That Inner Eye

Jo Self says that her flowers are “initially created in my mind’s eye. I see them with my inner eye…” They are visions of vision, both responses to the real presence of flowers, taking note of their forms, and a form of meditation. It is appropriate that her new work was done in the Dalai Lama’s private garden in Dharamsala, where meditation is the usual way of life, and robes are bright with saffron.

In Jo Self’s flowers, the recognisable biological forms are strong, simple and brilliant – the rosy cup of a tree peony, the gold and scarlet hoods of nasturtiums, the cream and chalk presence of an orchid, the scattered bright blue diamond shapes of morning glory.

The flowers stand alone, and much of their power comes from what appears to be an almost unerring choice of the right background colour. Single flowers, intense pink or red loom out of a greenish-black darkness. Complicated antirrhinums, yellow-lipped, salmon mixed with pale brick-red, deepest maroon, stand against a deep sky blue.

Jo Self has said that she usually begins to work with chalk on a black ground and had to change her way of seeing in the Dharamsala garden – the background colours became clearer, paler and more luminous. The colours remind me of those colours you see behind your eyelids when they are closed, that change with pressure, or the outside light, seeming to come from inside the head.

On a white wall they surround themselves with visionary contrasting after-images. And I love the way many of the bright shapes are so to speak tethered with extra-long stalks, vanishing off the edge of the canvas. These are of course in fact tubes and threads connecting to the earth and feeding the plant. Jo Self traces their wandering lines for their own sake.

Jo Self’s painted colours are related in a complex way to the colours of the plants themselves. Plants colour themselves by absorbing some colours of  light from the spectrum and reflecting others – chlorophyll, for instance, absorbs red and thus appears green. Colours are not still – they change with clouds, shadows, and the rays of the sun. They are not fixed. Bees and butterflies see colour in flowers but they do not see what we see.

Bees see into the ultra-violet – many flowers are patterned with paths to the nectar, invisible to the human eye. Jo Self told me, when I remarked on this, that her flower colours are made with oil colours with natural pigments in, and added “if flowers are hybridised…irradiated they become only one colour, like plastic, lose their smell, and bees are not attracted to them.

Beneath most colour in flowers is magenta or violet.” She paints her clear colours using this knowledge. There is a description of an earlier painting of a Tibetan  poppy, with its strange unearthly blue, where she explains that she had to cheat with the green of the leaves to make the eye see the equivalent blue in the paint.
Flowers, if we think about it, must for most of human history have been our intensest source of the experience of colour.

Through the Middle Ages cloth and buildings were drab. Stained glass windows were intense visions. And then there were flowers. The richness of Dutch flower painting came from a delight in the depiction of impossibly sumptuous explosions of colour – vases piled high with paradisal flower presences, all seasons impossibly together, many of the flowers worth more in the market than the masterpieces which depicted them.

Albrecht Durer’s paintings of growing plants, specimens of grasses, cowslips, heartsease,  give me an intense visionary pleasure, simply because of the accuracy with which he recorded the crowding shape of the leaves, the exact yellowing stain of incipient decay. He saw the accidents of a particular plant and managed to make them into a Platonic essence. Jo Self’s simplified shining florets contemplate the plant’s essential nature by other means.

If we think of flower paintings we come up against Georgia O’Keeffe, with her infolded flower-flesh, her enveloping petals, her quivering stamens. (Though she could also make flaring transparent poppies.) If Self’s paintings are analogies for the human body it isn’t the sexual parts that are emphasised. It is the eye.

Very many of her flowers have an inhuman presence which is almost a stare – they invite us to look and they give the look back. Pansies, daisies, begonias, which normally I don’t like, because they are too fleshy, seem to reciprocate the mind’s attention.

Painters in the nineteenth century made bravura curls and slashes and depths of paint into flower forms where what we contemplate is the brilliance of the relation of the work of the hand to what the eye sees. Manet’s white peonies are swirls of gleaming white, and grey shadows, and gold stains, and are delightful almost as abstract paintings, a thought about what light does to paint, with the surfaces of the flowers represented primarily as the impulse to paint.

Something of the same metaphoric double quality is present in Fantin-Latour’s meticulous arrangements of azaleas which require the onlooker to admire the brushwork at the same time as recognising the flower. I am a great admirer of the late flower paintings of Anne Redpath, who can make a jug of daisies, or a tight pot of anemones shine at you like an apparition – again making the light of the flowers with an encrusted solidity of paint, where the light glints off the texture, and blue and crimson appear and disappear as the onlooker moves.

Jo Self’s paint is put on differently. Many colours and shades of colours make up the intense presence of coloured light in her complicatedly simple petal forms. She has said she likes to look at Japanese prints of flowers, and her work has something of the attentive care with which the Japanese artists isolated the essential forms of a peony, or a Hiroshige iris. But the painter she most frequently speaks of is Mark Rothko, and there is, both in her flower colours and in the expanses of the backgrounds, dark or bright, a sense of light under the surface, which changes the surface, as the shades shift imperceptibly in a Rothko.

There is an aspect of Jo Self-s work which is in the tradition of the English visionary.  Like many English peopleI first met the idea of the inner eye in Wordsworth’s Daffodils, where he summoned up the golden brightness upon “that inner eye/Which is the bliss of solitude.” “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.

Humans began to see flowers when they were the intensest colour around. We now live in a world bright with unimagined pigments, plastic sheens , flashing strobes and brilliant screens, where we see colours never then thought of or imagined. And at the same time, the flowers in the wild are endangered. Jo Self’s vision is practically connected to the attempt to save the diversity of life on earth.

She has been Artist in Residence at Kew, and a painting of hers was sold in aid of the millennium seed bank. She funded three projects in Madagascar and the present show will, she hopes help to fund  projects in Tibet , where the people are “caretakers of some of our rarest ecologies.” Shakespeare, contemplating the onrush of mortality and destruction asked
“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?”

Flowers are tough, as well as fragile, and humans care about the relations between humans and flowers. Jo Self’s paintings are strong as well as fine and remind us of who we are, and what we have to lose.