I remember thinking, “That’s really powerful,” because everyone was looking and then you couldn’t see. I wanted to get round and see again. That’s very much the kind of animal/human – wanting to see something but being worried at the same time or repulsed. I remember the scene so vividly. I was obviously tuned-in to that way of thinking even then because I knew that it was important, visually important to me, and I understood the mechanics of it and I must only have been four or five.’
I remember slamming my fingers in a car door when I was very young and my dad – in the way dads do – bought me a Crunchie chocolate bar to make it better. So now, every time I see a Crunchie I have that memory and a slight twinge, a feeling of pins and needles. I remember looking down at the dent in my fingers, squished right down … that moment before the pain hits. You get a split second of perfect clarity.
‘Yes, exactly, and I think that sometimes I paint with that in mind. That moment.’
• • • • •
Normally, of course, these are just the sort of conversations that might make you change seats, carriages or trains if it came unbidden from the lady next to you – unless she’d introduced herself as a surgeon or a butcher, say, and you’d kicked off with ‘So … evisceration and the films of Nicolas Roeg, eh?’
Yet I’m fascinated in Jenny’s company and engaged to an extent where any weirdness, macabre connotations or squeamishness could not be further from my mind.
The incredible intensity of the few hours I spend with her will remain with me and, looking back, there was a saturation about that morning – the colours and the images, the source texts and the photographs … yet, at the heart of it all was this quiet, contained lady in painty tracksuit bottoms, hair held back by an elastic band … ‘But she was so bloody normal,’ I’ll later recall, then, almost in the same breath, ‘She was one of the most brilliant, uncanny people I’ve met.’*
We break for tea and I ask about Jenny’s childhood, how she came to be here, when she discovered who and what she wanted to be, her formative years.
Did you spend a lot of time in your bedroom?
‘I would say so, yeah. I lived in lots of different houses and went to lots of different schools and so art became something that was a constant for me. I just always remember making paintings or building things and I read a lot about other artists. I visited Cézanne’s house when I was sixteen because I had an obsession with Cézanne and I knew pretty early on what it took to be an artist – reading about the life of Van Gogh when I was about twelve, things like that. My uncle was an art historian and he ran courses in Venice and Florence so I’d spend summers there and would join in all the art history courses. In the Frari in Venice, there’s an enormous Titian altarpiece of the assumption of the Virgin and I can remember sitting in front of that and saying, “One day I’m going to make paintings as big as that.” It wasn’t a joke. I was absolutely serious. I didn’t really know who Titian was but I learnt about him and Tintoretto and eventually I owned it through that knowledge. I knew that was going to be my life. I didn’t even consider that that wasn’t a thing that women had done. It wasn’t even on my radar. It was absolutely my life – there was my life: I was going to be in dialogue with these people who had done this stuff. I think the naivety of my desire helped me. That’s just what I did and my mother was a teacher – she was my teacher actually, when I was very little – so the classroom, when all the kids left, was mine; so she’d be doing whatever she did and I’d just be making things or drawing and that continued. It was my language from a very early age.’*
Your vocabulary to communicate with the world.
‘Absolutely. I mean, I admire writers greatly. I don’t find the precision in words that I do in paint. I find paint’s the way I can hold all the contradictions of life. I can’t begin to use words that way.’
Interesting then that a lot of your catalogue essays are very cerebral and penetrating in that way – John Gray, for example, one of the most acute and steely writers I know.
‘I love his writing. Straw Dogs in one of the best books written in the last twenty years because it’s incredibly precise; to be able to go through that amount of information … the relationship that he’s got with humans as animals is something that I’ve had in my work, that I’ve felt, since I was much younger. I give it to everybody, that book.*
‘I’m interested in fictional, constructed ideas of the self – ‘If I had this procedure, I’d be more myself’ – that’s just a myth, a mythical thing. You have this fictional idea of what you want to look like or could look like, need to look like, to be more wholly you. It’s an artificial construct and I found that very interesting when talking to patients in New York; they felt that they were inhabiting their body more by having this artifice … and that’s not a modern phenomenon but the idea that you can re-sculpt your flesh, I thought that thrilling.
I wasn’t making a moral judgement with the work, which a lot of people thought I was; I was fascinated with the need to do it and what the mechanisms of that were because I’ve often been interested in the space between things. I’d say the biggest thread that runs through my work is “the in-between”.
If it’s a transvestite or a transsexual, you’re in-between – a floating gender. You aren’t fixed – and that movable boundary I found an interesting place to operate. A free space.’
That’s the word, I suppose, operation. A surgical gaze.
‘Yes, I would say so, and I’ve painted quite a few things where you’re not quite sure whether the body is alive or dead. I’ve often tried to find images that have that – one eye left open or a face that’s completely mauled. When I paint it, I want it so you have to work to piece the head back together again, so you’ve got a moment of crisis, as a viewer.’
There are very few things more arresting or off-putting than to have your gaze met by something ‘other’ – familiar yet alien.
‘I suppose so, but by the time I’ve done them I’m so involved with them that I don’t see them with fresh eyes because I’ve done the journey … I think I’ve developed the withdrawal of personality, the opposite of what portraits have been aiming to do for centuries. I try to show the personality of whatever trauma or alteration is of the body.’
The crash site. The aftermath.
‘That’s it, I’m not trying to show the personality of the human being in the way of “the eyes being the gateway to the soul” – it’s not that.’
But I think you can have both together. I remember John Hurt talking about how he cried reading the script of The Elephant Man because of that feeling, the glint and purchase of recognition – the body, the man behind the trauma.
‘That’s the thing: when you get people that work well – even an artist like Velázquez, his Pope painting in Rome, he doesn’t illustrate. Velázquez isn’t like Caravaggio. Caravaggio, however great he is, for me, he’s a bit of an illustrator. Velázquez doesn’t illustrate. He builds in paint. He’s in that moment where it’s more real than real because he uses paint so well, and people like David Lynch do the same thing, I think. Something like The Elephant Man, it’s not you but it’s the hyperbolic you, but he has enough realism in it that it brings it to you; so it’s in you and out of you at the same time, and that’s quite thrilling because it unlocks sensations that you know you’ve got but don’t often have the facility in life to think about or experience.’
• • • • •
Jenny leads the way into the larger room beyond, pushing through the plastic sheets,* revealing a space dominated by multiple versions of the painting Stare.