David Haines is one of a kind. The British visual artist (originally from Nottingham, England) makes hyper realistic drawings and videos. He has lived in Amsterdam for almost a decade. In his studio above the gallery in Amsterdam’s New Art Space, a huge drawing leans against the wall. It must be about two meters wide. It’s so precisely drawn that it looks like a black and white photograph.

Haines has just finished the drawing ‘Radiant Bodies’. It took him about a year. “It’s so delicate. It’s aquarelle paper. One day, somebody called me to warn me about a water leak. I rushed to my studio. And thank god I was in time. It would have been a disaster if it had been destroyed. It takes so much time to make this.”

The immense drawing shows a ‘scally’ boy, moving in the night on the Waterlooplein. Beer cans at his feet. Dancing, shaking or perhaps moving, towards a religious building. Scally boys, dressed in Adidas, Burberry and Nike are Haines’ main protagonists in his drawings and paintings. His models come from various sources, from professionals to rent boys found online. Creating compositions based on images from mass media, social networking sites and obscure Internet memes, he makes photographs and then drawings based on this information. ~~His drawings are more than just an exercise in craftsmanship; it’s a visual language.~~

“It interests me that parts of the gay world seek to mimic ‘straight’ (dress)codes. He likes football, he drinks beer and wears sport-type clothes. This type of ‘scally’ has also been fetishized by the gay world, copied and changed, creating a new language. You find examples of it all over the Internet. That’s my starting point. I’m interested in how French philosopher Deleuze wrote about a minor language destabilizing a major one, not through stating its difference but by using it, undermining it. In this sense ~~the drawings are not protests but they seek to create a new visual vocabulary”.~~

David Haines collected a set of images for Mimik that deeply affect his work and persona. It’s a journey through time and emotions. From pure hate against Ugandan politician Rebecca Kadaga to the tiny environments created by the famous outsider artist Hendry Darger.

AB: Did you find it easy to collect the images?

“Yes, it was pretty easy. I live in a world of images. The most difficult part was to be honest but not too personal in terms of family and emotion. I also picked images that really irritated me. That is emotion. And inspiration.”

Film ‘Weekend’

“I’ve never seen a film that encapsulated my life so much like Weekend does. It’s so convincingly real. Although nothing really happens. The still is the goodbye scene. In a kind of voyeuristic way you look through a fence, it’s just so extremely believable. It’s shot through a fence; you are a voyeur, you struggle to hear the actors; it’s just so extremely real.
~~What interests me about the characters in the film Weekend is that they encapsulate a kind of duality I recognize in many gay guys I know, including myself.~~
On the one hand there is a desire for conventionality, fitting into the world and being accepted, on the other there is an irritation that this never fully happens coupled with a ‘fuck you’ desire for protest. It’s a kind of balancing act.

This scene was filmed on Nottingham train station. This is where I come from. This is the train station where I made lots of melancholic paintings when I was eighteen, a bit lonely and at art school. Later when I moved to London, it was still a melancholic place. It’s a place that I associate with sadness, leaving. It’s not a very beautiful spot but it’s an important image. It’s what life is like. It’s not that it’s terrible. But it’s just so extremely recognizable, and a bit sad.”

Book of pictures (1998- present)

“The next thing I wanted to show is something of my own. This is what I call the ‘Book of Pictures’. It’s something I started collecting years ago. It’s a kind of atlas made up of images I have collected from magazines and on line.
~~Through printing them out they become tangible, through pasting them into this book they become mine, they become my language.~~
I started collecting them in 1998 and as it developed it became more complex.”

If you look closely you can see some of the inspiration for Haines’s work.

“They can come from anywhere. For instance a gruesome picture from a Polish fetish-site is combined with a far more prosaic image of a child playing with slime. The language builds in this way. It’s a kind of poetry. The flowers stuck in someone’s arse came from this site and then after seeing that image in the context of this book something else happened. I realised – One eats, one shits and flowers grow in shit. So you can see it as a machine of perpetual motion. And in the end the whole concept ended up in the large drawing ‘Against Entropy’ .
~~I’m basically just gathering language together.~~
You take something from this and from this and from this and from this and you find it coming back and coming back and coming back. You can’t do this on your computer really. It’s not the same. You don’t have the physical relationship to it. This is however a book of references, I don’t see it as a sketchbook.”

For a lot of drawings, Haines uses images he finds online.

“The most fascinating site I found is a polish fetish website. I guess it’s meant for gay men though it is clear that it is made by straight guys. It certainly contains elements of domination and submission but I wouldn’t say that it is necessarily worked out. ~~What I find interesting is that a group of straight guys have interpreted the codes of the gay world and got it wrong, in so doing they have created a kind of hybrid.~~
For example their shoes are wrong. There is no way that gay guys would wear those! What I love about this is that it creates a new, uncanny language – at once definable and yet not. But I can’t do anything with it because it already too powerful. I have made some paintings by combining some of the images but I can’t take it further. Funnily enough, on one of their sister sites, which is more about hazing, I found two of my drawings posted. Very odd. It’s a neat little circle!

Kate Bush ‘The Dreaming’ (1982)

“This is the album cover of my absolute heroine. Kate Bush. I don’t know what it is but a lot of people don’t really like her. When I was twelve this album, The Dreaming, was released and I bought it. I still find it fascinating. It’s like a labyrinth of meanings and sounds. Just utter recording genius. Despite her recordings and the influence she has had on a whole generation of recording artists there still seems something uncool about her! Maybe she is too dramatic. But I must be honest in this interview. This is in my opinion the greatest album ever made. I listen to her all the time. On her album ‘Ariel’, there is a bit where she sings ‘It’s gonna be so good now, it’s gonna be so good”, I listen to that when I start a drawing, it’s like a superstition. ~~I guess I feel I need that confidence when starting something which is going to take a year to finish.”~~

Pope Benedict XVI meeting Rebecca Kadaga (2012)

“This is pure hate, actually. You see the pope, but it’s all about the woman, Rebecca Kadaga, a Ugandan politician. The same week she was blessed by the pope, she was forcing a bill through the parliament to have a death penalty for gay men in Uganda. This actually is a picture that was posted on Facebook. ~~Now with Internet you can make a direct protest against people like this.~~
It kind of has a positive end to it I guess, because the bill hasn’t been past. But my blood boils when I think of her and the political party. And then in the same week you get blessed by the pope? Something is wrong there. I feel the need to respond to this situsation in my work”.

Joe Meek in his Studio (1961?)

“Joe Meek was the first independent record producer. He converted his flat in London into a recording studio and was responsible for the most innovative records of his age. Phil Spector copied him. The Beatles copied him. He was this very melancholic figure. Very confused. In those days in London being a gay man was extremely difficult. It was illegal. There’s something fascinating for me about how gay guys lived then. ~~Joe Meek was both an outsider in society and an outsider in the music business.~~
If you hear the record ‘Telstar’ you will recognize his work immediately. He went to extreme lengths to make weird and wonderful sounds.

The romance of Meek’s character and yet his music fascinates me. It’s 1961 and you hear toilets flushing, chains clanging and all kind of other strange noises. He had this weird fascination with sci-fi and the supernatural, often going to graveyards to records sounds. And yet he was also arrested for cottaging (having sex in toilets), a la George Michael. This started a kind of downward spiral in his life. ~~He ended up killing his landlady and then killed himself. It’s a tragic story of a truly innovative but troubled person.”~~

AB: This truly is a tragic story. But would you use it in your work?

“I think I will. I have known Joe Meek’s music for a very long time and I love it. It’s so fascinating. In ’95 I made a film in which it kind of showed.”

“In 1966 Joe Meek also produced a song ‘Do You Come Here Often’, it was a B-side. For two thirds of the records it’s just a piece of easy listening music, then you hear two men talking to each other.
~~What transpires must be the first openly gay text in popular music. Being gay in Britain was still illegal then.~~
The men speak partly in ‘Polari’, an esoteric language which developed so gay guys could communicate secretly. They refer to the ‘Dilly’, a public toilet where men would meet for sex. It’s certainly part of a history I want to acknowledge. These people had a difficult time. Now it’s different. Unless you live in Uganda, and other places I could mention.”

“Whereas my videos are more political, my drawings are more hermetic. Working for a year on one drawing, to a certain degree it becomes about that process and my relation to this object I am creating, the love invested in it and my ultimate absence from it when it enters the public domain. With a video camera, I find it hard not to follow my desire. That’s a very different way of dealing with a subject. As a result, through the act of filming I unavoidably enter a political arena. The two processes are however not mutually exclusive. ~~I know people who have said both: I understand your drawings by looking at your films and your films by looking at your drawings.”~~

Hendry Scot Tuke ‘August Blue’ (1893)

“Henry Scott Tuke was a Victorian water colourist. Amongst other things, what I find very interesting is his painting of the human figure. Painting human flesh in watercolour is extremely difficult. He did it with tremendous skill, he was a relatively famous painter in his day. However, with the advent of the avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was largely forgotten. Looking at his work now there is clearly a homo-erotic content and I find it interesting that this, within a post modernist dialogue, makes him in some ways ‘avant-garde’ today. I heard that many of his paintings are in Elton John’s collection, which makes sense! ~~Sorry, it’s gay again! But It fascinates me to rediscover these artists.”~~

Henry Darger ‘At Phelantonbrug They Raid a Guardhouse..’ (precise date unknown)

“Ok. I’m going to choose a straight man now.”

Haines laughs out loud.

“The most famous outsider artist, maybe. Henry Darger. He died in 1971, I think. And when he died they found in his one room flat in New York this enormous book he made: ‘The Story of the Vivian Girls in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal and the Glandeco – Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.’ It is 15.145 pages long. No one knew he had been working on it. He had illustrated the story with hundreds of paintings and drawings. In a sense he is similar to Joe Meek. They fascinate me because of the tiny environments they created. He’s been so influential. ~~You see naked children, girls with penises, soldiers, flowers and creatures. There has always been a discussion as to whether the work grew out of a perversion or not.~~
I think not. I think he wanted to protect these children. Through drawing you want to understand something, the act of drawing is both about love and control. For Darger that control was linked to protection. He was terrified that these girls and hermaphrodites would come to harm.

Love in Uganda from Rory Pilgrim (2010)

Rory Pilgrim is a British artist living in the Netherlands. Amongst other things he works with choral music. This is a work he made: Love in Uganda. It revolves around a piece of choral music written by Pilgrim himself. It is written to promote love between all people, gay or straight. Pilgrim sent the piece of music to all the Anglican churches in Uganda and asked them if they would play it within their walls. They all refused. He also sent it to some Dutch and British churches who did perform the work.
When I saw and heard Love in Uganda for the first time I thought: finally. This is someone who is making a statement about these issues without referring to sex or using direct protest. There are no arses involved!

Michelangelo ‘The Fall of Phaeton (1533)

“Michelangelo. The Fall of Phaeton (1533) is my most favorite drawing. Michelangelo was very in love with a guy called Tommaso di Cavalieri reportedly one of the most beautiful men of his day. Although the relationship was clearly platonic, through the years academics have tried to play it down and explain it in other ways. Michelangelo dedicate thirty poems to Tommaso which pre-date even Shakespeare’s sonnets. After his death, Michelangelo’s nephew re-translated the poems substituting all references to a male subject for that of a female. This drawing is one Michelangelo made for Tommaso. In a sense he defined the art of drawing as a medium in its own right with works like this.

“I realise that my choices are rather male/gay oriented so I have to apologize for that because my life isn’t actually like that. It’s just that when given a choice, these images are the ones that touch me the most”.