There were three paintings that hung above my mother’s bed. They hung there for nearly half a century, and they are still there now, even though the bed is empty. They are watercolours on paper, and the paper is now very yellowed, and they are still framed with passepartout, which is a sticky kind of black tape that was used during the war years. As its name suggests, it was used for everything and anything that needed sticking together.
The Still Life with Flowers and Striped Tablecloth I painted when I was five years old, and the other two depict mountain views in Switzerland, painted on our first holiday abroad after the war, when I was nine, where we went on one of the rare occasions when my father was in funds.
Those three paintings represent to me almost the sum total of the pictorial problems I was to spend a lifetime working on. The two mountain landscapes presented technical problems, problems of perspective, that most children will face at some time in their lives when they try to depict visual reality. The first one was, how to make the space slope down and away from the viewer, instead of up and towards one, which is what it looks like when you look at the picture. The second was, how to create the space between the mountain top on which I was sitting with my box of watercolours, and the mountain range on the other side of the valley, which was a very long way away. These are very interesting problems for a painter, and luckily they may be solved through practice.
The other problem, however, which I faced, aged five, was not so easily solved. It went like this: I painted the flowers red, blue, yellow, green, white. They were in a vase, which had a pattern of three white birds on it, the white indicated by the paper being left unpainted (rather crafty for five, I now think, and feel sadly that perhaps this was the best painting I ever made). The vase was placed on the middle of the striped tablecloth in the centre of the painting, and I started painting the stripes on the left-hand side of the vase, after which I painted the stripes on its right.
When I had finished, I sat back to admire my work, and received a horrible surprise. The stripes did not meet up. They had been painted at different angles. I looked round to see if anyone had noticed this impropriety, this unseemly transgression. No one was there. I looked at the painting again. Was it really so terrible?
Perhaps no one would notice? It couldn’t be changed; anyone who has ever tried watercolours knows that once the paint is there, there it stays. Not for nothing is Cézanne a genius, but I hadn’t yet come across his work. So I left it.
I left it, and indeed no one did ever remark on it, but the question has remained with me ever since, unresolved. Where does morality lie within art and is there any relation at all between art and truth? You cannot dissemble in painting. You cannot hide what is fundamental to the spirit of a person. Although it may take some detective work to see it. Secrets lie underneath the overt expression, and sometimes can only be articulated by their opposite. Much of painting is open, there to be seen, all at once, unlike music or literature, which unfolds gradually, in time. So it is a temptation to think: what you see is what there is. But this is not always the case.
bEGINNINGS
In 1957 Tess Jaray arrived at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She was 19 years old. It was only three years since she had left her parents’ Worcestershire home with its mementoes of their life in pre-war Vienna, and moved to London to study at St. Martins School of Art.1 Her parents had encouraged her love of art, particularly the German Expressionists, whose vibrant colours and vital forms were to influence her early student paintings. However, after three years at the Slade, these influences were no longer visible. Instead, like many of her contemporaries, Jaray had turned her focus from Europe to America, where the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School offered the enticements of a ‘brave new world’ full of artists exploring and pushing the boundaries of what was possible in art.
The years that Jaray spent at the Slade did not just transform her style. The history of art lectures given by Ernst Gombrich afforded her a new understanding of art’s purpose and role. As an enthralled Jaray sat looking at slides and listening to Gombrich teach, she began to discover the qualities that can make a work both great and important. Gombrich believed that the story of art was the story of artists. ‘There really is no such thing as Art’, he argued in his 1950 book The Story of Art, ‘there are only artists – men and women, that is, who are favoured with the wonderful gift of balancing shapes and colours till they are “right”, and, rarer still, who possess that integrity of character which never rests content with halfsolutions but is ready to forgo all easy effects, all superficial success for the toil and agony of sincere work.’2 His argument in both his writing and teaching was that there is an unbroken artistic tradition stretching from the tombs and temples of Ancient Egypt to the present day and beyond; a visual narrative shaped by the ongoing ‘conversations’ that take place between artists, in which ‘each work refers
to the past and points to the future’. 3 Jaray came to realise that she did not have to define herself in terms of belonging to a particular philosophy or art-historical movement, nor did her work have to resemble that of other artists. She did not have to connect to the artists who inspired her through explicit visual threads, only through their shared, overwhelming need to balance colour and shape ‘until they are right’ and their compelling desire to pursue an artistic vision.
At the end of her first year at the Slade, Jaray won a prize for painting. She was given a copy of The Story of Art that still sits on her bookshelf, its black-and-white illustrations a reminder of how limited her access to works of art was at the end of the 1950s compared to the almost instant availability there is today.4 Despite spending time at The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square or at The Courtauld Collection, which was then housed near the Slade in Woburn Square, she acquired most of her knowledge of painters and paintings through the few black-and-white photographs that illustrated the art books that she had. The monochrome flatness of these illustrations created an emotional distance that filtered the experience of art, keeping it one step removed from reality.
In 1960, however, Jaray was awarded an Abbey Minor Travelling Scholarship to Italy, which allowed her to visit Rome, Florence, Siena and Venice for the first time.5 Every day for nearly four months, she would leave her room early and return late; spending the time in galleries and churches looking at paintings, sculpture and architecture. These visits opened her eyes to appreciate art in a new way. She has never forgotten the emotional impact of first seeing Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (c.1305), or Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection (c.1463–65) in Sansepolcro. Before the trip, her knowledge of Italian Renaissance art had been limited to the slides shown during Gombrich’s lectures and her visits to galleries. But in the darkened lecture theatre they appeared like
ghostly apparitions with no real substance, whilst in the galleries they were hung as objects of aesthetic connoisseurship. Nothing could have prepared her for the actual experience. As she stood looking at frescoes and paintings in countless Italian churches she found herself bathed in colours that seemed to shimmer and glow in the diffused light that illuminated the interiors. And as she watched particles of dust dance in shafts of sunlight she felt her senses overwhelmed. Suddenly, these paintings with their often obscure subjects, came to life, not just through the presence of liturgy and music but through these other elements, the nebulous atmospheric shifts that she had also noticed when walking past the orchards and landscapes of her Worcestershire home.
These moments of revelation transformed Jaray’s understanding of art. She not only started to notice the space that surrounded these works, but the architecture that held them. As a painter, she had considered architecture to be a different discipline with no relevance to her own practice, but her attitude changed when she encountered the bold geometric patterns that cover the surfaces of so many Italian buildings. Here were abstract paintings in stone and brick that spoke a simple visual language she could understand. And as she stood within their walls, she came to realise that a building was essentially a container to hold and frame space. It was this discovery – that space could be a subject in itself – that opened up the artistic path she would follow for the next 50 years.
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), the Florentine architect and goldsmith, became Jaray’s artistic hero. Like her, he was concerned with space, pattern and design. Although he was credited with introducing knowledge of mathematical perspective to Florentine artists, it was his work as an architect that particularly
Published in 2014 by Ridinghouse in association with Djanogly Art Gallery
On the occasion of the exhibition: Landscapes of Space: Paintings and Prints by Tess Jaray
21 February – 27 April 2014
Organised by the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Art Centre, University of Nottingham
Djanogly Art Gallery
Lakeside Arts Centre University Park
Nottingham NG7 2RD
United Kingdom
www.lakesidearts.org.uk
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Images © 2014 Tess Jaray unless noted on p.254
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Front cover: Flight (Dark), 2008 (detail) back cover: Tess Jaray working on mural for British Pavilion, Expo 67, Montreal, 1967