Allegories of Feeling of wiliam
ALLEGORIES OF FEELING
Alun Leach-Jones often speaks of his art in terms of feeling. In any number of
interviews, he insists that his work does have a subject matter, and that this subject
matter is feeling: “The goal of my art is to heighten and enlarge perception and feeling
into the most vivid image possible”.1 In saying this, Leach-Jones is undoubtedly being
a little defensive. Not only is feeling rarely spoken of in art today, but this insistence
on feeling is meant to counter the common perception that his art is merely
decorative. On the contrary, Leach-Jones argues, his art is not at all abstract or selfreferential. It does seek to depict something outside of itself. If it does not refer to
anything recognisable in the world, it does nevertheless speak of the relationship
between us and the world. It attempts to “heighten and enlarge” perception and
feeling. And in this, Leach-Jones is suggesting, his painting is also part of what it
records, contributes in some way to those feelings and perceptions it aims to
represent.
But what exactly does it mean, to depict feeling in art? It is something that many of
Leach-Jones’ critics and commentators have spoken of over the years, although we
cannot help thinking that they are writing under the influence of the artist or repeating
his thoughts on the subject without quite understanding what is implied by them.
(Although, to be fair, Leach-Jones, following one of his other great artistic passions,
frequently commissions poets to write about his work, who themselves know, in a
practical sense at least, how much art is a matter of feeling.) Feeling is undoubtedly a
difficult subject to write about in art, because feelings in art are not the same as they
are in life. Feelings when they enter art are as it were abstracted, rarefied, undergo a
process of sublimation or self-reflection. This is not at all a matter of judgement – art
has nothing to do with morality in the conventional sense – but of testing feelings
formally, of seeing how they stand up against the various forms of art.
In truth, there is only one feeling appropriate to the work of art. It is the feeling that
encompasses all of the others, and within which they all must operate. It is the feeling
simply of whether the work of art is any good or not. This is not to deny that all kinds
of other feelings can be expressed in art, but they must all obey a more general artistic
logic, take their place within a wider, more disinterested set of considerations. There
is no emotion that is inappropriate to art, but every emotion must justify itself
aesthetically, fit within the overall economy of the work seen as a whole. It was
perhaps Clement Greenberg who spoke of this best, at least within the terms of
modernism. Against all misunderstandings of his doctrine of “formalism”, which is
not at all the study of the “forms” of art, divorced from any external content, he writes
in his essay ‘The Necessity of Formalism’: “Quality, aesthetic value originates in
inspiration, vision, ‘content’, not in ‘form’… Yet ‘form’ not only opens the way to
inspiration, it can also act as a means to it… That ‘content’ cannot be separated from
its ‘form’”.2
It is this subtle interdependence between content and form that we should try to keep
in mind when looking at Leach-Jones’ work. When critics speak of the feelings
produced by his paintings, they inevitably resort – and this is not surprising – to the
broadest, most familiar and most recognisable of emotions. They describe their
feelings in terms that do not apply to, or at least are not specific to, art. It is as though
art for them provides merely another instance of an emotion already well-known from
everyday life, as though art and life occupy the same level or order of experience. The
critics write, for example, of Leach-Jones’ The Romance of Death series (1985-6):
“They are formally severe and paradoxically suggest an underlying disquiet, a sense
of foreboding”.3 Or they write of his Landscape of Bone series (1992-4): “The pastel
and charcoal drawings of sombre browns, greys and black are associated with the
paintings, and it appears that in these works Leach-Jones’ pessimism has gained the
ascendency”.4 Or they write, by contrast, of his more recent The Plain Sense of
Things series (2004-6): “Leach-Jones’ allusions to life’s miseries are more than offset
by his glorious colours which bustle and pulsate with the resounding exaltation of a
Chartres window”.5
Alun Leach-Jones, Romance of Death, No. 1 (1981)
In fact, Leach-Jones himself offers a profound insight into the specific form emotions
take in his work. He says of the attempts to relate particular objects to feelings, to
“read” off emotions from their worldly equivalents: “The images that result in my
work are clear but simultaneously ambiguous and enigmatic”.5 It is both to license
those readings of his work that seek to make connections between it and everyday life
and to caution that such connections are invalid or impossible. It is at once to suggest
that his works are open to all kinds of associations and to make the point that the form
emotions take in art are absolutely singular and untranslatable. And this is broadly to
sum up Leach-Leach-Jones’ relationship to the “spiritual” in art, from Delaunay’s
Orphism to Kandinsky’s synchronism to C.W. Leadbeater’s occultism. On the one
hand, Leach-Jones argues that abstract art becomes a mere game without some
content it is trying to transmit. And, on the other, he rejects these crude early
twentieth-century efforts to unlock the mysteries of art with a simple key. The attempt
to decode art according to a set of unvarying symbols, like a kind of “dream book”,
will always fail.
So, again, we might ask, what is it to express feeling in art? Where do we see this
properly aesthetic feeling that decides whether a work of art is any good or not? We
propose to answer these questions here with reference to a number of Leach-Jones
paintings. We do not look at where feeling might usually be thought to lie, in those
large-scale symbolic or metaphoric structures that occur across a number of works,
and which critics have often spoken of as conveying emotion: the blades, skulls,
boats, moons, flowers and hourglasses we find featured throughout his paintings.
Rather, we look at the level below this, at a series of stylistic devices that, although
they run across several works, strike us as being singular each time. They are
elements that give the impression of being added on at the end, of being surplus to the
overall requirements of the work. They can appear impromptu or improvised, almost
like a musical cadenza, which occurs when a performer adds a trill or variation of
their own to the written score. But they also can appear as a solution to an artistic
problem, appended to the composition to make it succeed when it otherwise would
not, a supplement without which it would not be complete.
We might begin to speak of this in terms of Leach-Jones’ use of colour. Leach-Jones,
as is typical of many British artists of his generation, was thoroughly influenced by
Matisse’s conception of colour. This is indicated not only by an early work subtitled
‘Homage to Matisse’ – in fact, coming from a series that is amongst the least Matisselike in Leach-Jones’ oeuvre – but by Leach-Jones’ quite precise deployment of
Matisse’s colour system: the way that in the great Matisse works like The Red Room
(1908) and The Painter’s Family (1911) the eye is systematically led around the
canvas by the ordering of colours. For example, in The Painter’s Family, our gaze is
drawn first to the yellow novel held in Matisse’s daughter’s hand, then to the orange
of his sons playing chess, then to the dark red of the settee on which his wife is sitting,
then to the blue of the fireplace behind her, before finally returning to where we began
with his daughter’s black dress. It was around 1981 with his The Romance of Death
series – ironically, a series that is said to come out of the darkness and depression of a
residency in Berlin – that Leach-Jones first begins to undertake the same systematic
organisation of colour. For example, in The Romance of Death #8 (1984), a sequence
of black, dark blue, light blue, red and yellow culminates in a slice of hot pink across
the centre-right of the canvas. In the slightly later As the Lily Among the Thorns
(1987), a sequence of black, purple, dark blue and red culminates in a series of
yellows scattered across the canvas. It is a patterning that can become extremely
complicated in the works from the mid-‘90s on, but that still fundamentally organises
the pictures in the same way.
Alun Leach-Jones, Through the Eye of the Needle (1986)
There is undoubtedly a painterly logic that guides Leach-Jones in his choice of
colours here. And there is obviously, as always with his work, a representational
overlay that imbues his colours with a variety of metaphorical associations. His pink
can indicate either female sexual organs, as in The Rising of the Moon (1987-2002), or
the stamen and petal of a flower, as in Foxglove and Belladonna (1989). The purple in
a work like The Poet’s Voice (1987) cannot but suggest the poet’s tongue protruding
from yellow lips. But, despite this, in each case there is also something surprising
about Leach-Jones’ choice of concluding colour. In a way, because of the other
colours it is surrounded by, it takes on a special significance, exactly like the unusual
or unexpected note within a musical melody. It at once appears as the logical
culmination of the work and as that improvisational element that makes its tune
especially moving or memorable. Indeed, at times this artistic supplement can even
appear to be what the work is about. In The Eye of the Needle (1986), the one thing
that is threaded through the “needle” is the semi-circle of purple to the right of the
canvas. In The Music of Colours #1 (1989), the whole composition rises up towards
the two slivers of pink at the top of the canvas.
Alun Leach-Jones, Instruments for a Solitary Navigator, No. 5 (1992)
The same thing might be said about the dots that start to enter Leach-Jones’ work
from the mid-1980s on. We are thinking here, for example, of the three red dots
towards the top of In Praise of Music (1987), the series of blue dots to the centre and
right of Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #2 (1991) and the two white dots to the
left of Tenebrae (2000). The immediate precedents for these dots in Leach-Jones’
oeuvre are The Romance of Death #12 (1985-6) and It Matters Not How Straight the
Gate (1986), which use respectively rows of dots and wooden lattices attached to the
sides of the canvas as framing devices. But these straight lines and wooden panels are
meant to be invisible, not strictly part of the composition. (This issue of how to frame
or fill out the composition is one of the long-running problems of Leach-Jones’ work,
which in many ways comes out of Analytic Cubism, in which it was also a difficulty.)
These edging borders of dots become even more prominent in the subsequent
Instruments for a Solitary Navigator series (1990-99), where they can be seen on
either the left or right or even on both sides of the composition. And these lattices are
to be found throughout Leach-Jones’ work, first in the Matisse-inspired series of the
late-‘70s, then in such works as Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #10 and #11
(1994) and Snakes and Ladders (2004) and then taking the form of the fences of Unto
the Gathered Field (2000) and the crushed and folded newspaper of The Rustic’s
Table (2003).
But these dots (and we include in this the vertices formed by the lattices) some time
after the mid-1980s begin to wander in from the sides of the pictures and become
autonomous elements in their own right. In some of the Instruments for a Solitary
Navigator series, they can appear to be stars in the skies or reflections off the water. In
works like The Mystic Trumpeter (1990), they can appear to be notes of music
hanging in the air. But the specific kind of dots we are speaking of are not like this. In
In Praise of Music, Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #2 and Tenebrae, the dots
work more like visual beats or accents. Again, as in Leach-Jones’ use of colour, they
are what the entire composition leads towards and yet remain unexplained by it. They
are a supreme act of pictorial intelligence and also entirely intuitive or impulsive. In
that sense we have tried to describe before, they arise out of a pure feeling of aesthetic
“rightness” and are a reflection upon that feeling. The work at once embodies this
feeling and is somehow about it. And in Leach-Jones’ more recent paintings, the
breaking of the rules that these dots represent becomes even more evident, the
freedom the artist allows himself becomes even greater: the two grey smudges at the
centre of The Gardener’s Table (2001), the blue and yellow speckles to the centre-left
of The Golden Bowl (2002), the brown stain high up to the left of The Plain Sense of
Things #2 (2004-6).
Alun Leach-Jones, The Golden Bowl (2003)
The final “decorative” element we look at here is related to this. It is Leach-Jones’ use
of shadows. Of course, shadows are employed in Leach-Jones’ work largely to build
up pictorial space. If we look closely at his compositions, we can see that shadows are
used both mimetically (as though they are cast by real three-dimensional objects) and
according to a Cubist vocabulary (in which shadow is a “sign” that we must learn to
read). Shadow is used illusionistically in the foreshortened wheel to the right of
Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #9 (1993-4) and in the diagonal of black that
crosses the door to the left of Red Sky at Night – Shepherd’s Delight (2001). Shadow
is used in the Cubist manner throughout the Instruments for a Solitary Navigator
series to suggest reflections of light on the sea and in the black that snakes around the
assembled forms, producing a “fictive” (legible but not visible) depth. There is even a
kind of penumbra or halation around objects that begins to enter Leach-Jones’ work
from the background of the paintings of the late 1980s, such as The Poet Listens to
Nature (1988) or On the Beach at Night Alone (1988), although this can perhaps be
seen to go back to the very first of Leach-Jones’ works, the Noumenons of the early
1970s, in which hundreds of tiny biomorphic shapes are each outlined by a scalloped
edge, in order to give them an optical shimmer. We see examples of this second, more
painterly shadow in the pale horizon line of Evening Coming in over the Fields
(2001), in the blue haze to the top right of The Country Beyond the Stars (2002) and
throughout The Plain Sense of Things series (2004-6).
However, the kind of shadow we are speaking of here belongs to neither of these two
logics, the realist or the Cubist. We see it perhaps in the marks scratched on the blue
circle to the left of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2003), on the series of rudders or
propellers to the left and right of From the Ocean of Painting (2005-6) and on the
purple triangle to the left of The City on the Hill (Ten Years After) (2007). These
marks neither create the illusion of three-dimensional space nor work within any
existing code for signifying shadow. Instead, they are a pure addition on Leach-Jones’
part, whose very status as an afterthought (though perhaps a necessary one) is
indicated by the fact that they are drawn in with the end of the brush. Indeed, in their
indexicality they remind us of something else that is usually amongst the last things to
be added to a painting: the artist’s signature. And it is at these moments that the
painter’s subjectivity is seen most clearly. It is a subjectivity that is expressed not
through any act of wilfulness or arbitrariness, but through the act of aesthetic
discrimination and judgement; not through the breaking of rules, but through the
discovery of rules beyond rules.
Alun Leach-Jones, From the Ocean of Painting (2005-6)
It is exactly in what we might call this “supplementary” level of Leach-Jones’ work –
the unexpected bursts of colour, the dots, the shadows – that the artist is revealed
before us. It is in these meaningless or otherwise overdetermined “fillers” that we find
the unity and intent of the work most explicitly figured. And it is just at these
moments that we come closest to grasping the true “feeling” of the work, the one that
all of the others have to function within. It is the feeling not of happiness, sadness,
comedy or tragedy – all of those “grand narratives” that are carried across from life to
art – but simply of whether the work is successful or not. Each of those extra elements
we have followed here is added because Leach-Jones believes his paintings would not
be any good without them. But these elements – and it is perhaps this in the end that
makes the work modernist – are not just real moments of aesthetic feeling but signs
themselves for feeling in art. It is in these apparently incidental grace notes, these
involuntary or last-minute patchings-up, that the work makes its most ambitious
claims about the role of feeling in art. These easy to overlook moments are, amongst
other things, allegories of feeling in art, tell us that art is a matter not merely of
feeling but of reflection upon feeling. They are not only actual moments of feeling on
the part of the artist, but tell us, in an impossible self-knowledge, that feeling is the
proper subject of art in general.
Rex Butler
1
Alun Leach-Jones, ‘Notes from a Journal, January 1992’, in Gwalia Deserta: Selected Works by Alun Leach-Jones,
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, 1992, p. 5.
2
Clement Greenberg, ‘The Necessity of Formalism’, in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Contemporary Esthetics, Prometheus
Books, Buffalo, 1978, p. 174.
3
Christopher Gentle, ‘Reflection and Metaphor’, in Robert Gray, Graeme Sturgeon and Christopher Gentle, Alun
Leach-Jones, Craftsman House, Roseville East, 1995, p. 41.
4
Ann Carew, ‘The Country Beyond the Stars’, in Alun Leach-Jones Everyman: The Inventor of Signs, Geelong Art
Gallery, 1995, p. 5.
5
Peter Pinson, ‘Alun Leach-Jones: Painter, Printer, Sculptor’, Australian Art Collector 37, July- Sept. 2006, p. 183.
5
‘Notes from a Journal’, op. cit., p. 5. See also Leach-Jones’ statement: “The precision of form [in my works] vies with
the ambiguity of what they are saying’, cited in Jonathan Goodman, ‘An Edgy Spendour: The Drawings of Alun LeachJones’, in Alun Leach-Jones: Drawings, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, 1998, p. 11.
Alun Leach-Jones often speaks of his art in terms of feeling. In any number of
interviews, he insists that his work does have a subject matter, and that this subject
matter is feeling: “The goal of my art is to heighten and enlarge perception and feeling
into the most vivid image possible”.1 In saying this, Leach-Jones is undoubtedly being
a little defensive. Not only is feeling rarely spoken of in art today, but this insistence
on feeling is meant to counter the common perception that his art is merely
decorative. On the contrary, Leach-Jones argues, his art is not at all abstract or selfreferential. It does seek to depict something outside of itself. If it does not refer to
anything recognisable in the world, it does nevertheless speak of the relationship
between us and the world. It attempts to “heighten and enlarge” perception and
feeling. And in this, Leach-Jones is suggesting, his painting is also part of what it
records, contributes in some way to those feelings and perceptions it aims to
represent.
But what exactly does it mean, to depict feeling in art? It is something that many of
Leach-Jones’ critics and commentators have spoken of over the years, although we
cannot help thinking that they are writing under the influence of the artist or repeating
his thoughts on the subject without quite understanding what is implied by them.
(Although, to be fair, Leach-Jones, following one of his other great artistic passions,
frequently commissions poets to write about his work, who themselves know, in a
practical sense at least, how much art is a matter of feeling.) Feeling is undoubtedly a
difficult subject to write about in art, because feelings in art are not the same as they
are in life. Feelings when they enter art are as it were abstracted, rarefied, undergo a
process of sublimation or self-reflection. This is not at all a matter of judgement – art
has nothing to do with morality in the conventional sense – but of testing feelings
formally, of seeing how they stand up against the various forms of art.
In truth, there is only one feeling appropriate to the work of art. It is the feeling that
encompasses all of the others, and within which they all must operate. It is the feeling
simply of whether the work of art is any good or not. This is not to deny that all kinds
of other feelings can be expressed in art, but they must all obey a more general artistic
logic, take their place within a wider, more disinterested set of considerations. There
is no emotion that is inappropriate to art, but every emotion must justify itself
aesthetically, fit within the overall economy of the work seen as a whole. It was
perhaps Clement Greenberg who spoke of this best, at least within the terms of
modernism. Against all misunderstandings of his doctrine of “formalism”, which is
not at all the study of the “forms” of art, divorced from any external content, he writes
in his essay ‘The Necessity of Formalism’: “Quality, aesthetic value originates in
inspiration, vision, ‘content’, not in ‘form’… Yet ‘form’ not only opens the way to
inspiration, it can also act as a means to it… That ‘content’ cannot be separated from
its ‘form’”.2
It is this subtle interdependence between content and form that we should try to keep
in mind when looking at Leach-Jones’ work. When critics speak of the feelings
produced by his paintings, they inevitably resort – and this is not surprising – to the
broadest, most familiar and most recognisable of emotions. They describe their
feelings in terms that do not apply to, or at least are not specific to, art. It is as though
art for them provides merely another instance of an emotion already well-known from
everyday life, as though art and life occupy the same level or order of experience. The
critics write, for example, of Leach-Jones’ The Romance of Death series (1985-6):
“They are formally severe and paradoxically suggest an underlying disquiet, a sense
of foreboding”.3 Or they write of his Landscape of Bone series (1992-4): “The pastel
and charcoal drawings of sombre browns, greys and black are associated with the
paintings, and it appears that in these works Leach-Jones’ pessimism has gained the
ascendency”.4 Or they write, by contrast, of his more recent The Plain Sense of
Things series (2004-6): “Leach-Jones’ allusions to life’s miseries are more than offset
by his glorious colours which bustle and pulsate with the resounding exaltation of a
Chartres window”.5
Alun Leach-Jones, Romance of Death, No. 1 (1981)
In fact, Leach-Jones himself offers a profound insight into the specific form emotions
take in his work. He says of the attempts to relate particular objects to feelings, to
“read” off emotions from their worldly equivalents: “The images that result in my
work are clear but simultaneously ambiguous and enigmatic”.5 It is both to license
those readings of his work that seek to make connections between it and everyday life
and to caution that such connections are invalid or impossible. It is at once to suggest
that his works are open to all kinds of associations and to make the point that the form
emotions take in art are absolutely singular and untranslatable. And this is broadly to
sum up Leach-Leach-Jones’ relationship to the “spiritual” in art, from Delaunay’s
Orphism to Kandinsky’s synchronism to C.W. Leadbeater’s occultism. On the one
hand, Leach-Jones argues that abstract art becomes a mere game without some
content it is trying to transmit. And, on the other, he rejects these crude early
twentieth-century efforts to unlock the mysteries of art with a simple key. The attempt
to decode art according to a set of unvarying symbols, like a kind of “dream book”,
will always fail.
So, again, we might ask, what is it to express feeling in art? Where do we see this
properly aesthetic feeling that decides whether a work of art is any good or not? We
propose to answer these questions here with reference to a number of Leach-Jones
paintings. We do not look at where feeling might usually be thought to lie, in those
large-scale symbolic or metaphoric structures that occur across a number of works,
and which critics have often spoken of as conveying emotion: the blades, skulls,
boats, moons, flowers and hourglasses we find featured throughout his paintings.
Rather, we look at the level below this, at a series of stylistic devices that, although
they run across several works, strike us as being singular each time. They are
elements that give the impression of being added on at the end, of being surplus to the
overall requirements of the work. They can appear impromptu or improvised, almost
like a musical cadenza, which occurs when a performer adds a trill or variation of
their own to the written score. But they also can appear as a solution to an artistic
problem, appended to the composition to make it succeed when it otherwise would
not, a supplement without which it would not be complete.
We might begin to speak of this in terms of Leach-Jones’ use of colour. Leach-Jones,
as is typical of many British artists of his generation, was thoroughly influenced by
Matisse’s conception of colour. This is indicated not only by an early work subtitled
‘Homage to Matisse’ – in fact, coming from a series that is amongst the least Matisselike in Leach-Jones’ oeuvre – but by Leach-Jones’ quite precise deployment of
Matisse’s colour system: the way that in the great Matisse works like The Red Room
(1908) and The Painter’s Family (1911) the eye is systematically led around the
canvas by the ordering of colours. For example, in The Painter’s Family, our gaze is
drawn first to the yellow novel held in Matisse’s daughter’s hand, then to the orange
of his sons playing chess, then to the dark red of the settee on which his wife is sitting,
then to the blue of the fireplace behind her, before finally returning to where we began
with his daughter’s black dress. It was around 1981 with his The Romance of Death
series – ironically, a series that is said to come out of the darkness and depression of a
residency in Berlin – that Leach-Jones first begins to undertake the same systematic
organisation of colour. For example, in The Romance of Death #8 (1984), a sequence
of black, dark blue, light blue, red and yellow culminates in a slice of hot pink across
the centre-right of the canvas. In the slightly later As the Lily Among the Thorns
(1987), a sequence of black, purple, dark blue and red culminates in a series of
yellows scattered across the canvas. It is a patterning that can become extremely
complicated in the works from the mid-‘90s on, but that still fundamentally organises
the pictures in the same way.
Alun Leach-Jones, Through the Eye of the Needle (1986)
There is undoubtedly a painterly logic that guides Leach-Jones in his choice of
colours here. And there is obviously, as always with his work, a representational
overlay that imbues his colours with a variety of metaphorical associations. His pink
can indicate either female sexual organs, as in The Rising of the Moon (1987-2002), or
the stamen and petal of a flower, as in Foxglove and Belladonna (1989). The purple in
a work like The Poet’s Voice (1987) cannot but suggest the poet’s tongue protruding
from yellow lips. But, despite this, in each case there is also something surprising
about Leach-Jones’ choice of concluding colour. In a way, because of the other
colours it is surrounded by, it takes on a special significance, exactly like the unusual
or unexpected note within a musical melody. It at once appears as the logical
culmination of the work and as that improvisational element that makes its tune
especially moving or memorable. Indeed, at times this artistic supplement can even
appear to be what the work is about. In The Eye of the Needle (1986), the one thing
that is threaded through the “needle” is the semi-circle of purple to the right of the
canvas. In The Music of Colours #1 (1989), the whole composition rises up towards
the two slivers of pink at the top of the canvas.
Alun Leach-Jones, Instruments for a Solitary Navigator, No. 5 (1992)
The same thing might be said about the dots that start to enter Leach-Jones’ work
from the mid-1980s on. We are thinking here, for example, of the three red dots
towards the top of In Praise of Music (1987), the series of blue dots to the centre and
right of Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #2 (1991) and the two white dots to the
left of Tenebrae (2000). The immediate precedents for these dots in Leach-Jones’
oeuvre are The Romance of Death #12 (1985-6) and It Matters Not How Straight the
Gate (1986), which use respectively rows of dots and wooden lattices attached to the
sides of the canvas as framing devices. But these straight lines and wooden panels are
meant to be invisible, not strictly part of the composition. (This issue of how to frame
or fill out the composition is one of the long-running problems of Leach-Jones’ work,
which in many ways comes out of Analytic Cubism, in which it was also a difficulty.)
These edging borders of dots become even more prominent in the subsequent
Instruments for a Solitary Navigator series (1990-99), where they can be seen on
either the left or right or even on both sides of the composition. And these lattices are
to be found throughout Leach-Jones’ work, first in the Matisse-inspired series of the
late-‘70s, then in such works as Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #10 and #11
(1994) and Snakes and Ladders (2004) and then taking the form of the fences of Unto
the Gathered Field (2000) and the crushed and folded newspaper of The Rustic’s
Table (2003).
But these dots (and we include in this the vertices formed by the lattices) some time
after the mid-1980s begin to wander in from the sides of the pictures and become
autonomous elements in their own right. In some of the Instruments for a Solitary
Navigator series, they can appear to be stars in the skies or reflections off the water. In
works like The Mystic Trumpeter (1990), they can appear to be notes of music
hanging in the air. But the specific kind of dots we are speaking of are not like this. In
In Praise of Music, Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #2 and Tenebrae, the dots
work more like visual beats or accents. Again, as in Leach-Jones’ use of colour, they
are what the entire composition leads towards and yet remain unexplained by it. They
are a supreme act of pictorial intelligence and also entirely intuitive or impulsive. In
that sense we have tried to describe before, they arise out of a pure feeling of aesthetic
“rightness” and are a reflection upon that feeling. The work at once embodies this
feeling and is somehow about it. And in Leach-Jones’ more recent paintings, the
breaking of the rules that these dots represent becomes even more evident, the
freedom the artist allows himself becomes even greater: the two grey smudges at the
centre of The Gardener’s Table (2001), the blue and yellow speckles to the centre-left
of The Golden Bowl (2002), the brown stain high up to the left of The Plain Sense of
Things #2 (2004-6).
Alun Leach-Jones, The Golden Bowl (2003)
The final “decorative” element we look at here is related to this. It is Leach-Jones’ use
of shadows. Of course, shadows are employed in Leach-Jones’ work largely to build
up pictorial space. If we look closely at his compositions, we can see that shadows are
used both mimetically (as though they are cast by real three-dimensional objects) and
according to a Cubist vocabulary (in which shadow is a “sign” that we must learn to
read). Shadow is used illusionistically in the foreshortened wheel to the right of
Instruments for a Solitary Navigator #9 (1993-4) and in the diagonal of black that
crosses the door to the left of Red Sky at Night – Shepherd’s Delight (2001). Shadow
is used in the Cubist manner throughout the Instruments for a Solitary Navigator
series to suggest reflections of light on the sea and in the black that snakes around the
assembled forms, producing a “fictive” (legible but not visible) depth. There is even a
kind of penumbra or halation around objects that begins to enter Leach-Jones’ work
from the background of the paintings of the late 1980s, such as The Poet Listens to
Nature (1988) or On the Beach at Night Alone (1988), although this can perhaps be
seen to go back to the very first of Leach-Jones’ works, the Noumenons of the early
1970s, in which hundreds of tiny biomorphic shapes are each outlined by a scalloped
edge, in order to give them an optical shimmer. We see examples of this second, more
painterly shadow in the pale horizon line of Evening Coming in over the Fields
(2001), in the blue haze to the top right of The Country Beyond the Stars (2002) and
throughout The Plain Sense of Things series (2004-6).
However, the kind of shadow we are speaking of here belongs to neither of these two
logics, the realist or the Cubist. We see it perhaps in the marks scratched on the blue
circle to the left of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2003), on the series of rudders or
propellers to the left and right of From the Ocean of Painting (2005-6) and on the
purple triangle to the left of The City on the Hill (Ten Years After) (2007). These
marks neither create the illusion of three-dimensional space nor work within any
existing code for signifying shadow. Instead, they are a pure addition on Leach-Jones’
part, whose very status as an afterthought (though perhaps a necessary one) is
indicated by the fact that they are drawn in with the end of the brush. Indeed, in their
indexicality they remind us of something else that is usually amongst the last things to
be added to a painting: the artist’s signature. And it is at these moments that the
painter’s subjectivity is seen most clearly. It is a subjectivity that is expressed not
through any act of wilfulness or arbitrariness, but through the act of aesthetic
discrimination and judgement; not through the breaking of rules, but through the
discovery of rules beyond rules.
Alun Leach-Jones, From the Ocean of Painting (2005-6)
It is exactly in what we might call this “supplementary” level of Leach-Jones’ work –
the unexpected bursts of colour, the dots, the shadows – that the artist is revealed
before us. It is in these meaningless or otherwise overdetermined “fillers” that we find
the unity and intent of the work most explicitly figured. And it is just at these
moments that we come closest to grasping the true “feeling” of the work, the one that
all of the others have to function within. It is the feeling not of happiness, sadness,
comedy or tragedy – all of those “grand narratives” that are carried across from life to
art – but simply of whether the work is successful or not. Each of those extra elements
we have followed here is added because Leach-Jones believes his paintings would not
be any good without them. But these elements – and it is perhaps this in the end that
makes the work modernist – are not just real moments of aesthetic feeling but signs
themselves for feeling in art. It is in these apparently incidental grace notes, these
involuntary or last-minute patchings-up, that the work makes its most ambitious
claims about the role of feeling in art. These easy to overlook moments are, amongst
other things, allegories of feeling in art, tell us that art is a matter not merely of
feeling but of reflection upon feeling. They are not only actual moments of feeling on
the part of the artist, but tell us, in an impossible self-knowledge, that feeling is the
proper subject of art in general.
Rex Butler
1
Alun Leach-Jones, ‘Notes from a Journal, January 1992’, in Gwalia Deserta: Selected Works by Alun Leach-Jones,
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, 1992, p. 5.
2
Clement Greenberg, ‘The Necessity of Formalism’, in Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Contemporary Esthetics, Prometheus
Books, Buffalo, 1978, p. 174.
3
Christopher Gentle, ‘Reflection and Metaphor’, in Robert Gray, Graeme Sturgeon and Christopher Gentle, Alun
Leach-Jones, Craftsman House, Roseville East, 1995, p. 41.
4
Ann Carew, ‘The Country Beyond the Stars’, in Alun Leach-Jones Everyman: The Inventor of Signs, Geelong Art
Gallery, 1995, p. 5.
5
Peter Pinson, ‘Alun Leach-Jones: Painter, Printer, Sculptor’, Australian Art Collector 37, July- Sept. 2006, p. 183.
5
‘Notes from a Journal’, op. cit., p. 5. See also Leach-Jones’ statement: “The precision of form [in my works] vies with
the ambiguity of what they are saying’, cited in Jonathan Goodman, ‘An Edgy Spendour: The Drawings of Alun LeachJones’, in Alun Leach-Jones: Drawings, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, 1998, p. 11.