{"id":1952,"date":"2017-02-24T09:00:56","date_gmt":"2017-02-24T09:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/?p=1952"},"modified":"2017-02-17T11:31:05","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T11:31:05","slug":"feature-confessional-painting-recent-work-by-chantal-joffe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/2017\/02\/24\/feature-confessional-painting-recent-work-by-chantal-joffe\/","title":{"rendered":"Feature: “Confessional Painting: Recent work by Chantal Joffe”"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY GEMMA BLACKSHAW<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Linda, you are leaving
\nyour old body now.
\nIt lies flat, an old butterfly,
\nall arm, all leg, all wing,
\nloose as an old dress.
\nI reach out toward it
\nbut my fingers turn to cankers
\nand I am motherwarm and used,
\njust as your childhood is used.<\/p>\n

(Anne Sexton, \u2018Mother and Daughter\u2019<\/a>)<\/p>\n

When I asked, in 2015, how she might describe the images of mothers, daughters and poets that have preoccupied her, the artist Chantal Joffe<\/a> talked of transitions \u2013 of ageing, and of painting as an attempt to mark the moments in a lifetime that are both intensely personal and reassuringly universal.<\/p>\n

Esme, her daughter, has just started secondary school; in the portraits she returns her mother\u2019s gaze with a new boredom and suspicion, arms folded across her chest. Skirts, striped t-shirts and pointed shoes cover a body the artist is no longer permitted to depict, a loss of innocence and intimacy that is counted out in the piles of family photographs that cover Joffe\u2019s studio surfaces \u2013 Esme by a paddling pool; leaning over a birthday cake; sucking on a straw.<\/p>\n

In her poem \u2018Mother and Daughter\u2019, Anne Sexton (1928-74) addressed the eldest of her two girls, Linda, who had just turned eighteen, leaving her \u2018old body\u2019 (\u2018all arm, all leg, all wing\u2019), her childhood and mother behind. Ignored, rebuffed, \u2018pick-pocketed\u2019 \u2013 Sexton reflects on the transition in their relationship, on what she has given and what she has lost.<\/p>\n

Joffe\u2019s interest in the confessional poetry of Sexton, her friend Sylvia Plath (1932-63), and their tutor at Boston University, Robert Lowell (1917-77), stretches back to her time as a student, but in recent months it has deepened. Painting at a time of change \u2013 on the brink of her daughter\u2019s teenage years \u2013 she has returned to this literature of confidences, experiencing its often-painful descriptions of familial relationships anew.<\/p>\n

Her most recent exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery, London (January-March 2016), included the portraits of Esme, her cousins and friends that have become, over the years, so much a part of Joffe\u2019s practice \u2013 their ageing a marker of her development as a painter.<\/p>\n

But these images appear alongside those of the American poets and their families: Anne Sexton embracing<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Chantal Joffe
Sylvia at the Beach, 2015
Oil on board
35.5 x 28 cm
14 x 11 1\/8 in
Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London (Photography Stephen White)
\u00a9 Chantal Joffe<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Linda; Robert Lowell with his wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick and their daughter, Harriet; Sylvia Plath, radiant at the side of Ted Hughes. In conversation, Joffe refers to these subjects by their first names \u2013 \u2018Look at Anne with her cigarette; Sylvia \u2013 so happy…\u2019 \u2013 and this reveals not only the intensity of her reading but also the intimacy of her relationship with people she has never met and will never know.<\/p>\n

In early 2015, in an interview with Sarah Howgate<\/a>, Contemporary Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Joffe described how, as a student at the Royal College of Art (from 1992-94), \u2018I was always trying to inhabit other people, particularly other artists… I love them so much I want to be them.\u2019<\/p>\n

In a series of collages dating from this period, she painted images of the female poets she had come to love: Plath at the beach, beaming in a white bathing suit; Sexton preparing for her suicide, locked in the car in her mother\u2019s fur coat. Painting her own features over theirs, or sticking a closely cut photograph of her head and shoulders on to their heads and shoulders, Joffe represented both her identification with these writers and her determination to overcome the personal and professional conflicts they experienced \u2013 significantly, in the image of the suicidal Sexton, Joffe presents (as she wrote to me in an email interview) her \u2018cheerful, young face\u2019, smiling from ear to ear.<\/p>\n

In her new images of these women, Joffe is more concerned with empathy than identification. Understanding the indivisibility of these poets\u2019 lives and works through her own history as an artist, mother and lover, Joffe\u2019s recent paintings of Plath and Sexton are both more nuanced and more knowing. Working from family photographs reproduced in their biographies, collections of letters and verse, she paints their portraits without the need to include her own image, to \u2018inhabit\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Chantal Joffe
Esme in the Beach Hut, 2015
Oil on canvas
45.8 x 36 x 2.5 cm
18 1\/8 x 14 1\/8 x 1 in
Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London (Photography Robert Glowacki)
\u00a9 Chantal Joffe<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But her life merges with their lives, nevertheless, with her self-portraits, her paintings of Esme, their family and friends surrounding her images of the poets. As she moves back and forth between photographs and canvases \u2013 between images of families that include her own \u2013 her very practice becomes bound up with her representation of shared emotion and experience, across the 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup> centuries.<\/p>\n

The relationship of Joffe\u2019s paintings to the photographs they re-represent is more complex than it might at first appear. The unposed, unplanned pictures that interest her \u2013 of families, children, and seemingly inconsequential scenes of domestic life \u2013 are, in her own words,\u00a0the images that enable her to achieve through the act of painting \u2018a distillation of the everyday\u2019.<\/p>\n

Joffe may paint quickly, but the working of oil on canvas is a much slower process than the pressing of a button on a camera and it is in these delays \u2013 these movements from the easel to the glass table top she mixes her pigment upon, these returns to the canvas \u2013 that she \u2018distils\u2019. Working both reflexively and critically, Joffe\u2019s painting of the photograph is fundamentally different to the photograph itself: she colours and erases, extracts and distorts. Paint diluted with thinners runs down the canvas surface; primed in lurid green, violet, electric pink, this vivid ground grins through flesh tones painted with broad, bold sweeps of the brush.<\/p>\n

Joffe\u2019s mark-making draws attention to both the materiality of the paint and the physicality of her engagement with it; she stands to work, crosses the studio floor, her arms moving expansively and this \u2018dance\u2019, as she describes it, is registered on the surface itself. Photographs, she remarks, are \u2018all over\u2019 \u2013 everything is reproduced in equal, often excessive detail \u2013 but in her gestural approach to painting, in what she purposefully omits, Joffe leaves a great deal to the viewer\u2019s imagination.<\/p>\n

What do we imagine as we look at a portrait of a slender woman in a black dress, eyes downcast? We are unlikely to recall the photograph of Sylvia Plath it is inspired by, of the poet in a rowing boat, arms resting on a pair of oars, the straps of her sundress dangling under her shoulders \u2013 details that Joffe has almost entirely obliterated.<\/p>\n

Untraceable, unidentifiable, we might wonder instead about this woman\u2019s relationship with Joffe, imagining her as a sister, a niece, a friend. The work of the confessional poets, which takes human emotion, sincerity and vulnerability as its ultimate subject, frames Joffe\u2019s practice.<\/p>\n

But in this new body of work we see Joffe\u2019s confessional painting framing the practice of the poets she has admired for so long. Portraiture, for Joffe, is an analogy for family \u2013 a family that extends to those artists one loves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Chantal Joffe and Gemma Blackshaw in conversation at the Zabludowicz Collection, February 2017. Photography \u00a9 Reuben Henry.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This research was first published in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Chantal Joffe at Victoria Miro, London (January-March 2016).<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

About the Author:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dr Gemma Blackshaw<\/a> is Professor of Art History at Plymouth University. In 2014 she co-curated with artist David Austen Drawing Room\u2019s most-attended exhibition, The Nakeds<\/em>, which included new work by Chantal Joffe. Blackshaw and Joffe have been \u2018in conversation\u2019 ever since, most recently at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, where they presented a \u2018Master Class\u2019 (2 February, 2017)<\/a>. Speaking to close to 200 people, the largest audience the Zabludowicz had attracted since its founding in 2007, they talked about Joffe\u2019s transformation of the modernist tradition of painting, portraiture, and that most-contested genre of Fine Art, the nude. \u00a0Their conversation is available at:\u00a0https:\/\/vimeo.com\/203418830<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY GEMMA BLACKSHAW Linda, you are leaving your old body now. It lies flat, an old butterfly, all arm, all leg, all wing, loose as an old dress. I reach out toward it but my fingers turn to cankers and I am motherwarm and used, just as your childhood is used. (Anne Sexton, \u2018Mother and… Continue reading Feature: “Confessional Painting: Recent work by Chantal Joffe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":2025,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[647,87,645,644],"class_list":["post-1952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","tag-anne-sexton","tag-art-history","tag-chantal-joffe","tag-gemma-blackshaw","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1952"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2028,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions\/2028"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.plymouth.ac.uk\/artsinstitute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}