It’s a weird feeling, when your brain knows something to be true, but you can’t bring yourself to fully believe it (see also: the Abbatars at ABBA Voyage). This is what’s happening when I look at today’s cover of the Standard. It looks like a meticulous illustration or digital invention; I know perfectly well that it’s a near-microscopic, photographic image of a splodge of actual paint. I just… can’t quite get my head around it.
“In real life it’s probably two centimetres square, something like that,” says Rob Carter, one half of the artist duo Rob & Nick Carter with his wife, known otherwise as Nicky. “But with the advent of super high-powered digital cameras — this is a 150 megapixel camera — we can capture all that detail from a tiny little paint blob and blow it up to a massive scale.”
The image, part of a new series of works by the pair that continue their longstanding experiments combining painting and photography, is being made available as a limited edition print (just 95 will be made) exclusively to Standard readers, for one week only, for the extremely discounted price of £350. It’s a far cry from their usual prices.
“Some of our work is quite prohibitive, cost-wise, because it is so labour intensive to make,” says Rob. “Some of our transforming films have taken 5,000 man-hours of digital animation, so that takes them beyond a certain price point.” Their Transforming Still Life Painting, a lavishly framed three-hour looped digital rendering of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder’s Vase with Flowers in a Window (1618) in which night gradually replaces day, and a caterpillar and a butterfly visit the scene, sold at auction in 2023 for just under £53,000.
“When people say, we can’t afford your work, we say don’t worry, we can’t afford it either,” laughs Nicky.
The series of which the print is part will go on display in October at the couple’s gallery at 5a Bathurst Street near Paddington, during the Frieze Art Fair, and will be accompanied by a new film, showing the paint moving, brought to life by AI, in a development that has really only just become technologically possible.
“I think a lot of artists are rightly or wrongly worried about all things AI,” says Rob, “and I think we’re still trying to learn from it. But I think if any artist has a bit of a block, if you type in a few words then it might generate a few images, not that you’re going to paint or use, but it might steer you in a new direction.”
The really exciting thing “for us and for artists and filmmakers in the future isn’t just text to image, it’s text to moving image”, he says. He mentions a site called Sora (not widely publicly available) that turns the written word into moving image.
“For filmmakers or artists, the possibilities are going to be limitless. Toys R Us just released an advert using it. It’s not amazing [he’s right, it’s dreadful: flat and creepy] but it gives you an insight into how things are going and how quickly,” he says. “But that can just be another tool. To continue our transforming series without using traditional digital animation methods —we could be using descriptive methods.”
What about the fear of losing those ‘traditional’ methods? “Yeah, but they probably said that when they moved from hand-drawn to digital. People were frightened of cameras, weren’t they? It’s just another tool at the artist’s disposal.”
The couple wanted to release their print with the Standard because, says Nicky, “it’s really lovely to have it accessible out of the confines of the gallery, to a wider readership and not just within the art world but something much bigger”.
“And also we’re quite London artists,” adds Rob. “Our studio’s here, our gallery’s here, we live here.”
Though they met a decade before, at boarding school (Nicky is from Yorkshire, Rob from Essex), they got together here. They set up as artists in London in the late Nineties, at a time when it was possible to live here on relatively little.
“We were really lucky,” says Nicky. “Lots of artists were making waves and trying to change things, trying to bring contemporary art to London because it was quite an elitist gallery system; there weren’t many contemporary galleries. So that was just kicking off, and there was a real feeling of pushing the boundaries.”
“At that time there was a kind of go-get attitude,” says Rob. “That coincided with the internet, and our work lent itself quite well to the internet — it was very bold, graphic, brightly coloured imagery that even the slowest modem could download.”
They set up a website quite early on. “Back then I had to phone up to register the domain name, and I said robandnick.com and the guy said, ‘You got robandnick.com, that is wicked!’ He thought I was setting up an online version of Loot, selling stolen goods.”
“It is expensive here now though,” says Nicky. “We really do need to support people, because how is anyone supposed to afford to live and work in London as artists? It is really tough. More needs to be done. Hopefully, with the new government they will make waves and support younger artists and get some studio spaces that are accessible with a community feel.”
How do they feel about the new government? “Hope? Yeah, hope,” says Rob, without much conviction. “I mean, it can’t be any worse.”
“I feel strongly that history of art should be accessible,” says Nicky. “You speak to so many schools, certainly in the state sector, where they don’t get any history of art and hardly any art, it’s not considered a proper subject. But if a child has learning difficulties or certainly a dyslexic child — having two dyslexic children ourselves actually — you can learn about history from paintings. All those scenes in Napoleon [the recent film] were made by referencing old master paintings.”
Both their daughters, Jess and Saskia, are artists. Both are studying, both are living at home in their twenties, “because obviously it’s what we talked about — it’s very hard to make a living as an artist and actually live and work in London”, says Nicky.
Rob thinks art schools don’t help, though. “I do think they should have a little bit more emphasis on what it’s like to be a professional artist. Just one lecture a week, practical advice — how do you price an artwork? How do you negotiate a split with the gallery? How do you deal with European bureaucracy?”
“I mean, galleries wouldn’t exist without the artists,” says Nicky. “And I’m not sure the reverse is true.”
