David Shrigley on Anxiety, Absurdity & Ageing Disgracefully

0:00I was happy as a child with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. And I'm happy as a middle-aged man to be the same, you know. So I think that is my default setting. I guess I'm an introvert. I'm quite a shy person, so I've always been quite happy with my own company. And I think that lends itself to doing what I do.

0:21The other thing about comedy is, if you start analysing it, it ceases to be funny. It's almost like you don't want to look too hard at it. and don't want to analyse it too much, otherwise it really will stop resonating. I'm 57 years old and I can just do what I like. I think once you've got past 50, it really doesn't matter. You can't be cool anymore, you're not young anymore. Do whatever you like, it's fine. As long as you don't do anything that's against the law, it's fine.

0:56David Shrigley:Hello and welcome to Homing. I'm Matt Gibbard. Today's guest, excitingly, is David Shrigley. David's a contemporary artist. His drawings and deadpan observations have earned him a big following for their mix of humour, bleakness and childlike simplicity. David grew up in an ordinary red brick estate in the suburbs of Leicester. As a shy child, he was happiest alone with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. And in many ways, not much has changed. His artworks have an improvised quality, but beneath them lies a surprisingly ordered life. David admits to having obsessive tendencies and talks openly in this conversation about anxiety, control and the routines that keep him grounded.

1:46David Shrigley:He says, making art gives me a structure. It's at the centre of who I am and what I do to make myself happy. his studio in Brighton is the backdrop to his daily life and he'll soon be revamping it with the architect David Cohn there's a list on his drawing board where members of his team can leave suggestions about what he might want to draw I get the impression they make each other laugh quite a lot and David certainly had me in hysterics while showing me around his studio especially with his pretend ad campaign for Heinz Beans. We'll make that tour available to our Patreon members. I really enjoyed my visit to Brighton.

2:28David Shrigley:David's an expert at making people laugh, but he's also an introspective character, and there's a quiet seriousness beneath all that absurdity. So here it is, David Shrigley. I hope you enjoy it. Hi, David. Hello. Thanks so much for being on Homing. Really appreciate it. So just to set the scene of where we are, we're in your studio. Yes. In Brighton. Yes. Which is presumably quite close to where you live. Everywhere is quite close in Brighton and Hove. Is that right? Yeah. I live on the other side of town, but it's still only 10 minutes in the car. Okay. Where did you grow up, though? I grew up in Leicester, in the suburbs of Leicester.

3:13I was born in Macclesfield in Cheshire in 1968. And I was born at home in my parents' matrimonial bed. I thought you'd like to know this, this being a homing show.

3:30David Shrigley:Nice detail. I have no memory of that, of being born, obviously. but I have no memory of living in that place. I moved when I was just before my second birthday, apparently, to Leicester. But it gives me some credence amongst the Manx, you know. They say, oh, you're one of us, David. So what was the childhood home like then? Describe it to us. I just grew up in the Red Brick Estate, like so many people, I guess, in the UK. Yeah, I had quite a happy childhood, doing very suburban things. and, you know, rode my bike, had a paper route, lived very close to the school, played football. In retrospect, architecturally, suburbs are very similar throughout the country.

4:21I guess you go to different countries, the burbs are different looking. But the landscape of the suburb is really ubiquitous in the UK. so I feel like I'm feel like an everyman in lots of ways is that quite helpful then in some ways I suppose so I mean I suppose it gives you a grounding and a feeling of yeah this is kind of where I'm from in the sense that you know people draw their identity from the part of the country that they're from however a lot of parts of the country are really the same you know which isn't always the case but um I think if you live in a suburb of a city that's that's sort of the way it is but I moved to Glasgow when I was 19 to study at Glasgow School of Art and I lived there for 27 years so that the the bigger part of my life was spent in a in a city that was architecturally very different from from where I grew up and from the suburbs so So I always lived in Victorian tenements, Victorian houses when I was in Glasgow.

5:29And I think that when I first went there, which would have been about 1988, I was really struck by how different Glasgow was architecturally. I mean, it's very different in lots of ways, culturally, meteorologically. It rains a lot. But yeah, it felt like going to the big city in those days. So I was really impressed by the Victorian architecture of Glasgow. And yeah, lived in some really interesting accommodation there as well.

6:01David Shrigley:Well, let's come back to that. I mean, dwelling for a moment on your upbringing, tell me about your parents. What did they do? My mum and dad's still alive, but very elderly. My dad was an electronics engineer and my mum was a computer programmer. Okay. But they're both in their late 80s now. My parents and I don't really have a lot in common. We've always had a really good relationship, but, yeah, we really don't have a lot in common. I'm quite an outlier in my family as a visual artist. My pathway into being an artist was one that just sort of happened. It didn't really come from anything that happened in the family home.

6:43It was very much an external interest for me.

6:48David Shrigley:So did you feel that point of difference growing up then? I mean, when did you first become aware of that sense of being an outlier, as you put it? When I was a teenager, I guess. That's when you sort of form your identity. I mean, prior to being a teenager, I think I wanted to be an astronaut, as you most little boys do, or a dinosaur hunter or something like that, and then a professional footballer, which obviously wasn't going to happen. And then an artist. Even before I knew there was such an occupation as an artist, I guess in my early teens I discovered visual art and went hand in hand with discovering music and record cover art and stuff.

7:35And then I had some good art teachers at school who kind of lit that fire for me.

7:41David Shrigley:What kind of art were you doing at that point? I mean, would we recognise David Trigley at that point or would it? I think you probably would. Yeah. I feel, I mean, unfortunately, my parents didn't really value my artistic output until I became famous. Yeah. So none of my childhood art got kept, you know. And they didn't have any, you know, they didn't really have any interest in art or didn't really see any value to that activity when I was a child. whereas I suppose if I'd had children I'd I never had children but I would have kept all their art I mean I guess people like us would be primed to do that so there isn't really any record of what I did as a child but in my memory I you know I think my work was not that dissimilar when I was six to how it is now you know grab figurative drawings with text and pictures of dinosaurs and I don't know lots of probably quite violent I'd imagine can you describe what like that so when you were drawing pictures like that when you were six or when you're a teenager is that do you feel like that's something that's just within you and you just felt like it was just something that needed to come out somehow do you know I mean there is that thing with artists sometimes where it's not a voluntary thing is it I guess so I mean the caveat of talking about that is that you you tell these stories about yourself but you don't really know if they're true i i mean it sometimes it's just a story that is told for the benefit of this type of conversation yeah but that said i i do feel as if in my default setting is is to be an artist is to be you know i'm i was happy as a child with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and i'm happy as a middle-aged man to be the same you know yeah so um i think that is my default setting i'm quite I guess I'm an introvert.

9:39I'm quite a shy person, so I'm quite happy with my, I've always been quite happy with my own company, and I think that lends itself to doing what I do.

9:46David Shrigley:Yeah. I notice in myself as I've got older that, you know, I'm not really very happy unless I'm making something, and time spent away from making art, if I spend any longer than two weeks without making a drawing or a painting, I start to get a bit angsty, I think. Do you? Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. How did you get on at school then out of interest? Being, you know, describing yourself as an introvert, it's not always easy. No, I navigated school pretty well. I mean, being a lot bigger than everybody else was quite helpful, I suppose. So you were tall from an early age, were you? I was, yeah.

10:25I was really always one of the tallest kids at school, so I didn't get bullied too much. But then school is pretty horrible, as we all know. You know, you navigate it as best you can. either you're a bully or you're one of the bullied or you just try and you're somewhere in between yeah you just sort of try to navigate that path as best you can avoiding violence and humiliation in the best way possible um i went to a big comprehensive school um which wasn't too bad in retrospect i think it was a fairly good school it wasn't it wasn't too horrible um but that said yeah school is difficult and i i sympathize with kids predicament and being in there you know because they're not socially it's such a bare pit you know sometimes yeah but i managed okay i think and i got through and i i fitted in i liked football i guess if you've got something that they can latch on to to bully you for then then you're in trouble whereas i managed to not have anything apart from having a strange name it was where mine you know i think when you've got a funny a funny surname your your surname becomes your nickname so it's kind of okay you know what did it get adapted to well it's just shrig i'm still shrig you know shrig shriggers whatever um it wasn't really worth adapting you know it didn't warrant adapting because it was strange enough in itself.

11:59Whereas if your name's something else, you get called, well, whatever you get called, something unpleasant. But I was just the tall kid with a funny name. That was enough to get through relatively unscathed.

12:16David Shrigley:Okay. If I asked you to describe what was the most sort of challenging experience or aspect of your childhood, what would you say that was? it's hard to say other i mean other kids probably it's the worst it was the most challenging us but other human beings have always been the biggest problem in my life um i i had as i said i had a pretty good relationship with my mom and dad i still you know we still got on well albeit you know we're very different people you know i escaped childhood without any having any resentment towards my parents my parents you know i think if you always feel that your parents love you then that's okay that's just the most you can hope for in a parent-child relationship and I always felt that so I never even though my parents and I have our differences it's uh I never felt that I wasn't loved and cared for my parents are Christians and my dad latterly is an evangelical Christian which is quite a position to take in life And if you don't subscribe to that position, it's, yeah, it's a big difference.

13:29And I'm not a practicing Christian. I'm not. Whilst I'm sympathetic towards faith as a whole, I'm not, you know, I don't practice any. So that was probably a cause of conflict to some extent. And it shapes your upbringing as well. Not necessarily in a negative way. I think you know there are positive things about that framework for your life but um you know I grew up going to church and to Sunday school but once I became a teenager and did O-level sociology it became more there were some questions that needed to be answered that my father wasn't able to answer so I uh drifted away from the church but yeah apart from that it was a pretty happy

14:16David Shrigley:childhood so you you mentioned that you went to art school in Glasgow um did presumably you study at the McIntosh School of Art did you I did yeah I mean I was there in the good old days before it burned down twice well long before it burned down but not only that um before you actually had to pay to go there so I um when I studied not only did you not have to pay but they also gave you money to go which is called a grant which was extraordinary um looking back there were 11 students in my year in environmental art in the fine art department um i got a grant to pay for you know my living expenses um i had a a studio to work in not that not that smaller than the room we're in now it's only shared with like one or two other people in some semi-derelict annex of the art school um so i didn't study in the mackintosh museum as it was became called i studied in this build old school building victorian school building with a gymnasium we had a rope swing in the middle of the in the middle of the gymnasium swang around on it destroying each other's artwork and it was a very it was a great experience of art school what did you learn at Glasgow technically do you think just as a as a draftsman or as a painter or or is that not how you look at it uh well if you look at my graphic abilities now you'd probably say nothing um are you given that I you know actually did life drawing in the Macintosh building in the life drawing purpose designed life drawing life room uh you know with my arm extended and my thumb measuring proportions i was useless at life drawing relatively speaking i mean relatively speaking i'm better at drawing than most people but relative to professional artists i'm pretty rubbish um or at least i don't certainly don't demonstrate many skills but the things I learned weren't necessarily craft skills I think I learned resourcefulness and I learned about um my what my own practice was and I think that a fine art course essentially should teach you that because craft skills are pretty easy to acquire you don't actually need to go to art school to learn how to draw you can do that at evening class you don't really need an artist to teach you in in a way it's a craft skill um I think the way that you learn to be an artist is through making art and that that three or four years that you get art school is what that's there for is for personal development and hopefully you have some good guidance I have an odd relationship to craft and it's something I talk about quite a lot because I don't demonstrate craft skills in in what I do is that a deliberate thing though how conscious is that it's conscious in the sense that i talk about it but it's also it's a genuine lack of craft skills like it's not it's not an affectation that i'm adopting i am genuinely useless when it comes to drawing or genuinely not that good and it's not a decision to not use skills that i have although to some extent it's mannered but it is you know a decision to make art in a certain way or to make graphic work in a certain way which I find is a really rewarding adventure somehow and I think it might be different if I was naturally more gifted with a with a pencil and a paintbrush so if I asked you to draw as accurately as you possibly could a dinosaur or a human being's face would it come out how your art comes out at the moment or would it come out quite differently to that i would come out exactly as you'd expect um come out exactly as you expect it's real you know the work so interesting i mean also my handwriting is real as well people often comment when i write them a message that that's your handwriting and i'm like Yes, yes, what did you expect?

18:42So this is my handwriting. And so in that sense, I feel like I'm a conceptualised in the sense that the value of the work is about some kind of demonstration of ideas rather than a manipulation of materials in a certain way.

19:05David Shrigley:That's so interesting. so what does that do to the experience of living with it then let's say someone's got your work in their home do you think i don't know i i mean i'm always flattered that people want to live with the work and i make it because i like making it but also i like you know i'm proud of the things I've made but I you know I never really expected it to be so popular at the same time this is you know the things that make it to being a screen print perhaps are the kind of kernel of what I'm trying to achieve graphically um and conceptually maybe I think the work is yes it's a message you know on it um because it's it's not badly rendered it's just you know rendered in a very simple way um in a very economic way and i think that um people like that i mean it's not to say that i don't think about colors and images and stuff like that and i do make decisions there is a mannered way of doing it but i guess people are interested in the messages i suppose and there's i guess there's a i don't know some kind of relationship between the the images and the text which is some sort of slippage there that people perhaps appreciate um i mean there are two ways of describing it there's the way that i'm describing it just there in terms of what i've said and there's the other way which is you know i'm at a dinner a party with strangers and they say what do you do and i say i'm an artist and then my wife will chime in dave's a famous artist and oh are you what's your name blah blah blah and then they start looking at it on their phone and then you sort of see a perplexed look on their face when they find look at the these images and they're like oh and they don't really know what to say like how can you be so successful making what appears to be kind of really crude images that you know i wouldn't you wouldn't imagine that you'd actually have to go to art school to learn how to do this so there's a you know a conflict between um the way i might speak about the work and the way it is it's really interesting i love that um let's talk about your current home um so you live in brighton just just describe it to us is it what kind of building is it well i moved to brighton 10 years ago and i've lived in three different places uh since then i started off in the neighborhood where we are now we're in my studio which is in kemptown albeit very close to the uh city center and i started off in kemptown in what we call Kemptown Village in a terraced Victorian house, which we moved from Glasgow from a palace, which I think, yeah, looking back, it was a palace.

22:19It was a lovely half of a townhouse, Victorian townhouse, built in 1840 with a mural in the foyer kind of thing. And then we bought this terraced house in Kemptown. and at the time we also owned a holiday home in devon which we've had for many years which we've been trying to renovate during that time so we we sold our house in glasgow and then moved to the holiday home for a bit in devon and then we were going back and forth to brighton to find a house to buy and we ended up buying in haste and bought the wrong house and bought this terraced house which was sort of quite nice but really wasn't quite what we wanted what was wrong with it couldn't park the car outside and the walls were paper thin so you could hear each other farting next door and whatever else and it was sort of a bit up and down as well it was four floors and quite narrow so we're constantly going up and down the stairs the attraction of buying it was that it It had some outside space, which is lovely because we've got a dog.

23:25And it's very close to all the amenities, very close to the sea. And it had a separate apartment in the basement, which meant that we could afford to buy it because that became my studio. So I could buy it as a business expense. So we ended up buying a larger house than we otherwise would have to. Anyway, it sort of worked out and it was kind of nice. but it just you know that way where it's just not the house that you want and the worst thing is when you've actually had the house that you really love that you felt like you'd stay in forever and then we ended up for one reason or another deciding to leave Glasgow and ended up in this house and from day one the day I moved in I was like I don't like this this is a mistake and I should have listened to that voice that told me this I mean you make the decision with your partner and I kind of listened to her and I should have listened to my gut you know what were you

24:23David Shrigley:experiencing that maybe she wasn't aware of like what why why was it so wrong I think she was being pragmatic but she ended up spending most of the time in Devon and I ended up spending a lot of time here and sort of uh so maybe because she wasn't here that much it was kind of okay that wasn't quite the right place i think she sort of zoomed out a little bit and saw the you know the whole picture that felt like this this was the amount of money we had this was the best thing that was available at that time anyway spent six years there oh wow that's quite a long time but there were lots of positives about that i got to know the neighborhood i got a little studio up the road and made friends made a lot of friends in Kemptown and made a lot of friends in Brighton so it wasn't a disaster it was it was a good thing in lots of ways and I wouldn't be where I am now but all of that time I was searching for a studio as well so I wanted to um I mean I didn't have very much money at that point but 10 years later I managed you know I was I had enough money to buy the building that we're in now so there was always that side project of looking for somewhere else and um but six years later we we ended up having an opportunity to sell it and it just sort of came out the blue we umdenard about selling it and we and covid happened and we spent a lot of time in our holiday home in devon which was a incredibly fortunate situation and then we didn't have anywhere else so we we we rented an apartment at the marina which is another really strange place to live i don't know if you've ever been to brighton marina yeah but there's a big modern block there yeah that they built on the kind of harbor arm and it was sort of all right but the lift kept breaking down and we've got a little dog who needs to go to the toilet in the middle of the night and will not go in the dirt box so that was quite a lot of moving around when the dog's got a funny tummy um but i quite enjoyed it in a lot of ways and it is a bit of a a very peripheral location to the city but it was kind of nice and kind of living in it it was always temporary but we felt like we bought some time so we had the money in the bank and i was slowly i was trying to persuade my wife to buy another house during that time um and i still had a studio so eventually we found this house in hove and surprisingly to me she agreed that we should buy it and it was quite you know it was quite quite a lot more expensive than the one that we'd sold and we were just sort of like right this is it we'll buy it so we looked at it i think we looked at it on 20th of april and we moved in there on the 20th of may something like that so it was like four weeks between viewing it and moving into it so it was quite a quite an expedited process but it was that was a detached parking space garden close to the park a little bit on the cusp of the burbs um but still a victorian house um a really lovely little villa there's a few things that need doing to it but it was in really it's in a really nice pretty good state relatively speaking so yeah it's just it was just the right house at the right time and then our dog's got old and needs a lot of care so she's got a garden so she can go out in the night in the garden really close to the park which is great really close to the train station which is kind of great for me i need to go to london or to gatwick or wherever so it's been really nice So, yeah, we live in, I guess, an 1890s Victorian villa in Hove.

28:23David Shrigley:What does a good day at home look like for you? The dog hasn't peed the bed. That's a good start. That's a good start to the day, yeah. I mean, it's my own fault. The dog shouldn't sleep in the bed, but there we are.

28:39Yeah, it doesn't wake up too early. a lot a lot of my life revolves around caring for an elderly dog now yeah as we speak of the devil my little friends just walked in hello hello hello it's a lot of dog walking giving the dog meds um getting ready to go to work sharing the load with my with my wife um and I try and come to the studio at 10 a.m.

29:09David Shrigley:every morning. Sometimes I do yoga first thing. I have a yoga lesson. This little snuffling in the background is Inca, my dog, by the way. She's wondering why I'm not on the floor with her now. So, yeah, I try and work a 9-5 day or a 10-6 day. I often take the dog to work with me. So she comes and sometimes some of my studio team take her for a walk. In terms of my working day, I feel like I've always been of the strategy that if you put the hours in, the work makes itself. And I've got quite a... It's taken a while, but I've got some good people who work for me now. And they do all the stuff that I don't want to do, like answering emails and doing meetings.

30:09So I'm able to focus on the things that I can't delegate, which I suppose is making the work. Yeah, I feel I try to think about the process rather than the end result. I guess I just try to make a certain amount of work and not think too hard about what it is.

30:27David Shrigley:So how much will you get through in a typical day or week? Well, when you see the paintings, the one that's on the easel over there, I might make ten of those in a day. Oh, seriously? Yeah, if I'm going for it. But they're not finished. They're always half finished. So I might make an image and then I'll go back to it and add something else. So where will it be while it's in a sort of holding pattern? It goes on the drying rack and then in a box. and then once you know a hundred or however many i want to make are finished then i go back to that hundred and work on them again and i sort of make notes of a right thing sometimes they have text in them sometimes they get finished immediately and sometimes they uh they take a few weeks coming back to usually the text arrives after the image but not always and usually there's sometimes the image changes a little bit like this and a lot of the time also behind me you'll see um some marks it's sort of like a a um a prisoner marking off the days of his uh incarceration um so i do that when i've when i've made a a drawing or a painting i'll tick one off on this on this little checklist in fives with the line through it each time you make one each time I make one yeah so I do that but that's sort of apparently this is obsessive compulsive behavior which I am prone to and I I kind of get obsessed with with this just making the work so I don't I'm not in a way it's sort of quite helpful because it I don't think too much about making what the work is it's just the desire to finish it or just the obligation that i seem to put on myself to finish it so that kind of works um so yeah i've got all this um pieces of paper with lots of little lines on them and everybody asked me what are they and then i tell this story um i say it's a good thing to be obsessive compulsive it only becomes a bad thing when you have to drive back home to see if you've locked the front door.

32:48David Shrigley:Do you do that? No I always check it twice before I leave and I'm only allowed to check it twice. That's what my therapist says. Is there anything else that happens inside the home then to do with your obsessive behaviour? I'd say I've had a light brush with OCD and it varies a lot so I've started all of the books that I've read since I moved into the house have to be kept on the bookshelf and no other books are allowed on the bookshelf and I'd never I don't tell my wife things like this but I'm so I keep asking her have you taken that are you reading that I because she's like I know I've read it can I have it back then can I buy you another copy of it so that you can read the other copy so I can have the copy that I've read that has to stay on the bookshelf.

33:43So there's a bit of that. But it's just, it's not too bad, I don't think. I think it's generally a healthy thing. And certainly in regards to making art, it's quite a good thing. It gives me a structure to make it. So, yeah, I don't have to arrange things in the fridge. You know, it's not that bad.

34:00David Shrigley:But obsessive-compulsive behavior of any sort, and obviously some people are very unwell with it, and it can be a very serious thing. so it's not time to trivialize at all but in your case you know it sounds like you got under control to some extent but i suppose it is that word control do you think is it about trying to exert some control over the world somehow i think so yeah i um i uh as you say i wouldn't um complain in terms of my relationship to ocd because it generally is a positive thing but I think when you do what I do, you need to give yourself a structure to make the work. And I think you have to have the ability to make something because nobody's going to tell you what to do and you can stay in bed all day if you want to.

34:52So, yeah, giving yourself a structure is really important. I find making art gives me a structure somehow. It gives, yeah, it's very much at the center of who I am, my identity and what I do and what I do to make myself.

35:06David Shrigley:happy so you mentioned earlier that if you were to go for a couple of weeks without making anything that would start to take its toll somehow what happens that make you anxious or what would happen well it usually happens when I'm on holiday so I'll you know when I'm on holiday I I realize that it's actually healthy not to do it for a couple of weeks and just to read books for a couple of weeks but yeah by the end of the third week i'm sort of like i don't want to do this anymore i want to go back into the studio in a way it's sort of like that that week of not making art is part of making art if you know what i mean it's just a sort of necessary counterbalance in order to be able to make the work so perhaps that it's part you know and it's not really a break in the sense it's just part of the process I think also it's very difficult to chart your own emotions sometimes very difficult to know what you're unhappy about until you've removed that thing or added the thing that you want you know I don't think we know ourselves very well we just have to think about the pattern and what we've learned and and do that but when a new thing when a new pattern emerges it's quite difficult to figure out are you interested in psychology in general I mean have you done any psychotherapy have you kind of read about some of this stuff what's your approach to it I mean I've kind of done therapy in the way that a lot of people do therapy just to help you in difficult moments and to give you strategies to to deal with the difficulties that you might have in life but there's nothing really particularly groundbreaking in that or there's nothing particularly remarkable in that um it's been helpful and I'd definitely be an advocate of um you know looking after your mental health in that way um but I don't really want to think too hard about myself somehow I feel like the point of art is that it's a great adventure and it's the thing that takes you outside of yourself it's important to look after yourself physically mentally emotionally but I like the thing about art is it is an adventure and it is exciting and it gives not really a meaning to life but it gives a purpose to my life in that it feels as if i am it's a constant inquiry and a constant way to discover things yeah so that's what it is for me yeah i've obviously got to ask you about humor you know i'm not flanneling you here but you are the only artist that I come across that does make me laugh out loud a lot it's an amazing gift for you to be able to do that but also for someone interacting with it for me it's really the key to everything that you're about and everything that you do and I think I think personally that's why people choose to live with your work it's not often I suppose that you come across something and it does elevate your your existence in that way tell me about your sense of humor I mean I I'm intrigued by this are you chuckling to yourself when you're writing some words onto a piece of paper or oh yeah I mean it would be really strange if I wasn't I've always felt this kind of imposter syndrome in in terms of being a successful artist when I first had success even when I first went to Clasier School of Art I felt like have they made a mistake by accepting me to this such a prestigious institution and then you know when I had success as an artist I was sort of I felt like how has this happened somehow like it must there must be some mistake which will be redressed at some point in the future and I still there's still part of me that feels that but um at the same time that's not really helpful you have to just get over it that people like the work they like what you do enjoy that when i was in my i was probably 27 years old maybe when my first when i had my moment first moment in the sun as it were and i well the way i talked about the work then was that it was some kind of poetry and it was only accidentally comic um it was the comedy it just ended up being comic but what I was aiming for was some kind of something more profound and whilst I would still I would still sort of I would definitely say that there's a desire to say something profound I acknowledge that I really like the comic aspect of it and it is deliberately comic and and to be able to laugh at the work to be able to love anything in life is a gift is a you know it's the most joyful thing you can have almost um so i'm definitely trying to make myself laugh and i have a lot of people around me now who i'm trying to make them laugh as well so that's one of my that's something i really enjoy it's making other people laugh because i get a direct response well i was going to ask you that so do i mean with a let's say a stand-up comedian or something you know they would obviously be trying out their laughs all the time in front of an audience are you trying stuff out in front of people that you know albeit the work is finished so it's not going to change it's done so i'm not gonna it's it's not going anywhere and it's not going to be revised because people don't laugh also unlike a comedian one of the virtues of what i do is it doesn't actually have to be funny because it's art it's just it's comic art that often is funny but doesn't necessarily have to be uh so that's good that's always a gown clause Whereas if you're actually a comedian, it's very binary.

40:52They laugh. It's good. If they don't, it isn't. So that's why I can never be a comedian, because the burden of making people laugh would be too heavy to carry. I feel that now, I guess the main forum for people experiencing the work is social media. So they're looking at it on Instagram. But even then, you're sort of not really sure if they're laughing or if they just like pictures of cats or whatever I've drawn.

41:23David Shrigley:Has social media helped your career, would you say? Oh, yeah, I think so. I became an Instagram artist without really intending to or being told to do it. I was told to do it. Yeah, comedy. Yeah, I embrace comedy totally. And also I'm really aware that some of the work is just puerile, you know but i'm sort of embraced that as well it's totally fine to make something that's just really childish in amongst all the more slightly more complex comedy that i employ um but yeah yeah it's comic art and it's but i think there's something that you're kind of searching for something that i'm searching for that is is it has to be very funny but it also has to be sort of has to have some kind of meaning to it that resonates somehow that says something a little bit more than simply that's just funny in the moment i suppose so i guess that's what i'm searching for but i'm and you know you probably instinctively understand that anyway but that's what i'm about the other thing about comedy is if you start analyzing it it ceases to be funny I mean, we all know that as well.

42:41So it's almost like you don't want to look too hard at it and don't want to analyse it too much. Otherwise, it really will start to stop resonating.

42:53David Shrigley:Yeah. If we were to ask a friend of yours, would they say that you are a funny person in everyday life? I probably am, yeah, but I'm not, you know. Also, like I said, I'm quite an introvert. But I left on my own devices and comfortable company. And I'm really, really childish. That's good to hear. Very, very childish. In a way that I'm probably, you know, I'm on my best behavior now because there are people here and I have to talk sense. But when it's just me and the people I'm with every day, we just am constantly being as juvenile as we possibly can. I feel also that I'm 57 years old and I can just do what I like.