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Jonathan Leaman
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Jonathan Leaman: Pinning down God John McEwen ‘The world has no meaning. We make meanings in the world,’ Jonathan Leaman in conversation. Jonathan Leaman says he writes best when he ‘spouts’. Spouting is his nature, applying as much as to his conversation as his art: both teem with ideas, expressed as clearly and volubly as in the studied fidelity of his painting and drawing of objects and people. As a child he remembers that one soldier was never enough, he had to draw whole armies. As an artist he says he would love to paint freely, but recognizes he is a born ‘literalist’, which requires infinite pains. He strives for and, as we can see, sometimes attains a simple image but, however simple, a Leaman picture is pregnant with allusion and reference; rich in hyper-realistic detail. His literalism has become more concentrated with time and the requirement to be true to life has drawn him away from the fleetingness of movement, which could drive him to caricature. This in turn has encouraged the accentuation of things. No title identifies the fact, but a glance will reveal that the same middle-aged man appears in Vanity, Incredulity and pulling a cart bearing a bed in the middle of Whinny-Moor. The man is Leaman himself; and in conversation he is happy to admit that he also used his face, feet and torso as the models for those in Acheiropoieton (‘unmade by hand’ – a reference to Veronica’s veil, with its miraculous imprint of Christ’s face), Abel and Summer. My exposure of this high degree of self-portrayal is to emphasise that, for all that he makes a virtue of objectivity he is also unfathomably subjective. No artist could take more trouble in explaining his pictures or is more willing to engage in their discussion, but he prefaced the detailed notes he helpfully provided for the writing of this introduction with a warning: ‘That I talk about what I am willing to talk about does not mean that I talk about what I meant - There is much hidden or laying on the surface I won’t, can’t, am ashamed to make clear.’ The earlier of these paintings – Vanity, Incredulity and The Electric Age – were included in the exhibition at Israel’s Tel Aviv Museum of Art, his first retrospective, which finished in February 2005. In Vanity, he redoubles the moral by making it truly a vanity of vanities through the inclusion of his self-portrait. As he says, what could be more self-deceptive than a study of the elusive self? An elusiveness ironically caught by his silhouetted paunch in Abel, a pitiless examination of middle-age spread inspired by seeing the stark reality when caught off-guard by a bathroom mirror. Leaman has been described by the late Rudi Nassauer, an early supporter of his work, as a religious painter. His art is certainly full of references to Judaic, Christian and other religious ritual and scripture, but he is not God fearing.The skull in Vanity with the cigarette clamped between its teeth could be a joke at the expense of government health warnings; while the cheeky figure of Death, peeking round the distant door, subverts the solemnity of the traditional Vanity. If there is a vain hope it is putting our faith in Elysium Leaman describes Vanity as the first ‘deliberate’ still life painting he has made; endorsed by his casting himself in the modern - guise role of the biblical Laban. In Genesis the story of Laban and Jacob tells of the solemn covenant between the two, in which Jacob, father of the future tribes of Israel through his children by Laban’s daughters, takes all Laban’s possessions, including his idols, on condition Laban has no further wives, and therefore no other descendants. In the picture Laban/Leaman is shown holding an idol surrounded by his possessions, boxed in stacks or represented by a few samples displayed on the marble slab, the accuracy of its foreground perspective daringly put to the test by the geometry of the receding shelves. The skull partly hides a snapshot of Leaman as a boy; an ironic twist on the artistic conceit of the picture within a picture - as is his reflection in the floating bubble. But above all this is a picture about ‘the power of things’, the hold of things. Leaman’s purest, most deliberate, still life to date is Patibole. How rich in metaphor and atmosphere this masterpiece of mimesis is compared with the normal run of this now debased genre. ‘Patibole’ is the English for ‘patibulum’, the transverse beam of the Cross. The spread glove with the stigmatic suggestion of blood made by the plum in its palm hints at the same; as does the Dutch notion of still life as betrayal, betriegertjes, the notion Leaman prefers. Patibole is still life as a staged drama. A T34 tank (made more threatening by the artist’s discreet distressing of the original toy model) enters right, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake as it advances, under the swag of apples and towards the tied theatrical curtain on the left. Meanwhile ‘ Alice, as Lady World, perhaps reports wanly from on top of her apple ‘More of the same…’’. In the background gloom putti carry off a laden table representing ‘the spirit of still life’. Art is born of art but Leaman’s refutes and rebuts Modernism’s denial of observation. In Acheiropoieton the brick wall stamps its authority as singularly as the soft contrast of the ‘halo’ of pears or the ostensible subject of the mother and child. The wall was inspired by one seen outside Darlington station – its occlusive effect as complete and tantalising as the curtain he admires in a picture by the Master of the St Bartholomew altarpiece, at the National Gallery Leaman has recently been looking more at medieval art than that of the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch golden age, and perhaps this shows in the greater accent on decay and death. He proclaims the ‘holiness’ of things. His reference to doubting Thomas in Incredulity, the man exulting in the gore of reality, might celebrate realism in general Large canvases of mind-blowing detail have been a Leaman speciality for many years, but never so apocalyptic as The Electric Age, with its fire tinted clouds and floating boulders reminiscent of John Martin and Wright of Derby. It is a vision of the life force, the élan vital, as the melting point in a waste of disruption on the verge of immolation: ‘earth is plane and surface – surfaces cracked, rent, splintered or gathered in – planes expelled, boiling erupting, peeling (and peeled back): fissured or brushed aside’. A volcano of a picture, eerily prescient of the awesome inferno at the fuel depot in Hemel Hempstead – the association the more apt since The Electric Age is not a night scene, as he reminds us by including the glimpsed glimmer of a sunlit sea beyond the cloud. Whinny-Moor, the subject of an ancient English ballad, is the other panorama. Whinny-Moor is a purgatory of whinns or gorse bushes the dead must cross where, if you have neglected to be kind or charitable in life, ‘the whinnes sall pricke thee to the bare bane’. Leaman’s burdened souls suggest memory in this world is purgatory enough. His walking dead bare the past on their backs, like characters in a Tadeusz Kantor drama. In the centre the artist drags a chassis supporting his bed. The same bed, with the same blood-red blanket, has appeared in other Leaman paintings over the years, notably Strongly, Wrongly, Vainly 1996. It is occupied by a kneeling figure, a giant hair-brush - a very intimate object; we instinctively avoid using another person’s brush - and a gorse branch. The branch, distinguished from the rest by a richer green, is tied to the frame – perhaps because in bed we are pricked by conscience even more than during the distraction of workaday life. Certainly it serves as a reminder that for all its doleful cast of wanderers this picture’s ‘main player is gorse’. The four pictures of the seasons make a logical set, although each is specific and self-contained. Leaman displays them in the order of Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn: ‘Grabbing, drowning, collapsing. raising up. Chaos, fertility, war, apocalypse. Creation, budding, spoliation, annihilation.’ Leaman does not believe in ‘beauty’ any more than in redemption, for him there are no hierarchies in nature. Man does not ‘destroy’ nature. As a natural agent, along with all other physical agents, he merely alters it, neither for better nor worse. If this means he extinguishes himself, so be it. Nature will still be nature, missing only one - albeit a dominating one - of its myriad components. His symbolisation of the seasons may seem bleak – frustration, anger and desolation abound; and references to war and the torture that is the Crucifixion are insistent – but a ‘terrible beauty’, by whatever aesthetic measure, is nonetheless achieved. Summer is heat personified. The charred corpse, the glaring light, the detritus dry as the dust, everything speaks of desiccation, of wells dried up – the psalmist’s phrase for spiritual desolation. The implied erection of the upturned horn of plenty, spilling its fruit, could not be a more potent metaphor of impotence. It thrusts into nothing and suggests a rhino horn – hollow irony, the rhino threatened with extinction because its powdered spike is superstitiously regarded as an aphrodisiac. Reference to the Iraq war is intentional, in that the image of the charred human head and shoulders was taken from some footage of the US army’s notorious ‘turkey shoot’. But there is a more gruesome detail, which he saw on late night tv ‘when they show the pictures they don’t want us to see’. It is a draped and disembodied head. Autumn is equally topical. The thrust of the manhood is literally a hooded man, a suicide bomber who ‘has to force God to exist otherwise he has no meaning at all’. His faith is fully realized only through self-obliteration, an appropriate subject with which to symbolize the season of death and the dead. Spring and sub-aqueous Winter off-set the drought. The drowned cart of fertility is the same car chassis as the one being dragged across Whinny-Moor. Such cross references abound in Leaman’s art. To his surprise he realized on the train home from his annual winter holiday at a remote Cornish cottage, that he had modelled the ‘hidden lake’ in Spring on the mud flats at Dawlish. It is a reminder that, for all Leaman’s erudite knowledge of art and literature, his investment in the power of things is based on memory and an intense observation of the objects he takes such pride in getting right. His pictures involve months, often years, of work. The seemingly blank sky of Whinny-Moor is in fact full of ghostly clouds, which took a dozen glazing coats of white paint over ultramarine to perfect. The apparently straight-forward perspective of Patibole actually incorporates four vanishing points, each requiring arduous re-alignment. Every painting is an accumulation of numerous sketches, drawn details and the final transfer of a finished cartoon; the laborious counterpart of his abundant terms of emotional and historical reference. Above all, it is perhaps Leaman’s wizardry at conveying light which most distinguishes his art. Not just the fall of light on objects but the blinding light which etherealises his tattered childhood teddy in Entrance; the infinitely subtle gradations of cloudless skies which so distinguish Summer and Autumn. . ‘The most important thing is that pictures should belong to the people who look at them,’ he says. But a viewer must beware. Pinned to the table-cloth in Patibole is a latin tag roughly translated as, ‘Here’s a dragon eating its own tail’ – a warning that ‘if you attempt to find a meaning you just go up your own bum’. But meaning there is - in abundance. Leaman’s art is an obdurate exception to the fast-food culture which has made a virtue of disposability and historical amnesia. Thoughtful, skilful, questioning, informed, tirelessly observant, it celebrates the power of the imagination, which is why his godless and sometimes sad vision of the world is so uplifting. John McEwen The third edition of John McEwen’s Paula Rego’s (Phaidon) will be published in September
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Selected Biography Jonathan Leaman1954 Born London 1973-1977 Studied at Camberwell School of Art, London 1977-1983 Teaching at Camberwell School of Art Solo Exhibitions 1994 Paintings; 1989-1994, Beaux Arts, London 1996 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London Take 3 , Beaux Arts, London 1999 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London 2002 New Paintings, Beaux Arts, London 2004 Ziw, that Light, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel Selected Group Exhibitions 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 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) 1995-2005 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 Publications and Reviews New European Artists (Volume 1) , Published by Annual Development b.v. and edited by Edward Lucie-Smith. Beaux Arts catalogues to accompany solo exhibitions with texts by; Rudolph Nassauer, John McEwen and Richard Morphet. Jonathan Leaman , Rudolph Nassauer, Modern Painters, winter 1993. Stripped Naked in Arcadia , John McEwen, The Sunday Telegraph, February 1994. Art in Detail , Julia Weiner, Jewish Chronicle, May 1997. A Star is Born , John McEwen, Art Review, May 1997. Welcome a Sensational Modern Master , John McEwen, The Sunday Telegraph, May 1997. In the Big Time , Julia Weiner, Jewish Chronicle, October 1999. Glorious Mayhem, Laura Gascoigne, What’s On, October 2002. Jonathan Leaman, Elspeth Moncrieff, The Art Newspaper, November 2002. Ziw, that Light , with texts by Prof. Mordechai Omer, Director and Chief Curator of Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Mark Gisbourne, Curator and Art Critic, Berlin & Freda Uziyel, Freelance Art Critic. Tel Aviv Museum of Art Catalogue, Israel, 2004.
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