The Shadow Is Many Footsteps Long LO R A I N E B O Y L E
The Shadow Is Many Footsteps Long LO R A I N E B O Y L E
To my parents Aubrey and Wendy, to whom I owe everything and the memory of my dear friend Graeme Roberts 18 • 11 • 1949 – 14 • 09 • 2019
Studio chair with hewn marble, 2019 Cover & inside cover: detail from Triptych, 2019, oil on canvas, 170 x 55cm each
Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta (1957)
“There is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract than reality.� (Morandi in De Salvo & Gale, 2001)
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The Shadow Is Many Footsteps Long
I developed this body of paintings following vague clues, led by unarticulated feelings and the painterly process itself. Sensibility, according to Immanuel Kant’s theory, deals with space and time as pure intuition. It is through the same intuitive understanding of space and time that these paintings have evolved, using the alchemy of the physical material to coax the images to the surface; to do, to undo, to redo, until the shadows have a history of time: until the painting finds its end. In order to introduce my work, I would first like to refer to the great Italian painter Giorgio Morandi’s Natura Morta (1957). I wish to draw your attention to the shadows and to a particular discrepancy of visual logic within this work. Looking specifically at what might be seen as an apparently subsidiary detail, where the artist explores the relationship between light source and shadow, we may also speak to the art of painting in general. Morandi’s Natura Morta (1957) is quite modest: it is small (30 x 35.4 cm); the range of tones and colours is extremely limited; it is a still life (considered the
lowest expression in art at the academy where Morandi was educated) (Abramowicz, 2004); and it has been executed with no effort to disguise its means of production. The brushstrokes with which he painted are clearly visible as is the canvas below them. Trompe-l’oeil (one of the great ambitions of the still life tradition) has not been pursued and there is no attempt at fooling the viewer that they are looking at a real arrangement of a vase and three small boxes in a space. It is not really even a space: the relationship of the objects to each other tells us that there is a space, but the brushstrokes tell us that the plane they are on and the plane of yellow above and behind them are painted around the objects that are in front of them. The only interruption to the flatness of this space is in the reflected yellow light bounced back onto the vase from one of the blocks and the shadows the objects cast, especially the two boxes on the right-hand side which serve to describe the horizontality of the plane on which the arrangement of four objects stand. Such formal analysis of the work has, however, not touched upon the incongruity or
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‘mistake’ within this work, something that is illogical or ‘wrong’ within it. Looking closely at the shadows, we see that they are cast at slightly different angles. That they are not congruent. We know that Morandi painted his very carefully arranged objects ‘from life’. He would organise his scenes so that he could always resume his position in relation to them and maintain their relation to each other and to the natural light that came into his bedroom-studio. Having made, by this stage of his life, hundreds of paintings of his little vessels, we cannot imagine this anomaly of the shadows to be a mistake in observation. If it is not a mistake, then we can only assume that the source of light moved between his painting of the first and second shadows, and instead of correcting this movement he faithfully immortalised it in the painting, as in many others. The movement of the shadow tells us about the movement of the sun and his choice to record it in the painting inscribes time. In a static image that has been carefully
This awareness of the effect or possibilities of shadow to convey shifts in time in Morandi’s painting, underlies my choice to privilege shadows in my work. In addition, the metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico have influenced my practice, albeit in a more discreet way. The iconic shadows of de Chirico, painted by a painter instead of cast by an object, are presented as misaligned distortions within the painting. The most important is the manufacture of what he refers to as the ‘orphan shadows’ - “shadows detached from their indexical origins, shadows cut off from their cause, shadows thrown by an invisible object, shadows of objects repressed outside the frame. They use the iconic detachment of the photographic index to produce pictorial catachresis: they represent an object that has never been presented. De Chirico made a specialty out of this” (Hollier & Krauss, 1994). In de Chirico’s The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910), the aspect of time is introduced from the outset by the painting’s title. It accounts for the long, heavy shadows that draw through the painting.
materialised by the hand of the artist, through meditation and observation, these shadows hold not just the specific time in which the painting was created, but time as we experience it and which relates to the movement and being of any person.
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In the centre of this composition we have the shadow of the headless and armless sculpture pointing towards the closed portal in the brightly illuminated façade on the left. This sense of pointing is emphasised
by the fact that this shadow darkens as it moves away from its source, also giving us a clue as to its symbolic nature. The twin trickles of water flowing from the sculpture’s plinth serve to emphasise the heat of this sun-baked courtyard and the trickles of water parody the idea of freedom beyond the walls of the city (freedom suggested by the unexpected positioning of a boat whose sails we see over the buildings on the right).
Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon (1910)
The painting has an altogether unsettling atmosphere; a mysterious deserted piazza void of the masses except for two figures. A man and woman walk towards the sun holding each other, exactly halfway between the glowing sculpture and the foreboding architectural structure that encloses the courtyard on the right with its dark shadow. The woman seems to be in a state of distress, a sentiment elevated to an existential level by the impression that the space they occupy has a ceremonial purpose; that if the ‘camera’ were to pan to the right we would see some great temple standing there casting its strange shadow. The painting and what it speaks of comes from its shadows, but also from its lack of one shadow.
scene from quite a height, yet our shadow, or that of the structure on which we would have to stand, does not enter into the narrow foreground of the painting. We look as if through a disembodied eye, that of god or some other impotent observer of this dramatic scene.
The viewpoint from which this scene is captured contributes significantly to its disconcerting character: we survey the
The shadows in Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, and the very different shadows of Morandi’s Natura Morta, are my shadows
The final support for this sentiment comes from the style of the painting: nowhere does de Chirico allow a trace of a brushstroke, or any clues as to the material nature of this image to creep into the painting. With the technology of his time, this image could not be made in any way other than through the act of painting, yet he has seemingly suppressed that aspect to the absolute extent of his ability.
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Pierre Bonnard, Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1934-35)
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too, and can best be summarised by the following negotiation with Martin Heidegger: The answer to Heidegger’s question ‘Why do we find something like time at the position that the shadow occupies ...?’ shows itself in the way celestial, human and nonhuman bodies are spatially oriented toward each other in care. Yet this spatial-bodily orientation, which is nothing other than everyday time or being-with-others-in-the-world, takes on a different character based on Dasein’s relationship to its shadow. Dasein1 (being there) initially experiences the shadow as that which enriches everyday care by allowing Dasein to open itself up and extend itself like the afternoon shadow. But Dasein’s stance is unstable when anchored in the play of the sun’s light and the shadows cast by the body. The desire to hold itself open for the uncertainties of the future can quickly flip into a fear of other beings. Dasein’s frantic pursuit of the shadow - the time that it senses as slipping away - leads it into an inauthentic understanding of the present ‘now’ as that which it must dominate lest another steal it away. However, while Dasein’s absorption in its shadow can make its relationships to others rigid and close itself off to beings who may ‘take up’ any of its time not already
used up, the shadow, at the same time, draws Dasein back into an authentic relationship with itself and the present. (Aumiller, 2017). It has taken great technological effort, from adjustable apertures, different ‘speeds’ of film, digital receptors, image stabilisers and better lenses, to be able to take pictures in the shadows. The long shutter speeds that capture the shaky movement of those holding the camera or the subject in front are now a matter of preference and not a limitation of the tools. In short, the efforts of technology have been to try and defeat time regarding image-making: to capture forms in space accurately and instantly, regardless of the lighting. It is these images that we believe hold the most truth as a documentation of events. But what of the truth of the experience of the observer? I would like finally to look at the work of one of my favourite painters, Pierre Bonnard. Bonnard was among the first wave of painters able to make use of a camera, receiving one of the first generation Kodak pocket cameras in 1896 (Rizzi, 2019). It was through photography that he was able to record with moderate precision the fleeting moments of action and interaction of the subjects in his incredibly intimate
The word Dasein from Martin Heidegger’s investigation in Being and Time starts with an enquiry into our own being. The term Dasein literally means “thereness of Being”, Heidegger calls man Dasein and conceives it as Being-in-the-world. Dasein is future-orientated, it responds to the past in the context of the present for the sake of the future.
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domestic scenes. He would recompose and refine his highly constructed paintings through compositional sketches so that the camera was only used for a small part of the reality of a painting. It is, nonetheless, a very important technology in relation to his work. The discrepancies we can see between some of his photographs and the paintings connected to them give a deep insight into his personal interest in a particular scene. In some sense, it is these discrepancies that chart his desire and subjectivity, more than the paintings as independent objects (Watkins, 1994). Bonnard completed countless paintings of his long-time model, muse and eventual wife, Marthe. They lived together for almost fifty years but were only married after thirty-two years together (Watkins, 1994). His long-time fascination with Marthe (there is no question as to the power she silently exerted in their relationship) was paralleled by an interest in form and vision which materialise in his work in incredible ways: he is constantly playing with the picture plane, manipulating the space of the painting with a seemingly arbitrary distribution of radical tonal and colour relationships that completely defy conventions of traditional pictorial manipulation. In academia, artists were encouraged to use colour purely as the phenomenon; the importance of illustrating the concept or
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narrative was paramount. Bonnard turned the customary belief of colour upside down and argued, “drawing is sensation. Colour is reasoning. The colours themselves could please in an almost abstract way� (Meisler, 1998). In Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1934-1935), Marthe blends in completely with the yellow-brown walls framing the window that looks out onto the garden. The dark colour of her dress makes her more a frame for the flowers in the vase than a subject in her own right: a part of the fabric of his life, not an agent in it. Although the trend is of cold (receding) colours in the distance and warm colours in the foreground interior, the space of the painting is barely held together. It is a jumble of colourful objects, planes and forms. Nude in an Interior (1935) presents Marthe as a partial object occupying a liminal space: the radical division of the composition into bold geometric forms, planes of colour and patterned surface serve to frame a long vertical slither of Marthe. She is nude and engaged in some private activity, an object of his desire, although perhaps only insofar as she is not whole, and her gaze does not act as a barrier to his fantasy. In Nude in Bathtub and Small Dog (19411946) we have a curious phenomenon:
the centre of the composition is occupied completely by Marthe lying in the bath and posits her as the subject of the work. However, the whole canvas, barring the space occupied by Marthe, has been built using contrasts of light and dark and of strong colour relationships in the back wall (furthest from us in the ‘space’), which is made of hot (advancing) oranges and yellows, juxtaposed with their complementary blues and purples. In the foreground we have the white bathmat and richly coloured dog that are the point of highest tonal contrast in the painting, and which jump out at us: on a formal level this is the most powerful element. Looking with eyes half closed, Marthe evaporates and we have instead just a cold and relatively sickly pool of murky colour. There is a sense of voyeurism, as in many of Bonnard’s nudes, but the wan quality of the body deprives her even of any sexual power. Nochlin (1998) provides an interpretation: As a woman, and a woman who is a feminist, I must say I find something distasteful, distressing, painful even, about all that mushy, muzzy, abject flesh. Yes, I am being naïve, abandoning my art-historical objectivity, but certainly contradictory intuitions have a place in one’s reaction to a work of art. I deeply admire, indeed at times am passionately seduced by, the pictorial rhetoric of Bonnard’s bathers. Yet at the
Pierre Bonnard, Nude in an Interior (1935)
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Pierre Bonnard, Nude in Bathtub and Small Dog (1941-46)
same time, and with equal intensity, I am also repelled by this transformation of woman into thing, such as melting of flesh-and-blood model into the molten object of desire of the male painter, that I want to plunge a knife into that delectable body-surface and shout, ‘Wake up! Throw him into the bathtub! Get out of the water and dry off!’ There is something unsettling in the way that Bonnard used Marthe in these paintings, as in many others. Their relationship evolved from one of artist and model, so there is no question that she was powerful, and aware from the very beginning of her role as an object of his work. However,
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he hardly ever acknowledges her own gaze by having her look out of the painting at him: a very important marker of what she meant to him, and of the limits of her subjectivity. As evidenced by the dates, Bonnard often spent years on a painting, working and reworking layers of painterly application, often allowing traces of the whole history of the surface to come through in the final work in such a way that, no matter how powerful its individual elements are, his composition never transcends its materiality or hides its mode of rendering. As such, his fidelity to the material, process and composition means that the painting
is privileged as an object more than the subject in any specific work. How do these analyses of certain works by three early to mid-20th century men relate to the body of work I have produced over the last year? In hindsight, the paintings and objects that constitute this body of work and my negotiations with my environment, personal and cohabited, make use of the tools that these men provided: the psychological and iconic aspect of de Chirico’s barren compositions meets the colourful chaos of Bonnard, all of it tempered by the stillness of Morandi. The ever-changing shadows in my paintings have been largely privileged over the objects casting them, because they are transient and move through and within the space, mediating its substance but only ever fleetingly. In their cyclical impermanence, they speak of life and a passage of time in a way that the objects cannot, and also carry with them a symbolic weight that the objects don’t. Additionally, in the flatness of their projection onto surfaces, they mimic the abstraction inherent in painting itself, whether of the highest degree of hyperrealism or the simplest ‘wall painting’. I begin with photographs taken on my iPhone. This image-making machine is
always present and because of its shape and how it works, it can translate directly from the world into my point of view of that world. These images do not have the considered formal properties that photographs usually have; instead they are incidental and awkward compositions that are simply a moment of my point of view as I move through my space. Far from ‘true’, the images are full of digital noise. Colours, which one’s eye blends seamlessly, have been separated out and fixed in their relative tonal values in a way that our eye, with its ever-compensating pupil, cannot. The picture also sections off a part of the world, giving it fixed limits in a way that our vision does not. I zoom and crop to create disorienting compositions while trying to retain something aesthetically rich. These by now strange and degraded photographs become the source material for paintings, which, the moment they have begun, lead the painterly process on its own path, with only tenuous ties to the source imagery. Like Bonnard and Morandi’s, the painting process focuses on an honest engagement with the material and exploration of its various physical and optical properties: the canvas, paint, painting medium, and brushes all get to have their say and participate in the potential modes of application, from dripping and washing, scumbling, working impasto, wet into wet and glazing.
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The ‘standing works’ exemplify the au-
clearly resonate with those in the paintings
tobiographical nature of this series. The
and they silently signal domesticity and
canvases are of the proportion of my
labour.
body, aren’t hung, but rather lean against the walls of the gallery, to bring them into
But what of the quiet muse Marthe in all
the space of the viewer. Apart from the
this? It is as if, after the cultural develop-
occasional inclusion of my own shadow
ments of the past hundred years, I have
in a scene, these are the only figurative
turned the tables, or rather the easels,
elements. In the gallery these paintings
inadvertently painting the paintings that
cast prominent shadows of their own,
Marthe herself would paint today. As if, by
graphically describing the space between
taking Bonnard’s crimes of representation
themselves and the walls and floor that
in hand and a step further, she reclaims
supports them. The colours of these shad-
a place in the world built by others, in
ows vary subtly according to the quality
spaces pervaded and broken up by spec-
of light they are obscuring and signal that
tres, inscribing her transience rather than
one should take a closer look at the more
having it inscribed by another.
conventionally hung pieces: a subtle yellow glow 2 emanating from the top edge of a canvas onto the wall above one painting reveals an unexpected and only indirectly visible intervention on an aspect of the canvas stretcher too high to see. The colours of these real shadows and reflections open up an understanding of the radical colour on the paintings as ‘derived from the light and shadow of the world’. In addition to these paintings, a few unadulterated found objects stand around; a broom rests against the wall between a painting and the exit, a slightly battered chair faces into a corner with a head-like piece of hewn marble resting on the seat. They seem out of place, but their colours 2
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Note Morandi’s yellow reflected light within Natura Morta.
Michaelis studio sketch, 2019, oil on canvas, 42 x 29.5cm
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Foreshadowing, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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The light that threw the shadow, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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The darker the shadows, the brighter the sun, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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Shadows I, 2019, oil on canvas, 101 x 76cm 17
Shadows III, 2019, oil on canvas, 101 x 76cm 18
Throw the light, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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Love tied the knot of time, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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Shadows II, 2019, oil on canvas, 101 x 76cm
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Triptych, 2019, oil on canvas, 170 x 55cm each
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Lightness plays with darkness, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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Beyond my grasp shift the sands of time, 2019, oil on canvas, 200.4 x 104.4cm
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Shadows V, 2019, oil on canvas, 101 x 76cm
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Shadows IV, 2019, oil on canvas, 101 x 76cm
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What it might be, being transient, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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The interruption of light, 2019, oil on canvas, 50 x 37cm
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Previous page: Diptych I & II, 2019, oil on canvas, 170 x 55cm each Shadows VI, 2019, oil on canvas, 101 x 76cm
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References Abramowicz, J. 2004. Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence. London: Yale University Press, p.24. Anderson, P. 2007. Foundling’s Island. South Africa: uHlanga. Aumiller, R. 2017. ‘Dasein’s Shadow and the Moment of Its Disappearance’. Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences. 40(1):25–41. De Salvo, D.M. & Gale, M. n.d. Tate Modern (Gallery) and Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 2001. Giorgio Morandi: St. Ives Artist Series. Tate Publishing: London, p.13. Hollier, D. & Krauss, R. 1994. Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows. October. (69):111-132. Meisler, S. 1998. ‘Pierre Bonnard. (Cover story)’, Smithsonian. 29(4):33 Nochlin, L. 2019. Pierre Bonnard: the Colour of Memory, London: Tate Publishing, p. 207. Rizzi, J. 2019. Pierre Bonnard: the Colour of Memory. London: Tate Publishing, p. 47. Watkins, N. 1994. Bonnard. London: Phaidon Press, p. 69.
Images Morandi, G. 1957. Natura Morta. (Painting). Oil on canvas, 30 x 35.4 cm. de Chirico, G. 1910. The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon. (Painting). Oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm. Bonnard, P. 1934-5. Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden. (Painting). Oil on canvas, 127 x 135.3 cm. Bonnard, P. 1935. Nude in an Interior. (Painting). Oil on canvas, 134 x 69 cm. Bonnard, P. 1941-6. Nude in Bathtub and Small Dog. (Painting). Oil on canvas, 122 × 151 cm.
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Bibliography Abramowicz, J. & Morandi, G. 2004. Giorgio Morandi: the art of silence. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Barthes, R. & Howard, R. 1984. Camera lucida: reflections on photography. London: Flamingo. Batchelor, D. 2008. Colour. London: MIT Press. Baxandall, M. 1995. Shadows and enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bonnard, P., Gale, M., Benesch, E., Serrano, V., Clausen, P., Rizzi, J., O’Malley H., Tate Modern, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek & Kunstforum Wien. 2019. Pierre Bonnard: the colour of memory: the CC Land exhibition. London: Tate. Crosland, Margaret. 1999. The enigma of Giorgio de Chirico. London: Peter Owen. de Chirico, G. 1971. The memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico. London: Owen. Findlay, M. 2017. Seeing slowly: looking at modern art. Munich: Prestel. Gombrich, E. H. 1995. Shadows: the depiction of cast shadows in Western art. London: National Gallery Publications. Hughes, R. 2002. Nothing if not critical: selected essays on art and artists. Pbk. ed. London: Harvill Press. Morandi, G., Bandera Viani, M.C. & Miracco, R. 2008. Morandi, 1890-1964. 1st ed. Milano: Skira. Newton, S. J. 2001. Painting, psychoanalysis, and spirituality. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rilke, R, M. et al. 2011. Letters to a young poet; & The letter from the young worker. London: Penguin. Rothko, M. & Rothko, C. 2004. The artist’s reality: philosophies of art. New Haven: Yale University Press. Watkins, N. 1994. Bonnard. London: Phaidon Press. Whitfield, S. & Elderfield, J. 1998. Bonnard. London: Tate Gallery Publishing.
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Acknowledgements My sincere gratitude to: My supervisor Virginia MacKenny – thank you for your invaluable support Douglas Gimberg for your incredible generosity of spirit and insights that have paved my path Diana Vives for your friendship and reminding me to believe in myself For their support and encouragement, my fellow painters in 4th year and PGDip colleagues Stanley Amos, for his kindness and never letting anyone down in all things wood, and Moneeb Dalwai for his Mac magic Gail and Alex Learmont, for your wealth of knowledge and advice Lena Sulik for designing my catalogue
And finally, my profound gratitude to my husband Michael, my parents and my children Daniel and Joseph for their love, unfailing support and encouragement throughout the year.
Back cover: Studio broom, 2019
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