Published in the exhibition catalogue, Jane
Joseph, Drawn in Place: Two Decades of Drawing and Printmaking 1980-1997
(London: Morley Gallery, 1997)
One cannot step into the same river twice, according to Heraclitus, because even if one enters from the same bank, different water flows, different fish and twigs follow in its course. And yet this relentless change is what defines the river. If it stagnated, dried up permanently, or went underground, it would no longer warrant a name and a trickle of blue on the map. The river lives with the paradox that it is fixed in consciousness by its state of flux.
The
south view from Jane Joseph's studio is of a river of sorts. The Westway, a triple-carriage motorway
cutting its swathe through Westbourne Park and Ladbroke Grove, is a fixed
entity supporting constant flow.
Sometimes it is complemented by a tube train on the Metropolitan
Line. Not a pretty sight, although
through the double glazing it does present a reassuring monotony akin to a
blazing hearth. The unstill prospect of
the Westway creeps in to some of Jane Joseph's studio images, drawing these
interiors outwards, thematically speaking, towards her favourite Thamesside
locales. Her Thames is hardly
picturesque either: it's Brentford, with its wharfs and boatyards, rather than
Henley, with its yachts and regattas.
It's a working Thames, not a punting Thames, a Thames in daylit action,
rather than a Thames submerged in Whistlerian haze.
Jane
Joseph is a realist of the no-nonsense, true-grit variety. She is drawn to real places, she is obsessed
by actual phenomena, perceived facts, felt sensations. But she fastidiously avoids the pitfall that
has caught so many realists past and present of sentimentalising the grime,
wallowing in the bathos. This is not to
say that her art is prosaic; it has its own kind of heroism, one which has to
do with fixing within the finished product a sense of the restless effort that
went into its making. In this respect
she reveals herself to be the proud and thoughtful pupil of certain remarkable
teachers, among them Robert Medley, Frank Auerbach and Euan Uglow, and in the
process stakes a claim as an original within a tradition sometimes called, for
want of a better name, the School of London.
But School of London drawing can succumb to a pitfall of its own, that
of making a fetish out of the signifiers of "the hard-won image": the
extended page, the exposed plumb-line.
Joseph's art is a no-go area for any tropes of effort: no random
open-biting here, no tears or lesions in the page, no studied grubbiness.
In
one significant way, however, a Joseph drawing bears remnants of former
attempts, in the form of the fainter lines that hover around a figure or
object. But these lines, whether faint
because they were put down tentatively or because they have been partially
rubbed away, always play a full rôle
within the pictorial scheme of the finished work, filling space between
dominant points, suggesting atmosphere, or movement. The halo-like misregistrations that follow the commuters in Central
Station Milan (1996) which give a sense of crowd, of people walking where
millions have walked before, can also read like the marks in a Futurist
painting to denote locomotion. There is
movement, too, within the fixity of individual figures. In the same drawing, the improbable width of
the man with his hands behind his back in the front of the composition, walking
away from the viewer and bucking the forward drift of the crowd, is justified
by the sense of his turning, of his being drawn in time as well as space. The figure loses certainty in his right
side, which is rubbed away and fissured, compared with his heavily drawn and
sharply defined left flank. At the same
time, lest we over-interpret the man's casual and undemonstrative movement, the
chiarascuro within his figure relates to contrasts of light and shade picked up
elsewhere in the composition, in such fixed entities as the balustrade and
column. Joseph's drawings are
characterised by restrained liberties with perspective and modelling within
compositions of overall measure and control.
The
drawing of Milan Station stakes a moral claim for the living over the static
which will be welcomed by anyone familiar with this particularly awesome and
bombastic example of fascist architecture.
The crowd forms a sinuous, vital flow, fluid and organic, within the
relentless fixity of the station's heavy duty neo-classicism. But Joseph always gives the living priority
over the static, or at least parity with it.
Where nature is depicted, it is tempered by industry, which stands for
human interaction: the swinging crane in Low Tide, Brentford, January
(1986), for instance. Where an
architectural landmark is the main event, nature is given its fair share of the
action: branches compete with cast iron in grace of suspension in Hammersmith
Bridge (1988). People and cars are
never edited-out of portraits of celebrated city landmarks. In the Piazza del Popolo (1992) the
eponymous populace are given their due.
There
is nothing effete about Jane Joseph's touch.
Even when she etches flowers, catching their intricacy with an
incredible subtlety of line and tone, nothing of her robust, awkward,
exploratory hand is suppressed. She
equally holds back from theatricality.
Her quarry drawings of the early 1980s, done at Ardgour, Scotland, are
among her most dramatic works, with almost painterly flourishes and a mood of
the old masters (a Rembrandt Deposition comes to mind), but more usually in her
oeuvre the page is animated by a restless energy which comes from tentative
marks. Even when they are deeply bitten
or heavily drawn, even where they are agitated and abrasive, her marks seem
interrogative rather than declamatory, astute rather than strident. This, surely, is what keeps her line so
strangely alive, what compels sometimes awkward or inscrutable passages to
reward the patient gaze.