‘always quartettish thoughts’—the art of joanna m. paul
The dead don’t die. They look on and help. —D H Lawrence
‘Stars, bread, libraries of East and West’, begins Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Matthew XXV;30’, a poem which goes on to itemise other cherished staples of a life: ‘Playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars…’. It is a list that Joanna, a great maker of lists herself, would have warmed to: ‘…a human body to walk with on the earth… / shadows for forgetting, mirrors that endlessly multiply, / falls in music, gentlest of all time’s shapes…’.
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Single words and phrases trickle down a page of Joanna’s poetry or they emerge from the whiteness of paper or the ground of a painting. The noun never far from its object. Joanna was a keeper of journals and inventories. (What is her book Unwrapping the Body but a bound, annotated and illustrated ‘list’?) However, there is an important distinction to be made between the impulse to itemise the world and the impulse to commodify it—Joanna’s art being an ardent instance of the former and a negation of the latter.
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Like the lists of the tenth century Japanese diarist Sei Shonagon, or the Chinese poet Li Shangyin, Joanna’s inventories manifest both an attentiveness to everyday detail and a decorum. There is something of Joanna to be found in Sangyin’s many lists:
Things that certainly won’t come
A dog, if called by a man with a stick in his hand.
A singing-girl, if summoned by a penniless student.
Things that make a Bad Impression:
To fall off one’s horse at polo. To choke when eating
with one’s superiors. To return to worldly life after
having been in a monastery or convent. To lie on
someone else’ bed with one’s boots on. To sing love-
songs in the presence of one’s parents.
Maybe there is an unwritten code of conduct lurking out back of Joanna’s art, a respect for certain rules (but only rules worthy of respect) and an acceptance of the restraints of time, family and circumstance. There is certainly—and this is another lesson learnt from Shonagon—a quality of courtliness and manners which is also reminiscent of the Baroque music she loved, but without the frivolity, decoration and excess. Her works are structures of refinement, order and restraint.
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If Goethe had it that every genuine poem is prompted by an event, Joanna’s art upholds the moment of stillness, the easily overlooked detail, the non-event. Presented with a grand vista of forest, Joanna would as likely walk up to it and make a bark rubbing as paint or draw the long view.
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While Joanna’s eye would often seize upon a discreet object, a thing in isolation (and she could approach a vase or a flower or a fencepost as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered), she was also a maker of marriages, juxtapositions. Within a single work, she could place a pen drawing of a flower alongside a pastel of a brass band; a still life would be framed by musical manuscript; a bark rubbing placed in the same frame as an oil painting. Things renew themselves by being in relation to other things. She was a master or mistress of the paint-box, pillow-book, sun-hat, play-ground, day-room. (She would, in her poetry, invest an adjective with the qualities of a noun—white, red, luminous—and her nouns could describe and embellish: fragility, beauty, even.
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There is the euphoric engagement and delight you would expect from Julian of Norwich or from Eileen Duggan sitting at her desk overlooking Lyall Bay, Wellington: ‘All that green calm crept in and flowed around me…’
According to what principle, you might ask, is a half of a bowl missing from a still life drawing, or is a patch of field left blank—and why, in another work, does the word HORSES appear where you might expect horses to be? These recurrent blind spots, the sensory deprivation of them, are like silence in music. They are also like an overexposed negative, a vision too intense.
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She said she belonged to the musical school of the painter Frances Hodgkins, to which might be added the painterly school of Claude Dubussy, and the theological school of film-maker Robert Bresson. To this identikit picture, I would add the following list of virtues: the reticence of Erik Satie, the good housekeeping of Sei Shonagon, the orderliness and inspired disorder of her mother Janet Paul, the delicacy of Pierre Bonnard or Maurice Denis.
If you required a manifesto or style manual, you could consult—alongside the Pillow-Book—the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard and his Treatise Concerning the Art of Limning:
A good painter hath tender sense, quiet and apt… Discreet
talk or reading, quiet mirth or music offendeth not, but
shorteneth the time and quickeneth the spirit, both in the
drawer and he which is drawn; also in any wise avoid anger,
shut out questioners or busy fingers.
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Joanna’s paintings, domestically scaled, subtly articulated, are a kind of hausmusic—a ‘house music’ in the original sense of music which is written for the home, to be shared among self and friends, by performer and audience alike. The paintings are musical arrangements. There is the music of what and how we think as well as the music we think about. What we see, what we listen for: ‘the gentlest of all time’s shapes’. Joanna would have approved of Robert Schumann’s reply when asked what had been so happily preoccupying him: ‘Always quartettish thoughts’.
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And when we have ceased talking about the quietness, poise, inwardness and subtlety of the work then we can begin to talk of Joanna’s resourcefulness, the tough, resolute nature of hers. An artist of resistance. An artist of circumstance, but not a victim.
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I am left thinking about the long wavering lines of her landscape drawings, the subtle distortions of her interior spaces and the explorations into the different frailties of youth and of age. Infinite variations on these themes. As Thomas Morley would instruct the singers of madrigals: ‘You must be wavering’. And, as John Cage would have paraphrased it: ‘Let us admit, once and for all, that the lines we draw are not straight’.
As an accompaniment to the languid, unfurling lines of Joanna’s evocations of the Whanganui or Wellington skyline, I return to her short-lined poems: frequently one word per line, stepping down the page like a shopping list while, at the same time, invoking such past masters of the short line as Pablo Neruda, e e cummings, William Carlos Williams and Lorine Niedecker. Life, too, can be a tragically short line. Art is one of the few consolations—‘the gentlest of time’s shapes’. We join, with Joanna Margaret Paul, in Henri Michaux’s crepuscular chorus: ‘Always the deathless music’.