St Veronica Reads the News by Craig Burnett (2018)
At the top of a narrow flight of stairs in a corner of Rachel Howard’s studio, there is a small, scruffy room, the crucible for the elusive content of her paintings. Contents include a bed for midday dreaming, piles of paper (some blank, some covered in charcoal or ink), an uneasy stacks of books (one topped by a stuffed rabbit, another by a painting), an empty, paint-bespattered easel, a few bottles and boxes, a desk (with fan), and, beside the desk, on the floor, a spillage of photos, either taken by the artist or lifted from the press, just a portion of the artist’s larger archive of imagery, much of it grim and death-soaked.
Pick one up and you might see a soldier grinning beside a blackened corpse, war helicopters, kids playing, ants marching, dogs pissing, textile patterns, baby’s bottoms, dead birds, pigs’ heads, acts of humiliation, the aftermath of mutilation, flowers strewn on the roadside where someone died, planes crumpled or upside down on the hard earth. The whole parade of existence in squiffy snapshots. Yet we never, or rarely, see any of these images in Howard’s paintings, or not depicted in any clear or legible way. She paints dogs, true, and she has painted the famous shot of a prisoner with his arms outspread, at Abu Ghraib. Yet if death growls behind many of Howard’s canvases, you’re more likely to see a decayed grid, or a hovering sphere, or a textile pattern with paint as red as open-heart surgery. The images provide the stimulus for the paintings as much as the subject matter.
A painting of death is always a metaphor. There is no other way: an artist must transmute death into a form that is, paradoxically, pleasurable, unexpected, even illuminating. Think of the story of St Veronica daubing her veil across the anguished brow of Jesus Christ as he slouched toward his death. As she withdrew the cloth, his face appeared, fresh and free of pain. The magic doesn’t interest me, but rather the notion that anguish can be transformed into a kind of beauty, or understanding, by becoming a picture. No matter what they depict, pictures offer a version of Stendhal’s definition of beauty: the promise of happiness. The artist, St Veronica, reaches out compassionately to touch death, and that action creates a new image, an image that must have the presence and ambiguity to invite viewers to interpret it on their own terms. Think also of Perseus, perceiving Medusa through the hazy reflection in his shield[i]. To comprehend the brutality of the world, to vitiate its hold on our imaginations, the artist must create new pictures through obscure reflections.
Look at Howard’s Crash and Crash (IG) (both 2017), small paintings that depict planes as crumpled corpses, suspended in a pastel haze. Based on everyday press snapshots, Howard transmutes particular instances of bad luck – or hubris – into images of universal suffering. (Ink drawings of plane crashes in 2007 and 2009 are more explicitly self-portraits, with her name written across the fuselage.) Derived from a broader narrative of the relentless menace of death as depicted in the news, the planes here present the viewer with a story as old as Icarus. And I am reminded of Pieter Breugel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558), where everybody in the picture goes about their business while Icarus’s legs, twisted like Howard’s planes, writhe upside down in the sea. Suffering always takes place ‘anyhow in a corner’, in Auden’s irreplaceable phrase[ii]. Another day, another plane crash, another death. But Howard transforms: she paints these planes afloat in an unearthly glow, with florescent snippets pulsing beneath, no ground, no sky, no facts. She installs the planes into a delicate afterlife, where we can look at them forever. If these small icons of loss suggest we’re all pilots in a storm, our crumpled fuselage an inevitability, the artist activates both the viewer’s imagination and her sympathy, the canvas a veil applied and withdrawn from the world’s anxious brow.
Howard takes this idea to a heightened, abstract form in a cycle of four large paintings, titled On Violence (Spring), On Violence (Summer), On Violence (Autumn) and On Violence (Winter) (2017). On Violence is a reference to the book by Hannah Arendt, and here the title takes on a rhythmic force. Even as the seasons change, violence persists – even foregrounded – as if it were the driving force to all human history. Meanwhile, the seasons come round again, tucked away in brackets, powerless. The paintings start with a large curtain textile that the artist uses to push paint onto the canvas, revealing patterns, reapplying with varying intensities to create smudges and areas of pooled pigment. The result is a surface that has a ceaseless back-and-forth motion between legibility and ineffable fleshiness. The seasons are demarcated subtly by the artist’s choice of pattern, which might vary within the same painting. For spring, we see figures from nursery rhymes, while summer is lush with flowers and leaves, and winter’s bare tendrils are more rigid and formal. Darian Leader, in this book, writes about how victims of trauma remember these strange details, the wallpaper or carpet they espied mid experience, rather than the event itself. The cycle of paintings place these ‘anyhow in a corner’ details alongside vulnerable flesh, installing both into the same pictorial space. Exhibited as a group, the paintings resonate as a collective lament.
Even as a sculptor, Howard transforms everyday pain into ambiguous new form. For a new series of sculptures, called Not the last (RSM) #1-7, Howard bought packs of kitschy plastic flowers, the type you might leave at a grave, or a roadside memorial. In the studio, she dipped the flowers into an acrylic medium, repeatedly coating them in a creamy goo and hanging them upside down to drip and dry. The plastic stems and petals became soft curves, their forms carved by the force of gravity on a liquid medium. Formed from a blend of artifice and chance, the new objects were then cast in bronze, creating sculptures that look like they might be bouquets discovered in Pompeii. They also bring to mind Chinese Scholars’ rocks, and even the process has parallels: the stones would be chosen, cut and carved, then left in lakes so that the water would erode their forms. Not quite nature, not quite art, the doctored stone became both simultaneously. The combination, a simultaneous nod to nature (erosion, gravity, death) and unchanging form, has its parallel in Howard’s Not the last sculptures. Time is suspended in the curves and surfaces of an evocative object of contemplation.
Howard’s work moves toward abstraction without ever abandoning the stack of photos in that upper room. In her grid paintings there is an emphasis on formal qualities such as repetition, restraint, pattern and atmosphere. Look at A Sound of Any Kind, with its dense grid of dark lines and saturated colours at the base of the painting, the sense of decay and evaporation above. Howard depicts a mix of order and entropy that seeks to come to terms with loss. I am reminded of John Donne’s ‘The Triple Fool’, where the poet describes how ‘Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce’: something about the process of converting the dread of ever-present mortality into measured form ‘tames it … fetters it’. The patterns, the rhythms of lines, the sense of lush colour pulsating behind. These are pictures as visual chants and prayers, liberating the artist to keep painting and the viewer to keep looking despite the grisly images that occupy our imaginations.
[I] Italo Calvino’s ‘Lightness’ in Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
[ii] W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts (1938)
1) Crash (IG), 2017, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 53.3 x 63.5 cm / (21 x 25 in)
2) Crash III, 2017, Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 61 cm, 20 x 24 in
3) Saint Veronica with the Sudarium, Master of Saint Veronica, c. 1420, Oil on walnut, 44.2 × 33.7 cm