There’s always digging to be done
Education, conversation, participation and a bit of a challenge. This is what you get when Peter Brathwaite performs. He talked to us about singing and his all-important re-discovery of black portraiture.
Who are you?
I am a son, a brother, a partner, an uncle, a godfather, a pupil, a colleague, a friend. Those things are my jobs.
It’s strange, because everything has been redefined. In some ways, life hasn’t really changed that much. I’ve always done the work of my “job” in the house and then gone to a contract or concert. Learning the notes and all of that stuff, I do here. That’s continued. But without the prospect of immediate work, it’s a bit different. I’ve had to find other ways of structuring the day and making sure that I have an existence that is balanced and that I’m getting out enough. I’ve been getting out into nature, but not as much as I used to. I’m getting to know the house a lot more…!
I’ve been doing my portrait recreations. That started in April and they’ve become a fixture. I’m down to one a week now. At the start, it was one every day for 50 days – recreating portraits that feature black sitters. It went down to every other day, then three a week, more recently once a week. I can start to try and get a bit of balance back in terms of singing and writing and trying to get more of a routine. I thought there was a routine during lockdown, but it was kind of erratic.
Why do you do what you do (the singing)?
I’ve just now been for a walk and before the walk, I’d had my first singing lesson post-lockdown. That singing lesson was the first time that I’d felt – “Oh! I’m who I am again! This is strange!” I went on this walk to the woods and was trying to work out why the lesson made me feel so happy and how habituated I’d become to the act of singing. Not just singing, but being taught and being a pupil and that interchange. Having a master teach you.
I’ve been doing this since I was seven years old. It’s been a constant in my life for such a long time. Most of my life has featured singing and performing and today felt the closest to performing than I’ve felt in a very long time. Leading up to the lesson, I ate my lunch earlier than I would normally, I had a very considered warm up routine. I was actually quite scared of opening my mouth for the first time, for someone to hear me. Thinking about what I eat, or what I like to eat before I sing, not realizing that maybe I wear a certain thing before I have a lesson. It’s nice to have a step towards a routine and get back into that.
Had you missed these habits/routines? Did you notice that something was missing – beyond the singing?
Yes, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. I’m not very good at just sitting still and not doing anything. I’m always trying to create something or think of something new to do and I’ve been doing that during lockdown. But, alongside this, I felt the despair that everyone has felt and that loss of - something. You can’t really replicate doing a performance or having a lesson with somebody.
And I suppose that’s where the portraits have come in, because they’ve been an outlet that has allowed me to imagine performance. I see them purely as performance. That’s been the closest I’ve got to it, in terms of preparing myself, curating the objects, scenes, making the props and the scenery. Even down to using scissors and pulling gaffer tape - ripping it. All of that becomes a meditative act of routine. And then it builds to the moment of when I step into the scene and then “I’m ready!”
Others we have spoken to for this blog have talked about the reciprocal nature of live performance – what the performer and audience give to each other. If the portraiture is performance and it’s online, what is the nature of the relationship with the audience?
What I love about this project is that the medium of social media means that, while people say that they love this or they “like” that, a lot more has started to happen. For example, the young boy in Harlem in elementary school who decided to recreated the portrait of The Gardener by Harold Gilman (the Garden Museum) I’d done that the week before and I’d got a little notification saying that someone had tagged me and it was his mum and it was this picture of this boy who was about six, with the perfect pose – “inspired by Peter Brathwaite”. These little things that spiral off and the conversations with people saying “I’ve just discovered this artist”. The one today – Bisa Butler - people are saying that they didn’t know about her. When I discovered her about two weeks ago, I thought – wow, this is amazing. I have to put it in the project. (here)
All of that feels like performance. When I’ve been doing my Music That’s Been Banned by the Nazis - suppressed music – a lot of that is about introducing a small part, the tip of the iceberg and then people going off and discovering worlds for themselves. They’re discovering a piece of history.
How much, for you, is performance educational?
I’d say it’s most of it. It’s not necessarily having to teach the audience something, but asking yourself – what do you want to say? Who are the audience? Why are you saying it? Is there something that you want to change in people’s minds? Whether I’m doing the most traditional piece of repertoire, I’m always trying to think of those things. Also, I really like the idea of the audience being nimble and agile and ready. They want to be challenged. I’m demanding something of the audience - it’s not a passive thing for them. The experience is live and there are conversations that rise out of the performance and the dialogue that you’re having with the audience as well.
I knew, at the start of lockdown, that I wanted to do something. I didn’t really know what it was going to be. The Getty Challenge was unexpected. It came at a point when I’d found out that the majority of my work had gone. It looked quite fun and I’ve always enjoyed dressing up, so I thought – what can I find out there? I’m not sure whether I can pinpoint the moment when I thought I want to do a black sitter. I can’t identify whether it was because I wanted to show a painting with a black person in it or I wanted to find someone who looked like me. I found that first portrait – “A Black Servant in England” - and it seemed interesting – the juxtaposition of the glass and the boy’s skin and the dog. What I liked about the challenge is the natural humour because you’re using whatever you have to hand. After I did that one, I realized that I’d entered into a contract with this body of art that has been marginalized and forgotten. It coincided with family research as well. I was getting sick to the backteeth – I wanted to find a likeness with one of my black ancestors. I was going further and further back with information about who they were but no images. It doesn’t feel right that there’s been this silencing throughout history and you see it so plainly. So – it became a thing. Wanting to find more and more. Some of them I knew, some of them I’d seen but hadn’t really engaged with that much. That’s why I chose to say “Re-discovering Black Portraiture”. At the very start I was looking at things I’d already seen before and then you have to dig a bit more. Then you have to start to put terms into search engines and library websites – your gut tells you that that’s how they’ve been catalogued – if they’ve been catalogued at all. My fourth great-grandmother is recorded as being a “free mulatto”, so I used that term in the search engines to look for portraits. It came up with a whole body of work by an artist called Brunias, who was in the Caribbean in the 1780s. He was painting real people and specifically, mixed race people and his version of what it was to be mixed race in the Caribbean was what defined people’s ideas of what life was in the Caribbean. The sexual allure of being mixed race exoticised the nature of life in the Caribbean.
Mixed in with re-discovering and giving a platform to these marginalized works is identity and my identity as well, my British identity and all of the concentric circles of that.
What effect did George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent reaction(s) have on your art – planning, creating, performing?
I was about to wind down. I thought I’d approach 50 and finish. But when that happened, I didn’t really know how to respond. I knew I wanted to respond artistically, in the way that I find comfortable and comes naturally to. There was this element of persevering with this message – that seemed important at that moment. It’s very easy for these things to be neatly packaged and wound up and people think – oh right, that’s done with. It was an effort to show that these things don’t go away. They’re here, hidden in plain sight. I can show you that this body of work exists and I’m going to keep going and see how long I can carry on plugging the message - in a way that is mixed with humour and allows people to step into a world that maybe they have a fear of engaging with and this feels like an accessible route in.
There’s also a lot about perseverance and visibility because it coincided with all of the horribleness of all black people – black men - being disproportionately affected by Covid-19. That’s very difficult reporting to take but it suddenly felt like this huge pressure. The nature of inequality and those conversations and what was being revealed as the lockdown unfolded and the pandemic worsened – it seemed as though visibility was at the core of that. (As well as education and understanding – all of those things.) This seemed like a way of continuing the conversation.
Do you think that, your voice is now being heard in a different way?
I think that people who thought of me as one thing have possibly changed their perception. It would be interesting to know what people think of me now – just because this has become such a prominent feature of what I’m doing. What I’ve learned from it is that I have to use my art to answer questions and fight for things that we’ve always been fighting for. Music and visual art and culture are such useful tools. They are very powerful. Hopefully, people will see that I’m not suddenly doing something very different. It’s just a different means of articulation. I’m really longing for the time and opportunity to come to allow this to manifest in a performance that draws on all of these elements. The portraiture – I feel like I’ve been banging on the same drum. The diversity within the realm of this work is so great that I feel like no matter how long I carry on, there’s always going to be something new and there will always be stories that need to be told.
Do you think you’ll ever stop doing this? If so – when and how?
I need to stop soon, just because I feel like it needs to be handed over so that people can use it and actively participate in it. Obviously, I’m not going to stop looking at black portraits. I’m always going to curious about finding new ones. It will stop. There’s this idea of getting to 100! But at one a week, that is quite a challenge. My other half worked out that if we carry on doing them at one a week, it will end on January 1st 2021!
To complete the circle – who are you?
I’m a digger. There’s always digging to be done.
Still Life with Peaches and a Lemon - Juriaen van Streeck