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JOSEPHINE REA
THE BRILLIANT YOUNG ENGLISH PORTRAIT ARTIST
WHO FEATURED AT THE RECENT inBOND SAATCHI EVENT
SHARES WITH US THE JOURNEY AND THE CHALLENGE
OF A MODERN CLASSICIST
Figurative painting has been practically invisible since the millennium. It could well have been on the
verge of extinction, but in England this most personal and intimate of the arts has a champion. Josephine
Rea writes for BOND about some of the struggle, some of the work and some of the inspiration that may
yet awaken the mystical force of classical painting.
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection
Michelangelo
“It is often the story of an artist that they grow up ‘surrounded by creativity’. I was born into it, quite
literally. The day I announced my arrival into the world, my mother, an artist herself, was stripping floorboards in the house she was restoring. The hospital said that I might be a while yet, so she hurried back
to finish the job. My father, a musician as well as an artist, just had time for a swift ‘hello’ before he was
wrenched away to start a tour. Together, they steeped their children in a heady and highly combustible
concoction of all the arts that the world had to offer, and smiling, handed us the match.
“Beauty was everywhere, heightening my aesthetic awareness at every turn. As all children of music and
art will tell you, it can be a fairly nomadic life. Across continents we saw cities and cultures that made
our eyes water with the strange and the wonderful. Then there were galleries that my mother excitedly
introduced us to. She taught us how to draw quite early on, the results, of course, being quite amusing
at first, but through her own work I began to see how evocative the representation of nature could be
through art. The artist’s ability to mirror and interpret life is one that even adults still behold with an
innocent wonder. As a child, though, watching my mother capture the world with her hands was pure
magic, a type of magic that I dreamt of being able to recreate. My father always says that creativity is
a condition rather than a talent, and I would have to agree that it is a compulsion rather than a choice.
In my case at least, the die was already cast.
“When I was 18, I was accepted into Chelsea College of Art, and began its fine art foundation course.
I realized very quickly, though, that its version of fine art was not what I had in mind. While at secondary
school I was set the task of choosing a painting from the National Gallery in London to copy. I came
across a small painting of The Virgin in Prayer by Sassoferrato, and was mesmerized. She seemed to
literally glow, to pulse with life, yet somehow surpassed and transcended mundane mortality. Bewildered
I ploughed on, trying to mimic such mastery, with one thought in mind. This was what I wanted to learn
to do. To skirt the line between realism and the ethereal, a hybrid of naturalism and idealism.
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Josephine Rea, 2011
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Josephine Rea, 2011
“While figurative art was not exactly dead in the modern art
world, I found in pre-21st century paintings a mystique that still
seems to be lost in the development of new media and techniques. With artists like Da Vinci, Caravaggio, and through the
ages to Van Dyck, Singer Sargent and the Pre-Raphaelites,
it is fascinating to see the human form rendered so beautifully
and so instinctively that it still has the emotive power to move
people today. There is a quality to these artists’ works that
draws people in droves to see them, and I found it sad
that the techniques they pioneered and used so effectively were
being abandoned. I began to spend a lot of time wandering
around the National Portrait Gallery, imagining how these great
artists would have painted people today. The combination of
the traditional and the contemporary is one that I think is
becoming more widespread, and I saw no reason why the old
methods could not be used to portray the modern world;
it could create an intriguing visual and cerebral juxtaposition.
“So I embarked on a mission to educate myself. I set off across
Europe, was seduced by Rodin in Paris, bore witness to the
eclectic wonder that is the Hermitage in St Petersburg, was lost
for words in front of Alphonse Mucha’s The Slav Epic in a tiny
town in Bohemia, and stood humbled and awed before all of
Rome. Eventually, I stumbled into the Charles H. Cecil Studios
in Florence.
“Nestled under the medieval Porta San Frediano, the studio
occupies the Chiesa di San Raffaello Arcangelo, converted into
a studio by Lorenzo Bartolini in the early 19th century. For a
frustrated classicist, it was as if someone had opened the door
to the past and lit the way to a future.
“Here, they specialize in a naturalistic training; drawing, painting and sculpting directly from life. The main technique they
teach is ‘sight size’, placing the canvas next to the subject, and
standing back so that both are seen to be proportionally the
same. The technique comes from the 17th century, was used
by painters like Joshua Reynolds and John Singer Sargent, and
was taught in the 19th-century ateliers of Paris. Ateliers like
these provide the mould for this modern-day school. The initial
training is thorough, painstaking, and demands a rigorous
discipline not usually associated with fine art these days.
To send light into the darkness of men’s
hearts – such is the duty of the artist
Schumann
“You spend much of your first year drawing in charcoal from
plaster casts, in order to learn the sight-size method without
the interference of a living, breathing and, most of all,
a moving model. You progress to charcoals of nudes, and to
portraits, with anatomy and art history being taught throughout. And finally, on to paint! The day I was allowed to begin
my first portrait in oil remains vivid and terrifying in my memory.
The alchemy of pigment variations, mixing media from tree
saps and sun-thickened linseed oil, the canvas and brush
varieties – they all overwhelm your senses, and that is before
you make even the first stroke upon the canvas.
“The training does not stop there, for the philosophy is not just
to render an exact likeness, but to take reality and to subtly
enhance it, to bend it to your will. To use focus and impression,
softening here, sharpening there, to direct the viewer’s eye
around the form, all to create a painting that captures more
than a simple reproduction of form.
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“I left Florence with tired eyes and a full mind. Bursting with ideas but
also bound with anxiety. After so many months of hours learning a
craft, I now had to decide how to use it. I took a studio on the Talgarth
Road in London; anyone who has driven into the West End from
Heathrow airport will have seen the tall windows of St Paul’s Studios.
Designed expressly for artists at the height of the Arts and Crafts
movement in 1890, the redbrick and Portland stone facades echo the
movement’s mantra of ‘beauty for beauty’s sake.’ Igniting the imagination of everyone who sees them, it is easy to imagine previous
inhabitants Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris holding the
meetings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood within these walls. Here,
under the clear north light of the huge barrel-glass studio windows,
I am – with like-minded artists – making a return to the principles on
which these proud landmarks were built.
“The art of the portrait, commissioned or not, while on the rise again,
is one that has yet to regain its former glory. I would love to see that
happen. For me, there is nothing in art quite so poignant as one human
using their own hands to translate for the world what they see in
another. Although the development of photography means that our
faces, personalities, and our memories are much more easily captured
than in the past, there is something magical about what a painting or
a sculpture depicts. As well as attire and expression, every detail
of composition, every brushstroke and glaze of colour is carefully
chosen and examined to illustrate the sitter. Not just who they are, but
who they have been, and who it is they yet hope to become.
“The battle to capture an emotion or a particular mood is a difficult
but constantly rewarding one. The human face is probably the most
intricately beautiful of all living things. Each one has 98 muscles, and
whether we want them to or not, they convey our every subtle thought
and feeling. To portray a face is to capture the essence of the human
condition. A simple portrait can transcend the mere illustration of a likeness for posterity’s sake, and can become a work of art in its own right.
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“The world’s most recognizable portrait, the Mona Lisa, is a good example. In terms
of composition it is quite basic and in size it is surprisingly small. Yet the remarkable
paint handling draws your eye to the sitter’s gaze and ever-elusive smile, and
centuries after it was painted it is still one of humanity’s best-loved images. As
a species, we love to observe one another. With a portrait we are free to gaze at a
person endlessly, unrestrained by conventions of politeness. We are free to wonder,
what does that look mean? What were they feeling? To identify and to empathize.
Kwena Chokoe
“One of the joys of figurative art in general is that it is a language recognized and
understood universally, and there is no more familiar image to us than our own
reflection. There is so much to be done with the grammar of our likeness. In more
imaginative works, I aim not only to capture a specific person, or to encapsulate
‘life today’, but also to show how life could be. I have always admired artists like
John William Waterhouse or Alphonse Mucha for seeking to make the world better,
simply by creating a better world through their art.
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult
when you do
Edgar Degas
I believe, like many artists, that the joy is to be found in appreciation as well as
creation, and to me there is nothing more wonderful than the idea that someone
might feel better just by looking at a piece of art. That might happen when they see
a picture and identify with a sadness within it, and in doing so feel less alone. It can
also happen when they see something that is simply beautiful. Casting our eyes back
to the late 19th century and the Cult of Beauty, with the Pre-Raphaelites illuminating
fantastical worlds for their public, and Whistler championing the idea of ‘Art for Art’s
Sake’, we see a form of aestheticism that is neither empty nor shallow. Everybody has
imagination and excitement – that is the goal of the artist, and perhaps it is never
more vital than in the dark days we are facing now.
“In these times, there seems to be an overwhelming tendency for the artist to forego
the creation of beauty out of a perceived sociopolitical duty to slavishly render the
beast. More, the beautiful is dismissed as archaic. I believe that there is a place for
the classical amongst the contemporary. That both can merge to form a union
capable of exciting our pleasures whilst also mirroring our darkest fears. To show us
who we are, in all our imperfect glory, whilst celebrating the feats of creation of which
we are capable. One only has to look to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment to see that
this is possible, and hope that rather than shrug our shoulders and relegate such
magnificence to the pages of art history we can once again harness the power that
he wielded with only his brush and his mind”
.
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Luca Guarini