Inside of Henwood’s quiet, unassuming exterior is a vivid imagination. Beyond the definitive ‘teenagers’ series of paintings, this is the man who attacked Róisín Murphy with a giant lobster in her Movie Star video; made an animation about the rise and fall of a futuristic utopia called Sun Metro City (Johnny Pumpkin) and created a canvas of Kylie Minogue that depicted her as a small boy... 

Dean Mayo Davies: I suppose after two decades it’s pretty natural to reflect on your body of work, but how did you go about that process of curating it all into a book?

Simon Henwood: Well, it took a while to get my head around the idea of doing a book like this. I think part of it was to put a certain amount of the work behind me, and also to put it into context as I’ve worked across a lot of different mediums. I think the book has probably ended up featuring about 10% of my output over the 20 years, a lot of stuff got discarded...

DMD: Was that difficult?

SH: Yeah. It did take a couple of years, really and also added was the fact I was always working on new projects that I wanted to finish and include. For instance I wrote and illustrated fourteen children’s books in the late 80’s and early 90’s and I don’t think any of that work made it in - maybe one reproduction of a cover. It’s just more useful for me to see how my work has developed as a whole and where my work might go now, it’s about presenting a book that brings all these various things - interests, subjects, obsessions - together coherently and see how they thread their way through both painting and film. Childhood, I suppose being one of the main focuses.

DMD: Are you quite nostalgic? Did it bring back a lot of memories?

SH: I guess I am... I’ve never been asked that question. I think I’m nostalgic in the sense that I like to refer to things that have been present in my consciousness for a long time, there’s more weight to it. Because if you’re still thinking about it years and years later there must be something to address there, some issues to address.

DMD: And a kind of resonance. There’s commentary in the book from Mario Testino and Disney biographer John Canemaker. What’s your relationship with them?

SH: Canemaker is the biographer of a lot of Disney books, yes, and he was one of the curators of a touring animation show I did a few years ago. There was a catalogue that a couple of things came out of and that’s how I met him, through that show. It was toured by the Museum of Modern Art, around 2000. Mario? Mario was curating an issue of Visionaire and asked me to contribute to it. He has one of my pieces...

DMD: He’s quite a big art collector, isn’t he?

SH: He is, absolutely. He’s got a very good collection. Actually a lot of photographers buy the paintings - I’ve traded work with Larry Clark. It seems to be that particular style, the gouache portraits, that has a resonance with photographers.

DMD: It’s an interesting parallel to sketch, definitely. I think I first came across your work through your ‘teenagers’ series...

SH: They’ve been going for ten years now, maybe longer. I think I first showed them at the ICA in 1997, as part of the Spoilt Children conference. Initially I thought about doing maybe five or ten and then I decided it was an interesting series to continue - maybe I’d do fifty. And it’s probably about 150 now, I probably do a couple a year. A lot of them are subjects that I’ve repeatedly painted from when they were very young, so it’s been interesting to see how they’ve developed as people. In fact I just had an email out of the blue from a girl I painted over ten years ago; she’s now 24 and I painted her maybe three or four times from when she was fourteen. She wants to sit again, so that’s gonna be interesting.

DMD: How do you find your subjects? Do you street cast them?

SH: I very rarely do that. Usually they’re friends’ kids or neighbours...

DMD: Let’s talk about Ruby Blue, Róisín Murphy’s debut solo record. I think what’s interesting about that project was that everything gelled as a complete package. To me, those pictures you did are inseparable from the music.  And it was such an innovative album, it kind of slipped under the radar but in 20 years time I think it will be referenced as benchmark work...

SH: Songs like Ramalama (Bang Bang) are still getting loads of play and requests for soundtracks...

DMD: How involved did you get in that collaboration, how did it work? Did you meet Róisín through this project?

SH: No, I’d already met her before, I did a portrait of her which was actually nothing like the Sequins paintings. That particular series started off with one picture which was possibly going to be the album sleeve and she decided, with Matthew [Herbert, the record’s producer] to release the record in three parts on vinyl before CD. I ended up having to do three bloody Sequins paintings and it was very complex - it’s almost like sewing them on because they’re all hand-painted. I think a lot of people sometimes see the work, particularly the goache paintings, and don’t appreciate that they’re quite large. Sometimes people think they might be computer generated. But in the flesh they have a completely different feel - it’s a lot of work. Sequins became the theme, much to my, er, delight. [Laughs]. The sittings and all of the visual side is really from just playing around...

DMD: Did you hear it before you started working on the visuals?

SH: I heard most of it. I think in the end we did three 12”s, the album and two further singles, one of which was an oil painting. And the one for Sew Into You was like an Indian outfit...

DMD: It really dovetails. The compositions and poses you used seems to mirror the structure of Matthew’s production. 

SH: There’s an abstract quality I think, just because of the nature of sequins, the way they fall and the colour and the shadow. The poses definitely reflected that too, a little bit more angular, a little bit more arch.  Non-glamourous in a way. It was quite brave the way she approached it, especially for her first solo album. 

DMD: The images also ended up on t-shirts by Korean label Lone Costume. Did they approach you directly?

SH: Yeah, he actually approached me a couple of years before. We did a line of the teenage portraits, which I think must’ve been successful for him to ask again.

DMD: What was it that motivated your teenagers series? What is it you identify with?

SH: I suppose to start with where it comes from is that fact that in teenagers you see things of yourself. It brings back memories of your own childhood, your own growing up, people that you knew. In a way it was more interesting for me to relate to people like that because it helped me to focus on other things I wanted to remember. We were talking earlier about the nostalgic thing - it’s not as much about wanting to curate or preserve something, it’s about taking the essence of something and explore it in a different way, giving it its own life outside of the memory of it. With them, the thing that’s infectious is that they bring themselves to the shoot. There’s no brief, no styling, they are who they are and their attitude is very natural. I always compare it with a trip to the dentist - it’s sort of a painful process but it’s kind of a necessity. [Laughs]. Usually if they like the painting, they’ll come back and do another. But you get to a point where if they don’t like the way they look in it, it’s the end of the relationship. You get a lot more honesty - the older generations have learnt a way of presenting themselves, whereas teenagers are still exploring that.

DMD: Looking over your work as a whole, beyond the teenage, would you say fundamentally you’re interested in notions of identity?

SH: I like the idea but it varies from project to project to be honest. The most recent body of work has been There for the Grace of God, about failed actors. I’m becoming more and more interested in the idea of failure, and the great things that go along with failure. The negative things that success brings are often overlooked, whereas failure can create great character traits and great strength. The series of actors were ones that never made it, but also they kind of look familiar - maybe like another actor or someone you might know. They have a great dignity and there’s something about a dream that comes across in their expressions or how they look - you kind of feel if they did become famous that part of their innocence would be lost. In the same way that the teenagers portray something honest, I think that’s a very honest state, when you still dream, you still have this desire, ambition but you haven’t tasted success. Taste success and it changes people a lot of the time. I think that’s more interesting. I kind of got a little obsessed with it, when the olympics were on I started really looking at the runners that would finish last to see how they were behaving, really empathising with them that they got so close to this incredible situation but the camera’s already moved away! Anyhow, I first showed four of these pictures in Paris, in a show about celebrity. The curator wanted to show some of the Róisín pictures and maybe one of the Kylie paintings I did years ago, and it kind of sparked the notion of doing something anti-that. Then I started showing more and putting actors into imaginary film sets...

DMD: Those were some of the pieces you showed in Amsterdam?

SH: Yes, that’s right, for Gallant Company. They all kind of have a ‘fall off’ to the right or the left, with the picture looking as if it is a set. What I was going to say was that the second time I showed them, we had them all lined-up as a kind of rogues gallery - all the spotlights were shining on them and yet somehow it didn’t look right. So we trained the lights to shine between the pictures - even at this stage they weren’t getting their moment in the spotlight. [Laughs].

DMD: Celebrity is of course a different approach. You’re known for painting Kylie too, as you’ve mentioned...

SH: When I was doing the Johnny Pumpkin film, she was one of the voice-overs. So that’s how I met her. Then at that same time she was doing the Booth-Clibborn Kylie book, I guess it was a relaunch of her career by approaching lots of different artists to do images of her. I remember the animators at the office were obsessed with her so it was kind of a reaction against that, I liked the idea of painting her as a little boy. When I’d finished it I thought ‘shit, she won’t go for this’. So I called up Will Baker and said ‘can I send it to you before I show it to her?’ He loved it, but in the meantime I’d done another portrait which was more conventional. She ended up liking both and bought them - probably just for no-one else to have a painting of her as a little boy hanging on their wall. [Laughs].

DMD: Can we talk about the Little Red Riding Hood pictures you showed at Riflemaker. It was about twelve years ago you originally did those and only recently they got shown in the UK...

SH: 1997, yes. It’s a little bit like the Benjamin Button story by F Scott Fitzgerald - what that was about was comparing children with old people. I had a very good relationship with my grandmothers when I was growing up, and there were a lot of similarities that we shared above my parents. If you take the extremes - old people pushed around in wheelchairs, children in prams. Both wet the bed, both patronised by parents. That was the centre of the idea and it was really looking at notions around the story - the main painting of Red Riding Hood with the wolf foetus growing inside her, one of her arms being prosthetic where she’s obviously lost it when shagging the wolf or something. [Laughs]. There was a whole series of those paintings in quite a graphic style...

DMD: Completely. I wanted to bring that up, the stylistic difference to your more recent work...

SH: A lot of those kind of paintings at that time had a different approach. It just gives me a different narrative limb to work with, not so literal.

DMD: Did you ever get the feeling that they were controversial? You know how people are quick to jump on these things...

SH: I had a call from The Guardian’s women’s page at the time, on a witch hunt, but she hadn’t even read the text or realised it was Red Riding Hood. Then she kind of lost interest. I’m just having this problem at the moment, actually, with this Golly painting that was actually done in 2003. It was going to be shown at Riflemaker, but it just kind of seems to create this controversy around it. When I made it, it was purely a nostalgic thing for me - it was part of my cultural upbringing and it never had any of those connotations, I didn’t even think about it. But now it’s got this other interest I feel like I don’t want to show it, that I’d be guilty of contextualising it or putting it into an environment that’s unnatural. The Red Riding Hood paintings were never shown here probably for similar reasons - they were shown in America and in Japan, but then Riflemaker had this show Voodoo and the curator remembered the works and liked them. It was a great show, really intelligently curated with real depth. A couple of years ago, a magazine from Bucharest contacted me, they wanted to republish the images and even put one on the cover. It’s almost like effect has dulled with time, that it’s become more ‘acceptable’ somehow. I find it funny that people are interested again.

DMD: You have a really strong relationship with video too...

SH: I’ve always done film, as long as I’ve painted - even cheap videos. I’m just finishing off a short film which is about twenty minutes, 35mm. I wrote the script and it’s the first time I’ve really worked with actors - Tamzin Merchant, who was in Pride & Prejudice with Keira Knightley, she’s great, then I used two completely unknowns.

DMD: Film is very special in that you can create a world with it, whereas a painting is more anchored to offering an experience. How do you see it all? And through doing music videos for Kanye West and Róisín, do you think you’re making your practice more ‘pop’?

SH: Well first of all it gets me out of the house and gets me out of my studio! The worst thing about painting is that it’s very solitary - you can go days without seeing or speaking to anyone. I could be lying in my studio dead for weeks before anyone noticed!

DMD: ‘Simon’s not answering his phone...’

SH: ‘His message inbox is full’. [Laughs]. I love the idea of storytelling, and animation is a great discipline for getting into film. For years I was represented by Nexus, which is a great animation-only production company. Storytelling and narrative you have to be precise with - there’s no editing involved, you have to work it all out on paper first. Which suits me, as an artist. Getting into film was the next step really because I wanted to bring some of the my interests and influences into film and see what they looked like. Videos have been a great way of trying creative things out - I don’t do that many, two or three a year perhaps and they often come from close collaborations with people I know, like Devendra Banhart. That we talked about as I’d known him for a long time. And Róisín too, with hers she had huge imput. Kanye’s video we’d talked about for a year and it went through four or five different tracks on his last album before we did it. 

DMD: That one particularly captured the imagination, I think. And introduced you to a broader audience.

SH: It was very exciting, to be part of that. He’s very focused and I think I first met him about a year and a half ago. I ended up designing his tour, doing the stage set and the costumes, which is something I’d never done before. It’s great when someone has confidence - they see something in your work and you get new opportunities; it doesn’t matter if you’ve not done it before. That happens more in America, I think. That’s one of the reasons I left England for New York in the early 90’s.

DMD: Did your perspective change when you moved back to London?

SH: I came back with a lot more ambition and energy to do things for myself. That’s when I started publishing magazines and trying to find like minded people to create some sort of group of people with the same objective. But that’s a lot of hard work and it’s very easy to get sucked into organising other people’s lives. You start to forget about your own work and I think for four or five years that was happening too much.

DMD: Were you always drawing as a child?

SH: Yeah, always drawing. I’m an only child and my parents moved around a lot - I think I had eleven or twelve schools? So I had to be kind of self-reliant, getting inside your own head. Sometimes I talk to people who have brothers and sisters and there’s a little envy but really there’s good and bad with both. 

DMD: What about your future plans?

SH: Well I’ve wanted to work with club kids ever since doing the Movie Star video, which was a kind of John Waters-y homage. I think they have so much talent, they are works of art. Obviously I was aware of people like Leigh Bowery and Divine, all that kind of culture, but I’ve never really seen it done in an iconic way which really focuses on creativity. You see pictures of club kids, but it’s usually snaps, party pictures, in the back of magazines. I really want to take what they’ve done and create something more dynamic by doing a series of paintings, maybe even try and help them explore their worlds a bit further, because painting can obviously do that. As long as there’s no sequins!

DMD.

Henwood: Paintings and Films 1988-2008 is published by Stephane Simoens Editions.