Ann Johnson

 She has had work included in the 2010 and 2011 Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibitions. Ann and I are friends, Friends and also collaborators: we have made a number of poemcards (my poems, Ann’s images) and she included some of my poetry, along with poems by the late Pam Hughes, in her 2009 solo exhibition ‘Gathering’,  at the HOP Gallery, Lewes. Cinnamon Press will be using an image of Ann’s as the cover of a forthcoming book of poems co-written by both Meredith Andrea and myself (due to be published in 2013).

I invited Ann to have a ‘blog-chat’ with me about her painting, her art-making, her approaches. Along the way, you will be able to see some of her beautiful, imaginative and colour-drenched work.

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Ann, in a recent interview (Cultural Quarterly, Spring 2011) you called yourself a ‘working painter’ rather than a ‘professional artist’. I’d be interested to know more about why you make this distinction.

There are so many ways to be an artist but these days I pretty much stick to painting, so calling myself a ‘painter’ seems practical. As for ‘working’ rather than ‘professional’, this arose recently when a journalist from an arts magazine asked me if I was a ‘professional’ painter which struck me as an odd question.

There still seems to be importance attached to the handle ‘professional’ in art. Is it the same for poets? Contrast this, for example, with astronomy where ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’ work side by side and recognize that each has a valuable contribution to make in observing and discovering our universe.

I know what you mean. I like to remember that etymologically, ‘amateur’ means ‘lover of”. Doing what we do primarily for love seems like a meaningful and affirmative approach, suggesting the reach for something beyond ourselves.

‘Professional’ also implies earning one’s living exclusively from something and having a formal educational grounding. However, until a couple of years ago I had a day-job as a journalist. I moaned no end about what I perceived as a conflict but gradually came to appreciate how journalism provided me with a regular income, leaving me free to paint what, how and when I liked. I now value my years as a journalist, the horizons it opened up, and the skills I gained which continue to be useful in painting. I’ve enjoyed taking part in painting courses and workshops all my life. The learning – or should I say unlearning – continues.

Like many others, I lead a ‘patchwork’ life, switching between various commitments. It’s an on-going challenge to achieve balance and make real, substantial time for painting and drawing.

I have found that not having to rely on selling paintings has freed me up to take risks, maybe producing things people are not necessarily going to expect or be able to immediately relate to. However, I do sell through galleries and value that aspect. I show and share my work in a range of other ways. My paintings have been used to illustrate poetry in magazines, such as Resurgence, and lately books of poetry – including your own forthcoming collaboration with Meredith Andrea.

Yes – very pleased about that.

I value the way that you and I, Fiona, have explored ways to link our work, such as through the poemcards – and also through this blog interview!

I agree, Ann. There is something very inspiring about working across different art genres. I think it has something to do with relationship -? I do feel that there’s a symbiotic dynamic created from, in our case, poems in relationship to images/paintings. The paintings and poems each are their own thing and yet, set together, they ‘speak’ to each other in fresh ways.

You mention being freed up to take risks with your work. I have always seen a freedom in your painting, but do you feel you are taking new or different risks more recently? How is this manifesting in your painting – is it to do with technique, subject matter or something different?

It’s to do with a range of things including the ones you mention – technique, subject matter – but also ways of seeing and thinking. I sometimes attend courses run by the painter Emily Ball at the Seawhite Studios in West Sussex: http://www.emilyballatseawhite.co.uk/

 Have a look at her blog – there’s some wild stuff!

We often repeat the way we do things without realising – and the same goes for painting. For example, it’s common to paint lines and marks in the same way all the time, to use tried and trusted colours, to place things carefully on a canvas in the same position. Emily’s classes help overturn these habits. Once you leave your comfort zone and and move into uncharted territory it can get very exciting. Emily and her co-tutor Katie Sollohub get us to do things like paint the sensations of hot or cool, to paint with our ‘other’ hand, to draw with our eyes closed – all that sort of thing. One week we even dressed up as characters from the Velázquez painting Las Meninas! All this is really liberating. It wouldn’t suit everyone, but my way of working is in being prepared to produce things that may look, frankly, horrible. I am slowly learning not to throw things away or paint over them when this happens.

By exploring the possibilities of new visual landscapes, new ways of expression, there’s the potential to end up creating things you could never have imagined doing. Just think – all that unmined creativity just lying beneath the surface! Working in a group like this teaches humility. We have to be prepared to make fools of ourselves in front of others, to trip up and fall over and look as though we haven’t a clue …

Yes, this is very true of all learning.

Working this way helps keep my work alive and fresh. It’s not that I want to drastically change how I paint – just to shift and see from a new angle. When I try new systems and approaches, I then apply what I have learned to my on-going work. However, there is a definite visual language threading through all my work over the years.

Here are two landscape paintings. The one I call Dartmoor Sheep was painted from several different photographs about ten years ago, I think. It’s traditional in the sense the sky is above the land and the sheep are firmly rooted on the ground. The second work called Ascending City was painted a few weeks ago and is about number six in a series of paintings derived from a 300 year-old painting of Krishna and his consort Radha (painter unknown). There is no break between sky and ground and the space contains far greater use of instinctive, spontaneous mark-making, rather than painting what is ‘real’. This is almost straight from my imagination and some drawings of cranes that I did from the train. Halfway through, I saw a photo on the web of building work in Mumbai – skyscrapers rising beyond traditional buildings and trees – which gave me idea for completing the work. The task with a rather random painting like this is to combine instinct and spontaneity with thought in order to organise, edit out then replace marks so they make some kind of sense to the subject. But both types of paintings require certain fundamental elements in colour, shape and composition to achieve contrast, rhythm and cohesion.

'Dartmoor Sheep' by Ann Johnson

'Ascending City' by Ann Johnson

Ascending City, by the way, is a good example of something I really didn’t like when I first painted it. I thought: ‘Where on earth did this one come from?’ But I put it to one side then reviewed later and now it has really grown on me.

It is very rewarding when that happens – when we get surprised by our own work and something reveals itself unexpectedly. I have often found some of my poems ‘ahead’ of me, as it were, so that even years later I feel they have something for me, maybe a little learning or a small new way of seeing things, if you see what I mean? I also wonder: how did I do that? It is as if, though born out of the matrix of my own life, they become separate from me, too, going on to have a life of their own, hopefully in the lives of others. Of course, Rothko spoke eloquently about this kind of thing – the need for a ‘consummated experience’ between the art work and the viewer. He talked about pictures ‘living’ by ‘companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer’ (in Harrison and Wood, 1992, p.565). He said: ‘If I must place my trust somewhere, I would invest it in the psyche of sensitive observers who are free of the conventions of understanding. […] For if there is both need and spirit, there is bound to be a real transaction’ (Mark Rothko, 1987, p.58). I have always found that powerful. It chimes with the Zen idea and practice of ‘Beginner’s Mind’ which cultivates a quality of approach which eschews pre-judgements and self-projections and engages with an artwork (or anything!) with an open, present-tense mind.

But to return to you, Ann what kind of artist are you in terms of favoured genre, would you say – landscape, still life, portrait? And do you find yourself attracted to any particular kind of subject matter?

I paint what is around me and what I’ve been up to: the landscape, garden, animals, wobbly bits of pottery, a train journey to St Ives… Through charcoal and paint I try to shift these subjects from ‘reality’ into more imagined presences. My pictures are essentially about marks, colour, gaps, edges, contrast and punctuation with, hopefully, a few surprises and acceptable ‘flaws’. The aim is to achieve something that fuses and communicates in a way that words can’t. Footpath, based on the South downs where I live and walk, is an example of using memory – and trusting in imagination.

'Footpath' by Ann Johnson

Lately I have been importing into paintings motifs, symbols and structures from other cultures and histories – things that touch me in ways I can’t always explain. These are things we recognize when creations, objects, sounds reach our underlying senses buried by the routines of daily life. The other day I came across exquisitely drawn Chinese recordings of comets dating from 1600-1046 BC. They were observed with the naked eye then committed to paper in wondrous shapes and forms – quite unlike how people would depict comets today:

http://hua.umf.maine.edu/China/astronomy/tianpage/0009H_comets6563w.html

And I was enchanted and inspired by the animal and plant forms depicted on those remarkable objects at the recent Afghanistan exhibition at the British Museum. I have always had an empathy with art from past histories and, particularly, non-academic sources, such as Australian aboriginal painting, Cycladic idols, prehistoric cave paintings and what is commonly known as ‘outsider’ or ‘naïve’ art. These frequently non-western creations offer us deceptively simple truths translated in a way counter to the traditional perceptions of ‘reality’ once advocated by the Western academies which lingers on today.

I used to be suspicious of the way I paint intuitively but now I am learning to trust this. We can have fun with what we learn – lay on thick gooey paint, scrape it off, slap it on again, make blobs and splodges, rub it all out again – and see what comes up. If something interesting happens, then let it remain and never mind if it makes no immediate ‘sense’. Woodland is a good example of going with intuition. It was the end of the day and I wanted to use up the paint on my palette, so quickly sploshed over an old painting and, in about 15 minutes, this one appeared. Several little patches of the old painting remain.

'Woodland' by Ann Johnson

On the whole, I don’t set out to make paintings that urge people to think or react. I paint for me, and when others connect to the pictures, the fact we can share it is a real bonus.

Yes, absolutely. Your paintings are very easy to connect with, I have found!

I guess we should touch briefly on two things that further connect us – our concern about animals and our Quakerism -?

It is easy for animals to slip onto the ‘not acceptable’ list – rats, gulls, crows, strays – and now badgers have been demonised. I live alongside cats and gulls and painted Feral and Young Gull because both can have a hard time at the hands of humans. I was so glad that Feral and Young Gull – two ‘outsiders’ – were hung at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions in 2010 and 2011 respectively.

Yes, wonderful. Congratulations on that.

'Feral' by Ann Johnson

'Young Gull' by Ann Johnson

Ann Johnson outside the Royal Academy

The other day I saw on TV how reptiles, bound for the so-called ‘pet’ trade, travel on airlines, packed tightly together in bags. Apparently, even if 50 per cent of them suffocate and starve to death in transit, the traders can still make a profit. The Land of the Exotics makes reference to the way discovery has led to animals being trapped and exported around the world to zoos, circuses, vivisection laboratories – and the wretched aquariums.

Yes, we still have a long way to go before we can call ourselves genuinely ‘civilised’. As Gandhi famously said, ‘The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated’. Gandhi is someone who went all the way down and I really value that – not stopping at ‘boundaries’. There is no insuperable line, as Bentham said.

'Land of the Exotics' by Ann Johnson

Quaker Concern for Animals, of which we are both members, seeks to extend the Quaker Testimony of equality to non-human animals.

I have been glad of the opportunity to illustrate a leaflet for QCA to help highlight the suffering and death of non-human animals through warfare. The leaflet supports the ‘purple poppy’ campaign, initiated by Animal Aid, to include non-human animals on Remembrance Sunday in November.

You work very hard on behalf of animals, Ann – thanks so much for that. Shall we finish with a poem and image that we’ve made into a poemcard?

Painting is something of a sanctuary for me, a powerful and rejuvenating place in which to step aside from the difficulties of the world. We all have creativity in us and can use it in a positive, healing way. Using bright, warm colours, like the ones in Yellow Dahlias can be very nourishing. It seemed appropriate to partner this painting with your poem about Mechthild.

 

Dahlia

 

A single

flowerhead

flames,

as consummate

with the October sun

as Mechtild

with her God

 

I am your reflection.

How can I resist

my own true nature?

 

 

(Fiona Owen, Going Gentle, 2007, Gomer)

 

Thank you so much, Ann.

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If anyone would like to look at more of Ann’s work, you can do so here: http://www.annjohnsonpaintings.co.uk  

Owen, Fiona. IMAGINING THE FULL HUNDRED. Caernarfon, North Wales: Gwasg Pantycelyn (2003). ISBN 1-903314-60-7. Cover Illustration: Malcolm Strongetharm.

Fiona Owen is a poet who resides in Llanfaelog, Anglesey. This beautiful green book with a meditative face of a head-covered woman, sets the tone for her first published volume. The book’s title originates in David Hart’s poem “The snail sets out up the steps.” Fiona’s book title also graces her five-part poem sequence (40) which conveys the deeper message of her work by using an epigrammatic quotation from Gandhi: “I want to realize identity with all life,/ even with such things as crawl upon the earth.” The poet is affirming her own affinity with all living creatures and one may understand the “full hundred” as the Wan Wu, or Ten Thousand Things, of Taoist philosophy. Here we find insects tumbling out of petals during the making of elderflower cordial; bees and ladybirds, a brown mongrel dog, all experience annihilation when a child is treated to ” pictures of Armageddon, when God/ punishes the sinners; ” slugs, worms, wood lice, beetles, and snails are “a community in crisis.”

This central sequence is enfolded by poems which journey from sandy images of the Middle East, where the poet lived from the age of three to sixteen, to the green mountains of North Wales. Fear and dread, where lives of humans and animals coalesce in importance, whether it as a non-swimming mother in the ocean, or a old oil drum full of “not quite dead” dogs, or a scorpion “making its clinging way across the ceiling,” fill the earlier poems with emotion and trauma as the transience of life is explored. The poet identifies with Earth itself in order to empathizes with the suffering of nature. In the form of Rock, which/who expresses how it “fancies the movement of bird,” that is, until an earthquakes puts in an appearance. This poem, along with others, attests to the innocence of nature and to the writer as an integral part of it. Pablo’s incident in the shallows when he was stung by a stonefish (14) demonstrates the impartiality of nature. The poet accepts the natural way, as nature does what it is intended to do and nothing more or nothing less, and life continues to flow.

The unassuming simplicity of Fiona’s language in these poems makes her work accessible to all. Some will no doubt read the ‘stories’ and enjoy the narrative, and others will delve deeper and unearth the philosophy of one who writes because this is her ‘nature.’ And by her writing she blesses all things, from insects to people, from plants to moons, and accordingly she salutes the sacredness of the universe. Her poems are love poems in the mystical tradition. The divine is present in all things, she is reminding us. It is because of this divine energy that one may transmute and take on the characteristic of other aspects of nature. Thus, “When you shave / you make / your top lip shape / into a beak.” The shaver can apparently make a “bird-face” at will but it is not often that one gets to understand why or how (22). In another incident the beard becomes “a forest / [she] loses herself in” while the protagonist is “lunar / lying among roots / and leaves” (23).

Fiona shares with her readers the mysteries of the universe. The moon, for example, can do anything that humans can do and in a poem titled “Moondance” lightens the incredibly serious philosophy the writer is expounding, with unpretentious and original humour. We are aware of the moon dancing and trailing “fingers along the banister” and becoming the Peeping Tom and listening to the private encounter (24). This poem also expresses the alchemical and Hermetic dictum “As above so below,” so none of the significance is lost in the humour.

Fiona Owen demonstrates clarity in her thoughts, uniqueness in her metaphors, and humour and freshness in her poetic imagery. In the penultimate poem of Imagining the Full Hundred, the poet fits it all into a nutshell: “All forms are possible / at every instance. / No shape is an outcast / the mind need only accept” (60). Life ‘just is’ and one could say the same about these poems. Each is complete in itself, each is doing its own work, each poem is a fragile and transcendent moment in an impartial universe.

Owen, Fiona. GOING GENTLE. Llandysul, North Wales: Gomer Press. 2007 . ISBN 978-1-84323-818-8. Cover Illustration: Greg Tricker.

You cannot fail to appreciate the integrity of Going Gentle. Its cover image, by Greg Tricker titled “Francis and the Turtle Doves,” is vibrant, primitive, and eye-catching, and recalls St. Francis and his encounters with the natural world, as it depicts creatures sensing his gentle and compassionate presence.  Entering these poems, one is immediately aware that like Francis, Fiona takes what philosopher, Martin Buber calls the “I-Thou relationship,” experienced in moments that honour the sacredness of human identity, and extends it to all species, and all elemental forces. She is obviously familiar with Taoist philosophy,   and appreciates the concept of wan wu, understanding that each of the Ten Thousand Things is a part of the whole, a child of the universe.  In her poems even the minute insect, the street animal, and every “mud-mangled thing / bedraggled thing” (19), gazelle (2), caterpillar (23), and the dear cat, Gwen (24) are in her field of vision.  She will experience  the I-Thou relationship with every specie and feels that “Life / acute” is inherent in the “effortlessness” of her dog, Lleucu, who teaches her the joy of “play,” (another Taoist concept) (29).

Additionally, a second clue, offered to engage the reader even more deeply in the text, is the opening quotation by American poet, Mary Oliver: “It is the intimate, never the general, that is teacherly.”  This 72-page book provides the reader with the detail, to feed the soul.  This is what the poet wants to “learn” and pass on to her readers.   Thus, she begins her education with the physical act of “walking,” her “centre pitched low” like the “Tao men [who] walked the thousand mile journey” (9). Each instructive act, however, is based in an every day occurrence like exercising her dog  or “waiting for the 11.56 at Llandudno Junction (30).”  She is also learning to “let go  free fall to nowhere” (10), and accepts the Taoist notion of wu wei as an essential life practice.

The allusion to Taoism in the previous quotation confirms Fiona’s interest in eastern philosophy.  The poet has already learned to listen first, like the Taoist  Sage, whose title is composed of three calligraphed characters, two of which are the ear for listening on the left, and a mouth on the right.  She accordingly, speaks through her poems, to share the reality of the world.  Some of this “reality” includes “the supermarket trolley,” “fast food debris,” “condoms,” and “a sofa” partially submerged in the natural beauty of the river, revealing an understanding that the yin and yang will always appear in tandem. At first “the heart goes through periods of sinking” (15), but then, as the cycles alternate, she realizes “It is time to sing” (15). Thus,  she accepts the paradoxes of life without judgment.  She even speculates about “writing / a twenty-first century religious poem” (39).  She has, in fact, written an entire book of them.

“Poets,” according to the writer, have “faith / in language,” and she, like one whose virtue or te, is operating from natural goodness, is “small / against it all” (34).  In fact, Fiona tells us that she writes “To keep [herself] small / and connected to the silence” (35).  She does not, however, write to resolve the mystery, because in her eclectic philosophy, goals are either loose and flexible or at best, non-existent..  “Writing is one of the fine / sharp pinpricks” one needs to prevent hot air from making one into a “gas bag” (35) she comments.

Some poems have the style of the Imagists.  The poet presents her imagery as spontaneous, hard, clear, and concentrated.  “The first loganberry” takes on the appearance of William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheel Barrow” (37) as does a “cloud / with the light coming through “slanted towards” the holy island of “Ynys Enlli” (30).”  Moreover, the entire creation story is tersely explicated in “The Nature of Light,” as a single shaft represents Tao or Divinity, and “the myriad things” originating from non-being, eventually complete the circle to return to the source (31).

When you think you have worked in all out and exposed the Eastern thought-patterns in Fiona’s work, you recognize that her philosophy is not confined to this.  Her poems come from a universal place, the deep roots of mysticism which appear in Taoism, Buddhism, and are also inherent in 13th century  Christian mystics such as Mechthild of Magdeburg.  Like the Taoist sage who cherishes his te (natural goodness) this German visionary recognizes her “own true nature” as the reflection of the Divine (38).  The poet then is content just to be with “the mystery of things / and [with] spontaneous love” (40).  Feelings of “compassion” as “cold and love and sorrow.…/ in the heart centre,” evoked by the sight of a wren / on a fennel stalk”(43), confirm Fiona’s personal spiritual qualities.

Fiona Owen’s mystical philosophy is by no mean contrived.  It is what the Taoists term “high te,” natural and spontaneous, integrated into her thoughts, and a consistent part of her life as teacher, animal lover, friend, and loving wife.  This is her second poetry collection, her first Imagining the Full Hundred was received with critical acclaim.  Her final poem, the title poem of the compilation, appears to be a mellow nod toWales’ most famous poet, Dylan Thomas.  What better way to complete this meditation on the suchness of things and the transience of all life.

Beryl Baigent

Thamesford, Ontario, Canada

Afal Ynys Enlli

Our good friend Mandy Simone gave us, a few years ago, a baby apple tree grown by Ian Sturrock & Sons, of Bangor. The photo shows it in full bloom this spring.

Here is a poem to celebrate this tree, and to thank Mandy:

Note: ‘you are, therefore I am’ – title of a book by Satish Kumar, already mentioned on my home page.

 You can find out more about the novel from ‘A Common Reader‘, which is well worth checking out generally for its reviews.

Here is one such combination:

'Night Hare' by Ann Johnson

 The near-death experience of a Cartesian philosopher

 Animals he regarded as automata … devoid of feeling
or consciousness. Men are different: they have a soul
- Bertrand Russell on Descartes
 
There was a man who saw the soul as for man alone,
so dogs and the poor rest must go without.
He made a shout of it, as if knowing best,
but the real test came when he himself fell upon death’s floor
and on his hands and knees he saw amongst the dust
creatures with eyes, with blood the stuff of any blood:
a hare can die as well as any man, have its spark 
clean shot from its heart in a sharp rendering, its soul
lending light to the big behind-the-scenes white.
 
Returning from this, the man was wide
to open his framework entire, and straight
from his mind’s laboratory, he 
let all the living creatures out,
himself included.  

Fiona Owen in O My Swan  

Gwanwyn Hapus! 

Fiona (Vocals), Gorwel (vocals, guitar, bouzouki), with lovely things played by Cass Meurig (fiddle) and Edwin Humphreys (clarinet).

The song is off our second CD Spring Always Comes.

‘Our Quaker peace testimony arises out of the conviction that, as George Fox said, there is a “life and power that took away the occasion of all wars.”

Dwelling in the life and power involves opening ourselves to the Inward Light, allowing the Light to shine into all the dark corners where we might find occasion for attacking those who have hurt us.

As we dwell in the life and power, we grow in reverence for life. We recognise that there is “that of God in everyone” and this leads us to renounce violence. We may even adopt the Gandhian principle of ahimsa or “non-harm” in relation to all living beings.

Reverence for life leads us not only to avoid doing harm to living beings, but also to nurture life. We not only refuse to kill people, we nurture ourselves and others. This conscientious affirmation of the worth of every human being is the other side of the coin of our conscientious objection to killing people.

We open our eyes to the many forms of violence around us, including the “structural violence” of economic injustice, institutional racism, discrimination against women, and cultural oppression. We open our eyes too to the seeds of war in our own hearts and in our own lives’.

Winter Starlings

Each dusk, the starlings came. All winter long.

They sounded like this.