Marie Harnett: Still by Cristea Roberts Gallery

still

Marie Harnett

marie harnett

still alan cristea gallery

still

Marie Harnett

Bright Star

Marie Harnett’s studio is tucked away down a quiet residential street in south London. Clear white light filters down through skylights; small black-and-white photographs are fixed to one wall. It is in this environment – seated in a chair, blanket over her legs, listening to audiobooks of Agatha Christie or Donna Tartt – that Harnett creates her small silvered drawings. Balancing a pad of paper on her knees for hours at a time, she slowly transposes a film still into a mercurial work on paper, breathing new life into its shadows and highlights, faithfully representing the actors, the setting, turning a fleeting moment into something permanent and unchanging. Harnett began drawing in earnest while a student at Edinburgh College of Art in 2005. She loved the ‘magical’ gleam of graphite, its ability to be both line and tone. Initially she drew portraits of young men, then screen superheroes. She was interested in the circularity of transposing stills from films such as Superman and Sin City back into drawings, returning them to graphic form. It was a nod to their comic book origins and she continues to be drawn to films derived from books, turning them back into works on paper again. Harnett chooses films that are not set in the contemporary world, but rather exist in a past of the director’s creation. Her new prints, for example, are based on stills from American Hustle, Brideshead Revisited, Slow West and Bright Star. ‘There’s a preciousness to films that are based in times that are not ours,’ she says.1 She herself has appeared as an extra in several period dramas, and the attention to detail on set – the costumes, props and scenery – may have contributed to her fascination with such films. Her latest series of drawings are derived from Heleno (pp. 12-15), Carol (pp. 16-17) and The Man from U.N.C.L.E (pp. 18-21) respectively, evoking 1940s Brazil, 1950s America and 1960s Europe. Harnett doesn’t watch the feature films themselves, preferring to select images from each film’s trailer. She views them in greyscale with the sound muted so each one is transformed into a silent mini-movie, allowing her to focus on each frame’s potential to exist as a stand-alone image.

Proofing the linocuts at Thumbprint Editions, London

Trailers are to films what dust jackets are to books. They are designed to titillate and intrigue, to seduce and to sell. They must condense entire plotlines into three minutes or less while maintaining the atmosphere and feel of the whole. They appear to have the semblance of the film they trail, but in reality they often rearrange narrative sequences, use footage that doesn’t make the final cut and ramp up the jeopardy, the love and the hate, anxiety and fear. They are fictions created from the reality of a larger fiction. Hands are wrung or shaken, doors open and close, eyes flick from side to side and embraces are clung to or fought off with alarming regularity. They are also prone to change, being remade for different 5

audiences and nationalities, often existing in multiple states simultaneously. (We have YouTube to thank for now being able to witness this subjectivity for ourselves – see the ‘Official International Trailer’, ‘US Trailer’ and ‘Final Trailer’ for Carol (pp. 16-17) for example.) From this emotive and intense source Harnett distils the film to a mere handful of appropriated moments. Consequently each series she completes offers glimpses of a cinematic narrative that remains, however, overwhelmingly absent.

or sitting with a martini. We may wonder who these characters are, what they are doing and where they are going but we will never know their full story. They exist in a single moment of presentness, forever in denial of Henri Bergson’s observation that the present only exists as a duration, as an amalgamation of past and future moments.3 These characters are captured in the glossy surfaces like insects in amber, forever present and ahistoric.

By stripping out the sound and colour before selecting stills from each trailer, Harnett removes key elements from the original film. ‘I guess it helps them [the drawings] become mine,’ she says. ‘Films are this boundless beautiful source of imagery and I am always excited when I find one that looks interesting to work with.’ Philip Monk, writing about the removal of sound from Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, noted: ‘The hypertrophy of sight at the expense of sound only reinforces our attention in a way that perhaps is special to film in the first place – it plays to our fascination with the image.’2 Harnett goes further still, selecting only a few frames, transposing these into drawings and focussing the viewer’s attention on these alone. The images she chooses may be ripe with suggestion – a word written in a diary in Carol (p. 17), a finger held to lips in Silent (p. 21), a stolen moment of intimacy in Silvia (p. 15) – but they have purposefully been stripped of their wider context. We may anticipate future scenes or remember earlier events but the characters will no longer be active in them, frozen as they are in the drawing’s present. As Harnett says, ‘I take something so swift and fleeting and pull it out of the narrative. It is on its own, it becomes its own entity.’ The characters, removed from their fictional lives, are given a new existence as a drawing. The viewer instinctively tries to build a narrative from these fragments but it remains hypothetical. The drawings in the Heleno series (pp. 12-15), for example, suggest a love story, a romance between a suave businessman and a beautiful singer, set against Californian palms. In reality the stills are from a biopic rooted in 1940s Brazil about the womanizing footballer Heleno de Freitas, a legendary player undone by his own demons. Football doesn’t appear at all in the images Harnett selected, misleading any attempt to ‘read’ the film from the drawings (and perhaps chiding us for trying). For Harnett is not interested in evoking plotlines. Instead she is drawn to particular images that convey intense moments of human interaction, a universal subject that stretches beyond the confines of any particular film.

For ten years Harnett has completed each series in this way, finessing her astoundingly skilful drawings, adding more and more detail, as in her recent series Last Year in Marienbad. However, in 2016 she felt she needed to expand her practice. This resulted in a new large-format drawing and a body of linocuts, both of which explore a new scale of working.

Harnett’s careful choice of images reveals her ongoing fascination with the gaze – how characters interact with each other, how the director frames the action and how the viewer responds. She often chooses stills where we observe events over someone’s shoulder or through a window, down a corridor or across a balcony. We become voyeurs, glimpsing crucial moments of unknowable stories – a woman exiting a hotel or turning her head in a packed department store; a man leaning on a car, or standing in an apron,

The large drawing Windows (pp. 22-23), takes its subject from the trailer for Carol and depicts a party being observed from outside a building. The viewer must study the guests in the kitchen by looking in through the sash windows. The men we see are partially lost to shadow and the face of the young woman, split by the narrow frame of the sash, is blank. Visual access is further denied by a central wall, densely built-up into a sea of silvered black in Harnett’s reworking. This wall serves both to block our view and reflect our presence, making us complicit in the scene as well as a voyeuristic observer.

Windows drawing in progress at Harnett Studio, London

Harnett’s increasing manipulation of the image – the physical activation of the viewer, the legibility of the subject – also extends to her new linocuts. In Grief (pp. 38-39), taken from the trailer for Bright Star, Keats’ lover Fanny Brawne sits with her head bowed in sadness. The room blurs around her and we are left looking at the whorl of her ear, the curl of her hair, the white expanse of her blouse. Her slender fingers nudge the top of the central panel of the triptych and light from an unseen window illuminates her skin. At first we do not notice the slippage between the left panel and the central one, how the blouse is foregrounded on the left but recessed in the centre. The hand and the cuff are reproduced immaculately across the print’s central divide, but the blouse doesn’t follow suit. This glitch, this movement, alludes to the temporal nature of both the print’s subject (the film) and the physical process of making the image. Harnett worked across three large sheets of lino to create the cinematic scale of Grief (pp. 38-39). In Costume Party (p. 33), the complexity of an outdoor carnival procession in Venice (taken from Brideshead Revisited) has been reproduced using hundreds of curved lines. These lines, like dynamic tree rings, fatten and taper to add less or more ink to the scene, creating the appearance of a facsimile image charged with optical energy. Harnett derived this way of working after studying the Face of Christ (1649) by Claude Mellan, an engraving executed using a single spiralling line. Her own print technique is able to conjure

characters in vivid details, as in the seated man in Cowboys (p. 35). The other figure, however, dissolves into nothingness as a puff of smoke caused by a gunshot drifts across his face and body. In the trailer for the film Slow West the smoke blows over in only a second or two. When watching it we do not register the obscuring of the figure. This is something that can only be perceived in freeze-frame, by Harnett stopping time and rendering the transient permanent. The smoke ceases to be ephemeral and insubstantial and instead solidifies, causing the figure to disappear. For a moment he ceases to exist. This is the moment – now an eternal moment – that Harnett has chosen, a moment that questions corporeality and reveals her growing interest in the abstract edges of representation. If the linocuts and the large drawing offered Harnett room to expand and experiment, to free herself up, her new series of ‘overlap’ drawings do the opposite. The first two overlap drawings she made were based on single stills taken from the trailer for Crimson Peak, an American Gothic ghost story from 2015. As if to amplify the spectral content of the film, the particular trailer Harnett used featured vignettes that faded in and out of each other. Consequently in Allerdale Hall (p. 25) a dancing couple lose their solidity and become ghosts twirling over the snow-covered grounds of the haunted house. This compression of two scenes into one confuses perceptual consciousness, as one view then another dominates and the drawing refuses to let the eye settle. With the recent expansion of Harnett’s practice she is further asserting her control over what we see and how. The slippage between linocut plates, the purposeful blurring of certain characters’ features, the overlaying of stills and the compression of cinematic time takes her source material far beyond the original trailers as she explores temporality, reality and perception in meticulous detail.

Charlotte Mullins september 2017

1 All quotes from a conversation with the author at Marie Harnett’s studio, 13 September 2017

Allerdale Hall drawing in progress at Harnett Studio, London

2 Philip Monk, ‘The Split of the Unconscious: 24-Hour Pyscho’, 2003, reprinted in Time, ed. by Amelia Groom (London: Whitechapel, 2013) pp. 131-132. 24-Hour Psycho (1993) is a silent screening of the black-and-white Hitchcock film Psycho (1960), slowed down so the film lasts for 24 hours. 3 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 137

dr aw ing s

Heleno, 2013 (Almost, Bike, Martini, Silvia, Sing) Series of five pencil drawings on paper Paper 10 x 14.8 cm / Image 4.7 x 11 cm each National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh. Gifted by Tanja Gertik and Drew Scott, and Sir Sandy and Lady Crombie.

Carol, 2016 )Rain, Toys, Diary( Series of three pencil drawings on paper Paper 10 x 15 cm / Image 5.5 x 10 cm each

The Man from U.N.C.L.E., 2017 )Camera, Gaby, U.N.C.LE., Apron, Giornali, Tablecloth, Silent( Series of seven pencil drawings on paper Paper: 10 x 15 cm / Image: 4.3 x 10.1 cm each

Windows, 2017 Pencil drawing on paper Paper: 119.7 x 208.8 cm / Image: 116.2 x 205.4 cm

Allerdale Hall, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper: 12.5 x 19.5 cm / Image: 8.2 x 15 cm

Wall, 2017 Pencil drawing on paper Paper: 12 x 19.5 cm / Image: 8.2 x 14.4 cm

Gift, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 11.9 x 16.0 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Shoulder, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 11.8 x 15.8 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Hair, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 12.1 x 16.7 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Sleeves, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 11.8 x 16.0 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Hand, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 14.5 x 19.7 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Sunglasses, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 11.8 x 15.6 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Ornament, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 11.3 x 15.7 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Car, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 11.9 x 15.9 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Ribbon, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 9.6 x 9.5 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

Eagle, 2016 Pencil drawing on paper Paper 11.7 x 15.8 cm / Image 3 x 2.2 cm

linocuts

Costume Party, 2015 Linocut on Kozo paper Paper 83.0 x 134.3 cm / Image 63 x 116.3 cm Edition of 20 plus 5 aps and 1 pp Printed and proofed at Thumbprint Editions, London

Cowboys, 2016 Linocut on Kozo paper Paper 91.5 x 136.5 cm / Image 71.6 x 118.5 cm Edition of 10 plus 2 aps and 1 pp Printed and proofed at Thumbprint Editions, London

Swimsuit, 2017 Linocut on Kozo paper Â Paper 70.3 x 136.1 cm / Image 50.3 x 118 cm Edition of 15 plus 2 aps and 1 pp Printed and proofed at Thumbprint Editions, London

Grief, 2017 Linocut triptych on Saunders 190gsm smooth paper Paper 109.4 x 180.3 cm (overall) Image 90.4 x 162.3 cm (overall) Edition of 10 plus 2 aps and 1 pp Printed and proofed at Thumbprint Editions, London

Piano, 2017 Linocut triptych on Saunders 190gsm smooth paper Paper 124.8 x 269.1 cm (overall) Image 105.8 x 251.1 cm (overall) Edition of 10 plus 2 aps and 1 pp Printed and proofed at Thumbprint Editions, London

Marie Harnett would like to thank Alan Cristea and all at the Alan Cristea Gallery, especially Helen Waters, David Cleaton-Roberts, Kathleen Dempsey, Line Andreassen, Gemma Colgan and Tom Dickson; Pete Kosowicz and all at Thumbprint Editions; Charlotte Mullins for the wonderful text; and the National Galleries, Scotland for the loan of the drawing series Heleno to the exhibition.

Published by Alan Cristea Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Marie Harnett: still 22 November 2017 – 6 January 2018 Alan Cristea Gallery 43 Pall Mall London SW1Y 5JG All prints published by Alan Cristea Gallery, London Introduction © Charlotte Mullins, 2017 Catalogue and Images © Marie Harnett and Alan Cristea Gallery, London, 2017 Photography of all artwork by Peter White, FXP Photography, London Photography of proofing and works in progress on pages 4, 7 and 8 by Marie Harnett Designed and printed by fandg.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

isbn 978-0-9955049-7-4