Angela Stewart: Memory, Forty Years of Making

Angela Stewart

Memory: Forty Years of Making

Angela Stewart: Painting as Reclamation of Self

Estelle Barrett

In Angela Stewart’s studio we are surrounded by forty years of artistic practice. The space is a memorial to the artist’s soul – the soul as it is lived – as a materially sensing and desiring machine. This place is not only testament to her toil as an artist (what she refers to as practica), but also to Stewart’s intellectual evolution through her artistic and academic training – and lessons accumulated over time, as a woman in what remains a largely patriarchal socio-political domain. It is the confluence of these two dimensions of being that makes the body of work in this exhibition both intriguing and compelling to the viewer.

Stewart’s practice involves a ceaseless search for what is lost and forbidden; also, what is repressed by conventional practices and discourses of art. This dual aspect of her work can be examined firstly through a number of key terms that have come to influence and motivate her practice as transgression, and secondly through an interrogation of how her mode of making articulates the workings of memory, grief, trauma and recuperation. It is not so much what her images represent, but rather how their mode of making signifies critique and resistance, and how its repetitions and erasures articulate the ambiguities of meaning derived from memory and grief.

A number of terms referred to by Stewart (2010) from discourses and practices of Renaissance art are key to revealing how this body of work constitutes a feminist critique of conventions and attitudes that continue to perpetuate gender binaries in some contemporary art discourses. Let us start with a pair of these: disegno and pentimento.

Disegno, with its edict of strong skilful design, demands that all traces of the artist’s labour be removed. Fundamental to this is the privileging of the intellect over emotion. As such, Disegno was deemed to be an attribute of the male artist. Alternatively, pentimento, the traces and marks of labour, were viewed as evidence of ‘errors’ or blemishes to be covered over and disguised. Stewart’s evident command of design and craftsmanship is disrupted by her appropriation of pentimento as a mode of mark-making. This has evolved as a refusal of underlying gender biases in artistic

conventions and is illuminated, for example, in two portraits: Tony Jones (2002) and Joan London (2008).

In her making of Tony Jones, Stewart adopts the strong compositional and sculptural elements lauded by Renaissance artists and critics. The large scale of the original work and bold charcoal markings hold connotations of masculinity, but this is disrupted by the repeated charcoal ’scoring’ of the image; an indexical instantiation of hand and body of the woman who draws. Stewart becomes materially ‘present’ in the work. Through the artist’s sensory immersion in practice, rational thought gives way to ‘working hot’ (Bolt, 2004), a state in which sensation, desire and intuition produce a jouissance, that comes from breaking free of established rules and conventions. The edges and fissures of the Tony Jones image operate as ’dialectics of desire’ and of sensual intimacy. Roland Barthes (1975) has referred to this aspect of aesthetic experience as the ’pleasure of the text’ that can be transferred to the reader or audience as an ’erotics of reading’. Visual language operates similarly. Here, it is not the flesh that signifies, but the spaces between. Like the cleavage in a garment’s décolletage, they enact an invitation to look; a transgression. In creative practice, there is always vacillation and incompletion – the repetition of marks also signifies uncertainty or doubt, by staging appearance as disappearance (Barthes, 1975: 4 –10).

Is it this aspect of practice and aesthetic experience that underlies what Stewart refers to as ‘the bottomless freedom of disappointment?’ (Stewart, 2004: 99). If so, it is a dynamic that is motivated and extended in the artist’s use of pentimento – which began to evolve in the making of Joan London. Three terms from Renaissance discourse are also pertinent here: leggriadria, vaghezza, imitazione.

Leggriadria, as a feminine quality, involves the observation of a silent law, of nature, of moving with grace, modesty, nobility, measure (Stewart, 2010: 113). Vaghezza, on the other hand, carried more ambiguous connotations of the feminine from notions of vulgarity and superficiality as a denigration of the feminine and alternatively, as ‘a form of grace that could enable the mere labour of a sculptor to touch heaven’ (Sohm, 1995). The artist’s task then was to seek out the latter not through exact imitation, but rather imitazione, the perfecting of (woman as) nature through appropriate application of the rules of disegno. Hence, both in form and substance the task of the artist was to achieve the idealisation of the female body as an object of male gaze and desire. Much of Stewart’s practice is motivated by a refusal as well an interrogation of such patriarchal values and conventions. This can be seen, for example, in Joan London: a steadfast return of the gaze and pentimento, with weeping paint evoking not only the desire to transgress, but also grief and loss.

Pentimento, along with the use of impasto and the overlays and manipulations of her photographic works, characterise much of Stewart’s artistic output, which she says involves the making and remaking of images of self as a search for her identity as an artist (Stewart, 2004). What also features in these processes are erasures achieved

by rubbing or wiping out and the superimposing of images. This interplay is achieved through the use of various effects: oil stick drawing and Cibachrome photographic processes in the portraits and self-portraits, as in the Night Riders (2024), and the painterly effects of pentimento and impasto in Unlacing (2012) and Poeisis #3 (2013). In the latter, the resulting palimpsests and repetitions evoke a sense of something alternatively being sought after or annihilated. Corporeality and flesh give way to shadows and spectres of what has passed and what may be to come.

Such repetitions are a feature of traumatic memories and images. Memory is not a thing, it is a material process involving pre-personal forces or precepts; movements and repetitions that constitute temporalities and capture memory as moments of present sensation (Deleuze and Guattari). In Stewart’s work, imitazione is not mere reproduction, but operates as a drive to copy and repeat. Thus, practice becomes a site of memory production.

Henri Bergson’s (1988) account of the relationship between images, memory, and matter –and of memory as a primarily material process – helps to suggest how the ambiguities and multiplicities of the aesthetic image become one of the means of ameliorating the effects of loss and trauma by permitting a reconfiguration of the psyche. An observation by Stewart resonates with this:

I clothe myself in various facades of paint. Within the eerie construct of a simulacrum, I question if we as contemporary artists in portraiture can find moments of stability, to find a voice of self (Stewart, 2004:13)

Perhaps it is through the repeated and endless appearances and disappearances of Stewart’s artworks that the normal flow of images through which memory as a healing force of unforgetting and selfhood may be reinstated.

Here in Stewart’s studio, in the work Vaghezza (2024), the dark overlays of black paint as erasure have given way to an exuberant burst of paint as colour – painting not as a perfection or mastery of nature through representation, but as materiality – and as a reminder of the workings of art as an infinite flow of loss and recuperation.

Love Angela Stewart

Barbara Bolt

References

Barthes, R 1975, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York, Hall and Wang. Bergson, H 1988, Matter and Memory. trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, New York, Zone Books.

Bolt, B 2004, Art Beyond Representation: The Performative Power of the Image, London and New York, I.B. Tauris.

Deleuze, G and Guattari, F, 1994, What is Philosophy?, New York: Columbia University Press. Stewart, A 2010, Unlacing Carnal Margins: Portraits by Angela Stewart (unpublished thesis for the degree of Doctor of Creative Arts), Perth, Curtin University of Technology.

Sohm, P 1995, ‘Gendered Style in Italian Art Criticism from Michelangelo to Malvasia’, Renaissance Quarterly 48 (4): 759–808. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org, accessed 17 March 2024

We are met at the door and welcomed into Angela Stewart’s studio in Fremantle. There are bone china cups and saucers and a plate of fresh tropical fruit awaiting us, but what is ever more tantalising is the mystery of the paintings and drawings propped up against walls and spread out on tables all around this cavernous studio. It is a hot Perth summer’s day, but the studio space is cool. Angela turns off the overhead fluorescent lights and the fan and we begin our journey.

Angela has worked in this studio for over half her forty-year artistic career and it is full of life – her life and the life of the people in her drawings and paintings. During our afternoon with Angela, we meet many people past and present – her mum, her kids and grandkids, Eveline and Julianna Kotai, Joy Burns (Tim Burns’ mother), Eva Sounness, Terri-ann White, Anna Gray, Tony Jones, Jeremy Kirwan- Ward, Joan Wardrop and finally Joan London. She pauses with Joan, noting that ‘the pentimenti was growing in this portrait … this was 2008.’

Angela could be called a ‘portrait painter’ however the ‘works’ are never introduced as portraits, but rather as a relation with the person in themself. This is Tony Jones … this is Joan …. There are the people, the stories surrounding the making of the work, and then there are the associations that the artworks engender. Angela tells us of an exhibition of portraits at Perth Galleries in 2002. The paintings were all in different stages of completion and she titled them according to what era they reminded her of, rather than the actual name of the person depicted.

Her commitment to leaving drawings or paintings in a state of suspension has its genesis in her close relationship with her mother, also a painter. Towards the end of a painting (and always at the end of a hard day) she would ask Angela: ‘How do I finish this painting?’. The studio is in many respects a dedication to her mother. Angela bought it in 2001, a year after her mother passed away. Because of her, Angela notes, ‘I began leaving my paintings suspended … not quite resolved.’

In this sacred space of the studio, we also meet many different Angelas through time and in many different guises and states of being. Sometimes she is making herself up, sometimes she is being painted into existence and sometimes she is being painted over and erased. Each is a study in becoming … or becoming other. The multiplicity of self. There is always an immediacy and frankness in Angela’s art as in her life, which can be quite disarming and even disconcerting as we are drawn into her world.

Angela turns our attention to a series of dark-worked paintings. These eerie paintings hark from a different era and appear ’as if’ we are looking right through and inside the people in these paintings. Angela tells us that these artworks were exhibited in a darkened space at John Curtin Gallery in 2010 as part of her doctoral exhibition. Here she boldly introduces us to her muse, Sofonisba: ‘I was in Italy in 2005. That’s where I met Sofonisba Anguissola’. She continues: ‘My doctorate is writing to Sofonisba Anguissola’ (1532–1625).

Her letters to Sofonisba are respectful, but also intimate – the letters of a friend working through questions of life, love and art. What is painting? What is representation? How have the technologies of seeing (the camera obscura, the tavolleta, the stereoscope, binoculars, the camera, Photoshop …) changed the way we see, understand, and represent the world and its relations? How are women placed in the history/herstory of art? What difference can she make? This is Angela’s doubt, played through this dialogue with a woman artist who lived and painted nearly 600 years ago.

Each letter is dated and signed ‘Yours sincerely, Angela’ … well almost every one. In a letter written in Johannesburg in May 2010, Angela simply signs ‘Sincerely, Stewart.’ ‘Stewart’? I don’t know why I notice this. I check every other letter, but this is the only one with this form of address. Why? I seek clarification. She responds: ‘The reason I signed Stewart … is because in Bonnard/ Matisse: Letters Between Friends, (1992), Bonnard would sign his letters to Matisse as “Bonnard” and Matisse would sign H. Matisse or Henri Matisse.’ She notes: ‘It is a treasured book ... Letters Between Friends. … wonderful. I pick it up and read random parts almost daily.’

I need to go back in time for a moment. On Sunday 26 April 2020, I received an email from Angela entitled ‘love Angela Stewart’. She is seeking to know if it would be possible to correspond during the ‘strange time of the Coronavirus’. The message was quite long for an email, but it begins simply: ‘I will start from where I am today. Sitting here in my kitchen listening to the ambient sounds of birds, children’s voices, the occasional car passing, my Jack Russell Rupi – Rupert Brooke Stewart (born 11.11.11) – terrorising the occasional enemy dog that passes. I still live in the same house … I am not sure if you ever visited here … and I have a treasured Arthur Russell drawing hanging in the bedroom.’ She continues by telling me about her grandchildren and her children and how blessed she is to have a wonderful family.

And then she leaves a gap in the writing, as if she is actually in the room speaking with me. ‘And it is here I pause … Here is where I stumble and there is anguish. My eldest son Heath was killed on 5th of May 2018 aged 44 years … He is and was a beloved horseman and horse whisperer.’

There is ‘before’ Heath’s death and then there is the aftermath of his death, or, as she says, ’the grief bits’ and she takes us to 2018 and to two horse paintings, The Rider 1916 (2018) and Campdraft (2002–2018). At first glance, The Rider 1916 appears to be a riderless horse galloping across the vast Australian landscape. But as I focus, a rider begins to emerge and establishes himself as a shimmera in my mind’s eye. Angela then turns to Campdraft, a fiery painting of a horse and rider bearing down on a steer, telling us that she had started painting this work before Heath’s death: ‘The red was painted three weeks before he died.’

Initially I read the first date on The Rider as 2016 and assume that Angela had commenced the painting two years before Heath’s passing. But now I realize my error. It is 1916 and we are in the middle of World War I and with it, the misery and ruin of war and the loss of the lives of so many – soldiers, civilians and horses. In a text message on 11 March 2024, Angela tells me that her drawing series The Walers 1915 (2002) is drawn from old footage of the Light Horse Brigade and are a homage and a salute to all horses lost in battle. Yet, with all their life and energy, these drawings are not drawings of death, but of life. Angela observes, ‘I’m a draftsperson … It’s about life … a sense of movement.’

Throughout her drawing life, Angela Stewart, affectionately known as ’Stewart’ continually invites us into another space and time. Just as Heath was a horse whisperer, so Angela is a time traveller and people whisperer. Through her works she whispers to us, asking us to suspend belief and come with her on a journey, to be in the room with her, to see as she is seeing, to hear as she is hearing, to believe if only for a moment what she conjures up as real: art as ‘true to life.’ You have got to ‘love Angela Stewart’ for this life.