. Then we painted, without setting any guidelines, flipping the paper back and forth while layering and abstracting each other’s work.
Artist’s Website
Allistair: If I go all the way back, I was a bit of an awkward kid. Also an only child and coming from a pretty non-conformist, alternative family background. My parents are both punks, kind of. And also had a lot of history before they met, they actually met in rehab. They met, they got sober, in this place called Release. That's also why I have this tattoo [points to neck] because I'm the first Release baby. Also my dad is a tattoo artist and my parents in general practice the art of living unconventionally. They raised me in a way that was anti-authority. They would just leave me doing my stuff until I made my own mistakes and learned from them. So that's how I started just like locking myself in a lot, and I was always drawing and really interested in that and just spending time by myself. And I mean, not only because I decided to, but also because I was shy and awkward and had a hard time making friends in the beginning. I was mainly just drawing pretty creepy drawings. My mom just got out a few of those and was looking at them and thought like, “Okay, maybe a child therapist would have been very interested in that.” I was usually in the back of the class just drawing and at one point [came] to graffiti, and all these [things] were then connected with some people and for the first time I was like, oh yeah, I'm pretty good at that and because I'm good at that, people want to hang out with me and they kind of got drawn to me in that sense. I think that’s how I started identifying myself with drawing and making pictures. From there, I had a friend circle and some of them were also interested in doing more in arts than graffiti or street art. And then we got our first studio. That was like 2010, I would say. And it was still at a time when it was a bit easier to find space in Berlin. So we had this huge 200 square meter space basically, and we were four people and it was 200 euros. So pretty manageable even if none of us made any money from it, or I mean most of us probably had child support here and there. And my friend was selling some weed and this kind of stuff. And so we had the space and then we just started taking it more seriously, and all of us got more and more interested in really pursuing painting and then slowly also thinking about a career in that. Then we went to two different universities. I started out going to Leipzig because there was this traditional painting school. It's also internationally known, it's like New Leipzig school, it's like a whole thing. And I thought, okay, if you want to learn painting in some kind of classical setting, you have to go there. That's at least what everybody told me and what I thought. I went there and it wasn't really like that anymore. It felt a bit like the whole university had a bit of an identity crisis. There were classes [for] drawing from life or still lifes and portraits and all these things. And so I had somewhat of a classical education, but most of it was pretty [self-directed]. Like just looking at paintings, looking at things I like, trying to steal techniques, making them my own, trying to translate different things and all at the same time trying to figure out what I am actually interested in painting or in saying. I just started out taking all these pictures of my iPhone and was pretty fascinated by the points where the camera and the sensor of the camera couldn't really understand anymore. Like if it's too dark or if it's in motion or if things start to blur, things start to glitch, things get weird. And I was just visually very interested and drawn to that. So for the longest time I was basically painting blurred photographs and trying to do that in a manner of painters in history that I really liked. So if it's friends, lovers, parties, a lot of really weird self-portraits, it's basically always a game with my surroundings and myself and then being in the studio locked in by myself alone, trying to get the gist out of that. Just somehow creating an essence of a feeling. I never really thought about a concept behind it. And then I just continued doing these things and was always avoiding topics outside of myself. People around me would be interested in how the relation between this and that shapes this and that and then they would just go and research something outside of themselves, which is a thing that artists a lot of times do. I was avoiding that. I went from Leipzig to Berlin and was continuously just painting and doing visual arts in any kind of sense, photographing a lot, surrounding myself a lot with other artists, always trying to somehow find a collective sense. Over the course of several years, we had this collective where we did some exhibitions and tried to do publications, but in the end it never really worked out. But it's still an urge to try to find like-minded people and just build a sense of community, build a platform, something where all of us can enrich each other and just share each other's networks and build a bigger one. Somewhat randomly we organized this huge group exhibition with more than 30 artists. It really worked out this time because there was not so much planning and so much pressure before, it was just like, “Oh, there's this space, don't you want to do an exhibition?” And then we invited a lot of people, never thought that everybody would say yes, we thought it would be like 10 people, 15 people, but now it's 30.
Renee: Could you talk a little more about how you describe your artistic identity and how you came to find that?
AW: I realized that no matter what it is, if it's arts or if it's sports or if it's a thing that you do, as soon as you make that your identity fully, you kind of fuck yourself because as long as this is not going well, you also quickly lose your sense of self-worth. I am pretty aware that I'm doing that and try to still see myself just as me, as a person. But I can't really stop identifying myself as an artist or especially as a painter. I've gone through a lot of transformations over the last two or three years in my mind [over whether] I should start identifying myself more as a visual artist in general because what I do is a cross over between different things. I'm a painter, but I'm also somewhat of a photographer, I'm somewhat of a sculptor, I'm doing collages and doing a lot of things that then lead to an end product. And even if the end product never sees a brush, I feel like they’re paintings. It's a pretty new thing that I make artworks that don't fall in the classical means of painting. That can be printed fabrics that I conserve in an epoxy resin or a mix between a lot of materials, or for my diploma show I showed a piece of cake that was just completely covered in resin and even that still feels like a painting to me, I don't know. But that is probably connected to how it all started for me, and that I feel even if these things are different from each other, I approach them in a very similar way. So identification is a big topic also in my work, and everybody's work I guess, but yeah it's funny sometimes that that happens, that you put yourself in a box even if you don't want to be put in a box. Yeah, I think it's weird.
MR: Why do you think that you're specifically drawn to calling yourself a painter?
AW: I still don't like to call myself an artist if somebody asks, because something in me thinks that's pretentious, [while] calling myself a painter feels like something still somewhat based in a sense of…like if somebody says, “He's a painter,” and not an artist, it sounds I have a conversation with this medium. I don't know, maybe because I feel I can identify myself closer with it, I feel like painting is the field in arts that I know most about and I spend most of my time in and that I really feel like I know somewhat what I'm doing and somewhat what I'm talking about.
MR: We’ve talked with a couple artists and that's a commonality, not being comfortable identifying as an artist because of the pretentiousness that goes with it.
AW: “The artist” is something that always sounds so big. It feels like your art is bigger than anything else or whatever and I don't think like that actually. I think in the end, it is somewhat of a job and I have to approach it like that. Even if it's all self-managed and I have all the freedom [over] my time, I feel like I have to put the eight hours of my day in, if not more, to justify myself. I feel like as an artist you have to take it seriously to not be pretentious, and not be a thing that is so apart from other people because there’s not really a separation between artists and normal people. That's why I'd end up [identifying] with the craft as somebody would say they’re a mechanic or somebody would say they're a cook or they're a social worker. I feel a painter hits the point for me much closer to say I’m actually doing something real.
RF: Do you think there's a pressure from the art world of what they're expecting from you or from artists? Is that what's driving this more specific title?
AW: The art world, if you can call it like that, if there's one art world which I don't really think, but there is the main market and that's something that I'm still trying to figure out myself. How I can be part of that game [in a way] that feels genuine to me and doesn’t feel like I'm selling my soul? Because especially if the things that you do are directly close to your own life and to the things that you love, then you can quickly have the feeling [that] if you compromise it in any form that you would sell, you would not be genuine to the thing itself. That's also maybe a reason to not call yourself an artist, because art is so big. It feels somehow bigger than other things, than myself. The art world itself is not the part that's pushing it. I'm still somewhat finding a balance between rebelling against it and finding my way in it. It just started that I’ve had a lot of exhibitions and a lot of talks with different people and curators and collectors and gallerists and a lot of it was fine, but a lot of it also showed me a side of it that I felt was very negative and very money driven, very pretentious and very exclusive. Still also figuring out how to sell my paintings and my things in a way that I can live from in a good way and I don't feel like I'm the only one that's so cheap or still being somewhat accessible.
MR: We had a question prepared about your tattoo practice but I think what you're talking about reminds me of it so maybe apply it to both. When you give someone a tattoo they will live with your art for the rest of their lives and identify themselves with it. So how does it feel knowing that they are putting their identity into your work? And then I’m also curious about when you meet somebody you know really loves your painting and you're selling it and that's going to be in their home hopefully for the rest of their life. Those are similar things.
AW: I mean first of all it's a huge honor and one I'm really proud of. It's maybe a complex that a lot of artists have to try not to be forgotten and try to live longer than you do in your physical existence and it definitely feels like that a little bit. If I die tomorrow there's a hundred, two hundred people running around with drawings and tattoos from me on their bodies and similarly with just people owning things I did. [With tattoos] it also feels like they're not only getting something from me but I also get a lot from the people I tattoo, because it's always a feeling of collaboration and a big contrast to my usual studio practice. I mean 99% of my painting studio practice is just being alone in my studio. And with tattooing it really feels like it's a way for me to balance that because I feel like somewhat in a therapy session, for both ways, because you are kind of locked in for this time. It's a pretty big thing, somebody trusts you enough to put your art on their bodies. One thing that's important for a lot of artists is that you want to do something that you haven’t see somebody else doing before and even that cannot be the main goal. It’s so hard though, to make something that doesn't have any connection to anything else.
RF: I feel like that's an inherent thing, people are going to try to see a pattern or connection in a piece to something that they've seen before.
AW: There's always a connection. We live in a time that everything has been done, but somehow still within that you have to have your own handwriting.
MR: You said when you give people tattoos it's like a collaboration between the two of you. How do you feel like that differs from when you're alone in the studio? Does that collaboration inspire things in both art practices or is it just in that moment?
AW: If I do something that is completely freestyle then it's usually things that go with the body composition. The form or the shape of the body of the person in front of you is already inspiring. You do things that you wouldn't do if you just sat in front of a blank canvas or blank piece of paper. If you get a tattoo from somebody it also changes how you see yourself. The other part of the inspiration I feel also belongs to being in that moment with somebody and exchanging a lot of ideas and feelings and just talking. I mostly tattoo people that do very different things from what I do like doctors, lawyers, construction workers, social workers... I go home at the end of the day and I somewhat see myself in them, and the other way around, also see the differences and how they approach the thing that they do in life itself in a way that differs from mine. I feel if I really like someone then I try to find how I can incorporate this in my practice and in my life or in my relationships.
RF: We noticed that a lot of your recent work is depicting specific moments that you then abstract with your painting technique and you've been using resin and photo transfers. First of all, how did you figure out that process? Are these your own memories? Are you trying to reconstruct them? Do they merge with fantasy or dream world?
AW: It is my own memories, it is my own feelings towards things but the more I abstract them, I see them as something more general than just mine. If I talk about love, if I talk about fear, if I talk about whatever it is emotions that everybody has, that's also probably why people can relate to it. In a portrait or a picture of a scene, of course there's things that people can relate to, but the more generalized it gets the more it just talks about emotions. The more space you give people to connect with it. The process that I'm using now, I don't feel it's something that I completely figured out. It's just a compilation of very different things that I might learn from people or from trying out, just things that I grounded together in the end. The use of resin and photo transfers are especially new for me. It actually feels pretty free because I have too much control sometimes, and that was maybe a point why I started using these things. A lot of the things that I learned are from very hobby contexts. Everything I know about resin is from YouTube from mostly elderly people that make jewelry or carpenters. I would also never completely call myself a photographer because, I mean, I respect crafts and I respect mediums but I also like to fuck around with them. My photographic process has nothing to do with me knowing what lens, what light, what exposure time... With painting or with things that you know more of, it gets more and more difficult to create these mistakes, and if you just don't know what's right or wrong you can just create mistakes.
MR: I totally relate to that. With photography I usually just put the camera on automatic because I feel like if I'm considering all the different perfection, lighting stuff, and I'm overthinking it, I'm out of the moment. When you can just let the mistakes happen I love them, like when light just blurs and takes up most of the space. That wouldn't happen if you're controlling and having perfect lighting.
RF: How do you decide which photos to use for paintings? Is it a feeling or…?
AW: It's a feeling, I guess. It's a very intuitive process of finding what interests me, and for a while I also try to analyze myself in that process more. I'm very drawn to light sources in images, also what you were talking about, like if a light completely takes over the whole image. I'm drawn to things that I cannot really understand on the first look of it.
MR: Do you have an idea in your head of something that you want to paint with us?
AW: Not really. I thought we either get to a starting point that we want to work with or we just improvise.
RF: What was your schooling experience? Was it technical classes or…?
AW: I wished for a lot of technical classes when I went in just because I was wishing for some structure and guidance. In the end it's not really that somebody showed you or told you how to do anything, it was more like, “Here it is, do whatever.” In the beginning I was really looking for a mentor because, I mean, it's the classical painter's story that this person was the student of this person. I was looking for that and then I didn't find it, and I'm really happy I didn't find it because then I just found my idols in myself and in the things that I like. Not [just] in painting, sometimes in the attitude of how somebody plays music, or it's more about attitudes than about techniques. We live in a time where if you really want to learn something just go on YouTube to learn a classical technique.
RF: Have you collaborated much before?
AW: I used to do that before, especially when we started out painting we did drawings and paintings that we just passed around. It can help to not get too hung up on something that you like, but it can also be frustrating if you just did something that you like and then it's gone.
MR: Do you feel like painting photos, memories, does that make you process emotions more in the moment of painting? Or does it feel separate because you're connected to the material?
AW: Both. I actually feel it's neither one or the other. When I sit there and tell a story, if it's to myself or if it's to somebody else, you're just reinventing the thing. I feel like what we all consist of and what history and memory consist of is stories that get overworked and defined and abstracted in different ways.
MR: A question that we've been asking people is do you feel like collaboration empowers you or forces you to quiet parts yourself?
AW: I mean, since it's some kind of compromise, I guess both. There's things that only happen if you work together but then of course there's also a lot of parts where you have to compromise and then you not only go in the direction that you want the thing to go.
MR: Do you have ideas for collaborations in the future?
AW: Yeah, I think the first one would be fashion. I'm still looking out for some collaboration partner to do that because I don't have the skills to actually do it.
RF: Does it feel weird to be out of school now?
AW: Not really because I've been kind of out of school for a while technically. I was just going to class meetings maybe twice a year or something. But I feel like now I'm technically more adult in that sense, and also I have a masters.
MR: Do you think that your life is going to shift now because of that?
AW: I feel maybe there's some shifts coming. I mean, career-wise [there] could be some things coming up now after the graduation show. I might have some opportunities that I didn't think I would have. I have the mission to build a new portfolio. [I’ve been] doing my own exhibitions, promoting myself, and the internet works out pretty well for what it is, but it's another job on top of the other jobs that I already have.
MR: Yeah, I was a studio assistant last summer to an artist and his wife used to be a lawyer but transitioned to being essentially his manager. It's crazy how it's a two person job to do all the business side of being an artist because if you want to get anywhere you have to put yourself out there.
A W: I mean putting yourself out there for me is alright. I'm pretty much an open person and it's not so difficult for me to speak to people, but I have some other friends that it's really fucking up. There's so many greater artists than me from my point of view but marketing is such a heavy burden for them. It's scary to think that social media plays such a big role.
MR: Do you think your parents being in the alternative punk scene had an effect on your taste in aesthetics?
AW: Yeah I think so. There is a dark side in the things I do and in the things I like, but a lot of my life I was kind of rejecting that. Now for the first time I feel like I'm ready to embrace it a little bit more but of course I also want to find ways that it doesn't feel too... because these kinds of things can feel very cheesy. Maybe also the influences of what was around. Through my dad there were lots of books and comics and magazines that had great illustrations. Maybe more the attitude of thinking of yourself as different than most people in society, like an outlaw or outcast but also then trying to embrace that in a way that you feel like, “Okay, maybe I am different. Maybe people look at me weird but that's me and I'm not going to change.”
MR: My parents aren't in the punk scene but I grew up in a very hippie, Grateful Dead household and I feel like I rejected that a lot but as I get older I feel myself getting more and more aligned with the values.
AW: Yeah, it's funny, I never really had that much of a rebellion against the things my parents liked. How old are you guys?
RF: I'm 22.
MR: And 21.
AW: I'm 10 years older.
MR: Do you have any wisdom from your 10 years?
AW: There's probably a lot, but the best advice I can give is just to follow what you feel like you want to do in that moment. Things sometimes feel so permanent that you feel like, “Okay, if I take this direction then I will not be able to go there.” But it's not true. In the end things are just for the time being. If it's places you go, if it's your decisions, relationships, nothing is forever so just embrace the things in the moment.
MR: You were raised in Berlin right? What part of the city?
AW: Kind of everywhere because my parents were separated pretty fast and then we were moving around. I definitely enjoy coming here, it feels like a bit of a calmer spot and somewhat of an upgrade right now. I feel like the parts of the city that I grew up in are the most gentrified right now and they changed so much, and things got crazy with drugs and [people experiencing] homelessness. I have to deal with a lot of stuff myself mentally, and it’s easy to fall into bad spots and it doesn't really help to see people on the edge of existence on a regular basis all the time. There are a lot of problems in the system and how difficult it is to somehow find your way back once you're outside it. A good friend of mine, he's also a great artist, he got homeless once and now it's so difficult because to work you need a registration, so you want to work to afford a flat, but for the flat you have to have a flat, and it's like, things that don't make sense. Also his mental state got really bad and right now he's hospitalized and it's really difficult. I tried to help and friends of ours, we really tried our best to be there somehow, but you can't really do much…
MR: You talk about painting as your art practice but you don't talk about your tattoo business that much, do you not really feel as connected to it?
AW: I mean of course I'm more connected to the painting process. It’s just a very different process as well, being together with other people. But also I'm way more clearly depicting things in tattoos, and it's an even more technical process because it's less trial and error because errors are way more fatal. For now it's still the side hustle, but there's also days that I wake up and I feel like maybe I should leave painting and just be tattooing because that would be such safer outlook.
MR: Have you seen the movie Ponyo?
AW: Yeah, I love Ponyo.
MR: So you know the part when all the boats are in the ocean, and the ocean is rising and so it looks like the ocean is part of the sky? I feel like it's like that, where it looks like it's just the horizon, but actually it's coming up.
AW: Ponyo is one of my favorite movies! Actually I have this painting called Ponyo…
RF: Really? Is it here?
AW: I watched Ponyo, like, I don't know I can't tell but so many times. The first time I watched it was also induced by a lot of ketamine and that changed the movie for me forever. It's crazy, it's the perfect movie to watch. It's one of these movies where you think it's a kids movie, but it's so much more than that.
MR: What about it makes it your favorite?
AW: It's even more surreal, on a different level, than the other [Ghibli films]. At one point when you don't really know anymore what is under water at the end of the movie with the old ladies, it’s so weird in a way that’s not so much on the nose as Spirited Away or something. It's a different kind of trippiness. It's less Dalí surrealist, but more dissociated and that's also what I feel really matched in that time I think with over consumption.
RF: When did you make this?
AW: Last year. This one started out from a Polaroid that I obstructed. I basically took videos on my iPhone and I took screenshots of these, exposed them on Polaroid. I scanned one of these and then printed it in this size, started painting over it, and started using resin. The name Ponyo came along because it had a fishy watery thing.
MR: Like that's a coral.
AW: It's my girlfriend at the flea market holding a ceramic depicting dolphins swimming in this shell.
MR: Do you feel like our painting is done?
AW: I think now it’s at the point that if we do too much it can just get very muddy.
RF: Yeah I like it. I think it's done for now.
MR: You also work as a tattoo artist, an art form defined by its permanency. This contrasts with your painting, which seems to be toying with permanency and thinking about ephemerality. Is your use of resin a way to express permanency in your paintings?
AW: It has the part of conserving something. The first time that I had any contact with epoxy was through my parents. We used to have this plate that was very thick, and my parents were into morbid stuff and my dad, stereotypically for a tattoo artist, is pretty into bones and all these things. There was a rat conserved in the process of decomposing and the whole process got stopped and conserved into the resin [plate]. That's something that is a part of the medium, that if you take a flower, an animal or whatever, and you trap it in the resin and there's no oxygen coming into it anymore, you stop all the processes. But I also don't think tattoos are only permanent, because I started layering over tattoos. It's also changing through you growing, changing being in the sun. Similar to painting it's not permanent but the only thing that you can do is add on top, you can only go back so far. I feel that’s like everything, actually, every decision that you make. Also what I said before, life advice, I mean things are not permanent but of course they have permanent impact on you in a sense. When you decide to move to another state or another country you always can move back, but this will always stick with you somehow.
- Spring is coming, 2022 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Narziss, 2023 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Ponyo, 2023 (photo courtesy of artist)
- Border artwork our collaboration
- Ponyo by Hayao Miyazaki [film]