‘I’m not worried about going stagnant or out of fashion’ – an interview with Jake Grewal

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

‘It’s not finished,’ Jake Grewal tells me as I stand and stare at the massive triptych seascape leaning against the wall of his studio in Hackney. ‘It was incredibly saturated a couple of days ago, so I’ve knocked quite a lot of it back.’ Made up of three large canvases arranged next to each other, the work is bright and joyous: a great swash of pristine blue sky, earthy rocks underneath and three figures clambering around them. As I am looking, I start to think that those figures could in fact be one person in three different phases of motion. ‘I wanted it to be referential to some kind of cubist sense of movement, with the figure moving through the rocks,’ Grewal says, right on cue. I find myself thinking, too, of those dynamic Futurist artworks – Giacomo Balla’s Flight of the Swallows (1913), for instance – in which repetition of a single object conveys motion.

It feels like a surprising association to make. Born in south London in 1994 to an Indian father and a British mother, Grewal has made his name through subtle paintings and drawings characterised by tenderness, emotional sensitivity and allusiveness that feels anathema to the hard edges and brash industrial quality of much of those avant-garde movements that sprang up in the early 20th century. His paintings and drawings usually depict nature, male figures or male figures in nature: a man, contorted in a Schiele-esque pose, trekking through what looks like sandy-coloured savannah in Walking to Avoid Bear Traps (2020); two figures walking along a beach, the sand dappled by a burnt-orange sunset in Now I Know You I Am Older (2022); a lone figure in a dream-like forest in the charcoal drawing No One Said How It Hurts (2023). In another way, though, it makes sense. Grewal has a diverse, often unexpected set of influences and is largely uninterested in the strictures of genre, making art with a self-confessed freedom and letting emotion and instinct guide his hand across the canvas or paper. He aligns himself loosely with a tradition of British nature painting and figurative art that includes Turner and the Neo-Romantic school of the mid 20th century; but his technical skill, the importance he places on draughtsmanship, his innovative approach to depicting the human form and the way he thinks about colour and tone have captured the attention of the art world. Grewal has been able to marshal and recast a school of art that seemed to be slipping out of fashion, while remaining firmly individual.

Work in progress (2024), Jake Grewal. Photo: Ben Westoby; courtesy the artist/Thomas Dane Gallery; © the artist

The seascape, though a work in progress, is part of Grewal’s preparations for his upcoming exhibition at Studio Voltaire in south London. ‘Under the Same Sky’ is his third major solo show after outings at his gallery, Thomas Dane, in 2022 and at Pallant House in Chichester in 2023. It is larger than anything he has produced before – driven by Voltaire’s encouragement of artists to create an ‘intervention’ in their space – and will be hung on a curved structure in the gallery. ‘I don’t feel like anything is really super finished,’ he says casually, ‘but I feel like it will all be fine.’ Grewal is, a month out from his deadline, still ‘working through ideas’ but treats it all with a level of self-assurance that, combined with moments of deep self-reflection, is endearing rather than cocky. He speaks in winding, thoughtful sentences, pausing and self-editing as he goes, and, when the odd glimmer of vanity emerges – ‘I love drawing because I really just want to impress people’ – I feel disarmed by his honesty more than anything else. ‘I’m someone who doesn’t really know what a show’s going to look like until I hang the work,’ he professes. ‘You could just have an exhibition of one large painting […] maybe I’ll just get to curation and think actually I don’t want anything else.’ He says this with a half-smile, but with the tone of someone who is genuinely thinking about it.

If Grewal’s works are figurative – ‘paintings on a wall’, as he puts it – then his approach is almost that of an abstract artist. The settings of his works are ‘drawn from experience’, but the place, the content of the work, is beside the point. When he puts brush to canvas, he is not thinking about depicting a scene but using the brush ‘to figure out colour relationships’, to work through his ideas around form, to ‘evoke feeling or memory’. It makes sense to me, looking at a work such as Myself, With No One Watching (2023), a delicate, atmospheric canvas in shades of blue, in which the figure at the centre, though nominally Grewal, is posed a little like one of those adjustable wooden mannequins that artists use to draw figures. The whole thing is a mood piece, a tone poem on canvas, infused with an ambiguity and mystery that is characteristic of Grewal’s work. In that light, it feels apt that Grewal has tacked above his studio door a postcard showing Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75) by Whistler, the artist who once said that ‘subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony […] of colour’.

Myself, With No One Watching (2023), Jake Grewal. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography; courtesy the artist/Thomas Dane Gallery; © the artist

Grewal doesn’t mention Whistler while we are talking, but he does talk about the Neo-Romantics, whom he first discovered ‘a really long time ago’ at Frieze Masters. He felt an ‘emotional pull’ towards their work, in part driven by what they depicted – by Graham Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire scenes and John Piper’s drawings of churches in Wales, where Grewal spent much of his youth, or by the anxious, enigmatic male figures that crop up over and over in Keith Vaughan’s work. Above all, he felt an affinity with their approach to form, in particular the ‘abstract’ treatment of figures and landscapes. Those Vaughan paintings – Nude Against a Rock (1957), or Landscape with Two Bathers (The Diver) (1954) – are in their anonymity, their experimentation with surfaces, their innovative use of colour, distinctly Grewal-esque.

He identifies in the work of Vaughan especially a sense of ‘melancholy’ that also suffuses his own art – a difficulty of ascertaining mood, which I think derives from the fact that the figures are so often half-obscured, faceless or held in ambiguous poses. ‘That undertone of danger or darkness, or foreboding – that’s kind of how I grew up feeling […] being queer wasn’t necessarily a joyful experience for me until fairly recently,’ he says. He gives several possible reasons for that, including a feeling of alienation from the machismo of some of the men in his family. Many of Grewal’s works reward slow looking, revealing ambiguity the longer you ponder them, such as Eaten // Fled Tears (2021), a close-up of a man nuzzling (or perhaps biting) another man’s neck that feels pleasurably tricky to parse, balanced between tenderness and menace. Filed away in the rack of paintings in his studio I spot a work that looks to me like a variation on this theme, which he brings out to show me: this new work is much bigger, a metre squared, perhaps, and has a similar colour scheme to Eaten // Fled Tears, but the perspective has widened out and the men are kissing. It’s a more ‘overt’ display of eroticism than in the 2021 painting, something Grewal implies he has recently become more interested in depicting. And yet here too, in that kiss, the forcefulness of it, there is something he calls ‘weird, violent or possessive’, a dynamic that he says is ‘embedded in [gay] culture’.

Eaten // Fled Tears (2021), Jake Grewal. Photo: Richard Ivey; courtesy the artist/Thomas Dane Gallery; © the artist

‘Under the Same Sky’ is a display of paintings, but charcoal drawing is at the centre of Grewal’s practice, too. After graduating with a BA in art history in 2016, he decided to enrol at the Royal Drawing School in London. It ‘encouraged me to think more ambiguously about what the point of each work was’, he says, which is ‘where I find the joy now: what is the feeling? What am I trying to convey?’ Before that, ‘there was less depth in the mark-making’. A fire at the House of St Barnabas in 2018 which destroyed two of Grewal’s works (‘bad paintings’, he says) that formed part of a group exhibition there led to a substantial insurance payout that allowed Grewal to put himself through drawing school without having to work on the side. ‘You have to be consumed by your practice in order to push it forward,’ he says, and being free to study without other commitments allowed him to do that. The fact that he has now built a career on using charcoal – the very remnants of his own incinerated work that in turn allowed him to attend drawing school – seems to me a rather poetic turn of events.

Paint and charcoal are not, however, two independent strands of Grewal’s practice, but symbiotic. He frequently reinterprets his own works in different mediums, such as the bright painting Shifting Waters (2021), which he redid as a sombre charcoal a year later, and then painted once again in 2023–24, with the colours darkened and dimmed to create something akin to a blend of the two previous versions. This kind of redrafting – as he has done with several different versions of the seascape currently in his studio – is a way of ‘working through to the true idea’, of ‘making through making itself’. During a stay at the Rhode Island School of Design in the winter of 2020, Grewal discovered compressed charcoal – a harder type, one that allows for the creation of ‘subtlety and veils of tone that you can’t create with willow charcoal’ – and now uses nothing else. He describes drawing with it as ‘similar to the way I paint’: using a rubber on the layers is analogous to ‘scraping paint back’, and by ‘drag[ging] the charcoal across that light section’, you end up with subtle variations in tone that is a characteristic feature of his works on paper: the tender seaside scene Too Much To Say (2023), for instance, in which those rubber marks are clearly visible, or No One Said How It Hurts (2023), in which the delicacy of the charcoal strokes gives the uncanny sensation that the trees and forest floor are shimmering with movement.

No One Said How It Hurts (2023), Jake Grewal. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography; courtesy the artist/Thomas Dane Gallery; © the artist

We are talking just a couple of weeks or so after the death of Frank Auerbach. Spying a postcard, next to the Whistler, of Auerbach’s Head of Gerda Boehm (1961), one of the ‘charcoal heads’ that he drew in the 1950s and ’60s, in which layers of charcoal were built up frantically, sometimes tearing the paper, to create portraits with an extraordinarily vivid quality, I ask Grewal about the consonance between that approach and what he is describing. For Auerbach, Grewal tells me, ‘black and white reproductions [of his work] were as important as colour reproductions, or more so, because he thought of his work tonally. That’s how I try to think as well.’ Drawing informs his use of colour, allowing him to make ‘more interesting colour choices’, since if two colours, ‘even if one is red and one is green’, have the same tonal value and are put next to one another, ‘it works’.

In early 2024 Grewal visited India for the first time. In an interview he gave before he went, he remarked that people kept telling him that going there would have a ‘transformative effect’ on his work. Has it? ‘I came back and my work became a lot more colourful,’ he says. If it is difficult to see how his art could get more colourful than the fluorescent rainforest scenes he was painting at the very beginning of his career, I think what he’s getting at is that his use of colour in his more recent works – say, the verdant forest scene What I Thought I Knew (2024) – is more refined and better thought out. He recalls his maternal grandfather, who is white, telling him that the colour in his work can’t have come from the white side of his family. ‘I’d be like, “what are you talking about? That’s incredibly racist” […] but annoyingly, I went to India and was like, okay, that does kind of make sense,’ he says with a laugh. India is full of colours ‘that you wouldn’t necessarily find next to each other anywhere else […] The landscape and the light, and also just clothes and buses – the stuff. All the stuff is so saturated.’

What I Though I Knew (2024), Jake Grewal. Photo: Robert Glowacki; courtesy the artist/Thomas Dane Gallery; © the artist

I am aware that while Grewal is talking about colour and technique in his work, there is some level of discomfort too about the ways in which people discuss his background. He has expressed in previous interviews fatigue with the shorthand labels often used to describe him – ‘queer British-Indian artist’, for example. ‘For me that label was always really contentious,’ he tells me, because, having grown up in the UK, never been to India until this year, not speaking Hindi or Punjabi and not identifying as Sikh, ‘to propose that I was a South Asian gay artist wasn’t particularly true […] It’s just that I’m interested in [the Western canon], and I go to the National Gallery and I draw, that’s just where I live and that’s the kind of art that I grew up seeing. It’s not necessarily me trying to reclaim something – I’m not trying to de-colonialise myself by putting myself in the world of white people. It’s not that violent or aggressive.’

In many ways, this steadfastness is typical of Grewal as an artist. He has a tangible belief in his ideas about painting: ‘I don’t think I’m going to change,’ he tells me. ‘I’m not worried about going stagnant or out of fashion’. At the same time, he seems highly aware of what he doesn’t yet understand and what more there is to learn. ‘It’s not finished’ echoes in my head as a refrain as I step out of his studio building. It’s a phrase he has said a few times throughout our interview, and while it could seem like an expression of insecurity, when Grewal says it, it feels like nothing more than an acknowledgement that no work – no artist – is ever really finished.

Jake Grewal photographed in his studio in London in November 2025. Photo: Sarah Weal

‘Jake Grewal: Under the Same Sky’ is at Studio Voltaire, London, from 15 January–13 April 2025.

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.