ALLEGORIES OF FEELING
Alun Leach-Jones often speaks of his art in terms of feeling. In any number of interviews, he insists that his work does have a subject matter, and that this subject matter is feeling: “The goal of my art is to heighten and enlarge perception and feeling into the most vivid image possible”.1 In saying this, Leach-Jones is undoubtedly being
a little defensive. Not only is feeling rarely spoken of in art today, but this insistence on feeling is meant to counter the common perception that his art is merely
decorative. On the contrary, Leach-Jones argues, his art is not at all abstract or self-referential. It does seek to depict something outside of itself. If it does not refer to anything recognisable in the world, it does nevertheless speak of the relationship between us and the world. It attempts to “heighten and enlarge” perception and feeling. And in this, Leach-Jones is suggesting, his painting is also part of what it records, contributes in some way to those feelings and perceptions it aims to represent.
But what exactly does it mean, to depict feeling in art? It is something that many of Leach-Jones’ critics and commentators have spoken of over the years, although we cannot help thinking that they are writing under the influence of the artist or repeating his thoughts on the subject without quite understanding what is implied by them. (Although, to be fair, Leach-Jones, following one of his other great artistic passions, frequently commissions poets to write about his work, who themselves know, in a practical sense at least, how much art is a matter of feeling.) Feeling is undoubtedly a difficult subject to write about in art, because feelings in art are not the same as they are in life. Feelings when they enter art are as it were abstracted, rarefied, undergo a process of sublimation or self-reflection. This is not at all a matter of judgement – art has nothing to do with morality in the conventional sense – but of testing feelings formally, of seeing how they stand up against the various forms of art.
In truth, there is only one feeling appropriate to the work of art. It is the feeling that encompasses all of the others, and within which they all must operate. It is the feeling simply of whether the work of art is any good or not. This is not to deny that all kinds of other feelings can be expressed in art, but they must all obey a more general artistic logic, take their place within a wider, more disinterested set of considerations. There is no emotion that is inappropriate to art, but every emotion must justify itself aesthetically, fit within the overall economy of the work seen as a whole. It was perhaps Clement Greenberg who spoke of this best, at least within the terms of modernism. Against all misunderstandings of his doctrine of “formalism”, which is not at all the study of the “forms” of art, divorced from any external content, he writes in his essay ‘The Necessity of Formalism’: “Quality, aesthetic value originates in inspiration, vision, ‘content’, not in ‘form’… Yet ‘form’ not only opens the way to inspiration, it can also act as a means to it… That ‘content’ cannot be separated from its ‘form’”.2
everyday life, as though art and life occupy the same level or order of experience. The critics write, for example, of Leach-Jones’ The Romance of Death series (1985-6): “They are formally severe and paradoxically suggest an underlying disquiet, a sense of foreboding”.3 Or they write of his Landscape of Bone series (1992-4): “The pastel
and charcoal drawings of sombre browns, greys and black are associated with the paintings, and it appears that in these works Leach-Jones’ pessimism has gained the ascendency”.4 Or they write, by contrast, of his more recent The Plain Sense of Things series (2004-6): “Leach-Jones’ allusions to life’s miseries are more than offset by his glorious colours which bustle and pulsate with the resounding exaltation of a Chartres window”.5
Alun Leach-Jones, Romance of Death, No. 1 (1981)
In fact, Leach-Jones himself offers a profound insight into the specific form emotions take in his work. He says of the attempts to relate particular objects to feelings, to “read” off emotions from their worldly equivalents: “The images that result in my work are clear but simultaneously ambiguous and enigmatic”.5 It is both to license
hand, Leach-Jones argues that abstract art becomes a mere game without some content it is trying to transmit. And, on the other, he rejects these crude early
twentieth-century efforts to unlock the mysteries of art with a simple key. The attempt to decode art according to a set of unvarying symbols, like a kind of “dream book”, will always fail.
So, again, we might ask, what is it to express feeling in art? Where do we see this properly aesthetic feeling that decides whether a work of art is any good or not? We propose to answer these questions here with reference to a number of Leach-Jones paintings. We do not look at where feeling might usually be thought to lie, in those large-scale symbolic or metaphoric structures that occur across a number of works, and which critics have often spoken of as conveying emotion: the blades, skulls, boats, moons, flowers and hourglasses we find featured throughout his paintings. Rather, we look at the level below this, at a series of stylistic devices that, although they run across several works, strike us as being singular each time. They are
elements that give the impression of being added on at the end, of being surplus to the overall requirements of the work. They can appear impromptu or improvised, almost like a musical cadenza, which occurs when a performer adds a trill or variation of their own to the written score. But they also can appear as a solution to an artistic problem, appended to the composition to make it succeed when it otherwise would not, a supplement without which it would not be complete.
We might begin to speak of this in terms of Leach-Jones’ use of colour. Leach-Jones, as is typical of many British artists of his generation, was thoroughly influenced by Matisse’s conception of colour. This is indicated not only by an early work subtitled ‘Homage to Matisse’ – in fact, coming from a series that is amongst the least Matisse-like in Leach-Jones’ oeuvre – but by Leach-Jones’ quite precise deployment of Matisse’s colour system: the way that in the great Matisse works like The Red Room
(1908) and The Painter’s Family (1911) the eye is systematically led around the canvas by the ordering of colours. For example, in The Painter’s Family, our gaze is drawn first to the yellow novel held in Matisse’s daughter’s hand, then to the orange of his sons playing chess, then to the dark red of the settee on which his wife is sitting, then to the blue of the fireplace behind her, before finally returning to where we began with his daughter’s black dress. It was around 1981 with his The Romance of Death
series – ironically, a series that is said to come out of the darkness and depression of a residency in Berlin – that Leach-Jones first begins to undertake the same systematic organisation of colour. For example, in The Romance of Death #8 (1984), a sequence of black, dark blue, light blue, red and yellow culminates in a slice of hot pink across the centre-right of the canvas. In the slightly later As the Lily Among the Thorns
Alun Leach-Jones, Through the Eye of the Needle (1986)
There is undoubtedly a painterly logic that guides Leach-Jones in his choice of colours here. And there is obviously, as always with his work, a representational overlay that imbues his colours with a variety of metaphorical associations. His pink can indicate either female sexual organs, as in The Rising of the Moon (1987-2002), or the stamen and petal of a flower, as in Foxglove and Belladonna (1989). The purple in a work like The Poet’s Voice (1987) cannot but suggest the poet’s tongue protruding from yellow lips. But, despite this, in each case there is also something surprising about Leach-Jones’ choice of concluding colour. In a way, because of the other colours it is surrounded by, it takes on a special significance, exactly like the unusual or unexpected note within a musical melody. It at once appears as the logical
Alun Leach-Jones, Instruments for a Solitary Navigator, No. 5 (1992)
The same thing might be said about the dots that start to enter Leach-Jones’ work from the mid-1980s on. We are thinking here, for example, of the three red dots towards the top of In Praise of Music (1987), the series of blue dots to the centre and right of Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #2 (1991) and the two white dots to the left of Tenebrae (2000). The immediate precedents for these dots in Leach-Jones’ oeuvre are The Romance of Death #12 (1985-6) and It Matters Not How Straight the Gate (1986), which use respectively rows of dots and wooden lattices attached to the sides of the canvas as framing devices. But these straight lines and wooden panels are meant to be invisible, not strictly part of the composition. (This issue of how to frame or fill out the composition is one of the long-running problems of Leach-Jones’ work, which in many ways comes out of Analytic Cubism, in which it was also a difficulty.) These edging borders of dots become even more prominent in the subsequent
Instruments for a Solitary Navigator series (1990-99), where they can be seen on either the left or right or even on both sides of the composition. And these lattices are to be found throughout Leach-Jones’ work, first in the Matisse-inspired series of the late-‘70s, then in such works as Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #10 and #11
(1994) and Snakes and Ladders (2004) and then taking the form of the fences of Unto the Gathered Field (2000) and the crushed and folded newspaper of The Rustic’s Table (2003).
Navigator series, they can appear to be stars in the skies or reflections off the water. In works like The Mystic Trumpeter (1990), they can appear to be notes of music
hanging in the air. But the specific kind of dots we are speaking of are not like this. In
In Praise of Music, Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #2 and Tenebrae, the dots work more like visual beats or accents. Again, as in Leach-Jones’ use of colour, they are what the entire composition leads towards and yet remain unexplained by it. They are a supreme act of pictorial intelligence and also entirely intuitive or impulsive. In that sense we have tried to describe before, they arise out of a pure feeling of aesthetic “rightness” and are a reflection upon that feeling. The work at once embodies this feeling and is somehow about it. And in Leach-Jones’ more recent paintings, the breaking of the rules that these dots represent becomes even more evident, the freedom the artist allows himself becomes even greater: the two grey smudges at the centre of The Gardener’s Table (2001), the blue and yellow speckles to the centre-left of The Golden Bowl (2002), the brown stain high up to the left of The Plain Sense of Things#2 (2004-6).
Alun Leach-Jones, The Golden Bowl (2003)
The final “decorative” element we look at here is related to this. It is Leach-Jones’ use of shadows. Of course, shadows are employed in Leach-Jones’ work largely to build up pictorial space. If we look closely at his compositions, we can see that shadows are used both mimetically (as though they are cast by real three-dimensional objects) and according to a Cubist vocabulary (in which shadow is a “sign” that we must learn to read). Shadow is used illusionistically in the foreshortened wheel to the right of
Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #9 (1993-4) and in the diagonal of black that crosses the door to the left of Red Sky at Night – Shepherd’s Delight (2001). Shadow is used in the Cubist manner throughout the Instruments for a Solitary Navigator
kind of penumbra or halation around objects that begins to enter Leach-Jones’ work from the background of the paintings of the late 1980s, such as The Poet Listens to Nature (1988) or On the Beach at Night Alone (1988), although this can perhaps be seen to go back to the very first of Leach-Jones’ works, the Noumenons of the early 1970s, in which hundreds of tiny biomorphic shapes are each outlined by a scalloped edge, in order to give them an optical shimmer. We see examples of this second, more painterly shadow in the pale horizon line of Evening Coming in over the Fields
(2001), in the blue haze to the top right of The Country Beyond the Stars (2002) and throughout The Plain Sense of Things series (2004-6).
However, the kind of shadow we are speaking of here belongs to neither of these two logics, the realist or the Cubist. We see it perhaps in the marks scratched on the blue circle to the left of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2003), on the series of rudders or propellers to the left and right of From the Ocean of Painting (2005-6) and on the purple triangle to the left of The City on the Hill(Ten Years After) (2007). These marks neither create the illusion of three-dimensional space nor work within any existing code for signifying shadow. Instead, they are a pure addition on Leach-Jones’ part, whose very status as an afterthought (though perhaps a necessary one) is
indicated by the fact that they are drawn in with the end of the brush. Indeed, in their indexicality they remind us of something else that is usually amongst the last things to be added to a painting: the artist’s signature. And it is at these moments that the painter’s subjectivity is seen most clearly. It is a subjectivity that is expressed not through any act of wilfulness or arbitrariness, but through the act of aesthetic discrimination and judgement; not through the breaking of rules, but through the discovery of rules beyond rules.
It is exactly in what we might call this “supplementary” level of Leach-Jones’ work – the unexpected bursts of colour, the dots, the shadows – that the artist is revealed before us. It is in these meaningless or otherwise overdetermined “fillers” that we find the unity and intent of the work most explicitly figured. And it is just at these
moments that we come closest to grasping the true “feeling” of the work, the one that all of the others have to function within. It is the feeling not of happiness, sadness, comedy or tragedy – all of those “grand narratives” that are carried across from life to art – but simply of whether the work is successful or not. Each of those extra elements we have followed here is added because Leach-Jones believes his paintings would not be any good without them. But these elements – and it is perhaps this in the end that makes the work modernist – are not just real moments of aesthetic feeling but signs themselves for feeling in art. It is in these apparently incidental grace notes, these involuntary or last-minute patchings-up, that the work makes its most ambitious claims about the role of feeling in art. These easy to overlook moments are, amongst other things, allegories of feeling in art, tell us that art is a matter not merely of feeling but of reflection upon feeling. They are not only actual moments of feeling on the part of the artist, but tell us, in an impossible self-knowledge, that feeling is the proper subject of art in general.
1 Alun Leach-Jones, ‘Notes from a Journal, January 1992’, in Gwalia Deserta: Selected Works by Alun Leach-Jones,
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, 1992, p. 5.
2 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Necessity of Formalism’, in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Contemporary Esthetics, Prometheus
Books, Buffalo, 1978, p. 174.
3 Christopher Gentle, ‘Reflection and Metaphor’, in Robert Gray, Graeme Sturgeon and Christopher Gentle, Alun
Leach-Jones, Craftsman House, Roseville East, 1995, p. 41.
4 Ann Carew, ‘The Country Beyond the Stars’, in Alun Leach-Jones Everyman: The Inventor of Signs, Geelong Art
Gallery, 1995, p. 5.
5 Peter Pinson, ‘Alun Leach-Jones: Painter, Printer, Sculptor’, Australian Art Collector 37, July- Sept. 2006, p. 183. 5 ‘Notes from a Journal’, op. cit., p. 5. See also Leach-Jones’ statement: “The precision of form [in my works] vies with
