Joy Wolfenden Brown
22 October to 17 November
Catalogue Essay
Interpreting and analysing the work of some
painters can feel akin to catching butterflies in a net - pinning down something
that is, in essence, only viable when it is free and in flight. Joy Wolfenden
Brown is just such a painter. She works mainly in oils, with a gusto that defies
the seeming fragility of the subject matter, and denies that there is any
forethought or compositional planning to her pictures preferring instead to make
a start and enjoy what develops. Perhaps then it is this lack of cognitive
parentage that gives her figures (almost exclusively female) their wayward,
orphan charm.
I first saw her work in an exhibition in Cornwall
titled 'Letting Go', a theme that drew upon the idea of tentative first steps
and growing self-confidence. Two years later, in this exhibition at Beaux Arts,
while the independent spirit is still here (perhaps even gutsier as in the
depiction of the lone oarswoman or the vigorous archer who, almost out of the
picture frame, extends her energies into the bow and its potential) the
crosscurrent of themes that runs through the work pervades a wider emotional
landscape. Sometimes the figures are alone, preoccupied or pensive, at other
times they stare out of the picture frame, almost childlike with eyes naively
wide, into a middle distance that may or may not provide the approbation they
seem to seek. In 'The Sea Green
Dress' a girl sits, perhaps on the periphery of a party like the proverbial
wallflower, with arms folded in her lap. She wears the dress. Will it be a
success? Caught in paralysing
uncertainty, she waits to find out. Sometimes there is companionship – the two
figures who lean in towards each other sharing their thoughts in 'Threshold'
appear to be on the brink of something but whether it is a physical boundary or
a some pivotal moment in their relationship is for us to decide. There is little
ambiguity in the two who embrace on a bench or the wonderful, subtly humorous,
trio of naked forms emerging from the sea with arms interlinked, but what then
are we to make of that supreme exemplar of manipulation – the 'Puppeteers'?
Quite who in this implicit adult/child paradigm is pulling the strings and who
is dancing the tune?
The superficially anecdotal nature of these
paintings – tiny slices or verisimilitude selected from the myriad of moments
that comprise daily life – belie a deeper, more enigmatic quality. Joy
Wolfenden Brown's background is in Art Therapy (she worked for some time with
disturbed teenagers in a mental health unit) and one senses that to bring this
degree of emotional veracity to her work she has drawn at a deep well. It is not
just that she is able to elucidate the undertow of feeling in a situation but
that the figures themselves grow out of this current and thus come to personify
it.
However we read these paintings, or indeed if we
just enjoy them for their pure painterly exuberance, it is hard not to sense a
resonance in our own emotional hinterland. Just as the butterfly's wing-beat
marks a fleeting moment of time so these, with a similar lightness of touch,
capture fragments of experience and reveal them as hauntingly familiar.
Pip Palmer, 2007