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. . . alive
and kicking
'Wicked!' Said
the schoolchildren clustered round Jonathan Leaman's picture
A Jan Steen Kitchen, when it was first shown
as a new acquisition by the Tate Gallery. I have never before
witnessed such a show of enthusiasm by the young for anything
at the Tate; least of all those many items of formalist or minimalist
art, whose dubious merit we are ordered to take
on trust on the basis of the explanatory labels provided by the
gallery's Curator of Interpretation.
Leaman's engagement with the full range of painting's potential
is indeed a liberation. What a relief to see art that
is so recognisable and yet leaves so much to the imagination.
To see skill deployed in the age-enshrined service of depiction,
especially of detail and what he calls 'the difficult bits'.
And with what dynamic result between the inter-relation
of the parts. No one, seeing a Leaman, can for one moment entertain
the long fashionable notion that 'painting is dead'. Painting
in his hands is as alive and kicking as a sackful
of rabbits.
And yet, by his own admission, he is paradoxically
an old-fashioned painter; and this isolates him from
mainstream acceptance. Not that he dismisses Modernism.
His understanding of art is generous and eclectic. It is simply
that he recognises that, with its deliberate disregard of the
past, Modernism is only one way. 'I'm not a 'modern artist' in
the modernist sense. For a modernist the placing and identity
of things within the picture is less important than the activity
of the artist himself, I don't make my identity apparent. It
is the pictures which make the artifice, the play.'
Jonathan Leaman's third solo show at the Beaux Arts Gallery consolidates
and extends his reputation as one of the most powerful of contemporary
image makers.
His new pictures are characteristically jam-packed, with personal,
literary and artistic references; but there are striking developments.
They contain fewer humans and are generally less action-packed.
There are six works in oil on canvas, the degree of detail in
each slowing his current rate of production to three large pictures
a year.
They might be classified as three pairs. Two paintings
of emotional drama and figurative action: Interior with Row;
Prayer to the Fayum. Two in which a dramatic landscape is dominated
by a single foreground figure: Corronach; Tess Epinikian. And
two still lifes in the form of architectural hypostases: Babel
and The Throne of God. 'Hypostasization
rather than metaphor is the essence of picture making,' he insists.
The distinction is difficult to make, because there is a metaphorical
usage for hypostasis, but Leaman describes it as 'reification,
not a meaning, not a metaphor of something I
can't say.' Literally translated 'hypostasis' means 'that which
stands under' - first, in the sense of a sediment; secondly,
of
a base or foundation. Both meanings are appropriate to his multi-referential
art.
Leaman has criticised Modernism for allowing people to avoid
'the stuff that's hard to paint' by avoiding life; and he admires
Victorian painters because they 'never shirked the real problems'.
Nor does he. He remains a stickler for detail, for what he calls
the incidental, which is why his pictures take so long to do.
Leaman is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get things
right. An obsession lent genetic conviction by his descendance
on the distaff side from the famous turn of the 16th-century
Netherlandish engraver, Crispian van de Passe.
Another of Leaman's Dutch or 17th-century preoccupations is with
light, the fall of light and light as a creator of space. Both
his slice-of-life figurative dramas are
seen by candlelight, Prayer to the Fayum using the candle as
the pictorial focal point in the manner of George de la Tour.
Although it was an exhibition of 17th-century Utrecht painting
at the National Gallery, especially the work of Hendrick ter
Brugghen, which triggered a recent response.
'The great thing about the Utrecht school, I realised, was that
they learned from Caravaggio the business of having light and
dark as their main thing; but they didn't use dark as their 'dark',
they used deep tones of colour. I now mix my colours to a grade,
I pre-mix them into tubes. So I limit my whole palette.'
To depict candlelight is a tricky business for a painter, because
he cannot paint by the light of the candle he is painting. Leaman
would never leave such a critical fact to the imagination. It
must be done from life, whatever the discomfort.
In his country studio lack of space made it out of the question.
In his London studio, which is in his flat, he placed the candle
in another room and hurried between the two. Inevitably he had
to paint from memory but it certainly was not made up. 'Candlelight's
got to be right. It can't be wrong,' is his intractable view.
His other paintings can equally be analysed in terms of light.
The candlelit pictures are interiors; the other four might be
described as landscapes. Their settings are out-of-doors and,
in all but Babel, which towers against the sky, distance is a
crucial factor.
Distance is made spectacular in Tess Epinikian by a beautiful,
rolling, storm sky worthy of that Dutch-inßuenced French
romantic painter, Philipp de Loutherbourg. 'Surface denies spatiality.
Opening out space in a picture inevitably brings a polemic into
play about Otherness, Hereness, Beyondness.'
The sky and canine subject give Tess an l8th-century air. In
life all of us, consciously or not, see through painters' eyes.
'Eighteenth-century' skies do happen. The landscape
is fanciful but was prompted by memories of the countryside round
his aunt's house near Guildford. 'It definitely looks
like a chalk landscape to me. The clouds seemed to know
how to paint themselves. They took three days. The grass took
six months.'
Light and distance too lend threat to Corronach, a tossing sea
of chairs diminishing to a blood-red horizon. Colour bleeds out
of the sky, 'Corronach' is Gaelic for 'lament'. The equation
of flowers and a prone figure in armour recalls the famous lament,
'The Flowers of the Forest', commemorating the devastating defeat
of the Scots at the battle of Flodden. Leaman did not make the
connection until he had finished the picture.
The sunlight which bathes The Throne of God is his
most particular in intention. 'It's a specific Atlantic light
I'm familiar with from Cornwall, but in Portugal it's more intense.
There's this ultra-violet glow. You see it on hot days at Guincho.
The hills vibrate with violet. It's an afternoon light, definitely
after lunch.' The time of day appropriate to a painting in which
God, or whoever owns those giant slippers, has retired - perhaps
only temporarily to some shady place
for a siesta.
Subjects come to Leaman in various ways. Tess Epinikian and Interior
with Row derive from incidents in real life. Tess is the family
dog, which actually did kill a rabbit in his presence; and the
children did fool around with candles under the table one evening
when he was having a confessional supper with a friend - a scene
he has turned into a marital row, with the enraged husband jabbing
a furious and contemptuous finger at his meek wife. Such pictures
are 'given' by circumstance and so, in its way, was Prayer to
the Fayum, where the tomb-robber
in Ancient Egypt hacks the face from the mummy, a scene Leaman
first imagined, then envisaged twice in dreams.
The other pictures were more evolutionary. Babel
was done in response to a series of drawings on the subject
of 'connections' made impulsively 15 years before. By combining
them in a 'tower' he invested them with a previously missing
reality.
The Throne of God is, among other things, a re-working from Masaccio's
Madonna and Child in the NationaI Gallery. It also takes inspiration
from Ezekiel 1:26 (Geneva version):
'And above the firmament...was the fashion
of a throne like unto a sapphire stone,
And upon the similitude of the throne was by appearance, as the
similitude of a man above upon it.'
Corronach was planned as a 'Sleeping Beauty' picture.
'I can't remember where the idea for chairs came from - perhaps
the briars of the story seemed too spiny. The remembrance of
furniture is exact and particular, evoking great upheavals, and
splinterings of memory, in its piles and walls, looking out over
a wasteland: The Front.'
Leaman takes exception to being called a naturalistic artist,
although much in his painting has a stunning verisimilitude,
especially in the still-life details: the foreground furniture
in Corronach; the smeared bowls ('I had to cook the pasta bacon
and have it around for four days while I was painting it'): the
dish of blood in Babel - there are numerous examples. Keen observers
will also notice that the same model, his niece Alice, appears
in several guises. By her own account, under the table she was
'being silly' and, as the armoured knight, she was 'pretending
to be asleep'. 'This only emphasises the living nature of the
knight; a crucial distinction, because a corpse would have deprived
the picture of much of its fantasy. Indeed, such a reading would
make no sense.'
Leaman painted himself, for want of a model, as the meek married
woman. But it is also clear that he often paints figures with
a deliberate exaggeration which verges on caricature. Stanley
Spencer did this, but Leaman prefers Charles Dickens as an example.
'The reason I don't bother to paint everything the same is because
I'm interested in the identity of things. A candle is just a
candle, but human-beings are dynamic, they move around. Dickens
changes the scale when the subject-matter changes. He mixes cartoon
and naturalism in every one of his novels. I'm not interested
in naturalism whatsoever. But I am interested in your recognising
immediately what everything is. Looking for energy, you look
for that jabbing finger. A row is a measure of one thing, a still
life the measure of something else. The one thing above all else
a picture is about is the dynamic, how things are held together,
I have succeeded if the picture has its own life.'
Certainly these are not naturalistic pictures in the sense of
being true to nature. Their realism only disguising their unreality.
What are they about? That is determined by the reaction of the
viewer to the picture, an inherent dynamism.
Leaman recognises this and offers many ideas of his own. Babel,
in particular, has a babble of connected meanings; 'a protean
soup of creative renaming'. And, if you look closely in the right-hand
bottom corner, you will see it contains a reference to that grand
master of linguistic chess, Marcel Duchamp. In The Throne of
God, the Invisible One, seems to have said 'Right, I'm off!'
And where does that leave Man? 'The subject is 'presence': the
'absence' in 'presence'.' The colours of Tess suggest she is
the sky solidified, herself the wet and rushing storm. Corronach
is a lament, terrifying into the bargain. And terror and evil
combine in Prayer to the Fayum. The robber, by defacing the mummy,
knowingly ends all hope of its owner's redemption. Interior with
Row is a scene of domestic destruction, the children capable
of callous indifference to a shockingly adult degree.
'When we talk of understanding art we mean having enthusiasm.
People feel they have to be educated to understand. But in art
a stupid reading is as true as a subtle one, because reaction
is always revealing. You can't say that about any other art form.
It's one of the magic qualities of picture making.'
Yes, Jonathan Leaman brings magic into art. The magic too much
art has been missing too long.
John McEwen
Art critic, The Sunday Telegraph |
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Selected Biography
1954 Born London
1973-1977 Camberwell School of Art, London
1977-1983 Teaching at Camberwell
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1994 Paintings;
1989-1994, Beaux Arts, London 1996 New Paintings, Beaux Arts,
London
1998 Take 3, Beaux Arts, London
1999 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London
2002 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1994 Lineart,
Ghent, Belgium
1997 Artist's of Fame and Promise, Beaux Arts, London
1999 Recent Acquisitions (Collection Display), Tate Britain,
London
Simmer, Beaux Arts, London
1999 Home Life (Collection Display), Tate Britain, London
2001 Summer 2001, Beaux Arts, London
ART FAIRS
1992 Art92, The
London Contemporary Art Fair (Featured Artist, selected by Paula
Rego)
1995-2001 The London Contemporary Art Fair, London
20/21 British Art Fair, The Royal College of Art, London
1996-1997 Art Miami, USA
COLLECTIONS
Public Collections:
The Tate Gallery, London (A Jan Steen Kitchen purchased in 1997)
Private Collections: Belgium, Ireland, Mexico, Switzerland and
the UK |
