Michael Craig-Martin is known as the Godfather of the Young British Artists
Not every artist has obvious talent, says Michael Craig-Martin. They have toinvent themselves as he did, the artist mentor tells Fionnuala McHugh
You may not know the name Michael Craig-Martin, but if you're British, you will almost certainly have seen his work: it's managed to escape the rarefied atmosphere of galleries to appear on Royal Mail postage stamps and Sainsbury's shopping bags. He also used to teach art at Goldsmiths' College in London. A few years ago, a gallery in Berlin held an exhibition entitled "Art - curated by Michael Craig-Martin" featuring works by 26 of his students. You've probably heard of some of them: Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Michael Landy.
As a result, Craig-Martin has acquired a nickname as "the Godfather of Young British Artists". Every time there's a piece about the YBA art collective which sprang out of Goldsmiths' in the 1980s, his name is evoked. Given what's happened in the art universe since, given the - occasionally - monstrous influence of that tiny group, does he ever feel less like a godfather and more like Dr Frankenstein?
I think of the second half of my career as pleasing myself, pleasing my needs. Not being somebody I can't be
Craig-Martin, sitting in a backroom at the Gagosian Gallery in Central, laughs. At almost 73, he's as fresh-faced as a much younger man out for a stroll in Ireland, the country where he was born and whose passport he carries. (In this, as in his work, the apparent simplicity is complicated: he's one-eighth Chinese through a great-grandmother from Wuhan.)
"I gave permission to people," he says, of his human creations. "My function was to say: for God's sake, just do it. Don't wait. If there's something you want to do, that is the thing to do."
Old-fashioned question: where's the excellence in that? "You can't be excellent against a set of external values," he says. "You're not looking for a measure."
Are there no exams, then, at Goldsmiths? "Well, end-of-year shows," he says. "It's an unfair world. Some people have greater … I'm resistant to the word talent but many artists have been people without obvious talent. Not having obvious talent forces you to be creative. You need to invent a way of working. I had to invent myself."
This is relevant because when critics discuss Craig-Martin's work, they usually describe it as a dialogue between representation and reality. He initially worked with physical objects (boxes, buckets, tables). Then he did drawings, but only in black and white. Now he paints everyday items - cups, headphones, chairs - in as realistic a fashion as possible, which he colours in vividly unlikely shades. "Early on, I realised I was never going to be a painterly painter, no matter how much I yearned for it. And I hated the idea that a clean, straight edge was less emotional than something …" He stops and makes wild, sketching motions in the air. "Something scrubby. I hate that. It represents something romantic, which I'm opposed to."