I knew an amazing lady, now sadly deceased, who was celebrated as a doyenne of the British film industry. That lady was Renée Glynne, and a firebrand of a personality she was, right into her nineties.
Renée's professional credits include production and continuity supervision on such iconic British films as BRIEF ENCOUNTER, LITTLE LORD FAUNTLEROY and CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA, stretching into a long association with Hammer Horror Films, and British TV including Doctor Who, The New Avengers and The Saint. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jun/03/renee-glynne-obituary
On top of Renée's illustrious background in film, she was also a painter; she and I used to exhibit together. Renée was a coruscatingly larger-than-life character, a fountain of stories and anecdotes - many of them scandalous, and all highly entertaining. Her paintings and drawings were, unsurprisingly, individual and often provocative.
In the environment in which Renée and I were exhibiting, the display of nude paintings had to be approached with some caution. Alongside her louche and characterful depictions of London bar-life however, Renée was never shy about hanging her nudes, many of these being of male subjects.
Much missed, Renée typified the kind of artist who approaches the human body (and indeed life) with relish and honesty, eschewing judgement and avoiding glamourisation. Other artists with a similar outlook on the body are include Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville.
Francis Bacon went one step, or perhaps several, further. Bacon saw beauty in the grotesque, the violent and the horrific. I have recently re-watched the marvellous film about Bacon's life with George Dyer, LOVE IS THE DEVIL, featuring stellar performances from Derek Jacobi and Daniel Craig among others. The photography in the film is as brilliant as the acting, unerringly evoking through distorting lens-work the alcoholically-fuelled existential whirlpool of Bacon's life and vision. Whether we align with Bacon's vision or not – or even like his art - it is impossible to deny the visceral ferocity of this iconic painter's output. Bacon has commented “The very act of being born is a ferocious thing”.
I find the human body magnificent. Though I am not a figurative painter, I take enormous inspiration and energy from the flowing lines, planes and curves of the human body; all of these fundamentally infuse my abstract work. Influenced by Rodin's delicate and sensual erotic drawings I was, during an earlier part of my career, known for rapid, fleeting nude line drawings that I produced and sold while simultaneously developing my abstract style.
Is the human body monstrous, or is it magnificent? Surely, in its messy secretions as well as its divine secrets, in its blunt functionality as much as its sumptuous splendour, it is both, and more. No wonder that the human form has engrossed artists for as long as marks have been made by an implement on a surface.
In her recent book, ART MONSTERS: UNRULY BODIES IN FEMINIST ART (Vintage Publishing) Lauren Elkin discusses the depiction of the female body – often by female artists - in all its diverse glory. The book, which I have yet to read, was brought to my attention by a friend in the form of a review in THE GUARDIAN, and it was the title that piqued my interest. Unruly sounds a fantastic – if socially unachievable - way for a body to be!
At the head of today's piece I mentioned my old friend Renée Glynne. One day in 2015, while we were exhibiting together, Renée brought up the name of the South African artist Marlene Dumas (b 1953). Marlene and Renée, it turned out, were close friends, and Renée told me of the former's upcoming exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, THE IMAGE AS BURDEN.
Fascinated by Renée's descriptions of Marlene's paintings, I made a visit to the exhibition a priority; This exhibition ranks among the most unforgettable that I have attended. https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/marlene-dumas-image-burden
The images below are pages from the book that accompanied the exhibition.
One the one hand Marlene Dumas presents the naked body with objective sincerity. On the other, she discovers the erotic in unexpected places. Dumas, on top of sex, offers death, ugliness, and trauma to the artistic table. She is an artist of unpretentious and searing vision.
She finds magnificence in monstrosity.
The second part of today's title refers to the use of photographic reference by painters. Marlene Dumas, it is said, never works from life, but uses photographic images – often well-known ones – as springboards for her representations of faces and bodies. As a keen photographer myself, I too have employed this approach and find it a fascinating one, for the camera sees differently from the eye. The photographic image that one has seized as a 'moment' becomes a prism through which a drawing is subsequently refracted. Indeed, I used to title my early nude drawings 'Moments'.
Moreover, I have love the way in which Marlene Dumas brings a quasi-photographic technique even into her painting, often cropping-in close on a subject. In this way, a heightened awareness of inspection on the part of the viewer, and challenging confrontation on the part of the subject, are encouraged.
Francis Bacon too, was known to paint from photos, indeed his preoccupation with diverse reference material in the form of other artists' paintings, together with film and photography, is well-documented. In a typically Baconesque downplaying of the approach, he declared “It's easier for me to work from these records than from the people themselves – that way I can work alone and feel much freer.”
To be free, magnificent, and at times monstrous – this seems to me to be a fine artistic aspiration in itself!
BODIES: MONSTROUS OR MAGNIFICENT, AND THE USE OF PHOTOS AS PAINTING REFERENCE - Copyright Haydn Dickenson 2024
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