Figuring out how to give a logic to his figures is a part of the work that Spiers savors. The exaggerated limbs, the exploded anatomy. The musculature that can appear ballooning in a bicep but taught as piano wire at the tendons. It serves to reinforce this moment of transformation that the figure is experiencing, that we experience vicariously.
Spiers says, “Often I’m thinking about the problem of articulating a surface in such a way that it forces the eye to move over the painting in a particular way. The eye can get blocked at junctions: elbows, knees, ankles, etc. So I look for paths that run across the form in order to connect them. I often deviate from anatomical accuracy in order to generate compositional tension. There are also details that command the eye with psycho(sexual)
compulsion: lips, ears, nipples, fingertips, eyes etc. I will use the bulges and indentations of musculature as an inflection point to modulate the impact of those signifiers.”
His process is a mix of staying true to the initial inspiration as described above and leaving room for improvisation. There is a danger in letting improvisation take hold. It is required for a work to feel fresh. To avoid, as he has described, tediousness. Too much improvisation and the work loses specificity. Too little and it becomes academic.
He cites his 2024 work “The Sunbather.” It started with a clear idea. The dollish quality of the face. The arms and length of the arms, the angle at the hips. But it took him a lot of work to reach the result. Figuring out the chest, the next, the belly. Working with the anatomy, his taste, lots of trial and error.
He says, “I think leaving just the right amount of room for improvisation is something I’m getting better at. Too little and my solutions become pedestrian, too much and there is a danger of breaking the thread of believability that ties the viewer to the work.”
Spiers is hesitant to speculate much over the inspirations and references that go into his work. Much of what we see that leaves his studio has been combed through, combined, re-combined, and filtered based on his particular instincts and taste.
However, it’s hard to look at his work and not see it in conversation with Modernism and the Surrealists. A particularly weighty inflection point in terms of culture and history. A time when the world short-circuited, and a new order began. The impossible made real such that it all seems mundane and quaint from our perspective. A world at war, a world at peace, economic upheaval, a popular yearning for change.
For Spiers, the Modernists inspire making connections. Speculation, confrontation, being at ease with ambiguity. The tension between the resolved and the unresolved, and the hard work to make that dissonance part of the overall work without turning sour.
“I love the challenge of superimposing logic, order, and resolution over a proposition that seems to reject the rational and systematic. Maybe it’s this attempt at unifying contradictory forces that helps create the dynamic of tension and release that animates my work,” he says.
I DON’T REGARD A PAINTING OF MINE AS A SUCCESS IF I STRUGGLE TO EMPATHIZE WITH THE CHARACTER I’VE CREATED.”
But it’s not just the Modernists. His influences span Tarantino, David Lynch, Sonic Youth, Caravaggio, English Classical, American jazz, Derek Jarmen, Steven Spielberg.
He recalls David Lynch’s The Elephant Man—a viewing in his ancient youth. How he was inconsolable after watching the tragedy of Joseph Merrick. From that he learned something about form and content. The complex and contradictory relationship between the two. The power of counterpoint. How to use it to achieve balance. He brings up David Cronenberg’s Existenz. The way the film shows landscape, buildings, and bodies bleed into each other. The dissolution of apartness and the elimination of differences.
“Making connections is the viewers’ job,” he says. “It’s hard work and we shy away from that. But once we have surrendered to the task, we expand and become part of something larger.” *
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 73. The full issue is available here in print!
