As the panel for the nation’s biggest painting prize convene to choose a winner, Laura Davis meets Liverpool-born judge Ged Quinn

IT IS pretty bemusing to Ged Quinn that he’s suddenly being tipped as one of the next generation of artists to watch out for in reviews of the new Saatchi Gallery show.

The Liverpool-born painter is 44 and “Charles”, as he calls Britain’s best known collector, has been buying his work for five years.

“I’m as old as the YBAs!” he exclaims, referring to Young British Artists Damian Hirst, Tracey Emin et al who were shot to fame under Saatchi’s wing in the 1990s.

“It’s not the same as it was with the Sensation generation where being bought by him turned your life around,” he continues.

“That’s part of his success, that he’s one of a lot of collectors now.”

Quinn’s work has been bought by many prestigious collections, including Tate, and so well-established is he that he was invited to become a judge for this year’s John Moores Prize.

We meet the night before the panel gather to discuss the short-listed works, in the Panoramic restaurant overlooking the city the artist left in his mid-20s.

He seems to admire the view with an artist’s eye, fascinated by the effect height has on the perspective of the buildings below.

It’s an honour to be involved in the 53-year-old painting competition that inspired him as a child, says Quinn.

“Back in the 80s the John Moores at the Walker was this one thing every two years when this great mix of contemporary art just landed in the city,” he recalls. “You didn’t get to see it otherwise.”

Born in Allerton and growing up on Gambia Terrace on the edge of the city centre, he and his parents were regular visitors to the gallery.

“They had old-fashioned working class aspirations,” he says.

“My father was so proud of Liverpool, of the architecture and the Walker.

“The effect that going into the gallery had on you as a little kid was amazing – the huge Samson (by Solomon J Solomon) on the stairs was an absolutely awesome thing to see.”

Judging the John Moores painting prize is quite an odd experience for Quinn as he experienced the competition from the other side just two years ago when he was a finalist with his work, There’s a House in my Ghost.

“Coming from Liverpool, it was something I wanted to be able to say I’d done – shown in the John Moores,” says the father-of-three.

“The piece wasn’t finished when I entered, then I found out I was into the next stage and I thought ‘Oh my God I’ve got to finish the painting now’.”

In the meantime, Tate Liverpool asked him to include work in its Made Up exhibition for the Biennial festival of contemporary art so he ended up having work on display in two of the city’s galleries at the same time.

“I actually felt a bit greedy having both,” he admits humbly.

The experience was a source of great pride for his father John Quinn, a retired commercial traveller who has since passed away, and to his mother Doreen, who would bring her son brushes and tubes of watercolours from her weekly trips into town.

Quinn loved to paint from an early age but his passion was cemented as a pupil at the Blue Coat School in Wavertree.

“It was quite academic and they paired physics with art as an option,” he remembers, running his hand through his hair as he laughs.

“The whole year chose physics so I had these fantastic afternoons on my own in the art room. It was full of old art books and I’d just sit there reading, going through time really and looking at Renaissance Masters one day and Impressionists the next.

“There’d be a bowl of fruit and the art teacher would say ‘draw that’. That bowl of apples seemed more important to me than any of the equations the physics teacher was trying to get us to learn.”

From there he studied at Oxford University’s Ruskin College, where he attended human dissections (“there were jars around the room with people’s faces in them – they were like Damien Hirsts), and then on to the Slade, where he was taught by John Moores winners Tim Head, John Hoyland and Bruce McLean.

In the middle of all this, he spent some time as a keyboardist for Liverpool bands The Lotus Eaters and Teardrop Explodes, while working as a dishwasher at the Armadillo cafe on Mathew Street.

After graduation, with few prospects for a young artist in Britain, Quinn moved to Germany.

“Saatchi gets a lot of flack but he and (Tate Liverpool founder) Nick Serota were among an axis of people who transformed the contemporary art scene in this country and thank God they did,” he says.

“It really was bleak. The new galleries that came along after Saatchi introduced collectors to buying small pieces and then bigger pieces and suddenly there was an income stream.

“I spent four years in Dusseldorf and when I came back Damien Hirst had done Freeze (a YBA exhibition that included the work of fellow judge Gary Hume) and the whole scene had changed completely.”

Although he has spent much of his career working in installation, including wine and bread made from pulverised books, Quinn has spent the past seven-or-so years mainly focussing on painting.

His beautifully-detailed landscapes are based on the works of other artists, such as 17th century painter Claude Lorrain, but include modern motifs.

“The problem for me with painting was what to paint and the area I wanted to work in was the intellectual space other people had already created,” he explains.

“A painting is a vision by somebody else so I like to work between those two things, the reality and the imagined world. I think about some of the strands of the story and start to layer in contemporary imagery and different stories that I think maybe tease out the idea that the places might be real and that other people might inhabit them.”

Art critics are divided into those who gush about his work and those who consider he is wasting his talents.

“Brian Sewell, the darling, said I had a future forging Old Masters or restoring them or something but I actually don’t measure myself on those standards at all,” Quinn says.

“I’m quite cold about it.

“I love the image but I’m not that worried about painting to a certain standard.”

With the John Moores Prize judging under way, he is glad to see painting reclaiming its well deserved place in the spotlight, he adds.

“It’s an important showcase and because of its anonymity it creates an unpredictable survey show,” he says.

“It’s never what you expect.”

THE winner of the John Moores Prize will be announced at the opening of the finalists’ exhibition in September.