The exhibition ‘Joanna Margaret Paul—imagined in the context of a room’—presently touring the country—has offered a timely opportunity to revisit Joanna’s life’s work, her working life, her living work… First seeing the show in Dunedin late in 2021, I went back to my journals from around the time of her death. As well as working on a number of unfinished poems, I had written a few pieces of prose in her memory: an obituary for Art News, a couple of catalogue essays and, in 2005, a piece to accompany the exhibition ‘Beauty, even’, curated for City Gallery Wellington and the Sarjeant Gallery by Emma Bugden and Greg Donson. My contribution to the small-run publication (which was hand-made by friends of Joanna’s and gallery staffers to coincide with that exhibition) was titled ‘Always quartettish thoughts’, and is reproduced in sidedoor.

During the two or three years following her death in May 2003, as the inquest was proceeding, I was asked to give a lecture in Rotorua, where Joanna had drowned in a public swimming pool. The pastel drawings of bathers on display in the Rotorua Museum Te Whare Taonga o Te Arawa at that time still haunt me, with their eddying, spiralling, deceptive brightness. By contrast, her paintings of the bowling greens, lawns and gardens around the Rotorua Museum presented a plainer, more balanced, altogether safer place.

‘Joanna’s painted dolphin-box’ is a response to a performance by Joanna’s son Pascal, at the City Gallery Wellington on the weekend of the opening of her posthumous retrospective exhibition in September 2022. Instead of performing on piano, his usual instrument, Pascal courageously agreed to play a virginal (a member of the harpsichord family) which his mother had hand-painted sometime—my guess—back in the 1970s. (The instrument, which features an arrangement of flowers and two very Yeatsian leaping dolphins, was on loan from the Wedde family.)

The recital, which was poignantly staged amidst Joanna’s paintings, with a short Super 8 movie, ‘Rose’, playing to the right of the virginal, was consummate and revelatory. The smallness of the instrument—with its tiny keyboard—felt in keeping with Joanna’s characteristic mark-making, her lyricism, her humility and quiet. During Pascal’s 60 minute programme of J. S. Bach, a gust of wind came from nowhere and lifted the pages of the score from the music stand, leaving Pascal to finish the movement from memory. Which he did, flawlessly, emphatically and with immense feeling.

greg o’brien