Doug Campbell: B-movie incantations

Doug Campbell.
Photo courtesy of Janice Hathaway 

Doug Campbell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he still lives. He is an artist who works primarily in collage. When he was a child he discovered the word ‘surrealist’ in a science fiction novel and then was given a small book of surrealist paintings. This was the first step in an adventure that continues until this day. He has an ongoing engagement with the international surrealist movement through correspondence, collective games, and contributions to publications and group shows. 

When did you become interested in art and when did you start making art? At what point did you become acquainted with surrealism?

I don’t remember ever not being interested in art, in the widest sense, from my first picture books and comics onwards. I drew obsessively as a kid, grew up making and painting models and graduated into making posters for gigs as a teen and an adult. All this in spite of bad experiences at school, being told off for talking back to art teachers and having my work torn up in front of the class. Anything I know about composition, I picked up from Marvel comics, paperback covers and movie posters. It always mattered.

I first encountered the word ‘surrealist’ in a science fiction novel as a kid. I asked my parents what it meant and was shown a little book of paintings that fascinated me. Surrealism by Alfred Schmeller (1956), part of the Methuen ‘Movements in Modern Art’ series. 24 colour plates, with Magritte, Tanguy, lots of Ernst. I still have it.

Phantoms of regrettable incidents, 2025 

What is your technique in making collages? Do you prefer analogue to digital?

Most of my work is analogue. I buy second-hand books from local charity shops, harvest images that seem to me to have some kind of magic, and combine them using scissors, glue and scalpel. Final assembly of a collage usually takes just an afternoon. I work intuitively, guided by colour, texture, lighting and composition. I imagine the process as something like creating a toy theatre or a doll’s house. I find the constraints imposed by found source material productive. They force me to discover scenes that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Any symbolism is purely unconscious. The title comes last, suggested by the completed picture. I welcome other people’s interpretations of my imagery, though these are very rarely offered. When it happens, it’s like a tarot reading, something to be contemplated.

I have made digital collages occasionally, but it’s an entirely different experience. You can call up any image you can think of from the internet, so that sense of discovery isn’t there. There is the temptation to indulge rather obvious fantasies of one kind or another, or to create didactic cartoon imagery.

You are creating a seemingly ongoing collage novel called The Cabinet of Major Weir, which is online. How did this originate? I assume Ernst’s collage novels were an influence?

I discovered Ernst’s The Hundred Headless Woman in the university library, and was transfixed. I know people love the antique cross-hatched texture of the prints Ernst worked with, but I was thrilled by  the dynamic energy they derived from the pulp fiction that they illustrated. Heroes escape, lovers embrace, villains gloat. Action-packed romance at every turn. Here was a narrative language I recognised, but unmoored from its storylines  to express totally new mysteries with the same urgent, compelling power. I try to tap into that energy using modern source material. 

The fourth wall, 2025

When I first started making collage, it was a slow, uncertain process. I assembled perhaps half a dozen pieces over a couple of decades. Then, in 2017, I participated in the Archaeology of Hope, an extended surrealist game instigated by Merl Fluin and Paul Cowdell. It’s a long story, but I committed to creating an entire deck of collaged playing cards over four days and hit the charity shops for sourcebooks. I had previously been inhibited about cutting up books, but here was an inexhaustible supply of modern imagery at throwaway prices. Crucially, the pressure of working to a specific constraint suddenly made everything very easy, and I swiftly completed the deck.

This suggested the idea of adopting the collage novel as a model for a creative game: I committed myself to produce a collage every week, to be shared on the same day like an episode of a TV series. The process quickly became a routine part of my week, and I’ve been doing it ever since. The activity is something I look forward to, perhaps even therapeutic. The completion of a picture delivers the satisfaction of a solved puzzle, and I’m usually surprised by the final image. Repetition makes it easier to get into the creative headspace. It has been suggested to me that this repeated practice could be seen as a form of ritual magic. I hadn’t ever thought of it that way, but then all I would ever want from magic is to see into other worlds and dimensions, so there’s that.

The series is divided into fifty-episode ‘novels’. Fifty is an arbitrary number, but I find each novel still feels like a new start under a new title. There is no through-plot in the series beyond whatever is happening in my unconscious, but certain archetypal figures and environments seem to recur. In retrospect, I can sometimes see the impact of events in my day-to-day life. Major Weir himself is a legend of my home town, a historic figure executed for witchcraft. He is supposed to haunt the streets at night, in a coach drawn by headless horse, and driven by a headless horseman.

To charm a salamander, 2025

You seem to have a great interest in horror movies – when did this start?

I encountered the imagery of horror movies long before the films themselves, through pop culture things like Scooby-Doo cartoons, Aurora ‘Glow in the Dark’ models, Topps bubble gum cards and so on. I was a sixties monster kid, and I loved it all. The films themselves were shown rarely and late at night, so it was a very long process of discovery. In the era before digital media, these were holy relics, dead sea scrolls. Finally getting to see a revival of the original King Kong in our local Deco picture palace was a religious experience. Discovering films of this kind has never lost its magic, and I have an extensive library of the works of Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Paul Naschy and many others. Conventional art house cinema often seems timid by comparison, though I love the films of Fellini, Ken Russell, and David Lynch, along with contemporary directors like Peter Strickland and Bertrand Mandico and many others who sit outside of genres.

Of course, horror contains multiple sub-genres, and for me it is the gothic, fairy tale aspect that appeals. It’s a world in which the irrational rules, and imagination has free rein. I have no interest in grimly realistic portrayals of serial killers. That’s just the daily news, everyday misogyny and abuse, usually served up with the message that we need trigger-happy rogue cops to save us all.

I believe you also have an admiration for HP Lovecraft. Could you tell us more about that?

Last year, I was at the biannual Necronomicon fan convention in Lovecraft’s home town  of Providence. I found myself at Lovecraft’s graveside explaining to a couple of strangers how my dad had introduced me to his stories when I was ten, and how great it had been to encounter a writer even more neurotic than I was. Telling the story there and then was a strange, emotional moment. I’d never really put it all together before. I was a very anxious, fearful kid, and HPL really helped me come to terms with the monsters under my bed. I think it’s significant that much of Lovecraft’s imagery and plotting came directly out of his dreams. That gives them a tremendous power.

Of course, as everyone knows, Lovecraft was an awful racist, and it’s important to face that honestly where it comes out in his writing. However, I really don’t think his racism is the central point of his work, nor do I think that’s what draws people to it. For me, it is to do with feeling an outsider in a largely incomprehensible and indifferent world, where even your own identity may be in question. All sorts of people can relate to that, and I think the diversity of an event like Necronomicon tends to bear that out.

The fiery angel, 2025

What is your opinion of the situation of contemporary surrealism in general, and of British surrealism in particular?

I think there are an awful lot of misconceptions about what surrealism actually is, but despite all that, there are still lots of surrealists around the world working with the ideas and methods, and developing them in ways that are interesting. I think the idea of multiple ‘surrealisms’ is useful here. These groups and individuals are not homogeneous and certainly don’t always agree with each other. For example, surrealism includes both anarchists and trotskyists, militant atheists and pagan witches and so on.

We seem to be living through a moment in which surrealism and surrealists are academically respectable, with major retrospective exhibitions and a lot of books coming out. These phenomena are not in themselves surrealist, and this will pass, but I’m sure more people will be drawn into surrealist activities as a result. 

In terms of Britain, the Leeds Surrealist group have been active since the 1990s. Franklin Rosemont put me in touch with the group, I got to know them and participated in a number of their games and activities. Through this, I learned a lot about what surrealism is and how it is practised, and have met many other surrealists. We’ve certainly had our differences, but I think their surrealist practice is exemplary, and their journals are well worth picking up.

There is a long running network of surrealists in Wales, documented in John Richardson’s regular pamphlet ‘Once Upon a Tomorrow/Un Tro Yfory’ and a couple of lavish books by Jean Bonnin. More recently, the Surrealerpool group has emerged in Liverpool and have put out a number of issues of their beautiful magazine ‘Patastrophe. In Scotland, there is now an Edinburgh feminist surrealist group ‘The Debutante’, who produce a fine critical and theoretical magazine of that title. Just last year, a new group in Lancaster produced a fanzine Vile Bird. The line continues, and beyond these groups there are individual practitioners, writers and academics too numerous to mention.

At the appointed hour, 2025

The French poet Lucien Suel, in an interview, once said something to the effect that was a direct line from Dadaism through to near-contemporary movements, such as Situationism, Pop Art, Fluxus and Punk, whereas surrealism was a sort of deviation. What is your opinion of this?

You can absolutely draw lines between these movements, though I don’t think it’s a linear progression. Punk was massively important to me, and I came to the situationists through that, though ultimately came to feel that what I valued in situationist writings was already there in the surrealists. I think perhaps the distinction is that surrealism defined itself in terms of a genealogy running all the way back to roots in primordial myth, whereas the other tendencies were very much about the new, and the modern industrial era.

Jeff Keen was a British film maker, artist and poet who was tremendously influenced by surrealism, but also by pop and outsider art. He is regarded, quite rightly, as one of the top counterculture figures from the 1960s-1970s, yet he is still relatively unknown. What is your opinion of his work? 

I’m a huge fan. I first encountered his work on UK TV in the 1980s, a documentary including a generous selection of clips and complete films. My recollection is that it was late night, after the pub. I was absolutely awestruck. The richly layered images of the earlier films, and the futuristic blasts of animated scribbles and collage that followed. Much of the experimental film around back then was slow, minimal, mannered, and often more than a little boring. Keen’s work was nothing like that. A blazing, unstoppable creative energy. Short, intense glimpses of a world buzzing with imagination, colour and humour, often very black humour. Imagery from science fiction and horror, pinups and comics. My kind of stuff. I instantly fell in love with it all.

Unfortunately, pre-internet, I could find no way to follow up on this experience, even with access to a university library. I just had a name, and this incandescent, tantalising memory. It was more than a decade before I could start to put the pieces together. The massive Jeff Keen BFI box set GAZWRX in 2000 was a revelation. Looking back, I can see parallels with New York underground filmmakers like Jack Smith and Ira Cohen who were his contemporaries, and I believe he was every bit their equal and then some. He was producing this magical work out of junk harvested from his immediate environment and working with family and friends. Similar to what was happening over the Atlantic in that way, but distinctively English, coming out of  Keen’s home town of Brighton and the pop culture of his place and time. In 2023, I was very fortunate to be able to attend the GAZENTENARY celebration of Keen’s centenary in Brighton, see his film Mad Love projected, and meet with some of his circle, including his daughter Stella Star, now the custodian of his archive. I acquired an original Jeff Keen drawing, which will always have a place of honour in my home. An inspiration.

Translucent capes flap furiously, 2025

What is the contemporary arts scene like in Scotland?

I’m not really a part of it, except as a punter. I didn’t go to art school, and I don’t have a gallery or an agent. My activities are fairly solitary. I’ve had work exhibited in Egypt, France and the US, but never in my own town and always by surrealist groups. Scotland is a small country, but there seems to be quite a lot going on, particularly in performance. I think there’s been a sharp increase in activity since the Covid lockdown. People seem much more keen to get out there and do things!

A couple of us had a conversation on Facebook a short while back about ‘recognition’ – what constitutes ‘recognition’ and when an artist is referred to as being recognised, from whence that ‘recognition’ is coming – and does it have any validly.

I saw a presentation by the curators of the recent Tate ‘Surrealism Beyond Borders’ show, which was revealing in terms of how this all works. For that exhibition, they weren’t able to consider anything that hadn’t been exhibited before, and had arrived at an effective cut-off date of about 1980. They were queried about the latter, but didn’t seem to have an answer, though it is a truism that artists are often only ’recognised’ after they’re dead. One thinks of predators that can only see things that are moving. Perhaps curators can only see things after they have stopped.

Season of the wild hunt, 2025

I think there’s a kind of institutional ecology involving art dealers and academics and their agendas that would take a team of anthropologists to analyse properly. In my experience, individual dealers and academics genuinely love the work that moves them, but that’s not how the business works and it’s not how the universities work. In practical terms, I think most people can recognise the marvellous when they see it, and that’s actually what matters.

Are you working on any projects at the moment, despite The Cabinet of Major Weir?

I have vague intentions of putting out book of my work, but when it comes down to it, creating new collages always seems more appealing than wrestling with self publishing!

I’m part of La Sirena, an international group of surrealists who have been meeting online since lockdown to play surrealist games, documented on our website. We’ve participated in surrealist events in Cairo, Alabama and at the Maison Breton in Saint Cirque LaPopie and have a few more projects in development. I find travelling to meet and collaborate with surrealists in other parts of the world incredibly rewarding. If anyone out there has an event or a show, I’d love to visit - just get in touch. Surrealism is international or it is nothing.

Apart from that, I’m part of SPG One, a ‘post-punk space rock’ combo playing local pubs and venues. As vocalist, I have been described as providing ‘b-movie incantations’, something that pleased me very much!

Some exhibitions in which Doug Campbell’s work has appeared

Revelación profana, Fundación Eugenio Granell, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2005

The Archaeology of Hope, Shanklin, Isle of Wight, UK, 2017

Surrealism in the Suburbs of Lisbon, Via Aurea Art Gallery, Quinto du Conde, Portugal, 2017

Little Shop of Magic II,  The Potteries, Stoke, UK, 2018

International Exhibition of Surrealism, Cairo, Egypt, 2022

Fresh Dirt ‒ Echoes of Contemporary Surrealism, Birmingham, USA 2024

Echoes Surrealistes Contemporains, Maison Andre Breton, Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France, 2024

This interview originally appeared in The Odd Magazine.  

Manthipe Moila: poetry as language of leaping

Courtesy: Salomè Dubois Han 

Manthipe Moila is from Johannesburg, South Africa, and holds a BA honours degree in English Literature. Her work has appeared in publications such as Tupelo Quarterly, New Contrast, Stirring, A Long House, 20.35 Africa, Agbowó, and Saranac Review. She was a Charles Simic Poetry Contest finalist (Hole in the Head Review) and a Best of the Net Nominee (Hotazel Review). Rootbound is her debut poetry collection and was published by uHlanga in 2025. Manthipe is currently based in Seoul, South Korea.

Your poems are autobiographical in that they draw on your own experiences, from your past in South Africa and your present, adjusting to a new life in South Korea.  What are your thoughts about confessional poetry, and do you prefer such personal poetry to more objective, impersonal work? 

I love confessional poetry – it is the reason why I am enamored with poetry at all. As for objective, impersonal poetry, I’m not sure that I’ve come across much of it. Poetry is art and objective art seems to me a bit paradoxical. As I’ve matured as a reader and writer, I’ve found myself more and more drawn to poetry that plays with language. I think the younger me would was not that attuned to the wonders of form, rhythm, and had a harder time identifying a masterful poetic hand. However, these days, regardless of the subject matter of the poem, I find the poems that take my breath away are the ones that display innovation, evidence that the poet is executing their art masterfully, poems that exist for the love of the medium. 

Some of your poems deal with the trauma of your father leaving your family, and they explore the impact of that trauma on your life. Do you see poetry as a means of ‘healing’? 

I think that poetry, and art in general, can play a role in the healing process but they are not the be-all and end-all of the healing process. I’m no expert, but from what I have gathered healing is complex. At the Open Book Festival this year, something like this question came up and one of the audience members said something along the lines of  ‘art is not therapy. Therapy is therapy.’ I totally agree. Of course, there is art therapy, but putting together a poetry collection, however personal it is, is very different from processing trauma with a licensed professional. Especially because during the editing phase one has to take a step away from the work and then make decisions that best serve the poem, as opposed to decisions that best allow the person to process and move on from their pain. 

Do you see yourself as a poet, a woman poet, or a black woman poet? 

Well, I’m a woman and a black person, which affects my experience of the world, which then has an influence on my art. I believe that identity always has an influence on the work, regardless of how the person making the art feels about categorisation and no matter how ‘neutral’ their identity is deemed to be. 

When did you start writing the poems in Rootbound – while still in South Africa or mainly while overseas? 

I wrote the entirety of the collection while living in South Korea.  I had previously completed a chapbook-length collection while in university, but I wasn’t confident with what I had produced, so I put that away. I moved to Korea straight out of university, in 2018, and by 2019 I had completed another manuscript, which I actually submitted to uHlanga but did not meet the quality standards. After that I took a long break from writing before properly picking it up again, around 2023. From 2023 to 2024 I worked on the manuscript, and it eventually became Rootbound. So, I was writing a bit while in South Africa but since I’ve spent most of my 20s in Korea, that’s where the manuscript was fully developed. 

Apart from the obvious matter of themes, has your shift from South Africa to South Korea affected your writing in any way? 

Living in a foreign country has been quite an experience, equal parts mundane and bizarre. It’s shifted the way I think about the world. It’s also made magical realism or surrealism more appealing to me, and I have a feeling that my next piece of writing will reflect that.  

Your write in the Notes to Rootbound that the collection was inspired by Maneo Mohale’s Everything is a Deathly Flower – in what way was the collection inspired? What poets – South African and otherwise – do you admire and feel inspired by?  

Everything is a Deathly Flower was truly a life-changing book for me. Though the subject matter differs greatly, I think that Rootbound drew a lot from Mohale’s work, something essential that I find hard to put into words. Perhaps it is that Mohale made me want to write and to join the uHlanga family.  In fact, I found Megan Ross’s work had the same effect on me and I admire them both. I also love Safia Elhillo, Sabrina Orah Mark, Sarah Lubala, Safiya Sinclair, Mark Strand, Ilya Kaminsky, Franny Choi – the list goes on. 

I am curious about the experiments with form in some of your poetry – almost like concrete poetry or calligrammes. What inspired this experimentation? 

I think poetry is the language of leaping and I love the notion of poetry as play. I have been and continued to be inspired by many a poet who plays with form – Koleka Putuma, Terrance Hayes, and other poets I have had the pleasure of encountering online. How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes blew my mind and I wanted to try my hand at playing with form similarly. 

Roots are obviously important to you, and in the interview at the book launch at Love Books you mentioned you have many plants at home. But roots transform and grow, they spread, they journey – like lives, thoughts, emotions, words. Could you expand a little on this roots metaphor? 

I first learned about propagation in South Korea after I took an interest in houseplants. I find it fascinating how plants grown in such restrictive conditions can thrive – or at least, live long enough to give their plant parent the impression that they have a green thumb. I also love the fact that certain plants love being rootbound, but others will die if not given more space. Roots are often associated with home, and I wanted to complicate that notion by asking, what happens if one roots elsewhere? Is there a kind of falsehood to that existence or wonder? The roots metaphor is multi-layered though – it could point to identity, language, home, escape, belonging, hope. It’s part of the reason why Rootbound has its title – I love this multiplicity. 

What are your feelings about poetry publishing in South Africa at the moment? What do you see as the challenges and opportunities? 

I’m not sure, to be honest. I feel so far away from home and despite being a South African poet, I don’t feel like my experience is similar to that of poets living there. uHlanga is also an incredible press, but it’s a small one, and so I can speak more comfortably about small, indie publishing versus publishing at large. One of the main challenges is resources – small presses have smaller budgets for things like book promotion, especially in the age of BookTok, where it is often crucial to get copies of books out to people who have reach in the social media book space. As for opportunities, I think I would have to be on the ground to give a more cogent answer for that.

Guided by colours: Robert Roman speaks about Pascal Ulrich

Robert Roman (R) and Pascal Ulrich, Toulouse 2000

Artist and poet Pascal Ulrich was born in Strasbourg in 1964. He started writing poetry at the age of 16 and at 23 he created a small poetry magazine called Dada 64. When he was 25, after a suicide attempt and time spent in a psychiatric hospital, he was given a disability pension and was thereafter able to devote himself to writing and art. Having battled with depression and alcohol problems throughout his life, Ulrich committed suicide in 2009.

Robert Roman is a poet and artist who befriend Ulrich in 1994. After Ulrich’s death he published a biography of him, Pascal Ulrich –  The Lucid Dreamer,  plus several collections of Ulrich’s poems and drawings. In 2014 he formed  the BAKOU 98 association to preserve Ulrich’s work. He  also created a blog devoted to Ulrich’s poetry, art and life.

Painting 2005

When and how did you meet Pascal Ulrich? Had you been aware of his art or poetry before you met him?

Pascal Ulrich wrote me a first letter on June 16, 1994. I received it two days later, directly at my workplace. The letter came with a collage. In his letter, Pascal explained to me that he was contacting me following a request from Patrick Oustric, with whom he had been corresponding for several years. And it turns out that this Patrick Oustric, poet, and great lover of ancient letters, was one of my work colleagues! At that time I had not heard of Pascal Ulrich. I responded very quickly and that’s how our friendship began. We corresponded for fifteen years at the rate of at least one letter per week and we met eight times in Toulouse and once in Strasbourg.

Pascal’s art consisted of ink drawings, mail art, acrylic paintings, murals, and objects. Which did he prefer? I have seen only one or two collages of his – did collage not interest him?

His art has been guided above all by constant evolution and inspiration throughout his experiences and discoveries in his life as a man and as an artist. At first, it was just felt-tip pen drawings on simple sheets of paper or gouache paintings on Canson paper. Then in 1996, he started decorating his envelopes. His first attempts were clumsy because Pascal did not know how to draw. From 1997 his drawings with coloured markers became more beautiful and that is when he found his own style : shapes that snake around multiple heads. This is how his Postal Art began, which he then spread throughout the world.

Markers 2004

Pascal was interested in collage, but to my knowledge he practiced this art very little.

During the summer of 1998, with the multicultural workshop in the port of Kehl, on the French/German border, with a German metal sculptor, he discovered acrylic painting and, on this occasion, took the pseudonym Bakou.

But ultimately it was the technique of coloured felt-tip pens with which he felt truly comfortable. It prevailed through all of his work because Pascal had an innate sense for playing with colours, whether on envelopes or on sheets of different formats.

Pascal’s work could be classified as Art Brut. Did his consider his work as such, or did he not like his work being categorised?

Makers and coloured pencils 2002

Yes, I think that we can describe Pascal’s work as Art Brut Art even if he himself never formulated it that way. Pascal rejected many things : society, family, traditions, having children, celebrating Christmas or birthdays and even the constraints of art galleries. He refused to obey certain rules and therefore he did not appreciate being able to put a label on his back.

His art is figurative – it is always figures – not scenes or landscapes or still life. In that way his work reminds me of Gaston Chaissac – was he influenced by Chaissac at all?

Like Chaissac, Pascal was an autodidact. He had found his style on his own, even if Chaissac had been influenced by Picasso. I think that Pascal was not indifferent to the work of Chaissac, but he also loved Edvard Munch and Hans Arp, whose drawn shapes and colours can also be found in Pascal's drawings.

It seems Pascal did not give titles to his work – is that correct?

On several occasions Pascal gave a title to a drawing or painting, but he wrote the title directly on the work. He also sometimes did it on the envelopes he decorated. In general, though, it was more of a phrase or a sentence than a real title. But he rarely did this throughout his work.

Markers 2008

Pascal was also a very prolific poet. I believe Bukowski was a big influence. What other poets did he enjoy reading?

Pascal drew more than he wrote and perhaps his major fault as a poet was that he was satisfied with the first draft. In fact, Pascal rarely reworked his texts. He read a lot and Bukowski was in his library but he also appreciated Jules Mougin with whom he corresponded for some time, also Armand Olivennes, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Henri Michaux, Allen Ginsberg, Benjamin Péret, Baudelaire, etc.

Pascal was also a publisher, issuing small press books of his own work and others. I am interested in the small poetry journal he started in the late 1980s called Dada 64. Could you tell us something about his publications?

Indeed, in 1987, Pascal published Dada 64, a small poetry magazine, put together by himself and which ran for three issues. Inside, you can find his texts or drawings but also those of Marc Syren, Jacques Lucchesi, Gaston Criel, Marjan or Jacques Canut. Subsequently, with Dada 64 editions, he also published several poetry booklets.

Markers 2005

In 1991 he created Absurde Crépuscule and self-published three booklets.

In 1992, Pascal invented L’ours qui parle  (The Talking Bear), a simple sheet, single-sided, A4 format and photocopied, distributed by post and each time containing two or three poems of his own.

Markers 2006

In 1996 he reintroduced Absurde Crépuscule. This poetic entity was a publishing house until 1998, then a poetry magazine of the same name from 1997, which stopped after three issues.

Finally, at the beginning of 2008, he published Epitaphes, a series of 105 aphorisms and the final collection at Absurde Crépuscule.

Markers 2003

Pascal also loved music, ranging from classical to rock. He was a great lover of bands such as Soft Machine and musicians such as Nick Drake. In one of his final letters, to Bruno Sourdin, he chatted about Syd Barrett. Did he listen to music while he worked? Did he find it inspirational?

Pascal  was an insomniac. In the evening, while his partner slept, he listened to all kinds of music while writing letters or decorating envelopes. This could last most of the night, but he always got up quite early. Pascal had great sensitivity and the music he listened to for hours guided his hand on the paper.

Markers 2000

At one point Pascal was trying to create an arts centre, similar to Warhol’s Factory, but it collapsed. What happened? 

The multicultural workshop in the port of Kehl, in Germany, from July to December 1998, was a great artistic and human experience for Pascal, a great expectation but also a great disappointment. I never knew the end of the story but according to his letters of December 1998 and January 1999, his “associate”, the German metal sculptor, turned out to be a complete bastard. Pascal, being wholly uncompromising and libertarian, could not bear it and therefore immediately abandoned six months of work and hope.

Markers 2001

Pascal did manage to have a few exhibitions outside France – how did those come about?

Pascal exhibited in Cuba, Great Britain, Mexico, Germany, and Brazil, between 1996 and 1999. Apart from the Kehl exhibition in December 1998, where he was present, Pascal never visited the countries where he exhibited. In fact, I know very little about these exhibitions. Concerning the exhibition in Mexico in 1998, I think he was able to participate thanks to Ana, a Mexican violinist friend whom he had met in Strasbourg at the end of 1997 and who had to take some works with her in her suitcase. For the rest, I imagine that his epistolary relationships and the numerous contacts with foreign artists, authors and publishers made his participation in these exhibitions possible.

Pascal had an alcohol problem throughout his life. It started when he was a teenager and  towards the end of his short life he started drinking again, and could become violent when drunk. But how was he like when he was sober?

When I met Pascal for the first time in August 1997, he no longer drank a drop of alcohol following acute pancreatitis contracted in October of the previous year. We then saw each other eight times, and apart from his last visit in May 2008, which ended badly because he was drunk, I was lucky to only know him completely sober. So, most of the time I knew an intelligent, charming, calm, and generous man, curious about everything, mischievous and who had a lot of humour.

Mail art 2001

Since Pascal died, you have been trying to get art museums to take his work, but this has not been successful. Why are museums not interested in his work?

In 2014, I created the BAKOU 98 association whose goal is to make Pascal’s written and pictorial work known and continue. The association’s first action was to try to respect Pascal’s last wishes. Indeed, in his will, he wanted his drawings, paintings, and sculptures to be donated to the city of Strasbourg. Unfortunately, after months of procedures and discussions with the City Hall, they were  not willing to take the Ulrich archive. The reasons given by the cultural director were that it was impossible to follow up on our proposal given the orientations of the municipal collections and the numerous requests made to the city museums.

Mail art 2000

Following this first failure, the association contacted various museums presenting Art Brut. The first was La Collection de l’Art Brut de Lausanne in Switzerland, which very quickly declined our proposal, citing a restricted budget and a limitation of their reserve spaces, forcing them to be very selective regarding the acquisition of new pieces. Second failure.

Mail art 2001

Subsequently, La Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris informed me that it could not accept our donation because it did not have a collection (?). The Musée de la Création Franche in Bègles tells me that it will close its doors for work for at least four years. The Musée d’Art Brut de Montpellier told me that it is in demand from all sides and that due to lack of space it cannot consider the offers proposed to it. However, two years later, the museum accepted a donation of envelopes decorated by Pascal, which they would eventually present during a Postal Art exhibition. That’s it! Pascal Ulrich entered a museum through his Postal Art, but won't his envelopes stay at the bottom of a drawer ?

All the other museums contacted in France: La Fabuloserie in Dicy, the Musée Art et Déchirure in Rouen, the LAM near Lille, the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse and the MIAM in Sète, none of which responded to my emails and messages reminders.

Mail art 1999

You have published a few books of Pascal’s work posthumously. Could you tell us something about it, plus the biography of him that you published?

The first book that I published in my small poetry editions, five years after Pascal's death, was a 360-page colour book dedicated to the man, the poet, and the artist that he was. This biography was published in October 2014 and is entitled Pascal Ulrich – The Lucid Dreamer. We can follow his entire journey from his birth to his death and beyond. The book is embellished with numerous poems, letters, photos, drawings, and paintings, as well as testimonies from people who knew him.

Mail art 1997

Five other books were then published between 2015 and 2022. The first four were collections of poems and aphorisms written by Pascal in 1992, 1995, 1996, 2006 and 2007, in which  urgency, dazzlement, despair, revolt and death coexist, but also passion and love.

The latest collection contains only a series of black and white drawings executed with a felt-tip pen in 2004.

I am a frozen shadow

whose charm is in the fruit

of the melancholy twilight

*

Hello, what a pleasure

Goodbye, what a relief

Farewell, what a fatality

Pascal Ulrich, 1964―2009

Pascal Ulrich in Toulouse, 2005

This interview was first published in The Odd Magazine, in English and French.

Paul Warren: You’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?

Paul Warren is an artist and illustrator with an interest in surrealism and abstract art. He works in a variety of different mediums, including collage. Paul's work has been published by Dumpster Fire Press, The Odd Magazine and Word Vomit Zine.  He has online galleries at Deviant Art and Instagram. He lives in Daventry, England.

You live in the town of Daventry, Northamptonshire, in England. What is the art scene like in England these days? What is the support for visual art? Is there a fair bit of regionalism?

I think the art scene in England is pretty staid these days. It only exist in most people’s lives when Banksy sprays something on a wall somewhere.  All of the big exhibitions are London-based, with a corporate sponsor. From time to time something interesting will pop up in an independent gallery away from the capital. I usually find out about these after the event. National media focus only on the big exhibitions: Monet or Hockney, for example. Living here these things easily pass you by! So yes, I think there is some regionalism. There have been attempts to revive the Art Lab idea in some areas, including Northampton. There are people creating art locally but few opportunities.

Thankfully I have a day job. I would never make a living out of art, wouldn’t want to, it’s far too precarious. I also have the freedom to produce what I want.

When did you first start making art? What artists inspired you when you started out, and what artists inspire you now?

I started making art as a child, drawing mainly. I do remember being obsessed with the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album artwork. I spent virtually an entire school holiday producing Sgt Pepper-inspired drawings and paintings. It was the colour that amazed me. This was the late 70s, early 80s, in Northamptonshire ‒ there didn’t seem to be a lot of colour about then ! At about this time my eyes were opened to abstract art. The art teacher at my high school, I’d have been about 14 , sent me into a storeroom to collect some paintbrushes. On the wall there was a print of ‘Cossacks’ by Kandinsky. That blew me away. I didn’t know art could be like that. The most modern thing I’d seen up until then was a print of Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asniéres’.

The Catch

My intention upon leaving school was to study art, but this didn’t work out and I became disillusioned with art and stopped painting and drawing as I didn’t see the point.

When I was about 19, though, I discovered a copy of Patrick Waldberg’s Surrealism. This had a massive impact on me. This led to discovering Dalí. Dalí was to me, then, the greatest artist ever. I couldn’t get enough of his work.

I started painting surreal landscapes featuring faceless ballerinas, elongated tables, jugglers on stilts, human faces buried in walls, mannequins and of course cypress trees.

This led to me collecting anything I could find on Surrealism. I was also taking an interest in Futurism and Impressionism at that time.

Another chance discovery was Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. I couldn’t believe that book, staggering, full of these images that just threw themselves at you, written by someone who seemingly didn’t care. Major influence. Forty or fifty books in and he’s still having the same impact.  The cut-ups were a revelation. He was a genius with that. There is a richness and beauty to the prose that a lot of people just don’t get.

Through Burroughs I came to the work of Brion Gysin. Incredible talent and who’s heard of him, compared with Burroughs? Very few people.

Another artist whose work means a lot to me is Emmy Bridgwater, the British surrealist. She didn’t produce a huge amount of work but what she did produce was mesmerising. Her painting ‘Night work is about to commence’ is astounding.

Innocence Lost

An artist whom I’ve returned to recently is Stanley Donwood, best known for his work with Radiohead. The work he produced with Thom Yorke in the early 2000s is very inspiring.  It has a questioning, almost anarchic, edge to it. Very powerful work.

I’ve always been influenced by writers. A passage from a book or a lyric from a song often triggers something. Lately this has become more apparent.  For instance I’ve been collaborating with the writer Stephen Michael Whitter, producing the artwork for a new edition of his book Tales Deceptively Honest. The artwork combines images of mainly derelict buildings with Stephen’s text, incorporating drawings, collage and digital artwork.

The book is due to be published by Dumpster Fire Press in November.

And of course I’ve made a couple of pieces based on your work. One of these, ‘Each step backward erases each step taken’, was interesting as it led me on to do a small series of astronaut-based pictures. One of them, ‘Astronaut on a deserted Street’, was used by Ryan Quinn Flanagan for the cover of his recent book Fowler’s Revenge.

I produced a series of paintings heavily influenced by this period under a pseudonym The Watchman. I’d read the Djuna Barnes novel Nightwood and I got the name from the ‘Watchman, what of the night ?’ section of the book. The British surrealist artist Conroy Maddox also used that title for one of his most famous collages, which I later discovered.

The Watchman artwork had titles like ‘Mannequin Genocide’, ‘The Last museum’, ‘The Great Illusion’, ‘Radio Nudes’, ‘The Forgotten season’, and ‘Blood sports in the morning’. The choice of title was very important to me at that time.

You tend to work in collage, but what other mediums do you use? What is your approach to making art?

I am working mainly in collage at the moment, both hand cut and digital. It’s a time-constraint thing as well. For the work I’m producing at the moment collage is the only way to get these ideas out. It’s also allowing me to incorporate text into the artwork, something I’d been trying to do for years.

The purpose of luxury

I have a technique for layering the collages, which combines hand cutting and digital montage, which seems to work well.

I prefer to paint if I have the time. I use acrylic, watercolour, oil, as well as pastels and pencils. When I paint I use very traditional techniques. The ideas tend to come quick, so I tend to work quite fast. I rarely work from sketches, so what you see is, generally, the first idea put down. Not ideal, but I can’t do it any other way.

Some of your artworks comment on political issues, such as the invasion of Ukraine, or on UK politics. What do you see as the role of the artist in today’s society?

This is a fairly recent thing for me. I was appalled by the Ukraine war and initially produced an image of Putin with a clowns nose and hair, with something offensive written across his forehead in Russian. A few people liked this, so I had it made into a T-shirt design and tried to sell it through an online site. The intention was that anything I made would be donated to the Ukraine appeal. I sold a handful of these, then the site took them down. They were inappropriate, apparently.

Rouge

I posted about this on my Facebook page and Mike Zone, who is the editor for Dumpster Fire Press, got in touch. He’d brought one of these T-shirts and was shocked by the site’s action.

He was in the process of putting together a new anthology titled World on Fire and offered to use my Putin artwork. This opened the floodgates for me and I sent Mike god knows how much Putin/Ukraine/anti-monarchy/anti-capitalist artwork.

Most of which appears in the book. The book later became World on Fire: Propagandie ,with proceeds going to the Ukraine appeal. So, a big thanks to Mike for that.

I would hope that any artist is touched by world events such as the war in Ukraine. From my point of view, you’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?

The big figures from the years of punk have either passed on or have gone very quiet. Do you think punk it still relevant today, if not more relevant than ever?

Yes, I think it is still relevant. The ability to shock has largely gone, owing to the fact the world moves on and we’ve seen it all before. But the punk attitude and aesthetic lives on. The music is very relevant, particularly in Britain at the moment. There is a Liverpool-based poetry zine called Word Vomit, which carries on the punk aesthetic. Kate Floss who runs it has been kind enough to accept some of my text-based work. It’s DIY publishing ‒ I love that sort of thing.

Unncessary Atrocities

They do a lot of open-mic nights too. It’s the punk thing of just getting out there and doing it.

The punk aesthetic is something that I looked to last summer, for a series of alternative Queen’s Jubilee ‘stamp’ designs. These were based on a portrait of the Queen, satirical in nature and incorporated cut-up text made from media coverage, song lyrics and TS Eliot, as well as a bit of social comment on my part!

Jamie Reid was the big influence for the idea. Also David King, who did a lot of the artwork for Crass.

I was impressed with your series about the murdered actress Sharon Tate. In a way it reminded me of Warhol’s Monroe portraits, as well as his Death and Disaster series. Was Warhol in any way an influence?

They do share some similarities, not intended though. I’ve been looking at a lot of Eastern European collage and photomontage, notably the Polish artist Janusz Maria Brzeski and his ‘Birth of a Robot’ series. I didn’t realise until I started researching Sharon Tate how iconic her image could be. I say ‘could be’, as it’s been overshadowed by Manson. He took that from her. The series was intended to redress that , to take back her image. There were meant to be 10 or 12 images in the series, but it’s spiralled a bit and at the last count I had 45 pieces.

What is your opinion of outsider art? I admire outsider art tremendously, but I can’t help but feel it is becoming a sort of style.

It’s becoming big business. The Tate had a big outsider art exhibition a while back. Scottie Wilson,  the surrealist, is a good example of an outsider being brought into the mainstream, setting him up with an exhibition in a gallery and while the show was going on he was selling his artwork outside a pub around the corner for the price of a pint! Wilson had been selling his art from the back of a van before that.

Roland Penrose tried to bring him into the surrealist fold, but Wilson was treading his own path. That’s often the case with outsider art ‒ by its nature it’s different, often idiosyncratic, and generally has little commercial appeal, well, at least at the time it’s being produced.

Awkward Continents

I believe you are working with Mike Zone on a collaborative novel. Can you tell us a bit about this?

Yes, it’s to be called Dead Star: Control.  The initial inspiration was the Sharon Tate artwork we discussed earlier.  Obviously I can’t say too much at this point about the plot except that it’s a Burroughsian /Philip K Dick sci-fi thing that explores a lot of the themes surrounding the Tate murder. Mk Ultra, conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. Some of the Tate artwork will be in the book. It’s interesting, as when this idea developed, the artwork was influenced by the plot and vice versa. That’s what I find exciting ‒ the role chance plays in the process. Having a loose idea and just seeing where it leads.

Dead Star should see the light of day later this year or 2024.

We’ve collaborated before on Mike’s chapbook Fuck You: A Fucking Poetry Chap. That was great fun. The illustrations weaved around Mike’s text. It seemed to work quite well.

I also provided the Cover artwork for Mike’s latest book, Wonderful Turbulence.

Another book project that I worked on was a collaboration with both Mike and the poet Shannon Lynette, titled Razorville.

It was really interesting to see how the words and images ‘collided’ as the book developed: text influencing artwork, artwork influencing text.

Razorville was published earlier this year by Dumpster Fire Press.

Milk and Honey

What do you see as the future of art in England?

Interesting question. I’m not seeing anything inspiring coming out of the mainstream art world. The problem is it’s all about sales and profit. Everything I see that is inspiring, a little bit different, is online. There are a lot of people like myself who need to create art ‒ it’s about searching for something different. I don’t really take an interest in contemporary art anymore. Everything is too commercial, too safe, too nice.

Where’s the fun in that?

This interview originally appeared in The Odd Magazine.