Journal of Contemporary Painting - Current Issue

How might a painter or a painting correspond? In this dialogue, artists Rebecca Fortnum and Kelly Chorpening explore the ambiguity of the word correspondence as a creative method in painting. They examine the word as a set of equivalences or affinities, forged through the act of painting, as well as painting as a form of address. They evoke Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences’ (1857) and its many translations as a starting point to explore how things and ideas co-respond. Their discussion thinks through the relation between touch and sight within the painting process and how gestures or marks represent spatial dimensions and materialities. Debating ideas of mediation and copying suggested by the notion of correspondence, they propose that the term may be useful in allowing painters to forge multiple and varied connections and explore coincidences with and through their subject. Painting is positioned as a form of co-response that happens across time, allowing the painter to form correlations between past and present.

During the pandemic, the painter Natasha Sweeten invited sculptor Tamara Zahaykevich to collaborate remotely for an exhibition in New York. This visual essay documents the various technical and visual paths they took to realize their project. This resulted in two collaboratively made artworks that straddle the definitions between painting and sculpture.

An exchange of letters between artists Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson, written over the course of 2021. Himid and Johnson first met in October 1982 at the First National Black Art Convention at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, while studying Theatre Design and Fine Art respectively. In the correspondence, the two discuss their approach to painting and drawing, from formative studies at University to the present, and the use of light and colour in their work. At the time, Johnson was preparing for her solo exhibition of new work Still Here at Hollybush Gardens, London.

A visual essay concerning the work of Northern Nevada Paiute painter Melissa Melero-Moose. She creates paintings that participate in abstraction, drawing from patterns that appear in traditional Native basketry and design. She includes physical materials embedded in the paintings, such as willow reeds and pine nuts – materials and sustenance that have been gathered by the Paiute people for thousands of years. Gathering them for her paintings, she travels territory that has been overlaid by boundaries of private or governmental ownership since European settlement. Her work bridges and interweaves notions of landscape and identity, abstraction and tradition, design and memory – as well as representation and materiality.

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the painter Joan Eardley (1921–63) was a prolific letter writer, often writing daily to friends, family, lovers and associates. In person, she often appeared diffident, shy and unassuming (particularly in professional contexts), but her private letters, in contrast, reveal an altogether more expressive, witty and erudite character. The critic and artist Cordelia Oliver described her letters as ‘vivid word pictures’, full of evocative visual description and detailed accounts of her creative process. Eardley’s writing often veers on the ekphrastic in her attempts to convey the experience of painting, her use of colour and undaunted efforts to capture the changing weather and light. A portrait of the artist as a young woman, the artist’s letters offer readers an insight into the life of a painter utterly absorbed by and committed to her work in the mid-twentieth century.

This text uses auto-theoretical, diaristic and narrative writing methods to think through how correspondence operates in my writing, performative painting and moving image practice through a method I refer to as ‘speaking with’.¹ I understand ‘speaking with’ to be a feminist method of practice, of coming close to works, ideas, other artists and writers and their texts, to converse with them through practice. Practices and research that utilizes ‘speaking with’ methods acknowledge and articulate proximity and subjectivity between conversational interlocutors in drawing on, and thinking with, the works of others. By engaging with creative materials, texts, archival gaps and bodies, subjectivities are held in dialogue, from which work arises. As a method of conversation in fine art practice, research and writing, and in thinking through the potential of the term ‘correspondence’, I am opening this term out to account for different forms of engaging with an interlocutor in practice. This includes forms of art writing, autofiction and auto theory, as well as non-textual, material-driven creative and research practice, articulating these conversational encounters as fine art practice including moving image, performance, painting, sculpture, installation and more. In this text I enact ‘speaking with’ in correspondence with Amy Sillman’s concept of ‘awkwardness’, the work of Lynda Benglis, haptic memory of touch and feminist thinking around the horizontal. This work presents a thinking through an expanded painting, sculptural, moving image and performance practice and the role of the floor as an important dialogic space in my work.

Rehearsal for Deep Song recreates Martha Graham’s choreographic piece Deep Song, the last dance that she, as a mother of Modern Dance, performed alone in 1937 in response to the Spanish Civil War startling pictures of the performance reached the United States at the time, through different media. This project focuses on the analytical study, through pictorial mimesis, of the sequence of movements proposed by Graham in her choreography in order to deal with the Spanish conflict. Working with oil paint on long strips of canvas designed and prepared to represent sequences of movement in an exercise close to stop-motion, it develops a creative process based on an expanded concept of the idea of historical frieze. Its aim is not only to learn other ways to cope with the images of violence that news and social media are able to expose us to today but also to contribute to the renewal of the genre of historical painting through a working methodology that emphasizes the power of recreation (re-enactment) of the pictorial medium rather than restricting it to the mere realm of representation. Graham entitled her dance in reference to Federico García Lorca’s poem ‘Poema del Cante Jondo’ published in Madrid in 1931 and translated into English as ‘Poem of Deep Song’.

Northern Irish female painters are poorly represented in exhibition and publication locally and internationally. This review article of Louise Wallace’s first major solo exhibition, Midnight Feast, in The MAC Belfast, 2023, considers her depiction of the Glengoland estate gardens of her childhood in 1970s west Belfast. The pictorial relationship between still life and landscape is explored in relation to the cultural and political history of Northern Ireland. Close attention is paid to the detail and materiality of the paintings and to the voice of the artist, particularly regarding the minimal visual presence of the female body. Connections made with Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series frame the relationship between a younger and older self – the points of view of a girl and older woman in the paintings – and invoke the sexual politics and conditions of production of the work.

Review of: Ed Clark, curated by Emma Lewis

Turner Contemporary, Margate, 25 May–1 September 2024

Review of: Modern Painting: A Concise History, Simon Morley (2023)

London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 319 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-50020-489-4, p/bk, £18.99