Vanessa Baird: The cherry blossom in my neighbour’s garden - Oh it looks really nice, 2019
Vanessa Baird
Vanessa Baird is an artist who has directly confronted her own life as a source of imagery. As a drawer she is prolific and uses whatever is around her as inspiration, often revealing magical fairytales existing deep down in a daily existence that could easily dissolve into despair. She lives in Norway, but I think she may have also lived in Scotland as her mother is an artist who made her reputation there. In fact her mother appears in her images; a women now well into her 90s who needs looking after, at the same time that Baird's teenage children are also seeking her attention. The continuous distractions of her home life are not the only things she has to contend with, she has a long term illness herself. Somehow in the middle of it all, she keeps making drawings and as she does the chaos of domesticity begins to morph these drawings into something else, something that looks as if it was frightened into being by the ghost of Edvard Munch.
Munch's work is back on exhibition in England in the Tracy Emin / Edvard Munch exhibition 'The Loneliness of the Soul' at the Royal Academy, which is on until August 1st.
Tracy Emin
Munch
Emin
Emin
Munch
Munch
Tracy Emin
Both Baird and Emin look back to Munch as an artist that was able to communicate personal tragedy and existential despair using a personal language of nervous markmaking, shallow spaces and acidic colour, a language that can be adapted in several ways, as a comparison between Baird and Emin reveals.
The other issue of course is the change in society that has taken place since Munch's time. Although he did not die until 1944, Munch had developed his particular approach to image making by the end of the 19th century. Women did not have the right to vote in England until 1918 and although a man could make a career out of a very personal private view of the world, women's views were still on the whole ignored by a male dominated society. The fact that the Royal Academy is hosting such an import survey of Emin's work, reflects how far we have come as a society.
However the reason I have paired Emin with Baird is to also make a point about art and care. As well as art being used to express the angst of individuals and their ability to make their solitary way in society, it can also tell stories of home life and its messiness and the fact that women are often left literally holding the baby or being the family carer. I have been thinking a lot about the role of art lately and its ability to communicate how people feel and how it can make visible the invisible stuff that we hold inside ourselves and have decided that an idea of 'care' is central to my approach. Without empathy we could not begin to think about how to communicate with other people.
Old men's knees
An old school friend of mine has just had a knee replacement and my own knees are beginning to give out too, so I became interested in whether or not I could visually communicate this. He had sent me a photograph of his recent operation and had written to me about how painful his recovery had been. In order to make an image out of his and my own experience, the visual lineage of expressionist language going back to Munch and all those artists associated with Expressionism, seemed the most appropriate. You might feel that its all a bit old hat in the days of video art and performance, but that search for an image to communicate something is still, it would seem to me, a valid thing to do. I'm also worried about novelty, pictorial form shouldn't have built in obsolescence, the Egyptians used the same visual language over and over again for thousands of years. Marks, colours, shapes and textures can arrive in an infinite variety of combinations, but only certain images seem to stick in your mind, but when they do, they stick like glue. I decided I liked my image of old men's knees. Most of us will get these before we die, its part of the process of entropy, and even if the image only works as a note of sympathy for an old friend, he may well be comforted by the fact that I was thinking about him.
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