Joanna Paul:
Words and Pictures
TONY BELLETTE
Joanna Paul's work is dominated by a sense of space and the objects which occupy space. The space, or spaces, we contemplate in her poems and paintings are not those of the measurable world, for all the meticulous care which goes into their construction on the plane surface. These are not Albertian but Cézannean spaces, in which no stable or predictable laws govern the relationships between the object, the space it occupies, and the perceiving eye. Within these spaces things crowd together in semblance of profusion, or illusion of order, against a white emptiness of paper.
Joanna Paul is both a painter and a poet. The two activities, or modes of expression, are, one feels, kept meticulously separate so they might illuminate each other in a way quite different from that which we see in either the painter who fills the frame with words or the poet who writes in pictures. In fact, Paul's art might be said to have a kind of distinct propriety about it: a sense not of what might be done on the white paper of the watercolour or the book page, but of what should not be done. It is these proprieties that permit the expression of the small, sudden joys and the immense deprivations which echo through her work. An early poem entitled Still Life seems almost too careful on the page:
You rocked the cradle
I wrote & read
& searched an image for our child
(leaf petal pool tadpole)
& said
this likening
is loving merely
& when you came to bed
the two wine glasses overlapped
the white pot plant drew close to the camelia
& one green curtain embraced the whole
The poet seems almost suspicious of words. Their natural tendency to merge together and form pictures is carefully checked by the simple verb progression, the short stopped lines, and the refusal to admit any purely descriptive word except those denoting colour (and which become in effect, and throughout her work, substantives). Yet the fourth line contains within its parenthesis a suggestion of the immense possibilities of expansion open to the poet; and the last three lines take up the 'loving merely' and mock its reticence with an expansion of the verse itself as the carefully chosen images, the objects in the room, move and merge in response to the new intensity of feeling. What we have here is an actual transference of emotion to the objects, which enact the love ritual in terms of proximities, superimpositions, rearrangements within a frame. A still life (nature morte) is made animate by words.
The relationship between Joanna Paul's poems and paintings is best seen in this process of transference and reorganisation of objects, or words. In New Zealand art we have not before, I think, seen such a parallel development of forms, each true to itself yet linked to the other in its essential method. A series of poems entitled 'The spaces between things' uses broken stanza forms from which individual words detach themselves, find their own space, or regroup with other words in a manner as randomly careful as a Cézanne watercolour:
Between the camelia & the white jug
lines of red and black
pattern of space
complexity black
hewn wood space
palimpsest cupola cavity
Without the apparent unifying effect of a described action, as in Still Life, we are made particularly aware of the dissociative as well as the associative power of words. One's own name repeated until nothing of oneself is there; single words turned over like stones in the hand, made mysterious by their isolation yet relating to eye and ear with a new intimacy. Out of this might emerge new forms and new, complex meanings: but nothing is inevitable, and the process itself seems valued as much as any end result.
Perhaps in any 'Complete Works' many such poems might not appear, as if they were preparatory studies for a later more-complex statement. Yet we are easily seduced by finality in art, particularly in the literary forms. it is difficult to imagine a poetic first draft ever being regarded as highly as, say, a drawing by Rubens or an oil sketch by Constable. Perhaps a verbal artifact has no history of its own that is of any use to its reader. Joanna Paul's work continually questions such assumptions. Two works in particular, Imogen, published by the Hawk Press in 1978, and Mortality, a series of seven watercolours exhibited in Wellington at the Galerie Legard in August 1982, raise strikingly such questions of finality of form and meaning.
Imogen is dedicated to the artist's second daughter, who was born in February 1976 and died nine months later. The series of short poems that record this known and unalterable fact is as articulated and examinable in all its parts as the child. The poem on the page is a mimetic expression in itself of the endless possibilities of becoming that the child represents, both in itself and for the mother:
probe prove probing probably probity proboscis
I probe
she you lmogen probe probes probe
the forefinger
the extended forefinger touching
At the middle of the book is an emblem of great ingenuity spread over two pages and surrounding the two words 'space/Shape' . . . the contained and the containing in an equilibrium which does not last. Throughout the book words gather into lists, anatomies and chants. They seem like busy, fantastic patterns to distract or amuse, because the centre does not hold, the child's heart is faulty, and that defect seems to mock the word-activity. Only at the end do we realise that the words also form chords, canticles and litanies, and offer consolation. The conclusion is:
o my
white
white
white
white
white
white
white
one
The Mortality sequence of watercolours must be to a certain degree puzzling to a viewer unacquainted with the poems. The word itself, included in some though not all of the paintings, seems heavy and latinate and final. It evokes no other words, refers to no object, and its relationship to the succession of images which must in some way express its meaning is elusive. Even the poems, which avoid abstraction and name simple objects rather than describe states of mind or feeling, would find this word unyielding, inassimilable. It appears at the bottom of the first painting, as a kind of signature to a vast white space flanked on either side by narrow strips holding vase and plant shapes. We seem to be looking down on the objects, which do not intrude on the great central space but stay, sketchily outlined, on the periphery.
The second and third in the series organise the same few objects in different relationships to the still dominant white space. A plate in the second painting, again only sketchily outlined but decorated around its rim with intense jewel-like dabs which might be the paint itself, described almost its entire shape within the space itself, now 'framed' between narrow strips at top and bottom. In the third, the space itself is divided, and fails away from a central dark area containing a white jug with flowers of Redon-like richness. The containing shape is broken at the bottom and white jug becomes white space.
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| JOANNA PAUL Mortality
VI 1981 watercolour on paper, 760 x 560 mm. |
In the fourth painting, perhaps the most arresting of the series, the white space forms a rectangle enclosed on two sides by plates, glasses, still-life forms that again we seem to be looking down on. The white jug, its base forming part of the border, seems perilously poised. The picture is one of radical displacements, its fauvist richness of colour and shape banished to the periphery, or else bearing in upon the space, it is impossible to decide. The fifth painting liberates its central object with a splendid flourish. The white space of the right hand side is invaded by flowers from a figured vase, which, while free, still stays within the protective field of darker ground to the left. The white space is transformed by vase and flowers. All elements work together to suggest a joyous occasion. The sixth painting is massive and unmoving. Jugs, glass, cup and saucer weigh down on the narrow white space at the bottom like funereal monuments, each shape contained and isolated except for the two jugs whose handles improbably intertwine.
The last painting in the series is the most delicate and calligraphic. A pale blue and green vase, almost translucent, containing a single red chrysanthemum head and the remains of another, its petals gone, floats against whiteness. It is balanced by an ambiguous shape at the top, to which it is linked by a single line. The picture has a fitting, autumnal elegance.
The description I have attempted of this series is not intended as a 'reading'. It nevertheless draws inevitably from the poems, whose careful questions and assertions, and sense of a personal dialogue conducted with the ordinary things that surround us and act mysteriously as signs and ciphers for an inner world of feeling, are echoed in these paintings. To go further into the meaning of their collective title, or into the circumstance of their composition, would involve an act of interpretation out of keeping with their whole mode of presentation. The forms of poetry and painting are in themselves acts or assertions against an unknowable which surrounds us. Joanna Paul's constant evocations of 'whiteness' in poems and paintings alike convey this final sense of what is always known yet can never be totally absorbed or enacted. Some lines from Imogen express her work perfectly:
I could have taken her to another country
that is quiet
its shores are chalk and ash & the sea is white
this is a country I know
this is the temptation