Jo Self Peace
by Neil Spencer
If, as Jo Self says, ‘Every garden has its own magic’, what might one expect of the garden of His Holiness the Dalai Lama? From such a spiritual powerhouse, a powerful sense of enchantment and harmony must presumably flow.
The paintings and drawings gathered in Jo Self’s latest exhibition attest to precisely those qualities. Most were made during two extraordinary visits (of one month and two) to the exiled Dalai Lama’s headquarters in Dharamsala in North India during the winter of 2004/5, the rest on Jo’s return to her home and studio in Lambeth.
Over the last decade, Jo’s flower paintings have become a justly celebrated phenomenon of contemporary British art, acclaimed for their exuberance and tenderness, their mastery of colour and texture, and their stylised but naturalistic approach. Jo captures both the outward grace of nature, and its inner spirit, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ in Dylan Thomas’s famous phrase. Rooted, quite literally, in the organic world, Jo’s canvases have provided a welcome antidote to the excesses of commercial conceptualism and maintained the tradition of English flower painting, albeit in dramatically different form.
The invitation to Dharamsala arrived via a series of serendipitous encounters stemming from Jo’s charity work. She arrived at the Dalai Lama’s headquarters expecting the kind of access granted to patient photographers - one or two 30 minute sessions perhaps – and was astonished to find she was, in her words, to be ‘installed as part of the furniture’.
Having spent two years as Kew Gardens’ first artist in residence, Jo was used to working swiftly in open air and in public view, but the challenges she now encountered were of a different order. Besides the sheer otherness of India itself, there was the intensity of the spiritual life that hummed around her, the only woman among several hundred men; what she initially heard as buzzing bees turned out to be the chants of distant monks. In the beatific atmosphere of the gardens, where time seemed oddly suspended, Jo’s creativity faltered as she found that her ‘normal resources’ weren’t working.
Himalayan rains drove her under cover and seemed to freeze her brush; the cornflowers refused to manifest on the canvas. Insects became embedded in her oils. The presence of Kalashnikov-toting guards, who found in Jo’s output a welcome distraction from routine, was unsettling. Worst of all, her painting of a tree peony (the Tibetan lotus) went awry, her own dissatisfaction with it echoed by the Dalai Lama’s apparent dislike of the work and compounded by His Holiness’s observation that the plant itself was ‘dying, like the Tibetan nation’. Stirred, Jo feverishly made the painting anew, producing an exquisitely vivid portrayal. ‘Actually, the peony wasn’t dying,’ says Jo, ‘it was just between flowering’.
Subsequent canvases proved easier. Animated by the serenity and loveliness of the gardens and by the crystalline mountain light, Jo’s colour spectrum moved up an octave, into dazzling pinks, electric blues and shimmering jade greens. The midnight backdrops against which many of her earlier blooms had been set were abandoned, just as the Buddhist gardeners, she found, keep darker, less auspicious flowers discreetly at the back of the greenhouses. The more sombre acrylic backgrounds of the chalk drawings here (pre-prepared in London) were attacked with particularly violent colours.
Long hours at the easel – Jo took the Dalai Lama’s twelve hour working day as an example to be followed – soon conjured other delights; a cluster of oranges, a yellow rose looming from a pink background, a tender orchid, a ramble of morning glory. Extended periods of graft and contemplation were broken by inspirational events; on one occasion a huge, pale blue dragonfly posing obligingly by the painter’s hand, on another a sudden swarm of the insects crowded the garden, a scene captured in Jo’s numinous, impressionist canvas and its pulsating purples, greens and blues.
Then there was the charged, jocular presence of the Dalai Lama himself while out on his perambulations; chortling at Jo’s elevation of the humble daisy to painterly distinction (‘Ah, tiny one!’) and laughing thunderously when he saw her remade lotus, which, she had realised, had to contain the world in its cup, not spill it. A vision of a Tibetan goddess perched in the flower had intimated as much. ‘He knew I’d got the picture,’ says Jo.
Throughout her stay, synchronicities continued to chime. Taking a moonlit walk on ‘Buddha’s Enlightenment Day’, Jo was shocked to come across a series of massive flowers chalked onto the tarmac, evidently inscribed by monks to welcome the Dalai Lama, and eerily resembling some of her own early paintings. ‘I could tell the monks even draw the same way I do, with the arm at full stretch.’
One question remained naggingly in place: ‘Why me? Why am I here? What’s the connection?’ That Jo is not a practising Buddhist or especially religious – cheery irreverence is her normal modus operandi – made the question the more curious. The answer, according to the Dalai Lama’s secretary, Tenzin Geyche Tethong, was both ‘simple and complex’…there was, apparently, a karmic connection, a sense of destiny.
For Jo, the experience of Dharamsala was in part about ‘learning to let go, to let things come your way rather than having the restless drive of the West’. She also learnt something about her work; ‘I tried to paint the Dalai Lama’s garden in its entirety, but it proved my greatest disaster. It was like trying to paint Shangri-La. I paint one flower at a time because each of them becomes the centre of my meditation.’
On her return to Lambeth, Jo immediately embarked on the largest and most striking works in this collection; a lotus that pulsates with pinkness, a geranium that is a planet unto itself, reflecting a moon at its centre. They are huge, says Jo, because they ‘need to knock people’s socks off, to exclaim peace!’
The exhibition is, indeed, a reminder that ‘peace’, like compassion, is not a passive, inert state, but an affirmation of life, a busy exultation of creation in which flowers, plants and insects, however humble, are a central part.
Neil Spencer, 2005
Jo at Kew Gardens
"Kew makes me feel like a child again" she says, "because I'm always walking and you can see from horizon to horizon. I used to walk with my mother in the fields around Bovingdon in Hertfordshire, where we lived." This enhanced sense of scale - of endless horizons that trigger memories of childhood - is evident in Calla Lily. The painting is more like a landscape than a flower painting. Lying on its side, the purple petals undulate across the canvas like a range of hills floating on a surface densely worked in dark colours - black over midnight blue. A seam of pale blue traverses the interior like a thin line of light.
"I was in a plane" recalls Self, "and everything was black. Then, as the sun came up, a thin strip of light appeared along the horizon. The backgrounds are often based on skies, or on an internal darkness - a black part of me." With its rippling trajectory, the strange flower also reminds me of sound waves or a sting ray cruising the ocean floor. "In my mind was a Chinese scroll in the British Museum in which the hem of a dress is described in a wonderfully fluent line", says Self. "I often think the paintings are like dancing, because I draw with my whole arm. I draw the flower on canvas first, then colour it in."
Clearly these flowers are no ordinary blooms. A wealth of disparate associations gives them a disturbing intensity. Self often isolates a single bloom on a large canvas; yet, despite the enlargement, they do not have the hallucinatory clarity of, say, Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. This is partly due to the process. Having made a drawing of the flower, Self works from the drawing so that the final image is at one remove. "I'm dyslexic and have a photographic memory" she says, "so I paint the blooms from the image in my head - from my mind's eye." Her flowers remain an enigma, something remembered rather than revealed - emblems re-made in the unconscious.
She has been painting flowers for nine years now and a year at Kew hasn't changed her work so much as intensified its strangeness. She spent several nights in the Temperate House listening to the crows scrabbling about outside while watching the water lilies bloom. At first the flowers are white and male but, when pollinated, they turn red and become female. Given the eerie context, it is not surprising that Victoria Amazona looms up against its dark ground like an alien being. "Its very surreal at Kew" says Self. "I almost hallucinate there, partly because I spend so much time on my own. I call it West World."
Other paintings are overtly sexual. The fleshiness of Red Pansy Midsummer's Day is enhanced by the blood red that edges its petals like lipstick over bruising. Tinged a delicate pink, White Orchid is like a Rubens nude spreading ample thighs to reveal her sex. But the embarrassment induced by Pink Rose and Vermillion Rose is less easily explained. The flowers are so vivid that they trigger the smell of roses. Despite an almost melodramatic strangeness, these nests of shockingly vibrant colour are an overwhelming reminder of nature's gaudy splendour.'
Sarah Kent
August, 2001
Jo Self's floral paintings are like the darkness at the edge of the sun - a triumphant exploration of the power of pigment to titivate the psyche and arouse the emotions. Self is engaged in creating an anti-natural naturalism; her flowers are neither prettified nor decadent; not necessarily of the wayside or of the roadway. To enter Self's parallel garden world is to engage in a tremulous synaesthesia - the agonised juxtaposition of sense, and colour and sound.
Will Self, 1998
Jo Self - first Artist in Residence at Kew Gardens
Before she took up the residency Jo's main source of inspiration was her own 150 foot garden in Brixton which she made over 15 years.
At first she found Kew's huge supply of subject matter bewildering. Where to start? As she said recently to Elspeth Thompson: 'It was one extreme to another - all of a sudden I was faced with wonderful orchids and all sorts of strange exotic plants that I'd never even heard of before.'
Her paintings are very different from the botanically perfect textbook watercolours and drawings normally associated with the Gardens. Neither botanist, scientist nor gardener, she often feels vulnerable when working at Kew, describing herself as 'this mad artist, coming and going at strange hours and answering to no one'.
Jo Self is a painter of flowers but her fascination for them has nothing to do with science or botany. She uses their fantastically strange forms and unimaginably vivid colours to reflect her own emotions. The images she creates are bold and modern.
Kew has had a deep and powerful effect on Jo Self. She has visited the gardens to paint at different times of the day and night. 'There's a very intense energy in the hothouse, and the scent of all the plants is almost overpowering', she says. 'I was practically hallucinating, having all sorts of peculiar dreams.' She goes on to say: 'My work was rather abstract and ethereal before, but it has become very fecund, with a sort of meatier edge to it.'
In her new industrial space in South London Jo has created her very own hothouse, a 'mini-Kew', in which she intends to grow palm trees, flowering climbers and waterlilies in oil drums and keep tropical butterflies. |
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