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Will Self Review    

Geranium 2002

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
  I first met Jo Lee (as she then was) in the early 1980s. It may even have been 1980, but such was the temper of my times – fervid to the point of being deranged – that the exact place and time is difficult to pin down with any accuracy. Elsewhere in this book Jo herself speaks eloquently of this period in her life. When she was still in her teens, her friendship with Ben Trainin, who was at school with her in the sticks, had thrown her into the Soho milieu of the Colony Room, notorious haunt of Francis Bacon, John Deakin, Jeffrey Bernard et al.; and she remained – more or less – in the dizzy vicinity of this peculiarly creative vortex of gin and camp raillery. Ben – dead now for many years – was the link between us. For suburbanite Oxford students then in our late teens, Ben, with his street credibility and a few years senior, was a veritable homme du monde. In turn his friends, such as Jo, carried with them a whiff of dangerous allure; added to which was the fact that she was then – and remains incontestably so – a most striking beauty, with a Romany, raptor cast to her features.
I remember the Colony Room full of roués either wraithlike or obese, and dominated by Ian Board with his mulberry nose more like a fungus on the boll of a tree than any other organ. I remember parties in flats squatted, borrowed or purloined. Somewhere down the line Jo met my brother Jonathan, got pregnant and married him. At around the same time I became aware of Jo’s burgeoning – if inchoate – artistic ambitions. She presented me with a bizarre but affecting bas-relief, comprising plastic cowboys and Indians glued on to a painted backdrop of mesquites, mesas and cacti; along the bottom of the frame was inscribed the caption: ‘It’s Your Lookout’. I often think about ‘It’s Your Lookout’ (although I’m afraid somewhere along the way the relief itself disintegrated), because for me this very earlyJo Self anticipated all the virtues of the great stream of creativity that has
since burst forth from her fertile imagination. Quirky, yes. Offbeat, certainly; but more than that, with its mixture of media and its oblique take on the very act of being an artwork ‘It’s Your Lookout’ implied that it’s creator’s vision was wrested from the world rather than being at home within it. The next Jo Self I acquired belongs to her Wimbledon period and still hangs in my spare room. A large canvas (some 5’ by 3’), it’s dominated by a
television aerial that swims out of a distinctively London murk. Poised atop one end of this is an androgyne figure, halfway between a caryatid and a plastic doll, it sports a ruched loincloth and a ying-yang symbol on its head. This symbol is replicated elsewhere in the murk, and the whole composition is filled out and balanced by a free-floating face – scoop-cheeked, hollow eyed – that peers mournfully at the viewer. This painting, with its dreamscape of the symbolic and the hyper-real, has always reminded me of the way I encountered paintings as a very small child. In my parents’ house a reproduction of a Matisse still life (a few oysters open on a plate with a knife alongside) hung on as wall of the upstairs landing opposite the door of my bedroom. As I fell off to sleep each night it was this that I focussed on, and such was the obscurity of the rendition that coming to perceive it as a depiction of any kind, that the act of seeing it at all, became
synonymous, for me, with perceiving the external world itself. It’s this wondrous phase of early childhood (I must have been only four or five) that Jo’s aerial painting evokes for me every time I look at it, and I envy my own children for having been through the same phase in their childhoods with this painting as part of their unconsciously apprehended background. I was impressed by the paintings that Jo was doing at this time, but I confess I didn’t altogether understand them. The partitioning of the canvas into shelves and compartments, upon which rested either severed pigs’ heads or resided symbols savagely ripped out of context, suggested to me a naive surrealism. Surrealism of the affect rather than the intellect. The heavy brushstrokes produced a ruckled and workmanlike feel to the canvases, which I thought was at odds with their juxtaposing of irreconcilable elements.
Only with time have I come to appreciate the overall unity of these paintings, their surprisingly consistent psychic texture. With the flower paintings I think Jo has reached a level of technical
expertise and a fluidity of line that makes it possible for her to express the rough with the smooth, the turbulent with the limpid, and the minatory with the growing. Dylan Thomas wrote of ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, and Jo’s flower painting, to me, seems potentially explosive. The darkness out of which the blooms swim towards their viewer, pistils blazing, is a stygian realm of the collective subconscious. Elsewhere in this book Jo speaks of her own anti-natural approach to nature study, but really anyone who can see could tell as much without asking. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the ostensible subjects of these paintings are only pretexts for Jo’s explorations of death, life, sexuality, melancholy and solitude, but I would argue that the seemingly arbitrary choice to dedicate herself to painting flowers was indicative of a subject in search of an artist just as much as the reverse.
The flower is Janus-faced: the most frivolously cultivable of plants, like Mother Nature’s own silken lingerie they inflame us with a desire for a procreative relationship that can only ever approximate to that of pimp to paramour. And Jo’s own approach to the business of cultivating her subjects bears all the marks of a saturnine life painter toward his models. She sequestrates them, dresses and undresses them, moves them in and out. In effect, she uses them. Yet this particular floral exploitation is closer to a
fundamental – and arguably mythological – personification of the flower, than to the reductionism of the cultivation, arrangement and limpid depiction of blooms. If Jo’s flowers could speak they would, I’m sure, be angry narcissi, or, like the flower people of Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll, much more spiky characters than their seductive raiment would lead you to expect.
But let that be enough of my own cod-aesthetics; my purpose in
introducing this book of Jo’s work is to do simply that, rather than offer a disquisition. Since Jo began doing the flower paintings several have pitched up in my house, a radiantly fleshy rose over the mantelpiece of the bathroom, an altogether spikier rose by the front door, and a galaxy of hellebore floating in the inner space of the stairwell. Thus Jo’s work – like Jo herself – has remained engrafted with my life for the past two decades or more.
This has been a period during which, whatever the vicissitudes of her own life, Jo has stayed constant to her muse. In an era when so much art strives for the plangent, ready-made statement – in reality provoked by the times but seeking nonetheless to be provocative of them – Jo’s work has, I feel, remained carefully stated. It is an art of praxis, in which the working is always shown; an art of passion in which the terror of – and desire for – abandonment, is expressed with consummate cool. It seems fitting – if heavily ironic – that Jo should have turned to painting flowers at a time when Britain itself has become subject to the rule of a political party which has sought to re-brand itself using the rose as a symbol. New Labour, with all of its focus-grouping, media spin and tactics of user-friendly dubiety couldn’t be at a further remove from the intimate, painful insights of Jo Self’s painting if it tried; and yet the work in this book is also curiously within the zeitgeist, engaging as it does so profoundly with the spiritual queasiness of the postmodern condition.
A hot day in mid-summer. The house-cum-studio is like a stockade within which the plants have been corralled for their own protection. Looming overhead are the lowering modern dolmens of tower blocks, while from the park in the middle distance can be heard the ecstatic cries of the bathers at the open air lido. Concrete and gravel, steel and wood – the workaday world outside, with its rusting trucks and dusty breeze blocks, is confuted and confounded within this compound, where vegetation trails, loops and entwines, while water plashes and popples. Like all the best artist’s studios Jo Self’s exhibits the inseparable character of the work and the life. Indeed, looking at the vast expanse of working space, topped off by a hutch of living space, it’s sometimes hard not to conceive of the life as an appendix to the work. But none of this matters, it’s simply a profound joy to witness the paintings themselves, in all their variety, yet a complete and seamless expression of a world view that I’ve seen grow and mature over many years, now completely effloresce.