'Tending the Flame'

Catalogue essay for 'JAN CROMBIE : New Paintings', Said Business School Oxford 2004

It is rarely that one has the pleasure of witnessing the emergence of a distinguished artistic career, resolved and coherent, from a set of early experimental propositions. The new paintings that Jan Crombie is exhibiting at the Said Business School in Oxford offer just such a pleasure. The ten paintings, made 2003 - 2004, with accompanying drawings, showcase what is new in the artist’s practice and focus on a mature stance that has been arrived at after a long and intensive period of searching.

The paintings depict a range of colourfully stylised objects and figures, arranged on fields of colour that are sometimes textured. The various elements, figures, chairs, buttons, discarded toys, are defined by strong outlines. There is a heightened sense of drama and definition through the use of the outline that is reminiscent of the theatre designs of Vuillard or the posters of Lautrec. The artist cites the influence of Communist posters where the figures appear to be striding out of the canvas towards the viewer. There are echoes of the rounded and stylised shape of bodies and inanimate objects typical of the Russian Constructivists’ experimentation with geometric shapes and the elimination of extraneous detail. Through the use of such devices and not withstanding the denial of perspective or chiaroscuro the paintings have a strongly sculptural sense. Their weight and solidity is perhaps informed by the twenty years Crombie spent in a more sculptural practice, working with clay and in printmaking.

The objects and figures are of a similar size, directing our gaze to each equally, suggesting parity between all the participants in these tableaux. There seems to be a conscious attempt to subvert hierarchy and challenge the natural order of size in the interplay of the relationships. As viewers we feel freer in our association of objects than of people. The stylising and subsequent generalising of the figures distances us from the personal or the individual. We are directed back to our own references for help with interpretation. Our sense of familiarity with the objects is dependant on our own cultural background and invites subjective readings of the work. There is a sense of recognition of the familiar as well as of the strange. We know that there is something here if we know how to look.

A perennial dilemma for the viewer is how to interpret a work of art. What knowledge or skills are best suited to the task of looking at art and does it help to be an artist or to be able to reference art history?. The ability to interpret an artwork must surely be aided by an understanding of making art oneself and the ability to compare and contrast historically certainly doesn’t hinder the process of looking. There are other issues pertinent to the act of looking that need to be addressed; how much does the work permit one to enter into a dialogue and what are the signs one should be looking for in the work that will help one answer that most difficult of questions "what does it mean?"

There are many signs in these paintings; in the images and in use of paint itself to assist us in our reading of them. At first glance the works appear to be narrative, if not illustrative. One’s eye searches the canvases for themes and repetitions and indeed there are recurring elements that appear to allude to a narrative structure. The chair features here as it has in earlier works, representing the space around a person and the sense of loss when they are missing and the chair is unoccupied.

Some of the images are informed by the artist’s family history. But this is only a part of the evolution of these paintings. It is simplistic to view the works simply as echoes of her autobiography and Crombie is uneasy that knowledge of her background will provide too ready an answer to the viewer to something that is layered and complex.

As with the work of Louise Bourgeois, which, along with many contemporary artists, Crombie admires, there is a sense of a non-linear momentum at work that whilst emphatically of the present loops back over previous territory to unravel and uncoil. They are prescient in their references to war and the disorder created by it.

If narrative is part of the framework that underpins the work it is not the sole interest of the painter. In fact Crombie is more comfortable when she describes the works as abstract. She herself views them as non-narrative and non-sequential. She cites the writings of Peter Carey and Hiruki Mirukami as influences; examples of the non-linear use of often bizarre images that can involve the chance-crossing of lives, and feelings that one is left with that extend beyond the words. The meanings shift for the artist as the painting progresses and it is this fluidity of meaning that Crombie wants to leave for the viewer to experience.

The dramatic composition of the paintings, creates a spatial tension between the elements that reflects Crombie’s concern both to examine the relationships between the genders, and to reveal the essential solitude of the human state. The paintings have a sense of arrested motion and resonate with emotional depth. As in the later works of Max Beckmann emotional intensity is emphasised by everything being captured with outline, tying it into place, letting nothing slip. They satisfy too in their use of techniques, incising and embossing, constantly asserting the presence of the surface of the painting and offering it to us as image. Not merely the backdrop, the necessary ground upon which the pigment is worked; it itself becomes another presence in the painting. One that is no less important than the robustly described figures and objects themselves. This pre-occupation with the tactility of the surface itself is a new element in Crombie’s painting and is influenced by her years of working with clay.

The artist invests a great deal of care in the surface and how it is rendered. She admires this quality in the work of Chris Ofili. Like Frank Auerbach , she will endlessly revise the work, scraping off and removing or replacing large sections until she is satisfied with the composition. It sometimes feels like a battle between her and the painting as she takes elements out and moves them about, almost in defiance of the painting itself.
The artist regards it as essential to the reading of this work that we view these painterly considerations of composition, application of paint and surface as inseparable from the images. They are paintings as much about painting as about any narrative or representative aspects. These elements are as important a voice in the work as the graphic and brightly coloured objects and figures that are placed within the field of the picture.

This fact demands of the viewer an appreciation of the physical as well as the subliminal tools at the disposal of the painter, of the very craft of the painter. It requires a sophistication that informs the viewer that these works are about more than the sum of their parts. It is ‘thinking art’ wherein we are, as Duchamp described, the ‘active spectator’ who must complete the work by becoming a part of the creative act.

In these recent works the artist has depicted lost or discarded toys that she has collected. The use of the found object in art was associated throughout the twentieth century with counter-culture and a desire to re-order reality. Crombie embraces these attitudes and consciously echoes them in the paintings.

There is nothing incidental about these paintings. Everything has been done with intention; the carving up of the picture plane, the careful placing of objects, the treatment of the surface, the use of the outline and strident colours. The sheer insistence of intention forces us as viewers to behave in a particular way. We are compelled to stop and "watch" these paintings. As though in front of a stage or toy theatre we are entranced and held by the painterly and dramatic devices that the artist has employed to engage us.

One has a sense of a ‘cast’ in waiting, in suspended animation. The objects seem to inhabit the picture plane as though pieces on a stage, waiting to be moved by the voice of the prompt. The process of making the painting involves what feels to Crombie like a dialogue between herself and the emerging "characters" on the canvas. This manipulation of the figures in her painting connects to Crombie’s childhood love of acting when she devised, wrote, directed and performed in her own plays. Other features such as the use of the rondel, an emerging field of action, might be seen as a stage or a spotlight from which the figures emerge and into which they are placed. This adds a heightened sense of drama to the pictures.

The construction of the paintings conveys the artist’s authorship and she says that she has a strong desire to ‘control the journey’. This is perhaps reflective of this middle phase of her life where freer of the demands of a growing family, she has more control over her life and work. If the paintings reveal her presence as author and director, the strong design elements as well as the application of the paint, enforce the sense of how the artist is also in control of process as opposed to being at the mercy of the vagaries of temperature or humidity, as she felt she often was with ceramics. This does not mean that she is not responsive to the process. The artist knows it is important to be in control of process and yet respectful of it’s inherent qualities. She maintains a dialogue between image and process, that at times allows the process to become the very image itself. This is clearly seen in her renderings of the background colour-fields in the paintings. In the latest works the background is brought into relief by the placing of actual objects on the canvas. The artist hopes that this calibration of textures and colours emphasises for the viewer the sense of looking at ‘real’ painting, countering the seemingly illustrative nature of the images and asserting the presence of the artist as maker.

Crombie knows her craft and vigorously addresses the problem solving that is inherent in the act of painting, the balancing of formal elements in service to intuition. In contrast to her need to be in control of all elements, a belief in the importance of intuition also informs Crombie’s work. Her images arrive she says in a random manner, sometimes whilst sleeping. It seems as though she acts almost as a conduit to the works. Crombie has a strong, but non-verbal sense of what they mean. Often her sense of interpreting the work herself happens quite late in the making of the piece. It is a slow evolution to arrive at the essence of the piece. This description of their generation further defies the initial appearance of these works as merely illustrative.

In one of the last works in this series ‘Nurse and paramedic’ 2004, cap holders from a toy gun, are applied to the painting’s surface. This piece heralds a desire to connect to reality, the turning of the artist’s gaze from the inner world back to the external, outside the studio window. The last painting in this series is "Girl on suitcase and man" 2004. It refers to the tragedy of immigrant Chinese workers drowning in Morecambe Bay earlier this year. Echoes of her family experiences as refugees in this country meant that Crombie was especially affected by this event and felt compelled to respond to it.

The opportunity to exhibit in a bigger space has allowed the artist to return to large figurative paintings, such as she made when a student at Goldsmiths in the seventies. There she was taught by a group of artists, Bert Irvin, Michael Craig–Martin, Peter Cresswell among them, all of whom had an outstanding understanding of painting. A constantly rich dialogue about the essential nature of the practice was maintained and Crombie readily pays tribute to their presence at this important stage of her early development.

The ensuing years of child-rearing and earning a living through teaching and making ceramic works were rich in other essential ways. When she turned to painting it was abstract and was made alongside the ceramic works. The paintings were filled with gestural mark-making, with nuances of colour. It was through periods of painting for a few weeks each year when the ceramics were packed away that Crombie progressed her work. So the shift back to painting and to figuration occurred in a gradual and graphic manner. A motif had begun to occur in the ceramic pieces – a travelling line – in retrospect it almost appears as a road to the future. It traversed pots and drawings and prints and eventually small paintings. This following of a line through paint engrossed the artist and she allowed herself to be informed by it’s direction. To her intense excitement an image arrived in the painting one day, a domestic image, a saucepan. This was significant for Crombie because it was clear to her that if figuration was to re-emerge in her work then it simply couldn’t be done in ceramics, it had to be in paint. The emergence of objects and the use of them apparently without intention, almost randomly, seemed to be the right way to proceed. The image had arrived without pre-planning, in an intuitive manner. It felt to Jan like a major door opening in her work. She speaks a lot of doors opening in the work, of the work informing her. It may be that one opens just a glimmer and allows a peep at a new idea or image before it shuts again. At another time, as with the arrival of the saucepan it acts as a portal to a new direction in the work. In this case it sent her hurtling into a new era of heightened definition and symbolism in the work. It is however a symbolism that is opaque in meaning to the viewer.

Jan Crombie has never doubted that she is an artist. It is something she has known since she was a small child. She has spent her entire life talking about and making art. Her mother’s family were artists and her father was acclaimed British sculptor Peter king, who died at only twenty-nine, when Crombie was just three. An assistant of Henry Moore, King was part of the forward-thinking generation of post-war British sculptors who emerged in the fifties. His early death left a legacy of a stunning sculpture collection amongst which Crombie and her brother grew up. Her earliest memory of an art exhibition is seeing her father’s sculptures in the open air sculpture show in Battersea in 1960, following his death in 1957. Crombie was taken each summer by her grandmother, herself a sculptor, to museums and galleries in Vienna where she was encouraged to draw, discuss, question and form opinions. The influence of her grandmother and her consciousness of her father’s work helped to form her sense of herself as an artist.

When she painted as a young student Crombie says that she had a huge passion for it but lacked life experience and confidence. This latest body of work resonates with an intelligent sense of a life being lived that is defined, but not bound by the past. The gravitas of maturity has lent a depth and tenderness to the work. It is in this middle phase of Crombie’s career that one is seeing the certainty and the hunger of the youthful painter lent substance by the intervening years. It is the blending of talent and the authority of experience. It is not possible to fabricate this, or to rush towards it. It has to be arrived at, to be worked for, to be earnt and it does not happen for everyone. It is as true now as it was in the seventies, although it is no longer fashionable to say it, that many women artists become wearied by the travail of balancing the needs of family with the selfishness that creativity seems to need for it’s advancement. It takes faith and courage to continue to tend the flame whilst it is almost starved of oxygen.

Here, the evidence of half a lifetime’s practice invites us to reflect on acts of making, of remembering, of being human. This is the power of art and why it is important to be scrupulous in what we look at and to be able to distinguish the profound from the deceptive.

In recent years the artist has seen much contemporary art across Europe and has felt more drawn towards installation art as a viewer than to painting. She has seen little painting that has really excited her. When returning to painting herself she wanted to ensure that it would be relevant to the viewer of today. The survival of painting and its embedded position in contemporary visual art practice is due in part to the modernising strategies that painters such as Crombie apply. Perhaps it is the appropriate signifying practice for these apocalyptic times. She set out to find a new way forward in her painting in order to seize our attention. And demand our attention they do. Unlike so much art that is about art, to know the history of the artist or her intention or relation to others is not necessary for a powerful and personal experience of these paintings.

The artist says of the work "Through the decisions as a painter that I make I attempt to create a new set of relationships that allude to a possible new ordering, an alternative world. I attempt to open the paintings to the viewer to add their own associations and meanings."

These compelling paintings are acknowledgements of a past, responses to present and a propulsion into the future. They demand our attention as we too struggle not to feel lost, to locate ourselves and attempt to make sense and re-order the world.

Clare Carswell, 2004

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