Club classics – on the dance floor with Denzil Forrester The painter discusses dancehalls, club music and drawing in the dark

By Gabriel Coxhead

It feels rather ironic to be interviewing Denzil Forrester about his work in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. We’re communicating by video call, of course – Forrester in his home in Cornwall, me in London, unable to meet in person because of the rules around social distancing and self-isolating; yet most of Forrester’s paintings convey a mood that’s completely at odds with such restrictions. The scenes depicted in the Grenadian-born artist’s best-known body of work, which in many ways define his practice, are ones of social closeness and togetherness, of people enjoying the deep, human pleasures of mingling and interacting and sharing space. These are his paintings set in nightclubs and dancehalls, specifically the underground dub-reggae clubs he frequented as an art student in London during the late 1970s and early ’80s, which he continues to produce to this day – vast, immersive canvases in rich, lurid colours, that capture the energy and ecstasy of communal celebration, and that portray a now vanished era of Black British culture.

Now 64, with an accent that reflects his upbringing in both the West Indies and London (where he moved in 1967), Forrester explains how he began making drawings at all-night ‘blues’ clubs and parties after becoming a fan of one particular dub DJ, Jah Shaka. ‘I was looking for subject matter to paint. I went to this nightclub in Seven Sisters – just for fun, at first, to check out the music. The next time I brought an A4 sketchbook with me, but after a while I realised that was rubbish. You’re trying to capture all the movement and action, the expression of people in a moment in time – when you’re doing drawings like that you need a bit more space, so I started bringing A1 paper. I’d bring 50 sheets and use them all.’

This, then, became his process for generating drawings, in numerous nightclubs across east London – he cites a litany of venues which occupied faded, once-grand Victorian buildings in Hackney: Phebes; the Four Aces; All Nations, which had a restaurant serving West Indian food and domino games in the basement. Forrester would typically position himself behind the bar, watching the dancers and surging crowds and DJs – often his favourite, Jah Shaka – spinning records, sketching as best he could in the smoky near-darkness. Each drawing he made was done in the time a single song played. ‘I only had about three or four minutes to draw a section of the club, so I had to work very quickly, but I got very good at it. I did it for about five, six years, going to the nightclubs two nights a week, four or five hours a night. It became almost addictive. You’re there, drawing, being part of the crowd – it was a physical thing. You absorb a lot of stuff you’re probably not conscious of, but when you come to make the painting it all comes out, the physical presence of being in a space like that.’