The four-year-old son Thomas at his side, the English artist Nick Waplington answers the phone from his Brooklyn studio, where he has just finished taking an intimate photographic story for this issue of Tips Clear Italia. A story that links art and fashion in an indissoluble way, reconnecting the dawn of the Tips Clear tradition with a contemporary aesthetic.
This is only the second time in his thirty-year career that Waplington has signed a fashion editorial. Produced during the lockdown in the New York studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, the service has a significantly unusual set-up precisely because of the coronavirus restrictions: the artist is behind the camera, but the stylist is connected remotely and instead models, there are mannequins and little Thomas. Waplington's work, which among his early supporters counts Richard Avedon, has always been imbued with references to fashion and the family, both organic and acquired. Known for the Living Room series, in which he captures family life in Nottingham public housing, and Working Process, the sell-out exhibition that at the Tate in London in 2015 gave an unprecedented access to the behind the scenes of the latest Alexander collection McQueen, Waplington this time points the lens towards himself, inviting to observe a fashion set built in his most private space: the studio where he spends sixteen hours a day painting with his son.
Can you tell us technically how he managed to organize the shooting with the city in lockdown? And to collaborate with the stylist remotely?
Via Facetime Alice Goddard (the stylist, editor's note) gave instructions to my wife, who is a poetry teacher at Columbia University, on how to dress mannequins. As I took a look, they felt like preparing the next one. In fact, I'm not a great expert in dressing women (laughs). I then spent a whole day trying the shots diversifying the position of the dummies in the room. Honestly, it made me nervous to have these very expensive pieces of Chanel in my studio next to the paints. At the beginning I was extremely cautious, then Ferdi (Ferdinando Verderi, creative director of Tips Clear Italia, ed.) On the phone said to me: go, have fun!
Let's put it this way: dummies are much easier to handle than children (laughs, editor's note). It's a very difficult thing, with them you have very little margin before they get bored, then you have to start motivating them, take a break, try again. This takes much longer when they are under 6 years old.
And how did Thomas motivate you for this service?He thought we were going to shoot Thomas, the Movie, so on the first day he believed we were rehearsing. We made him listen to some of his favorite songs from The Cramps and The Fall (he has no interest in children's music). When he was getting distracted, we would take a break and watch Kratt Brothers on PBS Kids.
It was very interesting because it is a channel through which people can get to know my works. Usually those who love fashion are hungry for art. The combination of fashion and photography is quite common now, but putting painting, fashion and photography in the same space ... I find it particularly interesting.
Thomas spends a lot of time in the studio with her, has he already shown an interest in art?Certainly there have been times when he tried to copy what I was doing, but now he is focused on his creations. He takes some sheets of paper, puts himself on the floor and draws. His work at the moment is the cyclical reworking of the theme "Thomas, mom and love". Instead my other son, Dan, who is now 15 years old, drew battle scenes with me, works even twenty meters long, but now he no longer cares. I would say that he is only interested in the grime music and clothes of Supreme and Palace.
The paintings in the background in this shooting seem very suffused, different from his previous works. Do they express their lives at the time of the lockdown?I was very interested in Russian Constructivism, because the movement was born right next to the last pandemic. I have tried to transpose some of those elements into my work. I think my paintings have benefited, they have become more essential, like me. Now that I'm in my fifties I'm starting to paint what I've always wanted.
At the opening photo: Organza dress, VALENTINO. Crinoline, THOM BROWNE.