Lucy Jones (1955- )

Lucy Jones may well be the best British painter who you’ve never heard of. There is no doubt about her disability, because she was born with cerebral palsy.  But she has no intention of identifying as a disabled artist.  She is a simply an artist, and a very, very good one at that. 

I hadn’t heard of her either, until a friend of mine tipped me off about her show last year at Kings Place, London.  The next chance I went into the Gallery to see it and it blew me away, walls full of vibrant self-portraits and landscapes.  Lucy Jones is an expressionist, oozing hot Mediterranean colours that we would normally associate with someone like Matisse or Derain.  Her canvasses are full of  energy.   I was so excited that this painter was doing work of the first order, had never been part of the disability arts world, but was a leading British painter, that I tracked her down to discover more.  I met her in Newcastle, where her show transferred after London.  We had dinner with mutual friends, and then met in a tea shop in Whitley Bay to talk some more, dragging our wheelchairs and walking frames behind us.

Lucy Jones was born in 1955.     She told me about her early years, crawling around after her dad, painting the skirting boards.    While her sister went to ballet class, she went to the Byam Shaw Art School  in Notting Hill from age 7.    When she won a prize for her work, her mum was gob-smacked, she said.

Lucy went to Cheyne Walk Spastics Centre, and then to King Alfred’s, a progressive school in North London, “the only one that would have me”, she says.  There, her humiliations were about dyslexia.  Nobody could understand why she couldn’t read.  Luckily, there was a very good art department.  Even more fortunately, she got an amanuensis when she reached O levels, and suddenly she could express by dictating what she could never have written down.   Having only ever got an A for effort, now she was getting good grades and feeling like a real person.   Geography at Durham University beckoned.

But Lucy Jones chose art school, and went back to Byam Shaw for a couple of years , where she says that the best thing she was taught was colour theory.  Then she went to Camberwell School of Art, where she got a first, and to the Royal College for her MA followed by the Rome Scholarship for Painting, which took her to Italy for two years.  After that, she taught at Chelsea College of Art and the Slade.  But she never became part of the metropolitan art scene.  It was an old boys network, she told me.  It was all about going to the pub – she couldn’t get into the pub, being disabled, and partying till the early hours wasn’t for her. She pursued her work in a cold, East End warehouse studio until she was spotted and taken on by a West End gallery.

Ten years ago, she moved to Shropshire.  With her family, she had often holidayed in South Wales.  One of her earliest memories was of being sat in a rock pool on Pembroke beach and nearly drowning, only noticed by her Dad after her screams and she was saved. She would sail with her Dad in a boat, outside in all weathers, feeling in the moment.  Now, after moving away from London, she felt rebalanced, with her own garden and allotment:  “I can crawl from weed to weed pulling them out hour upon hour.  I can eat what I grow – gorge myself on fruit so good that it lies beyond the dusty expectations of London, as does the landscape, and evoke memories of the occasional taste, as a child, of the perfect strawberry.”   Lucy and I now exchange regular email updates about the progress of our gardening, our successes and failures.

Where previously her landscapes had shown Thames views, now they depict parts of the countryside around Ludlow where she now lives.  They’re vast and bright and absorbing.   She talks about  “depicting the surface memories of life, perhaps with some nostalgia, as if we see the world not as it is - but through our projections and hopes.”

She says that in order to paint, you have to inhabit the landscape and become part off it.  She gets out of the car and kneels on the ground, doing a preliminary watercolour.  Or she crawls into a field.  She’s out there to record what she feels and sees, not sketching but using paints or pastels.  She’s trying to cram a 3 dimensional experience into a 2 dimensional space.   She’s cold and wet and doing the only thing she can. 

Back in her studio, she selects something on paper, and makes a painting of it.   She told me “I have not got a natural facility.  Every single brushstroke I have to fight for.”  She creates rhythms and vibrations of colour, like Matisse or Derain.   Being in the country after London, she had to make her peace with green.  There are no figures in her landscapes, no narratives, because she doesn’t want baggage.  Just a vivid presence, a real sense of place, a heightened sensibility to movement and colour.   The critic Matthew  Collings talks of her saying “a fond yes to landscape, to the uplifting feeling of being out there in the atmosphere, loving its effects: light, wind, heat, the constant changes, the sense of timelessness.”

The canvases are huge.  She has many of them going at once.  She works on them flat on the floor of her Ludlow studio, and then props the work in progress against the wall to have a look at it.  Often, she goes back to paintings a year later and reworks them.  But she says, the responsibility of the artist is to know the right moment to stop.

I’m awed by the physical efforts and the integrity which goes into the landscapes, but it’s the self-portraits which I am particularly interested in.    Describing them, she says that: “Painting is like slowly taking bits of myself out of a box and beginning to examine them...  I use myself to find out about the funny and surprising, the awkwardness and ambivalence of looking and moving differently.  I look at the hidden parts, which cannot be seen by the outside gaze.”

Her series of self-portraits began when she went to work in Rome.  It was cheaper to paint herself than to use a model.  Now she has two full length mirrors in her studio.  But it’s not an egotistical interest. I think it’s more like research into the awkwardness of being human, a kind of reconciliation with her condition.  The portraits are very expressive,  powerfully emotional, with piercing eyes always looking straight out at the viewer.  Eyes are very important in self-portraits, she tells me. 

These days, she writes a lot as well, using software for people with dyslexia, and sometimes text creeps onto the painting, perhaps lettered backwards.  Sometimes the work is funny too.   One typical portrait is a metre and a half by more than two meters, and shows her in a striped black and red top, like Minnie the Minx, above light blue trousers.  Her head is tilted back.   Her hands are grasping her walker, the mobility device she needs to get around.    The background is a deep indigo, against which her green face draws the attention, with those powerful eyes.  It’s called “Lucy in the sky”, an example of her habit of choosing wry titles for these works.

Her images are unflinching about her physique.  A rear view shows her bottom jutting out with the distinctive posture caused by her cerebral palsy.   Her head is often angled on one side.  We see her in her bra, or naked.   She seems to be daring us to be embarrassed.  Over and over again she is trying to communicate herself, capture herself in those vivid colours.

Some self-portraits show some of the everyday paraphernalia of impairment.  A walking frame.  A walking stick.  In one painting, a stick is hovering near the bottom of the blue canvas.   Lucy, in bright red trousers, is walking down the right hand edge of the picture, eyes fixated on the stick ahead of her, and glasses falling towards the bottom.  The title? “It’s a long way to the bottom of this canvas.”  I am currently negotiating with her gallery to have this image as the cover of my new book on disability.

But what does disability mean to Lucy Jones?   It’s not much mentioned in her exhibitions or brief  biography.  She tells me about being on holiday in Penang, Thailand.  She saw a disabled man in a pen, segregated and powerless.  She had a moment of recognition, when she thought that in a different life, that would have been her.   The vision haunted her, and a year later, she went back to try and find him, without success.     She also talks about a sense of disjointedness, of being the only one like her, of not fitting in, but never talking about it.  She is wary of people taking control, of taking her over or putting her down.  She has ploughed her own furrow, and fiercely defended her own vision.  She’s been married for a while now, which has made her life richer, and I think calmer.  Her husband is an accountant.   He says he knows nothing about art, but he’s obviously quietly supportive of her work.   They seem to be true partners in a shared enterprise of life.

None of the other artists I have discussed in this series of essays would have identified as being disabled.   Most of them lived at a time when the category “disability” did not even exist.  For them, illness and impairment was just a part of life, not a key to identity.  For Lucy, it’s different.  There’s now a disability movement out there.  People are wheeling down the street, with banners and songs and pride.  This opens up new ways of being a disabled person, and it also changes the possibilities for being a disabled artist.   Back in the 1980s and 1990s, a new breed of disabled artist emerged, people who were making work about struggle or self-consciously using art to challenge oppression.  I did it myself, standing up on stage to make jokes about social workers.  The best of these disabled artists have gone beyond this agit-prop approach and are now doing great work.  But disability arts is still very much seen within the disability niche or the community arts niche.  A major institution like Tate will flirt with the radical fringe, but they won’t put the work on the walls.

I don’t think that this is what Lucy Jones is about.   Like  Toulouse-Lautrec or Paul Klee or British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, she is an artist who happens to be disabled.   She does not use art as a political strategy.  She does not even want to be categorized as a disabled artist, because it feels to her like a limitation.  Cerebral palsy and dyslexia and depression are part of her biography, but they’re not on the label for the artwork, any more than being a woman or living in Ludlow should define her or explain what she does.   “If I say they are political”, she tells me, “they will be grabbed by somebody, leaving me feeling boxed in”.  She wants her portraits to offer a universal comment on humanity.  And so they do, in the same way that Rembrandt’s did.

While respecting Lucy’s perspective, I want to claim her as a role model for what disabled people can do, just as I want to claim all the artists in this series, and many more besides who have made great creative contributions, either despite or even because of their illness or impairment.  I want to say that humanity is diverse, our experiences and physiques and mentalities are diverse, and that this is reflected in our lives, and to a certain extent in our achievements. 

Someone like Lucy Jones has struggled against the current to become a successful artist, in ways that a privileged non-disabled person who follows a traditional route to fame has never dreamt of.  We need to remove the barriers so that more people have a chance of going to art school, of being nurtured, of flourishing and expressing themselves in the mainstream.  We don’t want a niche, a separate enclave of “disability art”, but we do want to be there, represented alongside the Young British Artists or the Royal Academicians or the Tate blockbuster exhibitions.    We can do that by being non-discriminatory, by being accessible, by recognizing that talent knows no boundaries.  And we can also do that by celebrating the great artists with disabilities of the past and of the present.

Lucy Jones is a tremendously powerful painter. She is also a very honest person, who is not afraid to be vulnerable, as I found out when I talked with her over tea and cake in that Whitley Bay cafe.    It felt like we made a real connection, which has been sustained since those meetings.  Despite this vulnerability, her paintings have an enormous power and self-confidence.  It feels to me like painting enables her to rise above the struggles of having a disability in a world that is so often unwelcoming.  She operates within a hidden tradition of artists with impairments.   As they did in their own time with words, and scissors and chalks, and fabrications, so she too now masters life through paint.

Judith Scott (1943-2005)

She couldn’t hear, couldn’t speak and had Down syndrome.  She spent years in an institution, until her twin sister rescued her.  Yet today, her textile pieces are held in museums throughout the world and sell for tens of thousands of dollars.  This profoundly disabled person was at the same time a great artist, whose work has bought pleasure to many. 

Judith and Joyce Scott were twins, born into a middle class family in Cincinnati, Ohio.  As small children, the two girls were dressed alike, played together, and were encouraged to participate equally.   Joyce later wrote:

"At first we lived unaware and unafraid. In the sandbox where we played, pouring sand in each other's hair, wiggling toes in wetness, making our leaf and stick dishes and dinners, we still felt only the innocence of our soft skin and earthy explorations. But the forces pulling at us and threatening us grew as we grew. No longer wrapped in the protective web of our family's ties alone, we soon joined the neighborhood. There Judy was seen as different - and to a few ignorant and fearful souls, different meant dangerous. Our next-door neighbors refused to let her in their yard. Currents growing, doors slamming shut."

But Judith was born with Down syndrome, and after an attack of Scarlet Fever, she also lost her hearing.  When she was tested for entry to special school, her deafness meant that she did not respond to verbal questions, and so she was thought uneducable.  At age 7, her parents, acting on the medical advice of the time, sent her away to a residential institution for people with profound intellectual disability, where she would stay for the next 35 years.   Very distressed at being parted from her sister, Judith was seen as a disruptive presence on the wards.  Joyce wrote:

"The State Institution was a terrible place - worse than terrible - full of the awful sounds and smells of human suffering and abandonment. It still lives in my nightmares. That Judy is not haunted, that she has not been destroyed is a testament to the human spirit and most especially to hers. There is no doubt that institutional life has left its mark. Her habit of stealing small bits and pieces, of hoarding things, of being initially suspicious of strangers and of tending to isolate herself, these all reflect those terrible times. Her incredible ability to persevere and to sustain her focus, to hear her own inner voice, may also come from those years of crowded aloneness."

However, in 1986, her sister Joyce fought to get Judith out of the institution, and Judith lived together with Joyce and her family in California.  Later she moved into a community home, which meant that she enrolled at Creative Growth Arts Center, in Oakland.   She started in the painting class, where she showed no particular talent.    Several years later, she saw people working with textiles with a visiting fiber artist, Sylvia Seventy.  Judith Scott immediately gravitated to that medium, and created her own way of working.  

Her pieces consist of found objects, which she carefully wrapped in coloured fibre.  She would appropriate any object lying around the studios that she felt like, to act as the core of her sculptures, including once an electric fan, and at least one set of car keys. Each piece might take weeks of careful wrapping and weaving and knotting until she was satisfied.  Sometimes reminiscent of the figures of Alberto Giacometti, the results might look like strange animals or totem poles, or cocoons.  Often, they come in pairs.  As soon as she had finished one artwork, she would begin on the next one.

Judith worked as an artist for five days a week for eighteen years, and produced over 200 sculptures.  Her work is collected in public museums, such  as MOMA, New York or the American Museum of Folk Art, and private collections all over the world: she has become one of the most famous of all Outsider Artists.   As well as a critical study by John MacGregor, she was the subject of four different documentary films, in which she appears as almost regal, wearing a large hat, and firmly determined to make her work in the way she wanted, often carrying the large pile of glossy magazines, which she liked to look at.  Critic Eve Sedgewirk talks of her as "the holder of an obscure treasure".  Rachel Adams writes: "Looking at a piece by Judith Scott, our eyes are invited to function as organs of touch, sensing the texture and heft of the artifact, becoming aware of the relationship between our own bodies and the work of art."

Until the end, Judith remained very close to her sister and to her sister’s family, and it was in Joyce’s arms that she died of heart failure, aged 61.

Links

Judith Scott’s work can currently be seen in an exhibition called Bound and unbound at Brooklyn Museum until March 29 2015. 

There’s also a review of the show in the New York Times

Website 

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

“here, with a smile, comes to meet you the very simplicity of a non-dogmatic human being, and the undisguised warmth of his rebellious yet constructive life”

Kurt Schwitters, born to a prosperous middle-class family in Hanover in June 1887, was a unique and subversive individual, who contributed to Surrealism and Dada and Constructivism, who made work as a painter and sculptor and poet, and who pioneered installation art and performance art.   

Why is Kurt Schwitters relevant to a disability blog?  First, because he developed epilepsy as a child, and second, because of his deteriorating health at the end of his life.  According to the biography by Gwendolen Webster, Schwitters’ epilepsy first became evident when he was 14.  He had made a miniature landscape in the garden of his parents’ cottage complete with a hill and a pond, together with roses and strawberries, but local boys destroyed it before his eyes, at which point he had his first seizure.  His epilepsy was very distressing to him, with attacks lasting for up to five hours:

“He could generally sense the approach of a seizure, and the symptoms became obvious to ayone who knew him well.  First he would become nervous and irritable, and complain of a blinding headache.  His head, shoulder and arms would jerk uncontrollably until he collapsed.  As he lost consciousness, he would utter a series of terrible snorts, shrieks and cries, all the time hammering at the surface he lay on with clenched fists.   If he could manage to swallow a tumbler of diluted tincture of valerian before hand this would allay the symptoms to some extent.  When the seizure was over he would fall into a deep sleep for up to sixteen hours.” (Webster, 1997, 7)

The seizures became more frequent, with up to two every day.  As a result of the condition, he missed a year’s schooling, meaning that he was 21 before he finally matriculated.  Epilepsy may also have made him more shy and introverted.  He was described as having a perpetual frown, and of being immersed in a world of his own: literature, music and art became very important to him.  But this did not stop him becoming unofficially engaged to Helma Fischer, an unassuming local girl, who was working as a governess and became one of the two women who were to support him throughout his life.  As a friend was to say later,

“Helma Schwitters deserves a special monument for her unfailingly patient and dedicated attitude to her husband, who laid claim to everything around him.” (Webster, 1997, 109).

She helped him cope with his seizures, and he would try always to take her with him when he went on journeys, for example.  However, she also had difficulties, such as rheumatoid arthritis, which increasingly meant she would be unable to join him in his passion for dancing.  She was also extremely shy, which must have made the gregarious artistic circles rather difficult for her.

Epilepsy  meant that when war broke out in 1914, Schwitters was exempted from service and stayed home in Hanover.  He and Helma married in October 1915, and lived on the second floor of his parents’ house.  At this time, he was studying art in Hanover and elsewhere.  Initially, his style was rather uninteresting and conservative.   In 1916, all adult men were called up, and he was sent to the Wulfel ironworks as a technical draughtsman.  He began new abstract drawings inspired by machines.  The following year, came the tragic death of Kurt and Helma’s first son Gerd, who only lived for 8 days in an incubator.  Together with his association with the Kestner Society of artists in Hannover, this seems to have precipitated a turning point, as seen in the works “Mourning woman” and “Suffering” which he exhibited that year.  Schwitters

“began to stand back from himself and his narrow world by means of abstraction…he  began to see art not as a front behind which he could conceal himself but as a means of self-expression.” (Webster, 1997, 30). 

He began to write and recite poetry in the Expressionist style.    Particularly after he joined the Hanover Succession group of avant garde artists, unconventional behaviour became acceptable – which included his epilepsy.  Either because he had found creative fulfilment, or because he felt he was with like-minded people, after this his seizures began to diminish.  The war was a turning point in modern art:  “Everything had broken down,” said Schwitters; “new things had to be made out of fragments.”  Hence his famous collages.

Schwitters’ career as an artist in Hanover and Berlin flourished after his one man show in  Berlin’s Dr Sturm gallery in 1919.  He went on to make contributions to the Dada movement, with his collages, an approach known as Merz (from the word Commerz in an advert incorporated into the first of his collages), and with his performances and particularly Ursonate  - poems recited for their musical qualities rather than their meaning.  His work was so pioneering that critics thought he was mentally ill and mocked him.  This did not prevent him becoming influential in European and American art circles.  In the late 1920s, he also had success as a typographer.    From 1923 onwards, Schwitters was developing an elaborate installation in the family home in Hanover, which he named the Merzbau: room after room was converted into a grotto-like sculptural environment, which he originally described as a Cathedral of Erotic Misery.  It contained unlikely items such as friends’ underwear and a bottle of his urine.

At this time, Schwitters was actually rather healthy, although he was also obsessed with his health. He took his stock of medicines with him in a suitcase wherever he went, adding to them rather than discarding any, and ended up with a huge stock of remedies.    Although by now he was only having about one seizure a year, the Nazi hostility to disabled people – as shown by their eugenic policy and anti-disability propaganda – scared him, because he worried he would be confined to an asylum.   The Nazis would include him in their exhibitions of Entarte Kunst (Degenerate Art) which toured Germany from 1933.

Alongside the Entarte Kunst exhibitions, aware of growing hostility towards Jewish friends and other artists, and now hearing that the Gestapo wanted to “interview” him, Schwitters and his son left for Norway in 1937, leaving Helma behind in Hanover to look after the family property.  In Norway, he built another Merzbau in his garden, near Oslo.  Helma came several times to visit her family.  But after Schwitters left Norway for Britain in June 1940, he was never to see his wife again.

On arrival in Britain, Schwitters joined the thousands of other refugees who were interned as enemy aliens.   Aged 53, he was to endure nearly 18 months of miserable conditions in Edinburgh, York, Bury and finally the Isle of Man.  These conditions and the anxiety of internment exacerbated his epilepsy, and  his health deteriorated from now on.  However, he continued making art, painting portraits of camp staff and other inmates, and making possibly the world’s first porridge sculptures.  He became a celebrated and much loved inmate, for quirks like his habit of leaning out of a window to bark like a dog every evening before retiring to bed.   His compatriots would learn his Ursonates and for in years to come, any reunion of inmates would include recitations.

After release, Schwitters moved to London, where he struggled to survive and continue making art.  His health was not good, with symptoms of breathlessness and high blood pressure.   However, he was now part of a wider artistic community again, and he was also receiving food parcels from admirers in America – which also gave him materials for new collages (apparently he also enjoyed using Bassett’s Liquorice Allsorts wrappers).  A fantastic exhibition at Tate Britain in 2013 showed the work Schwitters made at the end of his life in Britain.   

In London he met a young neighbour, a telephonist called Edith Thomas, whom he nicknamed Wantee (because she was always offering him cups of tea) and who called him Jumbo (because he was so tall).  She was to remain his companion throughout the rest of his life.

The end of the war was to bring depressing news: not only was his beloved wife Helma dead from cancer, but also his Mertzbau installations were destroyed in Allied bombing raids.  Nor was Schwitters allowed to emigrate to America.  Instead, in summer 1945, he and Wantee moved to the Lake District, where the mountains reminded him of Norway.    Schwitters and Wantee endured a comically severe landlady, but made friends with many locals, and he painted portraits again to gain an income, and made his own work, inspired by the landscape.  However, his health was steadily worsening. He suffered two strokes, a severe haemorrhage, broke his leg, and was several times near death. 

Despite this, in March 1947, he decided to recreate the Merzbau in a local barn, financed by a grant of $1000 from MoMA in NY.   After the destruction of so much of his work, he was determined to leave something for posterity.  As colder, damper weather set in during late 1947, this work became more and more difficult.    Schwitters could by now only work for 3 hours a day.  Even so, he wouldn’t stop to allow a window and a floor to be put in to make the barn more comfortable, saying “There is so little time, there is so little time.”   

As the days became shorter, he worked on by candlelight.  In early November, he passed out and hit his head on a piece of stone on the floor, which left him with head wound and two black eyes.  He was heartened to receive the good news that he would shortly become a British citizen, finally allowing him to travel abroad again.  In December, he had trouble breathing on the way back from the Cinema in Windermere, but he still went to the barn to work.   He collapsed again, and was taken to Kendal Hospital, where he finally died on 8 January 1948.

Kurt Schwitters died in obscurity, aside from the appreciation of his friends and fellow artists.  But nevertheless, Schwitters had confidence that he was a great artist, and that he would one day be rediscovered and celebrated, as has indeed come to pass.  His Merzbarn was moved to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, and he has became one of the most influential twentieth century artists.  Naum Gabo said

“It needs a poet like Schwitters to show us that unobserved elements of beauty are strewn and spread all around us, and we can find them everywhere in the portentous as well as in the insignificant, if only we care to look… to me, his collages are a constant source of joy.” (Webser, 1997, 395)

Kurt Schwitters’ own final message was this:

“If you people of the future really want to do me a special favour, then try to appreciate the most important artists of your time. It’s more important for you and more pleasurable to me than if you discover me at a time when I have long been discovered.” (Webster, 1997, 401)

Further reading

Webster Gwendolen.  Kurt Merz Schwitters: a biographical study.  University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1997.