deborah poynton: picnicartist’s talk, 2 september 2016

I have called this exhibition Picnic because I want to reflect on the way we need to domesticate the world,

in order to see and appreciate it. We lay down a blanket, staking out a piece of ground, and nature becomes

less formless and meaningless in our eyes; it starts making sense as a backdrop to human existence. The

edges of the blanket are the borders of our territory: from within those borders we feel secure enough to

admire the landscape. I feel like paintings do the same thing for us. Inside their four edges, formlessness

becomes form. Paintings show us to ourselves, in relation to the world. This domesticating effect of image-

making also has a kind of nostalgia in it, because the ungraspable grandeur of the world gets lost. It’s

not really possible to reproduce the world, in all its sublime perfection. As we try to understand anything

outside of ourselves, or even look at it, we reduce it to consumable portions. We overpower it and change it

by categorising it. We turn it into images, words and concepts.

Not only does a picnic domesticate the landscape, but it brings the interior outside, turning domestic life,

the eating of a meal, into a different experience. The unfamiliar setting gives a special savour to the food,

as in this quote from Enid Blyton, in her usual wonderfully cosy style:

Soon they were all sitting on the rocky ledge, which was still warm, watching the sun go down

into the lake. It was the most beautiful evening, with the lake as blue as a cornflower and the

sky flecked with rosy clouds. They held their hard-boiled eggs in one hand and a piece of

bread and butter in the other, munching happily. There was a dish of salt for everyone to dip

their eggs into.

“I don’t know why, but the meals we have on picnics always taste so much nicer than the ones

we have indoors,” said George.

So picnics and paintings offer both containment and liberation, on the one hand transforming the

everyday, and on the other, reducing the landscape to a stage set for domestic life.

At particular times in art history images of people in nature have been important, and there are echoes

of these traditions in these works. The tension between pleasure and meaning is perhaps inherent in all

art. There is also the tension in painting between the illusion and the flat, painted surface. I like playing

with light-hearted art historical references as well as different approaches to painting, from abstract and

calligraphic to realism, that create a kind of oscillation of meanings and longings, frustration and fulfilment.

The two male nudes in this room have the title Fête Galante. In the Rococo period, in the 18th century,

people were getting tired of the Baroque style of painting, which was dramatic and passionate, full of

contrast, where figures emerged out of dark backgrounds, as in the work of Caravaggio. A new aesthetic

appeared, both in social fashion and in painting. Fêtes champêtres were elegant garden parties, which took

place in charmingly artificial landscapes, where people played at adventure in the most elaborate costumes

imaginable. The “fête galante” paintings by Watteau were flamboyant portrayals of his patrons in verdant

settings, with vaguely mythological motifs, but really an excuse for showing flirtation and the titillation of

masks and sumptuous fancy dress.

Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Feast of Love, 1718-19

Nicholas Lancret, A Lady and Gentleman taking Coffee with Children in a Garden, 1742

I have called these nudes Fête Galante to allude

to this time when aesthetic took precedence

over meaning. No longer those dark, portentous

images of myths, but a plunge into the frivolous.

And I am emphasising aesthetic over meaning,

because as the art writer Ackbar Abbas says,

the relationship between artists and the world is

“irrevocably broken”. I think he means that since

the explosion of modernism, we can no longer

innocently believe that an image is a truth.

Image and meaning can no longer be one to

one. We have to acknowledge now that meaning

is a shifting sand, as fluid as time. Watteau

was the epitome of frivolity and happiness; his

paintings contain an excess of aesthetic, to be

savoured by aristocrats playing at innocence.

Perhaps painting finds itself in a similar position now. Of all the kinds of art making, painting, particularly

realist painting, seems to lay claim in our minds to represent truth. But of course it does not.

In this painting, Fête Galante 1, you could think of Rococo images of the god Pan, both as consumer of

pleasure, but also as an object to be consumed.

I have left the traces of corrections and searching for the right lines on the canvas visible, and I’ve left parts

of the skin unpainted, or just with underpainting. For me this adds pleasure to the illusion. It’s like having

salt crystals in your chocolate. A painting requires layer upon layer of paint to create an illusion of reality.

The history of painting is layer upon layer of previous influence, and it’s not possible to get away from

this. Watteau himself used landscapes styled on the Dutch and Italian masters who came before him, but

inserted lighthearted, self-referential scenes. Artists have always stolen and subverted other artists’ work.

Painting is wonderfully laden with history and inherent contradictions.

Deborah Poynton, Fête Galante 1

François Boucher, Pan and Syrinx, 1743

While I am still talking about art historical reference, we can move onto the four panel work, Luncheon

on the Grass, which of course alludes to Manet’s painting of the same name, from 1863, a period when

painting started to emerge from the strictures of the academy. The academy of the 19th century was

that very rigid, smooth Victorian painting style of mainly mythological or biblical scenes. Impressionism

was born at this time. Both Rococo and Impressionism were a reaction against heavily laden meaning,

a movement towards pleasure, though taking very different forms. The poses of the boys, though they

are facing away and not towards each other, are reminiscent of the poses in Manet’s work, which was

considered very controversial and was rejected by the Salon, the official yearly exhibition. Luncheon on

the Grass was radical for its time, because it was in a large format which was usually only used for grand

mythological subjects, and because it showed ordinary domestic people, having a picnic in an ordinary

park, except that the woman is naked and the men are clothed. This was often the case in mythological

painting but to do it in a seemingly real life situation was outrageously subversive, juxtaposing interior and

exterior, alluding to myth but undermining it.

Manet painted the same people over and over again. The man on the right is thought to be a mix of his two

brothers. The woman was his favourite model. I also like to paint the same people many times, because then

the subject becomes an excuse for painting, and is not weighed down, or waylaid by intentional meaning.

Deborah Poynton, Luncheon on the Grass

Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur L’Herbe, 1863

The beginnings of Impressionism were another example of the eternal cyclical swing of art history, away

from the grandiosity of meaning and symbolism, towards a more experiential joyful philosophy. The figures

are not portraits of particular people, or intended to represent particular characters in a story. They serve

whichever image they find themselves in. Of course there is no resolution to the battle of intentional versus

incidental meaning. Art doesn’t contain anything fixed or true, but it always elicits both an aesthetic reaction

and an interpretation, of whatever kind, from the person looking at it.

My Luncheon on the Grass is like an unravelled scene, a scroll that’s been pulled open, so that bits

of landscape weave in and out of it. There is no background to fix the space too much into a typical

perspective. Just a foreground, with the two figures half tethered to the space. The fact that they are boys

could evoke a nostalgia, a memory of that feeling of being able to enjoy nature before reason robs us of

that simple pleasure. But while hinting at all of this, I also want to delicately undermine it. What I mean is, I

also want to emphasise the fact that an image is just a piece of staked out ground, a few constructs pinned

against a void, an attempt to translate the world into bite-sized pieces, words, adjectives. I like to think of an

image in terms of words and parts of speech, and I will come back to that in talking about other works.

To continue with the idea of both the picnic as a metaphor for a painted canvas, and at the same time,

paintings showing a construct of space, we can move to this triptych, which I have called Field Day. To have

a field day is to get away from your usual routine, to have a wonderful time doing lots of something you

really enjoy doing, maybe even at the expense of someone else. But I am also referring to the fact that all

painting is just a kind of field of activity, a sphere, a province – a territory. I have used underpainting here,

instead of a high level of detail, which has the effect of evening out the whole surface so that it is just a

visual field, without focusing on anything in particular, and reminding us as we look at it that it’s painted,

much like the feeling you might get going up close to a stage set. I also like the feeling of captured energy

in the movement of the brush marks, which are very workaday and ordinary.

Quite a few paintings in this exhibition combine realism and abstraction, as is the case with the three

diptychs, Arbor, Picnic and Painting Space 1. All territory is a form of containment, with defined edges, like a

canvas, or a picnic blanket. Or even like the confines of our ability to perceive, which is always limited by what

we already know. We need territory and definition, we want it, and much of what we do in life is an attempt

to get it. But territory also feels limiting, and as soon as we’ve staked it out, we want freedom back, and kick

out against the territories we inhabit. The grass is always greener. The bits of realism in these paintings seem

to offer certainty. They have a feeling of the botanical illustration, of nature observed and defined.

Deborah Poynton, Field Day

You know what that branch, or flower, or leaf is - I have

described it to you in paint. You think you know what you

are looking at. The bits of abstraction, on the other hand,

seem to offer freedom. I can fantasise about what that

mark is, or this line, you can dream into the uncertainty of

it and feel yourself unfettered by my intention. Of course,

neither of these is true. They are all just marks on canvas,

bits of illusion, of stage scenery. But there is something

about their combination which I find poignant, because in a

way, you are released from both freedom and containment,

or you can inhabit those two longings. An arbor is a

romantic, protective place, a garden grove with twisting

vines overhead. This arbor is perhaps more wild, less

structured, you might get a sense of space here and there,

or enclosure. You are allowed moments to dream, and then

you are brought back to the surface, to yourself. This is a

quote from Anthony Trollope, one of my favourite Victorian

novelists: “Every man to himself is the centre of the whole

world; the axle on which it turns. All knowledge is but his

own perception of the things around him”.

Deborah Poynton, Arbor

Botanical illustration

I have used the word “scroll” in some titles in

the show. As I mentioned before in relation to

Luncheon on the Grass, I like the idea of space

unravelled, pinned out against the nothingness

of white canvas. In the Scroll paintings there is

an element of writing, and although they are

too large I think of Japanese hanging scrolls,

and also hand scrolls which could be carried

around and which only revealed themselves bit

by bit. I am reminded of that first impulse to

imprint the self onto the world, to transcribe a

memory, or idea, or event, onto a cave wall or

a stone.

I like to think of how a written word started with

an image, which slowly changed over time to a

symbol. I like the idea of painting harking back

to this, wordless but embodying the impulse

towards words. These paintings can’t really be

understood all at once. There is the feeling of

having to move the eyes up and down, so that

you are taken away from the image as a whole

and drawn to little bits of it, small unrelated

marks and streaks. This is landscape without

density, ephemeral, reduced to calligraphic

marks and indications.

The purely abstract works use marks in a

different way, less calligraphic and more

painterly. They are just environments, romantic

notions or moments. For me they seem to

contain the most longing, and fail most of

all to fulfil that longing. Not abstract, but still

anchored to place in some way, they let you

down, there’s nothing to hold on to, but at the

same time there is space to dream. They are

hard to do. I start one, and go to bed happy, and

when I come into my studio in the morning I am

faced with a dead thing, and realise I have been

deluding myself. It is a terrible moment – and

then I have to throw it away. I find I have to be

in exactly the right frame of mind, starting off

just with a feeling about a space. Doing these

scroll paintings, or abstract landscapes, seems

Top: Nakabayashi Chikudo, Landscape with Waterfall,

1841

Bottom: Deborah Poynton, Scroll: Writing the Forest 2

to take up the same bits of my brain as listening to

words does. I really can’t do both, I can’t hear any

talking or music while I am doing it. I get completely

immersed, I enjoy it a lot, but also feel the panic of

probable failure as I struggle with them, because they

can so easily go wrong. These paintings underline the

fact that everything is subjective, I only have my own

feeling of rightness or wrongness in that moment to

go by. I think this is true for all painting, but in these,

no changes and corrections can be made. It’s just me

and it, in that moment. They need to be large, in order

to have a sense of the field again, field of operation, of

space, filling vision.

The two Lost and Found works follow on from

my previous exhibitions, Arcadia and Scenes of a

Romantic Nature, which revolved around romantic

decay. They refer to images of human territory lost

or taken over by nature, the futility of our efforts to

conquer. For example, in the work of Caspar David

Friedrich, who was part of a German romantic movement, which again was reacting to the stiff, pared down

tableaus of neo-classicism. They could be memento mori, reminders of our mortality. But again, as in the

other paintings in this show, the space is not as one might expect. It is all surface. Things seem to get in the

way of each other. Realism becomes abstract and abstract realism. They act as warp and weft with each

other, with the finely woven fabric of the white canvas showing through everywhere, destroying the illusion.

So they don’t really have a conclusion, or any real depth. They are floating notations.

Deborah Poynton, Lost and Found 1

Caspar David Friedrich, Forest in Late Autumn, 1835

The smaller paintings, which are all called Undergrowth,

are lighthearted little corners of territory, incidental bits of

nature, some with creatures in them, like illustrations for

children’s books. They are the opposite of grand, almost

like doodles that have turned into something, and they

remind me of hours in the garden as a child, coming upon

things in amongst sticks and stones and leaves, glimpses

of a whole world going on without me.

If I think about the show as a whole, it’s like a single work,

in which the abstract and real are inseparable. And this

is always to underline the fact that the corners of the

canvas, and also of the gallery, are like the corners of

the picnic blanket, and what happens on it or in it, as you

walk through, is a mixture of consumption and being

consumed, a place where it’s safe for the world to be

viewed, for the imagination to feel at home.

I like using both, because it seems to reflect our human

predicament. As I said before, the grass is always greener.

As soon as we feel safe and contained, we want to break out. As soon as we feel un-moored, we want to

crawl back into a safe place. Neither of these states is real. It feels to me like an over-function of some

survival mechanism, something that went wrong for us when we got consciousness and lost the ability to live

wordlessly in the moment. So although these styles might seem like binary opposites, they reflect the same

thing: a longing for wholeness. We oscillate between the two and can’t find the centre. An image of whatever

kind represents place to us and provides a holding ground for the imagination. That is the magic of imagery.

Whether realist or abstract, this essential function remains the same.

Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, 1903

Deborah Poynton, By the Sea 1

I hope the play of these contradictions offer

pleasure. Of course a picnic is a project dedicated to

pleasure. In 1864, the year after Manet’s Luncheon

on the Grass was finished, Anthony Trollope wrote:

A picnic should be held among green

things. Green turf is absolutely an

essential. There should be trees, broken

ground, small paths, thickets, and hidden

recesses. There should, if possible, be

rocks, old timber, moss, and brambles.

There should certainly be hills and dales,-

on a small scale; and above all, there

should be running water.

It’s lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek, he’s talking

about the popular fantasy of the time, about an

earnest project for frivolous pleasure. I think that

we can still allow ourselves such projected pleasure

on an actual outing, but it’s become thorny and

complicated in art. Art has to carry so many

functions. Philosophical, political, self-referential.

But for me, pleasure is a driving principle. Pleasure,

to be intense, is not unmixed. The references to art

history, to the death of old ideals, to emptiness and

the impossibility of finding truth, for me only create a more interesting flavour. There is a beauty about

these paradoxes that is more complex than simple sweetness.

Caspar David Friedrich, Gazebo in Greifswald, 1818

Deborah Poynton, Lost and Found 2 (detail)