Metamorphoses: Painting and Literature

When I was 18 I went to St Martins but it wasn’t a good experience with its drunken hedonism on the one hand and dry as dust conceptualism on the other. Women were told they’d make good artists’ wives or mistresses. Painters were warned, quoting Duchamp, that painting was merely retinal. And I remember a tutor saying ‘you can’t teach art, just open the wine’. St Martins therefore confused me to the point where I didn’t know what to paint or how to paint or if I was allowed to paint, and so after getting my Dip AD I gave up for ever, or so I thought.

I decided to follow my love of poetry and went to read English at London university and then did a PhD on Shakespeare before returning to painting. My annihilating time at art school had made me reluctant ever to pick up a paintbrush again but I was constantly told to do so by my husband, Peter, who I had met at university, and in the end I gave in to him and went back to art and to art school, not St Martins, in the 1990s.

This circular journey means that my pictures are often inspired by books, sometimes directly, sometimes more generally. And as an introduction I’d just like to touch on 3 literary themes that have influenced me. Firstly the subject of metamorphosis, in Ovid, Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell for example, all of whom have inspired series of my work. So here are Bacchanalian revellers from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: a single reveller, a group going up the hill to their ritual, the same group in an orgiastic frenzy. This is Bottom transformed into an ass from A Midsummer Nights Dream and this is Andrew Marvell melting, as he wants to do, into the green of his gardens. And, as in these little paintings of melting Marvell, the idea of metamorphosis has influenced my style of fluid, blurring, curdling, messy paint. For me, mess and metamorphosis are deeply related.

Secondly, metamorphosis in literature is often a result of the supernatural or strange intruding into a familiar world, for example Ovid’s gods or Shakespeare’s fairies playing havoc with people by transforming them. And this collision of two realities, the everyday and the uncanny, is part of my painting. I often suggest it by odd lighting effects as in this picture from the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or in the eerie light of ‘Actaeon’, about to be turned into a stag by goddess Diana, or in the weird contrasts between light and dark in my Beach sequences.

Thirdly I’ve always liked poetry and novels written or spoken by a solitary, outsider figure. And this has influenced my  pictures of single, wandering people, some from literature. Here are some literary outsiders from plays as well as poems and novels. Caliban from The Tempest. Then the anti-heroes of French existentialist novels, painted as covers on sketchbooks. Camus’ Outsider. Sartre’s Roquentin from his novel, Nausea. Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers about a drag queen prostitute written when Genet was in prison. And then I love TS Eliot’s alienated figures in The Waste Land. These pictures are all based on lines from the poem: ‘On Margate sands’. ‘Fear in a handful of dust’. ‘On a winter evening round behind the gashouse.’ Incidentally lilac, a favourite colour in my painting and the signature colour of my new monograph, is also a homage to Eliot and all his references to violet and lilac, most famously ‘April is the cruellest month breeding lilacs out of the dead land’.

These aspects of literature have been generative but this all took time to filter through. When I first went back to art school I didn’t have a subject at all, the old demon of what shall I paint reasserted itself. And for want of anything better to do, I worked in the life room ruled by grids and measuring, a legacy of Coldstream and Uglow. But this didn’t appeal, I thought of Matisse’s remark that ‘exactitude is not truth’ and the figurative artists I found most inspiring were those who liked disfigurement: Bacon, Baselitz, Kitaj, Michael Andrews, Larry Rivers. They made me think of another quote from Matisse that ‘you can exaggerate in the direction of truth.’

I knew what sort of figure painting I liked, messy and distorted, but I couldn’t seem to paint people until later. The first subject that gripped me was the nighttime motorway. And since we lived in west London, Peter used to drive me up the M4 and M40 so that I could draw the neon of petrol stations and signs. I liked what I thought of as the urban sublime and the feeling of danger with violent contrasts in light and dark and I felt drawn to the subject of travel with its restlessness and exposure. The glare, the speed, the sense of city wilderness and the idea of the journey were a prelude to later work.

And gradually I began to put figures into the wilderness, though a different sort of wilderness. I began to do solitary people or small gangs climbing, wandering, riding through extreme landscapes, and the rider became a recurring figure in my work as did the polar explorer. My rider is inspired by literature, by the Gawain poet or by soldiers in Marlowe, Shakespeare and Marvell, but the explorer has an autobiographical source. My father August Courtauld was an Arctic explorer who survived gruelling expeditions, notably to Greenland in the 1930s. He was part of an expedition to research the possibility of air travel across the north pole and he and his team built a weather station on the ice cap, in the middle of a vast white desert, in which there was a small tent designed for two to live in at a time and keep each other sane. However he volunteered to stay there alone for five winter months since there was not enough food for two men. Terrible blizzards meant that the station was smothered and August became trapped, with ice in his sleeping bag and icicles dripping from the roof, and he was rescued only at the 11th hour after his last candle had gone out and he had eaten his last crumbs of food. This is him when he emerged. And a recent print I made of his rescuer, Gino Watkins, shouting down the ventilator pipe to his tent. His story as well as the last, tragic expedition of Captain Scott inspired a whole series of paintings and monotypes. And for these monotypes, done last year, I drew on the film ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ with its dialogue of politeness kept up during increasing horror. All the old-school manners of ‘good luck sir’ and ‘thank you sir’ take on a poignant and ridiculous tone in the context of such ordeals and I used them as titles for prints of explorers shaking hands in whirling snow-storms.

‘The Explorers’ was just one of a series of outsider and wanderer paintings that I started doing in the 90s and have continued until recently. Another sequence was ‘Cowboys’, the subject of my first show with Paul Stolper. Another was ‘Astronauts’. Another more recent group was inspired by Sami reindeer herders trudging across tundra. And others are from places I’ve actually been to, the mountains of Morocco, the Cuillin range in Skye or swamps and estuaries in England. And my alienated figures are not just in the wild, they also find themselves in bleak, impersonal public spaces. Here the explorers are bizarrely conferring in a petrol station. And here the journey is through the neon aisles of superstores, up and down escalators in shopping malls and recently in the London tube. So a Shopper in Asda, a Tourist on Tower Bridge, a cleaner in St Paul’s cathedral, party Hens in Liverpool, a girl in Tate Modern, a woman on the District Line. And even though I’m obviously a long way from the ice cap, I still paint figures who are isolated or up against it. A road sweeper at 6am in Mile End, a circus clown losing control of an oversized ball, drunken Hen Girls, a priest facing the emptiness of the unseen, pensioner shoppers, a dishevelled tube traveller… and I depict them on discarded, rough materials like chipped plywood, cardboard packaging or large rectangles of canvas that are scuffed and stained. I’ve always liked Arte Povera and its reclaiming of low materials.

My excursions up and down the motorway therefore gave me two key aspects of work, the journey through different kinds of wilderness and also glaring light. Neon light, which I liked on the M40, has been inspirational in supermarket, Circus and Casino paintings. And natural light is important in a similar way. The city glare destroys forms and images, and the same can be said of extreme sunlight, dazzling and eating away at contours. And I like to paint veils of bright light in watery acrylic as a way of transforming my figures. Light is an agent of metamorphosis in ‘Scorching Beams’ a quote from Marvell. Or in ‘Riddled with Light’, a quote from WB Yeats, with the figure on the right erased or transfigured. And I’ve chosen the word ‘transfigured’ since the transforming power of light is often used metaphorically in painting and poetry to stand for the spiritual, like at the end of Dante’s Paradiso. This is a Beach scene done for an Easter show in Southwell Minster on the theme of Crucifixion and Resurrection—a Christian version of the vengeful goddess Diana coming for Actaeon. And this is from Marvell’s poem, ‘A Nymph complaining for the death of her faun’ in which the faun is an apparition of innocence. This one is based on a mystical quote from The Waste Land: ‘looking into the heart of light, the silence’. And the same intention is in my murals on the staircase of Springfield Psychiatric Hospital, painted for Hospital Rooms Charity in 2022. This triptych, called ‘My cottage becomes a universe’ is based on a Chinese poem, ‘The Valley Wind’ by Lu Yun, and the first two paintings show a hermit in a hut. They’re a bit like this picture painted on canvas from a similar poem, but the ones on the staircase leave the hut behind and culminate with this vision of a deer in light, an image inspired by a book about hermits in which animals choose to live close to forest recluses. Here is the top mural as you go up the stairs, a glimpse of something to be revealed as you ascend.

My interest in a cottage in the woods started with reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales where the cottage is often inhabited by a very bad woman—Mother Trudy for example, a lethal crone who turns into a witch and throws a girl onto her fire. But for the psychiatric hospital I (thankfully) got rid of the witch and turned her malevolent firelight into a circle or band of light surrounding a lone figure. I had been doing art workshops with patients and exploring the idea that solitude can be a good thing, despite being frowned on in our extrovert age. We talked about how being alone was not sad or negative but could be very creative, and the cottages in my murals are houses of inspiration lived in by a poet, artist or contemplative. The light which surrounds them is a metaphor for vision.

So light as destroyer, light as vision, then thirdly the subject of sunlight and shadow has also been a pretty constant theme in my work and has a rather unexpectedly melancholy flavour. ‘The worst of flawless weather is our falling short’ wrote Philip Larkin in his poem ‘To the Sea’ and a number of my pictures show a dejected figure, unlike my hermit in a hut, casting a shadow in sunlight. This is a notebook cover for Eliot’s Waste Land. April is the cruellest month. The figure here is the poet, Marvell, or his poetic persona, from his poem ‘Upon Appleton House’. Marvell’s poems in gardens frequently refer to the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man in the Book of Genesis, hence the title, ‘what luckless apple’. And he compares innocent, perfect nature with flawed, divided humans. My Marvell character is therefore like a blot on the landscape. The human creature, definitely falling short, appears in flawless weather—a dark, melancholic shape who contrasts with nature shining all around him. He is another of my outsiders. And incidentally the title of my Caliban picture, ‘the greater light’ also refers to Genesis before the Fall (when God made ‘the greater light to govern the day’) and shows the very fallen figure of Caliban as another blot on the landscape, looming over the hill against the sun.

The isolation of the sunlit figure is perhaps unusual. Sunny days are for getting out and socialising, fun in the sun, so something untoward seems to be happening here in my self portrait in March or in these paintings by Hopper and de Chirico which have inspired me. Hopper’s solitary woman looks desolate in her sunny bedroom. Then de Chirico’s sunny piazzas. Where is everybody? Why are the arcades all empty? A train puffs merrily in the distance, taking other people somewhere exciting but nothing is happening in this deserted square. Here in the ‘Melancholy of a Beautiful Day’ the single, muffled figure is stuck like the statue, inscribed by a long shadow in perpetual stasis. Its predicament reminds me of the noonday demon described by the anchorite Evagrius the Solitary, who lived in the Egyptian desert in the 4th c. He writes that he was plagued from about 10am-midday with a crushing sense of boredom and spiritual malaise intensified by the impression that the sun was not moving.

Self-portrait in March was done from a photo in Victoria Park but searching out figures and shadows has led me to boiling hot countries, especially Morocco. But not its desert. These were painted when I got home but these watercolours were made on the spot in Fez and Marrakesh, sitting on the pavement as shadows shortened and lengthened. This is one of a series of people against blank paper because I thought of these Islamic figures as pilgrims against white emptiness, against the blank of God about which, according to negative theology, Muslim as well as Christian, we can know nothing. They’re a bit like my linocut of the priest in Saint Paul’s, facing that empty space of the unknown.

So the violent and intense contrast between light and dark, the effect I liked on the motorway, is something I’m always returning to. And in 2004 I took it to surreal extremes combining dark sky and bright sands in my ‘Beach’ series. Another great surrealist, René Magritte, is an influence here with his paintings of night streets below blue skies, but I was also thinking of literature in which the strange intrudes on the familiar, specifically Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and the Carpenter:

‘The sun was shining on the sea

Shining with all his might….

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.’

The beaches were done for a show with Paul called Leisure Paintings in which I moved from single figures to crowds of sunbathers. No solitaries here but seething masses as far as the eye can see, made from drawings on Berck Plage in northern France. Metamorphosis once more governs figures moving in and out of abstraction, fusing into coagulates, melting in the heat. At the same time my world of leisure encompassed fine dining and I painted a sequence of Dining Rooms where crowds are eating and drinking beneath backdrops of black. Eliot’s poems of social unease are a source here, especially ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ where unable to make small-talk, Prufrock exclaims “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”. My dining rooms show people collapsing in the presence of each other with the structure of tablecloths set against untidy diners morphing into dysfunctional grotesques and molecular drops as if everything is reverting to a kind of biomorphic soup. They become what they are eating.

In both Beaches and Dining Rooms the figures are pixelating into cellular forms beneath backgrounds full of more cells as if there were some kind of incoming menace. This cell has been my favourite image of threat or mystery, ballooning and hovering near figures, since 2002, when I imported it into paintings based on Marvell’s poetry. Marvell was interested in the new science of microscopy. He expands his images as if through ‘magnifying glasses’ and I had the idea of accompanying my figures with these blown up cells, mysterious globules which I made by dropping fairy liquid into a layer of damp acrylic. The tiny drop of detergent blossoms out into things which look like nuclei or some kind of biological danger: part of my wish to show the ordinary intruded on by something unusual and over which we have no control. Indeed I had little control over shapes made by the Fairy Liquid which conveniently did all the work for me.

The cell has floated into my paintings of different kinds, streaming above beaches, poised over diners and then it was an essential motif in my Covid 19 sequence of 2020 where it hangs and buzzes as a virus in the air. Early on in the pandemic I was just setting up a lockdown studio at home when I was contacted by the consultant and art collector, Dr Peter Collins who had bought several of my paintings and thought that images of Covid Wards might be interesting subjects for me. He sent me photos from his hospital and I immediately responded to the isolated medics in PPE and the defenceless patients in neon-lit settings. I sourced other images from tv and did a huge amount of pictures on paper and then cardboard from our delivery boxes when the paper ran out. The images of masked doctors also appealed because I like painting figures that are semi-hidden and made mysterious or threatening. Similar to my ‘Explorers’ and ‘Astronauts’ my doctors and nurses are transformed through hoods and visors, like creatures from Bosch or like medieval plague doctors with beaks and helmets. I imagined their alien appearance to be especially nightmarish for the patient suffering from Covid hallucinations, and so painted pictures from this point of view with the doctors hanging over the bed. An image that occurred to me was the jackal-headed Egyptian god Anubis, embalmer of the dead, bending over the human figure.

Once again I wanted to show the ordinary world invaded by something frightening and strange. Anubis at the bedside. So this time it’s not just light that brings a sense of another reality but the doctors morphing into terrifying beings. The paintings are about a fear of doctors, iatrophobia, a word I learned at the time, and about the fear of metamorphosis, my favourite subject and one that has been bubbling away beneath what I’ve talked about so far.

This fascination with metamorphosis seems to be a key part of me. It was something I was scared of as a child if people put on sunglasses or a hat. It was something I was drawn to in literature and was the subject of my Ph D. And it has been part of my work since the 90s when I started making street drawings which transformed and deformed people. Around 1998 I started doing quick sketches of people in shops, streets, restaurants and parks and the speed of drawing inevitably meant abbreviation and distortion. Figures appeared grotesque with shrunken heads and hands like blades or they were fused together into conglomerates. When I looked through my piles of drawings I liked the way passing Londoners became extra fragile or frightening and I wanted to use these transformations back in the studio. My first foray into this was the Mutilates, a name I coined to mean mutilation and mutation, and these were huge paintings of semi-translucent figures made from the little drawings. They were shown in St Giles Cripplegate Church in the Barbican in 2001 where they seemed like bodies in decay or resurrected spirits emanating from the crypt. Either way they were creatures that were not quite human. And I have realised over time that my figures are always morphing towards this state, towards the non human. They become monsters, ghosts, yetis, cyborgs or beings made strange with hoods, horns and other disguises. Recently I’ve wondered why I do this and I think it’s because I like to add another dimension to the figures, to make them seem more comic, more menacing, more vulnerable or more mysterious.

But for me metamorphosis is not just about one image morphing into another, woman into ghost or man into yeti for example. It is rather a disruption of representation altogether. This is because I draw attention to the material composition of my figures—their paint, charcoal, pastel and pencil—and let these materials disrupt or attack the image with lines, smears and blots. I make pictures of people but then I unmake them by letting paint and other media resist depiction and assert themselves independently as stuff. It’s as if the human is struggling to exist but its media are going in a different direction, emphasising their status as matter. So metamorphosis here is not so much a woman becoming a ghost or a man becoming a yeti as people becoming oil, acrylic, water, charcoal and pastel.

And you might wonder why unpick an image in this way, drawing attention to what it is made of. It seems like self-sabotage. For me, however, this technique is meant to increase a sense of fragility. It is a metaphor for being pulled apart by matter, by indifferent, non-human forces as if the physical and material are dethroning the helpless human. There is therefore a constant tension between a figure and its upstart materials which refuse to represent it.

All this matter, this stuff can also suggest the contents of the human body. The streaming acrylic and veils of oil and turps can represent body fluids which flood over boundaries and contours. And this brings me to another favourite topic of mine and one popular with contemporary critical theory, that of abjection.To abject is to push away anything gross or disgusting, like bodily waste, corpses, filth, rotting food. However, and here’s the hitch, the abject is not just what we reject and throw in the bin or down the drain, it can be us, ourselves. We can be considered abject if we are outside social norms or propriety and are beyond the pale as objects of horror or disgust. And my work includes a lot of such damaged figures, Mutilates, horsemen, explorers, shoppers and also those who are not typical outcasts in wilderness but professionals, executives and dignitaries going to pieces in the middle of formal occasions. For example, the dishevelled diners in corporate dining rooms or figures exuding matter at a state occasion. These are from a series called ‘Queen and Country’, made for the Art Car Boot Fair a few years ago with ceremonial processions of bishops, courtiers, lawyers and royalty leaking and squirting amid the splendour of the event.

These ideas about the abject have been explored in philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis, especially by the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in her book Powers of Horror. Here she focuses on a child’s need to abject the maternal body in order to enter the adult world of language, law and society. The child must separate itself from the mother, which is then seen as primitive and chaotic. Something to be avoided. And so, abject par excellence, are my large woman Plumpers, inspired partly by Kristeva’s writing, partly by big women seen on Berck Plage and also by shockingly anti-feminist quotes in Marlowe, Shakespeare, Swift, Pope, Marvell, Eliot and not forgetting the 2nd century theologian Tertullian who said ‘woman is a temple built over a sewer’. My Plumpers started therefore rather negatively, as discarded, isolated women marooned in huge, leaking bodies. However, as I painted them I began to see them in a different way. As I put on the slabs of paint they changed from being disordered rejects into icons of strength and defiance. They began to relate not so much to Kristeva’s writing as to Barbara Creed’s book ‘The Monstrous Feminine’ in which the abjected woman bites back and takes revenge on her oppressors. And while Creed sees women as triumphantly monstrous witches and vampires, my Plumpers become monumental goddesses from classical or Celtic myth. Here are the Callieach, divine hag associated with the making of landscape or Brigid, goddess of fertility surrounded by her whirling egg-cells. They are powerful or jubilant and their overflowing mess is not so much disgusting as carnivalesque. It’s like in Cy Twombly, another favourite of mine, where smeared paint is ecstatic and explicitly bacchanalian.

And so to very recent work in which there’s also a combination of metamorphosis, abjection and monumentality. These are large paintings I call ‘Rags’, because they are painted on coarse rectangles of unstretched canvas and also because they refer to Yeats lines from ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’

‘Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’

This last line appeals to me because I work with what is rough and discarded and it also seems right for these figures painted from dishevelled city life. They are from drawings done on the London tube, whose subterranean world can suggest our hidden, buried being, a place like Yeats’s ‘rag and bone shop’.

The underground network can be a metaphor for the submerged, unconscious part of the mind or for the supernatural underworld, the region of the dead in myth, poetry and religion. And the underworld in psychology or myth or poetry or religion is a place of metamorphosis. In Freudian dream interpretation the unconscious distorts and edits: dream-images are fused together or an illicit desire is disguised. And then Jung writes of his own journey into the unconscious, ‘I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity’. These words recall metamorphoses in Dante’s Inferno, Virgil’s Aeneid or Eliot’s Waste Land. Dante’s thieves are turned into snakes, Virgil’s underworld contains ‘monstrous forms of various beasts’ and Eliot’s Waste Land, a descent prefaced by Virgil’s underworld guardian, the Cumean Sibyl, includes mutations like ‘staring forms’ and ‘withered stumps of time’.

More recently Seamus Heaney, discussing his poem District and Circle, sees the tube as a place of phantoms. He says ‘If you go into an underground train in London—probably anywhere, but chiefly in London—there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension.’ Built over plague pits and burial grounds and a site of casualties and suicides, the tube is also the place of many reported hauntings.

My drawings and paintings which explore all this began in 2023 when I made daily journeys on the District Line and did quick drawings of seated figures, distorting them through speed of drawing. Tube travellers became moon-eyed with stick arms or hands like hooks and I liked the way they seemed rickety, outlandish or menacing. Their eccentric shapes, gestures and expressions also reminded me of the pathos, ghostliness or grotesqueness of figures in different kinds of underworld. And these qualities became more noticeable in my subsequent work on cardboard and canvas. My oil sticks, watery acrylic, pastel and charcoal once again attack the figures through intrusive lines, poured paint and flung blots so that human structure and identity begin to collapse. The canvas has a thick, heavy surface like a tarpaulin and when I pick it up and shake it the acrylic runs off like water off a duck’s back leaving a Pollock-like, skittery pattern of dots.

As before my spoiling and messing indicates my subjects’ fragility with the struggle between a figure trying to exist and  materials which try to undo it. And as before these rebellious materials can also stand for the abjected matter of the abject body, its waste and fluids, which stream and spatter, bursting contours. But as with the Plumpers, my mess is not all destructive. I don’t just use materials to assault my figures since I want to introduce a feeling of mystery with the appearance of vapours, filaments, floaters and blots appearing around them. I want to accompany the travellers with shapes that are suggestively obscure, as in paintings in which a mystifying splat or tangle of lines coexist with images of people, for example Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer or Kitaj’s The Ohio Gang. Looking at this bunch of lines or this shape or smear, I think ‘what on earth is that?’ and my attraction to these inexplicable interruptions has led me to bring them into my own work.

I call them ‘the unnameable’, a reference to Samuel Beckett’s novel, and for me they represent uncanny otherness drifting near the figure, a bit like the idea of a parallel universe or the cells in my Beaches and Dining Rooms. And since they gather round or emerge from the head they suggest to me some sort of mental activity: for example what lurks beneath consciousness or what escapes language, like psychoanalyst Lacan’s concept of The Real, which he describes as ‘this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail’ and which, according to philosopher Slavoj Zizek, is like the inscrutable biblical God.

Staying with the subject of religion, the unnamed shapes may also suggest visionary, beyond-words experience. The single figure sitting silently on the tube is as it were in contemplation and its cloudy floaters and filaments remind me a little of a manuscript illustration by the Benedictine mystic, Hildegard of Bingen as she receives a vision with flames around her face. The marks around the heads of my tube travellers might also be signs for what is unformulated or inexpressible. As with my Beachesor Dining Rooms I want to bring together the named, realistic and recognisable with the unnameable and unfamiliar. The person sitting on the District Line is surrounded by enigmatic forces outside the visible, the speakable and the everyday.

For a figure painter I’ve talked a lot about the non-human. And I’m going to end away from humanity again with my series of animals and other creatures. The Gold Room. Very different from my other dining room pictures. No chatter, champagne or dinner jackets here, just a macaque reminding us of those absent human conventions by its defiant presence, pointing up the difference between animal and human. It is a nod to Sartre and his distinction between Being-in-itself and Being for itself. Being in itself refers to the way animals simply exist, without self-consciousness, as opposed to Being-for-itself which is human self-awareness, speech and responsibility. Humans must choose what to make of themselves and how to present themselves while animals cannot help being themselves. It’s a theme that recurs in literature, in Auden’s poem Their Lonely Betters for example or in DH Lawrence where animals, reptiles and birds represent singular and absolute being. The self-possession of the Lawrentian horse, rabbit, blue-jay or tortoise makes them fascinatingly different from us who are so full of concealment, anxiety and self-consciousness.

And I have noticed that I paint animals in a different way from my figures so that all the disintegration and mess are absent. My animals are without the swirling of liquid and hurling of blots that undo my figures but are made instead with decisive marks expressing their spontaneity and vigour. These were for a show at the Royal Geographical Society about Inuit culture and polar exploration. They are endangered Greenlandic species made on recycled cardboard pulled out of local bins as a small eco gesture. Snowy Owl, seal, Arctic Wolf, Arctic fox, Arctic hare and my favourite, the Arctic Shark which can grow up to 7 metres long, live for over 500 years and is pregnant for 8-18 years. I made them around the same time as prints of the explorers but there is quite a difference. While the explorers are crushed and worn down by time, sickness and weather, the animals and birds are well-formed and assertive. They are complete while my flailing figures struggle to exist as solid and coherent.

However, a confession here, despite being a ragged human myself, when painting animals I sometimes feel an almost shamanic identification with their spontaneity, alertness or aggressiveness. I became interested in shamans and their connection to other creatures when researching Inuit culture for the RGS and though it’s absurd to claim kinship with real shamans, I’m encouraged to know that several artists, Joseph Beuys or Leonora Carrington for example, have used shamanism in different ways. And for me a relationship with bird and animal subjects seems to fit with my impulsive, wordless life in my studio, away from conversation and polite society, where I can express raw or aggressive feelings like the hyena in Carrington’s story, The Debutante. Or the macaque flicking its tail. I feel especially akin (not surprisingly) to the primates and I have a range of gibbons, tarsiers, baboons, lorises, lemurs, macaques and chimps in my repertoire. While my burdened humans are trudging along the earth the monkeys are perched up above or flying through the jungle in a huge canopy of blossoms and vegetation.

The Jungle paintings are in those bright, artificial, sherbet colours which I’ve used in all kinds of different paintings and which have different effects depending on their context and subject matter. I was drawn to them originally when looking at the synthetic colours of superstores, malls, cruise ships, housing estates and hotel foyers as well as pills, cosmetics, cakes and sweets in shops and cafes. I noticed that these places and products seduce with colours that are smooth, unctuous and often opaque. You cannot see through them and the creamy coating of innocence, luxury or comfort masks something cheap or toxic. I therefore used them in my supermarket, Icon of the Seas, new build and hotel corridor paintings and also for Grimm’s Fairy Tale pictures with the dangerous icing-sugar house in Hansel and Gretel. Or orange mushrooms which look pretty but are poisonous.

However, these candy colours have a different source and intention in my tropical jungles. They make the forest look artificial it’s true, like something from a Disney film. But the artifice is not there to suggest commercial manipulation but to conjure a world made strange and visionary. My influences were not the sickly softness of the leisure industry but landscapes of Hindu miniatures. These Indian works have that sour-sweet, cool-as-a-cucumber colour that I love and they depict beautiful gardens with gods and goddesses and flowers in an intricate, bejewelled style. They show the elephant God Ganesh sitting on a lotus or Radha and Krishna in moonlight or the monkey god Hanuman in a garden. Their colour is artificial but this has a religious intention and represents the idea of paradise. The artifice is not there to deceive but to be somewhere better than here, out of this world, which reminds me of the philosopher Sonia Sikka’s words about Plato and beauty, ‘for Plato’, she writes, ‘the beautiful portrays an ideal that is more real than anything actual and inspires longing for this half remembered realm in which this ideal is real.’

So my apes and monkeys are in an invented garden of delights. Flamboyant Jungle isn’t our world, it is a highly artificial one but one which expresses a wish for boundlessness and exuberance. When in 2009 I was doing a residency at a Monastery in Yorkshire, the abbot, Father George, commented on this painting and said in a scathing voice, ‘the ape knows joy, we won’t, not till we get to the kingdom.’ We can, however, imagine such a state. And we can invoke it. The title Flamboyant Jungle alludes to Wallace Stevens’ poem about a tropical forest in Florida in which he asks for flame-like, or flamboyant, illumination. He asks that nature which creates such teeming life in the forest, fills him with fiery inspiration. And I’d like to end with his poetic appeal for that dashing, reckless energy that reminds me of the ape that flies through the trees.

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth

The big-finned palm

And green vine angering for life,

 

As the immense dew of Florida

Brings forth hymn and hymn

From the beholder,

Beholding all these green sides

And gold sides of green sides,

 

And blessed mornings,

Meet for the eye of the young alligator,

And lightning colors

So, in me, come flinging

Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.