| 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. From a review by Neil Spencer. |
“I can look at a knot in a piece of wood until I am frightened at it”, said Blake.
Self’s flowers invite that sort of attention. They remind me also of D.H.Lawrence’s ‘big and dark’ Bavarian gentians, ‘burning dark blue,/ giving off darkness, blue darkness” blue torches leading into the dark.“ |
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.
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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. |
