Please introduce yourself. What ignited your passion for art?

I was born in Exeter to parents who had fled the collapse of the Soviet Union just a few years earlier. A sense of belonging in the UK didn’t come to me right away. Exeter is an affluent but inward-facing place. As a child, trying to learn two languages at once, one at home and one at school, meant I wasn’t able to speak very well until much later on. I drew a lot - and pictures sort of became my way of communicating at that point. An interview I read in the Turps magazine recently really resonated with me, in which artist Andrzej Jackowski spoke to Grant Foster. Jackowski described how, as an immigrant in the UK, painting became his “psychological space to live in”. While this might be true for many children, I feel never outgrew that need.

I actually have a very specific answer for what ignited my interest in art and its history: it was the BBC series called “Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting” which I remember watching on my living room floor as a young kid. Her genuine, and very personal, connection to the art she was talking about pulled me into the paintings she presented. Although she was a brilliant art historian, she taught her viewers to not get too fixated on the facts: the genre, the period, or anything like that - but to really look at what the paintings are telling you. She taught me to think less like a historian and more like a painter.

In 2018, you graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art. What is something you learnt during your degree that you have continued to embed in your daily practise as an artist?

I chose to study in Edinburgh because it offered a degree specifically focused on painting, and we were fortunate to have tutors who were practising painters. From them, I learned a lot of technical things about materials, surfaces, mediums, and pigments. To this day, I try to use high-quality materials as much as I can afford them, and also stretch my own canvases.

Why are you drawn to capture night scenes? What do you look for in a potential subject to capture?

I’m a night person - I enjoy taking night walks, and some of my best ideas come to me then. Many of my favourite artworks are about nighttime, a time when places are quiet and empty.

I find it very hard to paint things I don’t feel strongly about, and the search for subjects is probably the most difficult part of my process. I aim to paint spaces and places, both real and imagined, in a way that brings out their poetics and enhances their psychological feel. One constant risk is that my subject choices can easily become too sentimental or veer into pastiche, so I’m always treading a fine line.

I usually allow an idea to exist and evolve in my head or in my sketchbooks before I commit to the canvas. My notebooks are filled with written notes - how it feels to sit by a bonfire, how strewn bedding can communicate the feelings of insomnia - abstract thoughts, and the paintings I make try to communicate these feelings through an image. I enjoy how the paintings of Norbert Schwontkowski, depicting fridges, flight schedules, cars - absurd parts of modern life - imbue mundane subjects with a poetic gravity.

What initially inspired your most recent painting? Describe your creative process from start to finish.

One of the small paintings I created for the Art on a Postcard Winter Auction depicts one of the rooms in my flat, which I've been using as my studio. It was inspired by the day we were moving in, when the flat felt vacant and had that liminal feeling. There's a street light right outside the window that fills the room with an atmospheric yellow light, even when the curtains are drawn.

It was also somewhat influenced by the oil study of “Night in Saint-Cloud” by Munch - an old favourite of mine.

As mentioned, I note certain moments I encounter in my life. Once the right moment comes, I try to get them down in paint. Some ideas take a lot of effort to transmute into one image, and they usually go through several studies or versions. This one translated into a painting quite easily.

Which part of your process do you enjoy the most, and why?

I usually enjoy the first hours of working on a painting the most, those are the most decisive and exciting moments. It’s when the idea really materialises on the canvas before your eyes. A lot of paintings then hit a halfway slump, where it takes a lot of determination to see them through to the end. They rarely turn out exactly as I initially envision them.

Clothes dryers are a common subject in your paintings, why is this?

I see objects as extended self-portraits, such as Tracey Emin’s bed or Van Gogh’s clogs. I currently have two works featuring clothes racks. The first clothes rack was an unplanned addition to “Interior With Clothes Dryer” - I originally painted a figure stood in the middle of the room, then an armchair, then an electric heater - before I arrived at the subject of the clothes dryer.

In the other painting,“Clothes Rack”, I looked at how daylight pierced through wet clothing strewn on a drying rack, and the surface tension of water of the puddle formed by the clothes dripping. The subject felt to me like one about vulnerability and a hidden self. I felt there was something interesting about a formal white shirt away from its role in the outside world, and in the process of renewal. The fabric of wet clothes in a cold room felt the opposite to the warmth, softness and elegance they offer at other times.

What is a typical day like for you in the studio?

Although I’ve rented studios in London in the past, I currently paint in the spare room where I live. I prefer having an instantly accessible workspace, it’s just way more convenient, and allows me to get in there when I need to.

I like to have a morning routine, usually it involves a walk and some sort of reading or listening to things that interest me. Usually, I’m in full swing between late morning and evening. I paint very sporadically, I fluctuate between flow-states and total creative blocks. In recent years, I've begun working on multiple paintings at a time, although I’m naturally still inclined to fixate on one work until it’s done. If I spend the day immersed in a painting, it is a good day.

If you could spend a day with any artist; dead or alive, who would it be, and why?

That’s a great question, I think I wouldn’t pick a painter, but the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. His films and his writings have influenced me a lot.

What have been your greatest achievements so far as an artist? What are your future aspirations?

I’d say the fact I’m still making work on the approach to being 30 years old is something I am proud of. There were moments when life’s challenges and limiting beliefs cast doubt on my pursuit of being a full-time artist. But I’m grateful to myself for continuing to create, even during those times, and for taking the plunge to commit to my work again. Having a solo exhibition at the Plough Art Centre in Devon was also a major point for me, and I’m immensely grateful to Peter, the gallery director at the time, for offering me that opportunity.

Some things I aspire to in my artistic career are to at least once exhibit at the RA Summer Show and the John Moores Prize show. I’d also love to show outside the UK more, especially Germany - the Germans seem to have a thing for the melancholic.

Why do you think art is important in society?

I’m not sure if I’m qualified to answer that. A lot of people that influence me think art is important for society’s spiritual well-being. Tarkovsky views art as a means to express moral and spiritual ideals, rather than serving social or political purposes, and I broadly agree with this.

I’ve been thinking about painting specifically and whether it has any claim to relevance in the current day. In the age of AI and algorithms that feed us garbage, "low-tech" art, created with traditional materials by a human, may start to draw more attention as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and alien. The art historian Gitte Orskou remarks on the “importance of painting as outstandingly anti-spectacular in a world marked by an economics of experience, rather than meditation”. This has been a comforting idea for me.

Pavel Isupov

ARTIST INTERVIEW: PAVEL ISUPOV