| |
| Neil Spencer Review |
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
|
|
| |
|
|
|
