Michael Lindsay-Hogg
Exploring the Creative Process
Part 1
Story by Victoria Chapman
PRELUDE
Michael Lindsay-Hogg needs little introduction because without him, much of what has shaped our world may not have happened. This artist has had a fascinating career in show business as well as the arts. On stage, he directed productions of Agnes of God on Broadway, and Normal Heart at Public Theatre in New York along with receiving a Best Director Tony Nomination for Whose Life is it Anyway?
At the age of twenty-four, he was directing the British live rock n’ roll TV show, Ready, Steady, Go,
In his own words:
When I was 24 ‘driven by ambition, cushioned by innocent optimism, having learned guile and been blessed with luck’, I found myself directing the greatest ever live TV rock n’ roll show, ‘Ready Steady Go!’, on which the regular bands were The Rolling Stones, The Who, Kinks, Small Faces, with Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones, The Walker Brothers and the visiting Americans – The Supremes, Miracles, Four Tops, Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, James Brown, Paul Simon. As a result of the attention the show received, I was asked to direct the earliest videos, then called promos. First with The Beatles, then The Rolling Stones. I did 4 with The Beatles and worked with The Rolling Stones for 15 years.
Lindsay-Hogg continued to direct groundbreaking videos with The Beatles, with hits like Revolution, Hey Jude, 1969 Concert on the Rooftop which became Let it Be, to name some. During those fifteen years with The Rolling Stones, he directed Paint it Black, Respectable, Waiting on a Friend, Jumping Jack Flash, It’s Only Rock N’ Roll and the historically witty, The Rolling Stones Rock N’ Roll Circus and more.
His direction in film and television has also been recognized by BAFTA and received Best Director for Professional Foul, Dr. Fisher of Geneva and co-direction of Brideshead Revisited. He wrote and directed, The Object of Beauty with John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell, which won Best Picture and Best Director awards at Cairo International Film Festival. Also, Frankie Starlight with Anne Parillaud, Gabriel Bryne and Matt Dillion, which was voted by Jeffrey Lyons and Siskel & Ebert as on their Top 10 pictures of the year. His film, Waiting for Godot was part of the Beckett series which won the award for Best TV Drama on British arts program, The South Bank Show. The list goes on and on.
After years of reflection, Lindsay-Hogg wrote a memoir about his childhood and early adult life, Luck and Circumstance – A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond. Which includes detailed descriptions of how as a small boy he was in the company of Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, and playing hide and seek with Olivia de Havilland as well as serving drinks to Humphrey Bogart and discussing the meaning of life with Henry Miller. This doesn’t seem too far out when the author mentions his mother was the Irish actress, Geraldine Fitzgerald, who received instant acclaim as Bette Davis’s best friend in Dark Victory. Fitzgerald was also in William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights and spent time with Hollywood’s elite, Laurence Olivier, Charles Chaplin and Orson Welles with whom she worked with in New York at the Mercury Theatre and in other productions.
Growing up among these great talents, how could Lindsay-Hogg not become a fountain of brilliance? Thankfully, I was given the opportunity to interview the artist about how he nurtures his creative pursuits, as well as where his visual language may stem from. Lindsay-Hogg has been no stranger to the art world. Even while in the depth of his directorial endeavors, he has made time to exhibit his work globally. Over the past few years, his paintings and drawings have regularly been on display in London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. “In the last 20 years or so, maybe because of a sense of stability that my marriage has given me, and also I’ve got a place to do it, I’ve started with oils, and I still draw every day, and there are several thousand by now,” he states
Finally, the artist’s paintings have been widely collected, and are in the private collections of, (partial listing), Mr. and Mrs. Rodolphe Von Hofmannsthal, Mr. and Mrs. Julian Sands, Nona Summers, Tara Summers, Jean Marsh, Wes Anderson, Leslie Nasser, Marc Kristal, Jane Moseley, Wendy Goodman, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Mr. and Mrs. Richard Finkelstein.
Temperamentally, probably going back to school days, I am not a 'joiner'.
EXPLORING THE CREATIVE PROCESS WITH MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG
VC: Michael, I would to talk to you about your creative process, painting over writing. I was intrigued by your comment during an interview with Shane Guffogg, on his TV show called,“The art of Art”, where you said- “My subconscious mind – such that it is … is at work when I paint, because, it’s not that it isn’t the same brain, but it sort of divides off, when I paint, I have a different level of fascination, when I write I try to get down to the truth.”
VC: I wondered if we could talk about this and you could explain your process of painting? Let’s start at the beginning. Where you get your first ideas to begin a work? Do these ideas come from memories of the past or are they dreams of reaching into the future? Or, are they about thoughts or events that happen throughout a day and you have created an additional twist. You have produced some intriguing paintings that are intellectually rich that are bathed in colors but are quite cerebral. I am curious to know more, as there seems to be a narrative that keeps the viewer guessing. In the interview with Shane Guffogg, he refers to them as your cast of characters. I think you must see and feel the world quite passionately?
MLH: In an essay, Marcel Proust wrote: ‘All this bears out what I have told you, that any man who shares his skin with a man of genius has very little in common with the other inmate, yet it is he that is known by the ‘genius’’ friends.
Leaving ‘genius’ aside, I think I know what he meant. That the working person, in his or her artistic endeavors, acting, directing, painting, writing, is one person when they are doing it, with their concentration, their imagination, their solo-ness, but yet somehow a different person in their quotidian pursuits, the checkout counter at the supermarket, or filling the car up with gas.
Yet, it is those daily exchanges when though the mind may be idling, it is not asleep and can often receive messages from Brain Central, just when you least expect them.
The painting problem, that insoluble scene in a play, can suddenly be solved when you have not been thinking of it, or so it seemed. The brain of a person who seems to function on a creative level, successfully or not, is like a magnet ready to grab whatever and however something useful comes its way.
“The painting problem, that insoluble scene in a play, can suddenly be solved when you have not been thinking of it, or so it seemed.”
(Clockwise) Untitled, Michael Lindsay-Hogg; MLH with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger; Untitled, Michael Lindsay-Hogg.
For me, I knew I would have no career in the normal business world, not that I might not have liked it, but I had no aptitude for it. My concentration strays and while it can be ferocious when it is engaged, at other times it wanders.
And, thank goodness, I have more or less been able to make a living with it. Sometimes I can write and paint on the same day. Drawing is not an issue. I draw every evening. But sometimes, it is like having two girlfriends and one becomes more demanding and makes me shun the other for a short or longer while.
I have been trying to write a novel (for twelve years) and have just started on it again. And I have not only not felt like painting but haven’t even liked the idea of doing it. Have not liked paint or brushes or surfaces.
Until yesterday, when after 3 months, I started again.
"Today with Social Media vigilantism, the screaming can drown out the considered nuanced opinion."
VC: This is fantastic to hear, I understand the creative process is dynamic and there is no easy formula, the act of creativity is a live wire and one must think and feel it all the time. In René Descartes quote, Cogito, ergo sum (Latin philosophical proposition) which typically translates to “I think therefore I am” the phrase was said to have originally appeared in French, as je pense, donc je suis in his Discourse on the Method, which translated to, “we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt … ” Does the nature of “Being” and what Descartes wrote enter your work philosophy? And does Identity play an important role in your creative endeavors of what you want to voice or what you want to create or document?
MLH: As far as I understand your question, it is partly about how the rise of the Identity claimed by a person or a group might include me and how it does or doesn’t affect what I do. In a way I am sympathetic to all people and groups so long as they don’t want to kill me. But, temperamentally, probably going back to school days, I am not a ‘joiner’.
And then what is weird is that over time, often a longtime, is that a bit of the story remains but what lasts or doesn’t is what was done, and that too can be forgotten, or ignored. Chairman Mao was responsible for the death of millions of his citizens, but has been dead 40 years or more, and so in China and in America too, you might find little effigies of him standing or at his desk, put on display or in the garden, as an ornament.
Degas was reputed to be an anti-Semite, but that philosophical filth does not affect the paintings which are great. Always there will be conflicts to do with opinion and what lasts or doesn’t. That’s the way it is, although today with Social Media vigilantism, the screaming can drown out the considered nuanced opinion. Basically, when I do whatever it is I do, I am only affected by what’s in my head and not what’s in anyone else’s. My tee shirt will say ‘Sympathy for All. Solipsism for Me. ‘
