‘Sometimes,” says David Shrigley, “I feel like a monk transcribing the Bible.” The artist, speaking by phone from lockdown in Devon, is referring to the meditative form of creativity he has been practising ever since isolation began. His aim is to produce a set number of drawings each day. “Sometimes it’s quite hard,” he says. “You just have to focus on it, like yoga or something.”
Shrigley’s entire lockdown life has a monkish feel to it. He is on the 16:8 diet, which involves fasting for 16 hours, and has been having 45-second swims in the sea, which he finds restorative but “balls cold”. At the start of 2020, the artist, famed for his absurd drawings that pair humorous quips with roughly drawn cartoonish characters, had at least eight overseas trips scheduled. But the pandemic has seen him swap international travel for coastal walks, trips to Waitrose and endless hours in his small studio.
This slower pace of life – which also includes cooking risotto, reading Dickens, planning an art school in nearby Sidmouth, drinking bottles of wine, and napping – is clearly having a nourishing effect: Shrigley has produced 400 works since coronavirus grounded us all. And he still has several hundred pieces of paper left, for what he says is becoming the largest single work he has ever made.
“I wouldn’t say it was a new strategy,” he says. “This is what I have always done. The only difference is that I am left alone to do it. One of my strategies is to focus on the process rather than the result. If you are just trying to complete a certain number of drawings in the day, that’s easy. If you set yourself the task of making a certain number of ‘good’ drawings, that’s really difficult.”
Shrigley is exhibiting his Lockdown Drawings on social media and via online exhibitions at Stephen Friedman and Anton Kern galleries, based in London and New York respectively. The A3 works of black ink on paper feature the artist’s usual lineup of curious creatures and nude men attempting to make sense of the world through outlandish statements and experiments. A dog plays the piano badly to “stop him destroying things”; a man fires a stone up “the beast’s ass”; and a new government initiative provides the nation with refreshment from a giant teapot.
The word “accept” recurs. We are encouraged to “accept the new structure”, “accept the universe” and accept that “there will always be clouds”. Although Shrigley, 51, acknowledges that acceptance and adaptation are an important part of life, we shouldn’t take his lockdown musings as profound revelations of truth. “I say all sorts of things through my work. It is very propositional, saying, ‘How about this?’ I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I am going to say it anyway. It is kind of like the opposite of journalism somehow, just saying things you don’t mean.”
So are these drawings inspired by his time in isolation? “All the work I make becomes about the issue of the day,” he says. A meteorite hurtling towards a planet, accompanied by the words “big black ball of shit”, could be about Covid-19, but it could just as easily refer to Brexit, police brutality or Donald Trump. So, too, could the four swords paired with the words: “As the crisis deepens people rush to buy swords.” He says: “Every artwork is a work in progress. Depending on who is looking at it and when, the work can completely change.”
Despite all these dark scenarios, Shrigley is still the artist who put a giant thumbs up on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. Is he optimistic about the future? “Yes,” he says. “I am an optimist because I choose to be an optimist no matter how miserable I am half the time. I think we have a choice. I don’t think it is like saying are you a Virgo.”
This optimism is aided by what Shrigley terms the therapeutic nature of drawing. “I cleaned the car yesterday and, while I was happy that it was done, I think the drawing I did yesterday probably did me more good – although cleaning the car earned me more points with my wife.”
• David Shrigley’s Lockdown Drawings can be seen at davidshrigley.com, stephenfriedman.com and antonkerngallery.com. His work will appear in Stephen Friedman’s 25th-anniversary exhibition in September.
