Bright spark

Nancy Alsop meets west London artist Alice Gates

Alice Gates’ online incarnation is resoundingly sleek. It is all ambient grooves and St Tropez frocks, and her sophisticated and striking paintings provide a backdrop to this vignette for a metropolitan in-crowd. Here she is urban, a noughties Bright Young Thing, a glamorous artist and favourite among the chattering class cognoscenti.
On the day we meet, the Alice Gates who opens the door to her fresh and colourful Shepherd’s Bush home-come-studio is surrounded by a very different crowd; her black spaniel, tail wagging enthusiastically, crowds at her feet, while Harry, her barrister husband taps industriously at his computer, amid all of which her three-month-old baby sleeps upstairs. “Thanks for meeting me at lunchtime – it’s easier when she’s asleep,” she explains, nodding upward
to the nursery.
Her easy acclimatisation to each of these polarised worlds seems fitting given the subject matter of her at once elegant and vibrant, comic and tragic, and above all, colourful output. “It is women who interest and influence me most in my work, I suppose because I know them better. It’s themed from this era, and the 1920s, or 18th century and right back to primeval because really, we’re all kind of focusing on the same thing.” Which is? “Well, I start off with flirting, fancying, gossiping, and then later marriage and babies and stuff.’ Her insightful narratives weave deftly and incisively around the theme of traditional female roles: daughters, mothers, wives and mistresses, temptresses and decorous figures of virtue.
The timelessness of her observational work has, thus far, served her well; she has fans as diverse as elite boutiques who clamour to adorn their walls with her befittingly soave and haughty figures (she has taken on commissions from the Kings Road’s Austique, as well as the exclusive Sea Green in Dublin) and Orlando Bloom, and has even won plaudits from the ever hard-to-please style bastion, Vogue. ‘I think the popularity stems from the fact that they’re quite humorous; they’re comedy but within that, people can recognise bits of themselves, or bits of their family. But a lot of them are also quite tragic - there’s often a depressing character, or an awkward character. And the colours maybe, just because they’re bright and joyful. I don’t know how you could do anything in black and white really. I always do everything in colour, all the time, always.’ This devotion to a vivid palette pervades her whole existence, from the interior of her house (‘I’m big on white walls and contemporary looking houses, but then I just kind of think, throw colour at it’) to the clothes on her back (‘At our wedding one of my best friends said I dressed like a Jackson Pollock. I’m just basically covered in colour - I’m sure it’s clashing and looks awful.’) It doesn’t - not remotely; despite juggling domesticity with working toward myriad deadlines, she’s casually well dressed (today in greens and pinks) and is composed – even serene – and pretty.
But in a previous incarnation, Gates very nearly took another path entirely. Her seven years of study (‘I could have been a doctor!’ she quips), began not at art school, but receiving instruction in the old greats on an Art History course at Edinburgh. ‘I should have gone to art college. But I was reacting against my mother really. She kept saying: “You must go to art college, you must go to art college”. I just kind of said: “No, I don’t want to actually”.’ It was during her third year spent in Rome that she took up painting seriously again, and realised that, perhaps – irritatingly - her mother might have been on the money after all. ‘Rome was brilliant. Then after my finals I went to Florence to study figurative painting. It was a means to an end – I learnt a lot though I didn’t really like the school. It was very traditional and they were very critical if you liked contemporary and more modern stuff.’ After that it was off to City and Guilds for the final leg of her training, but as well as the legacy of the Florentine education, Italian street life had left an indelible impression, feeding as it did directly into her observational approach to her oeuvre (it’s not hard to fathom why Toulouse Lautrec, that other great voyeur of humanity, is her all-time artistic hero). ‘People are much more expressive than here. They shout in public, they cry in public, they kind of wail. There’s lots of love and affection, particularly because everyone lives at home, and it’s very Catholic, so you can’t have boyfriends staying over. So all their displays of affection are out on park benches. Much, much more so than over here.’
But in spite of the more reticent British psyche, there is no dearth of material to draw from back at home– especially since very little escapes the keen eye of Alice Gates. ‘I do definitely freak people out. Particularly when I’ll remind them what they were wearing three years ago at a wedding. When it comes to their names, forget it. But I definitely take note of the visual stuff. And conversations, the way people sit, particularly if they’re flirting or having an argument – all that fascinates me. Oh, and their clothes too!’
Clothes and fashion, she says, have claimed a prime position in her consciousness over the last couple of years; she is currently working on prints for the second collaborative collection with fashion label, Libelula. ‘That came about because the girl who runs it, I was at school with, so I approached her. It was after I had being doing this sort of style, and realised that what I really liked was lots of different patterns within painting. I knew that her clothes were sort of bright patterns, so I thought it could be a good collaboration, and luckily she jumped at it. It’s been brilliant.’ For most people, that would be quite enough work to be getting on with, but for Gates, the flamboyant prints are just another string to her multi-tasking bow. She’s just finished an exhibition at The Gallery on Charing Cross Road, and is building up a second series of paintings for Sea Green, which will go on show in October. ‘I really thrive on working towards exhibitions. I like deadlines. And I also really like the event as well. I kind of know that no one on the night is going to be that rude, or at least I’m not going to hear it - usually people are very smiley-faced. I get nervous but I do enjoy it. At the beginning it was nearly all friends and family friends. And now it’s fewer friends; they don’t have the money. In that sense it’s less like my party, and more work, but I still enjoy that as well.’
Despite her galloping success, don’t expect Gates so be upping sticks to join the Primrose Hill set any time soon; she’s quite contented where she is. ‘I love the way the Uxbridge Road is so cosmopolitan, though we could definitely get rid of a few Fab fish bars. Even if I got millions and millions of pounds, I wouldn’t want to move from the area, I’d just want a nicer, bigger house with a bigger garden. People are in the streets all the time, it feels very lived in. It’s in your face, the inspiration – the kids in KFC, or you go to a smarter café and you get all the smarter mothers – it’s everywhere around here. There’s such a mix of people, it’s very rich.’ And equally, Shepherd’s Bush is all the richer for gaining the allegiance of Alice Gates.  l