Few artists get through their careers without painting a self-portrait - more likely, many self-portraits. The model is always available, always free of fee, and as fascinating as any self-exploration. Yet very few painters and drawers return to the motif as often as the immortal Rembrandt, or make the self-portrait a major, distinctive element of their output - like one of my favourites, Lucy Jones, whose new exhibition at Flowers Central (26 February to 26 March) concentrates entirely on these wonderful self-studies.
Both they and the landscapes and townscapes for which she is also famous are profoundly expressionist in viewpoint and technique. The painting is bold in colour and form, using a range of emotions that come from deep within the artist’s psyche. Expressionist painting is truly self-expression. The vivid, unnatural colours and distorted forms spring from the artist’s mind, transforming the motif into a vision of the painter’s private self.
The result with Lucy Jones is a series of self-portraits of intense honesty and unabashed vitality. The fact that she was born with cerebral palsy is evident in some of the paintings, but the condition is simply a fact, a physical aspect to be both recorded and, in a sense, ignored. The artist’s physical difficulties are both relevant (because they form an inescapable part of her being) and irrelevant (because her condition is transcended by her art).
Rachel Heller
I have a particular interest in the relevance issue because of my relationship to another artist who shows at Flowers, my daughter Rachel Heller. She has Down’s Syndrome, but the high interest and appeal of her work arise from its intrinsic value, not from the rarity of her talent among Down’s people. In fact, such talent is rare by any criteria. She is not a Down’s person who happens to be an artist, but an artist who happens to have Down’s. As with Lucy, she concentrates on a small number of subjects - lately the human body, clad and unclad; and studies of ancient art (mostly from the V&A).
Like mist of the expressionists, the two women share the powerful use of distortion, both of colour and form, to achieve their effects. But this has nothing to do with their ‘disabilities’; the quotation marks matter greatly, because neither is disabled in their work as artists. For some reason, it’s always tempting to link an artist’s eccentricities of style to physical explanations - like the myth that El Greco’s elongations stemmed from his astigmatism. In fact, x-rays have shown undistorted representation beneath the distorted images.
Nobody has ever suggested that Giacommetti’s long, thin figures stemmed from having the wrong glasses. The question Why so thin? remains interesting, but harder to answer. Would the answer make the figures even more moving? The response here is the same as that to learning the meaning of medieval symbols in Renaissance art: fascinating in its way, but the thrill of art lies in the impact of its visual elements in conveying the thoughts, emotions and aesthetic ideas of the artist. ‘Meaning’ is subordinate to these three considerations.
If you can get to Flowers East (82 Kingsland Road, E2 8DP, 0207 920 7777), Lucy Jones will provide a rare treat. There’s an accompanying book, a monograph to which four authors have contributed and which is rich with colour reproductions of these amazing works.
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