Breaking Dry Jan with Josh Raz

It’s Thursday night and I’ve just joined painter Josh Raz and gallerist Ocki Magill at Bradley’s Spanish Bar, Soho. We first met in late 2023, at the opening of Raz’s solo show ‘Shaken Ground’ at Magill’s Blue Shop Gallery in Oval. We’d stayed in touch, and a few weeks into the new year I’d invited them out for a drink. The venue is, despite the name, not a bar, is not Spanish, and the owner’s name is Jan. However, it is a good place for a quiet drink; it’s small, unpretentious and has an excellent jukebox. I would technically be breaking Dry Jan, but it’d be worth it to hear more from Raz about what drives his art.

Raz grew up in Wickham St Paul, a small village in rural Essex. After finishing 6th form, he moved up to Newcastle to study Fine Art – really, he was more interested in the city itself. It wasn’t actually until he graduated that he began to think of art as a profession. The first major event in his career came in 2016 when he won the HIX Award. In 2019, he moved to Greenwich. The Covid pandemic was the second event. He says that, at the time, he felt like he was running out of road. He used the enforced shutdown to work things out on paper and develop his practice. The work he’s been making since his return to the studio is the work that he’s “most excited” about. It was this work that introduced Raz to Magill, who included him in a group show, ‘Works on Paper’.

This development of his practice wasn’t simply a change in style, it was a shift from a youthful way of working to a more mature, more personal, more optimistic practice. “In art school, you’re encouraged to unpick art as a practice — unpick the mediums that you are instinctively working in — you become quite self-conscious about the work you’re making,” he says. “The work I’m making now feels a lot more connected to how I experience things, rather than through a lens of irony and cynicism that you can be shepherded into in art school.” His aim now is clear. “The best paintings are records of the feelings of the time.” Right now, that’s being torn between the push to individualism and the “innate desire for community that exists within all of us.”

When it comes down to it, Raz is a representational painter. He says that he enjoys the ‘narrative structures’ that representational paintings allow for. The story he’s trying to tell in his recent work, as shown at the Blue Shop Gallery, is about our relationship to landscapes. He explains: “There’s the objective landscape that exists without us, and that would always exist without us, and changes by the laws of nature and physics. But then there’s also what we imprint on the land, not necessarily physically, but just in observing the landscape and forming narratives through myth and folklore.”

Many representational paintings can be easily slotted into categories: figurative or landscape or still life and so on. But Raz’s work is hard to define. Despite being rooted in figuration and landscape, his paintings are all about their surfaces: his palette is vibrant, his handling of paint is precise, and as Magill points out, his pictures are remarkably flat, there’s often no focal point and little illusion of depth. “I use lines and geometrics to squeeze the composition and bridge those spaces between a figure and some aspect of the landscape, to imply that they’re both equally reliant, they are both valuable, and there’s a reciprocal relationship between the two.” But, he says, it’s important not to focus on a single painting. His work is “not like Symbolism, where one moment in a particular canvas means a particular thing. It’s more like chapters of a book.” You need to see all his canvases together to begin to understand the story he’s telling.

You can get an idea of what he’s getting at by comparing his paintings to those of the artists he admires: John Constable, painter of The Hay Wain and other landscapes, Jan van Eyck, “there was less pressure back then for artists to make work quickly,” and Édouard Vuillard, “at the moment, that’s the kind of painting that I love the most. He’s someone that I always come back to again and again.” Going contemporary, he says, Peter Doig, Daniel Richter, Cecily Brown and Andrew Cranston. “These are all painters whose foundations are in post-impressionist painting. They’re painting images that perhaps transcend trend and taste.”

We’ve been nursing our drinks for a while now. We finish them, order another round, and check out the jukebox while they’re pouring. La Vie en rose is playing. What would Raz choose instead? He picks out Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me and The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset. “But I don’t want to spoil what’s going on here,” he says. In the studio, he listens to all sorts: classical music, Bob Dylan, and recently he’s been getting into an Irish folk band called Lankum. His Spotify Wrapped tells him his favourite genre is hip hop. “I’ve got fairly broad tastes. I spend a lot of time alone, and music and podcasts and audiobooks are a painter’s best friend a lot of the time – their only friend a lot of the time,” he laughs.

What is life like in the studio? “As a painter, and I can only speak from the perspective of a painter, you work alone, mostly. So your work day is essentially making mistakes, figuring things out by yourself until something clicks.” This process can become all-consuming. “I remember, there were times when I used to basically work seven days a week, and I was totally immersed in making art that was kind of inseparable from my personality in a lot of ways,” he says. These days, he’s staying grounded. He’s balancing time in the studio with working in his flat’s communal garden.

Chatting to him, it’s clear that his approach to art is an expression of a philosophy, not just a style. Is his work about a search for truth? “No. I’m actually embracing the process of fictionalising it, because everything is fiction, to some degree, in the sense that language is used to inform the way people think and build up a three-dimensional life for both themselves and others… we’re always inhibited by the fact that it’s only our interpretation of what is happening.”

He’s trying to depict landscapes as we see them today: through our phones, flattened and backlit, separate to us. He points out that today, people living in cities can spend their entire lives without seeing a natural landscape. “What new stories and mythologies and folklore can that give you?” he asks. “It’s the equivalent of having a mirror held up towards you, you see entirely man-made things and you become insular. Pre-civilisation, landscapes were revered for their dominating qualities, the fact that they loomed over humankind. They were reminders of how insignificant we are.”

It’s a thought that stays with me as we gather our coats and bags and step out onto Oxford Street, under street lights and dazzling adverts, on the train as I journey home, and the morning after as I walk along the Thames. What is my connection to this place, and is there another way of seeing it?