A chat with Glen Baxter, the “Yorkshire surrealist” who’s spent decades drawing cowboys in strange scenarios

A preliminary glance at Glen Baxter’s artworks, and you’ll likely be drawn to the soft hues and fine lines of his somewhat traditional scenes. Boy scouts and school boys getting up to various antics, flat cap-wearing gardeners wrestling with fuchsias, bewildered policemen and musing cowboys – lots of cowboys. But it’s when you read the words below Glen’s drawings that the true artistry emerges. The seemingly nonsensical phrases and quips reframe the images that sit above them, bringing to attention the small gems of absurdity nestled within.

Chatting to Glen, it feels as though he’s lived many lives. Born in Leeds in 1944, at an early age the Yorkshireman developed a stammer, an obsession with cowboys and a love for surrealism, all of which have gone on to inform his creative pursuits and personal goals – overcoming difficult-to-say words and giving two fingers to the fine art world, to name just two. A successful stint as a poet (post art-school-disillusionment), was later followed by a long career as an artist, through which he’s combined his talent with words and knack with pencil and ink into a body of work that is truly unique and strangely charming.

A new collection of his work, Intermittently Ochre, is now showing at Flowers Gallery in London. In line with the exhibition, we spoke to the artist about his early life, colourful career, his distaste for modern art versus his undying love for cowboys, slowly succumbing to luxuries of modern life (namely iPhones and pizzas) and why he’s so averse to pigeonholing artists.

It’s Nice That: To start, could you tell us a little bit about how your creative journey started?

Glen Baxter: It began when I was four. I used to go to nursery and my mother came to an open day to see all the artworks that all the kids had created. There were three trestle tables, all filled with little models. My mum said to the teacher: “Excuse me,” she said, “which ones did our Glen make?” And the teacher looked at her, and she said, “these two tables.” So two thirds of the output was yours truly. As you can see, the warning bells were sounding.

INT: That’s an early age to have it all kick off.

GB: Well, I waited four years.

INT: True! I read that your attraction to words, poetry and surrealism came from your experience of a stammer when you were younger. Could you just tell us how this creative expression – both words and art – was something that helped you?

GB: When I was in junior school, I was okay, but when I went to grammar school, I developed this, this stammer – which occasionally comes back as you can sometimes detect. And amazingly, in those days Leeds City Council had a speech therapy program running. I went to that, and I was told to relax and, you know, just just to calm down and to try and get the words in order. Because what happens if you’ve got a stammer, is there are certain words that are like the stumbling blocks, and you get this peculiar relationship with words where there’s a kind of fear, and you have to devise a mechanism for avoiding these blocking words – you navigate around them in a sort of rather Byzantine way, which creates odd sentence structures.

I remember Jonathan Miller, the theatre director, describing his stammer, and he used to live in Golders Green and he got onto a bus and he wanted to go to Marble Arch, but he couldn't say the M in marble, so he held out his money and said to the conductor, ‘take me to the arch, which is marble’ – which actually is perfectly good, but it just sounds a bit archaic and strange. But it was his way of coping with the stammer. So we have to learn these mechanisms to overcome them, and I somehow managed to start speaking. Then when I went to art school, I discovered surrealism. Surrealism is like the right things in the wrong place, you know, a bit like my stammers were. I was saying the right things, but in the wrong spot. So I realised I was a ‘Yorkshire surrealist’, and I was happy to join the club.

There was one classic case I can give you an example of. My mother sent me down to this – don’t laugh – haberdashery shop. I had to get a collar stud for my dad’s best shirt (this was the 1950s) I thought, ‘Well, God, I’m going to go into this shop and see a complete stranger and get really embarrassed, and start stammering’. I rehearsed my lines all the way down, I went straight into the shop and the man behind the counter looked at me through his rimless glasses. He said: “Yes?”, and I said, “Do you have any collar studs?”, perfectly fluently. He looked at me as if I was a complete maniac, and he said: “Maybe you should try the shop next door.” I turned and realised I was standing in a furniture shop. Panic had driven me to get it over with, so I went into any shop. I was saying the correct words, but in the wrong place, which is exactly like the surrealist idea. There’s a dislocation between you and reality – and that’s how I came to embrace surrealism.

INT: You’ve become well known for your combination of crayon and ink. What is it about this combination that keeps you coming back?

GB:I was fascinated by my picture books as a kid, and in those days the paper and inks were rather cheap, so the colours used to sink into the paper. The colours were rather soft and muted, not like today, everything’s very flash, high vis and in your face. When I went to art school, I discovered that lithography is the technique that can create softness. Then I left art school (I didn’t have a lithographic studio) but I still had this idea of making the colours look like they were old lithographs. I found coloured pencils, and aside from kids, nobody was using them. It was a completely new medium, and I could use it quite freely without any preconceptions.

INT: So how did you then end up combining your art with words and poetry?

GB: When I left art school I was very disillusioned with art because it was all so compartmentalised to abstraction, there was no room for cowboys. So I actually started writing poetry, and I got involved with a little bookshop on Charing Cross Road that published American magazines, all stapled together and done in someone’s back room late at night, like a fanzine – cheap and cheerful. There was a publisher in New York called Larry Fagin who had a magazine called Adventures in Poetry, which was a potpourri of prose poems and French surrealist text translations, and modern American poets, and yours truly. They published my work, and then they invited me to New York to St Mark’s church, which is an incredible place where William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, and many great art and literature figures had stood on stage.

INT: As you mentioned, something that reoccurs in your work is characters – cowboys, gangsters and boy scouts. Why do you think these very recognisable characters make a good visual device?

GB: Because it’s a shorthand way of getting into people’s minds. Everyone knows about scouts, explorers, cowboys, whether they’re American or from Iceland – everyone can recognize it immediately.

INT: Talking of Cowboys, there’s this theme or idea of ‘modern art rustling’ [cowboys depicted looting modern art] throughout your work. Can you tell us a little about it?

GB: When I entered the art world, I still had this residue of cowboy culture lingering (some would say festering) within me, partly because when I was a kid, the only way to escape from the drudgery of everyday life in a northern town was to go to the cinema or the library. The cinema used to change the programs quite a lot, so you could go three times a week and see all different films. All the main features – the A movies – were always like big Hollywood technicolor things, and the B movies were invariably cowboy movies; black and white, the same old – they were just knocking them out. So I was completely immersed in cowboy lore… I began to think I was a cowboy for a while. Then when I went to art school, it was all about abstract painting, and nobody was interested in cowboys at all, except me. So I used it as a weapon of revenge against the art world.

INT: I’d love to know a little bit about your process. When you devise a piece, do the words come first or the image? Or is it sort of a process in which both are developing together?

GB: It’s all those things. I take whatever I get wherever I can. Sometimes, there’s a word that I want to use (revenge of the stammerer) to get one over on that word. An example would be my interest in the word clandestine. I couldn’t find the image that would fit it, and it was kicking around in my brain for ages. One day I was doing a drawing about cowboys, discussing Jane Austen. And I thought, ‘maybe I could somehow combine that?’. So I made an etching called Clandestine Meetings of the Jane Austen Society Were Held Every Other Thursday. It’s a moonlit scene on the prairie and there’s three cowboys hidden away in a clandestine way. Well, that was perfect – everything came together. Sometimes you’ve got the image, and the words sort of collide with it. It can be exhausting, but it also can be very rewarding as well.

INT: I can imagine the light bulb moment when you realise it’s all going to come together must be so satisfying.

GB: There’s nothing like it. It’s the best thing ever.

INT: In the new exhibition, I love the piece with the man whose iPhone has run out of battery but he wants to order a pizza, so uses airport signal flags instead. How have you kept your style and themes consistent, while allowing for hints of modern life to find their way into it?

GB: I’ve been trying to resist modern life most of my life, and it’s impossible, of course. Everyone succumbs eventually and gets an iPhone or a so-called smartphone. So gradually, by process of erosion, your brain becomes scrambled into modernity and these become part and parcel of your everyday life. Like ordering pizza, for instance. I’d never heard of pizza when I was a child, let alone how to order one.

INT: Your work’s often deemed as ‘cartoon’, but I think that’s just because of the text element, seeing them in the flesh and seeing the size of them kind of debunks this. How do you find being an artist and having your work categorised?

GB: Well, first of all, I’m totally against any form of pigeonholing, because it stops people from experiencing your art in a direct way. I mean, growing up, I never knew what was fine art and what was ‘lower’ art, I just thought of it as good or bad. So I didn’t have that barrier. That freedom, I really appreciate it, and when people then start putting you into compartments, it kind of destroys your ability to connect on this level.

The other thing about cartoons is, they’re mostly political or topical, and I want to just tell a story somehow with the caption. For me, the person who’s looking at [my work] has to somehow figure this out and make sense of it themselves in the way that I did as a child looking at the world. I was trying to figure out: ‘Why is that funny, why is that not funny, and how do these things work?’ I want people to be in that position of total amazement when they see something, and only then can they really have that, that lightning bolt burst, that recognition, which is a fantastic feeling.

INT: A lot of your work has been featured in The New Yorker and is very popular in America. Why do you think American audiences have resonated with your often quite quintessentially British scenes?

GB: That’s precisely where they like it. I mean, it’s the same in France. They think of me in the same fond terms as Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes, or a red pillar box. They love churches, handmade shoes, you know, brogues. So I kind of fit into their idea of what Englishness is. And certainly the Americans too, they have this idea of what idiots the English are, so I think they’re enamoured by this slightly less serious approach to Englishness.