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Dreaming at the surface
Some thoughts upon the paintings of Janey Sharratt
Janey Sharratt is a painter. She loves canvas and she loves paint and, once she has gathered her feelings around a particular moment that inspired her to dream, she directs the paint to play upon the canvas. Her paintings are a celebration of the journey she undertakes with a paintbrush in her hand: in the delight she experiences when considering placement and making connections, in the ecstasy that colour and texture promote, in the surprises that occur when she is scratching or scoring the surface. Often she removes the paint or repeatedly adds new layers, because on this journey she is always vacillating between making the subject clear and obscuring it.
The subtle gradation of tones that Janey uses to obscure the sharp edges and create a synergy between light and shadow has been a preoccupation in painting since Leonardo da Vinci invented it. This technique leaves as much as possible to the imagination, offering a tantalizing suggestion rather than a precise image. This is Janey’s territory and she couples this ‘Smokey Technique’ with the production of indistinct paint marks and with scoring into the surface to reveal the quarry beneath. She is not an abstract artist, but she does abstract reality. Readability continually floats in and out of view, alternating with the concerns of pure abstraction, but we are never in doubt about her literal content. The bottles and glasses may hover in space, having no table to sit on, but they are bottles and glasses nevertheless. She uses the ordinary material of the world, vessels and containers, to inspire imagination, presenting the physical world, but dreaming about rising above it or melting within it. The metaphysical painters were engaged in a similar quest to give objects a defining presence.
When Janey uses landscape as her subject, she perceives a field or a river scene in a very simple manner - its organisation around the horizon line, dividing sky from land or water, being treated as an obvious fact - but everything else in these paintings is indistinct, the edges blurred or fragmented by an inexact conjunction of two colours. There is such excitement in the surface that here is where we stay, exploring the paint, but believing in the rocks, the trees and the reflections. With her paint, Janey can make a river look deep; she can hint that a mist is settling on hill in the distance. We can make out the shape of leaves and differentiate between those sections of landscape that are earth and those that are solid rock. There is magical intentionality here, for Janey revels in accidents and she accepts mistakes as something that cause marvellous opportunities to occur.
"The world is strewn with unrelated things, immobile and inert solids; objects foreign to our nature. The soul suffers from a deficiency of material imagination." (1) This quote from Gaston Bachelard, who was keen to explore the phenomenology of the poetic imagination, could well help us to place ourselves in relation to Janey Sharratt’s world, for I suspect that she is entirely motivated by the creation of individual, separate objects that are capable of being joined to the heart of things. She delights in this state of fusion, between object 'otherness' and our shared sense of meaning; for it is in this place that paint creates ideas that are interchangeable and where poetic identifications flow.
In "The Soul of the Bridge", Peter Bishop states that "anything can be a vessel for soul, whether it be a part of the world out there such as a chair or a tree, or part of the world inside such as an idea or a fantasy. Matter is not just a convenient filling for supposedly harmonious, but empty forms. Similarly, places are not just geographical locations. Like matter, they are vessels for soul. Both places and matter are filled with imaginative resonances and a lack of beauty occurs when the materiality of a thing is ignored. There is then a kind of imaginal hollowness and insubstantiality. It seems crucial to listen to the things of the world as they tell their stories." (2)
Janey Sharratt tells stories and if we take up her invitation to dream at the surface of her paintings then we can have a sense of them. The invitation doesn’t stop just because she has finished painting them, for the surfaces continue to dream for any spectator who has a mind to travel in their imagination across her surfaces. They’re the kind of paintings that grow on you and become the friend you journey with.
Peter Stickland November 2009
1. Gaston Bachelard; Water and Dreams, an essay by Gaston Bachelard;
Published by Dallas Inst. Humanities & Culture; 1994 ISBN: 0911005250
2. Peter Bishop; The Soul of the Bridge. (from Sphinx 1. A Journal for Archetypal
Psychology and the Arts.) London, 1988.