Behind us, in what Andrew Holmes describes as his ‘writing room’, his most recent London exhibition – Road Work at the Architectural Association – is packed up and ready to move on. One piece is being sent to Berlin, one has been bought. ‘The house really is a kind of studio in which I happen to live,’ the architect/artist tells me. There’s a sense of practicality to the way that Holmes talks about the domestic, whether it’s the contents of his wardrobes and kitchen, or the table in his writing room where the two of us talk. Made of MDF, half of it red and the other half blue, the table is part of a set – the other is upstairs, in Holmes’s ‘drawing room’ – that can be configured according to need. Now, the table is arranged as a square, in order to make it easier to frame images for the AA show.
In both Holmes’s home and his practice, there’s a driving force of possibility, the ability for something to contain multitudes. In conversation for an event during the AA exhibition, he described his work as being animated by the idea that ‘it isn’t either/or, it’s both/and’. This, he tells me, is one of the many ways in which the avant-garde composer John Cage has inspired him. He recalls a day spent with Cage, in ‘a room twice the size of this one’, in which, rather than formally lecturing, the composer simply talked about what interested him, taking questions from the room. And among those things was that maxim of both/and. This took root in Holmes through the experience of two artworks that seem aesthetically and thematically distinct from one another: Edward Hopper’s deeply realistic oil painting Gas (1940) and Agnes Martin’s drawing of ink lines Stone (1964). Holmes came across them in adjoining rooms at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ‘They’re both equally moving,’ he tells me, ‘but in completely different ways. So, could [I] combine those feelings, have it be realistic but somehow very free and moving?’
Holmes’s artistic work, whether in the Polaroids that comprise Road Work, or hyper-realist drawing series such as ‘Gas Tank Series’, carry with them the deeply felt realism of Hopper – often in a way that makes their materiality feel almost uncanny – with the meditative repetition of Martin. There’s a visual similarity to Holmes’s photographs such as 1972 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale and 1973 Chevrolet Impala (both 1985). From their naming conventions to the position of the camera itself – straight on, with an emphasis placed on the object – is a straightforward practicality. And yet to look at them is to consider the details of the car, the expanse of the landscape, the vastness of the sky that looms above. Holmes stresses that, with feelings, ‘part of the definition of them is you can’t describe them in words, but you can describe very accurately the way you might go about generating this feeling’. He tells me that, in image-making and in architecture, ‘the practical thing is very important to me’, something that also extends into his domestic sphere.
All of the furniture is made by ‘Mr Bird’, from Holmes’s drawings, because ‘it’s also to do with knowing the bloke who can do the thing’. He describes himself as being ‘very particular’, telling me that the house itself is ‘built for tall people’, with high rooms, and a handle for the front door that I need to stretch in order to reach. His process, too, is particular; not just in terms of what gets done where in the house, but the objects and method with which they get done. When it comes to drawing furniture and aspects of the house – including the front gate outside – Holmes tells me that he’s ‘trying to convey not just the way it’s made in the drawing, and its dimensions, but how it’s supposed to be perceived’. Something for which he’s devised his own particular process: ‘I just use a 0.28-repeat graph and nothing else and tracing paper, an old-fashioned parallel motion. I don’t use a computer to draw at all.’ A computer, he says, ‘draws with light’. The physicality of the object, no matter what form he is working with, is given emphasis and meaning.
There’s a fascinating tension in Holmes’s work, the importance of the physical object working in tandem with a certain kind of invisibility. People are absent from the sprawling roads and truck stops of series such as ‘Gas Tank City’. There’s an openness to this for a viewer, an intimacy or invitation into these spaces. He describes the front gate as being ‘as not there as possible’, stressing that ‘it’s impossible to make a gate that keeps people out’. For him, this sense of invisibility – in a gate, or in a canvas – is a way of letting people in. The walls in his writing room are white, which he painted after moving in, spending one Christmas Eve taking off the ‘Laura Ashley-type floral wallpaper’ that came with the place. Holmes’s idea of expansive space, of the invisible, returns to Los Angeles – a place of continued visitation and cultural obsession – placing an importance on white and blue, the latter of which is reminiscent of LA skies: ‘There are never any clouds in the sky in Los Angeles, they burn off by 11 o’clock.’
Upstairs, in the drawing room, is one piece in a series of new work; the front of a house in Fresno, what Holmes calls ‘day for night pictures’ (below the monochromatic image that’s working on is the colour original), named after Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. There’s a sense of film noir in this impossibly black-and-white landscape. He admits that he’s ‘having a nightmare drawing the ground at the moment’, even as the detail of his work is beginning to emerge in a tree, a car and a looming shadow. But this ‘nightmare’ seems just as important to the creation of his work as the visual details and cultural references that go into them – in a room downstairs, adorned with musical instruments and portraits, model cars and a mantelpiece of figurines ranging from baseball mascots and Mickey Mouse to Batman and The Rock, is a small stack of film-noir DVDs. Holmes tells me about the unique feeling that comes from hearing a ‘wrong note’ in music, that distinctly human fingerprint. He mentions a little-known singer in the 1950s who said ‘it ain’t no good if it ain’t got grease’. That singer would later change her name to Tina Turner. For all of the specificity and fidelity that animates his work, that grease, that uniquely human perspective, is everywhere – from the fact that his Polaroids are two millimetres away from being perfect squares to his house being built for tall people.
