Joe Packer Joining and Continuing
Matthew Collings
“At the house I grew up in,” Joe Packer says, “You
could walk straight out of the back door into a wood. It was in a small place
called Shottesbrooke in Berkshire. Childhood memories involve being in the
enclosed, interior/exterior space of a wood. The filtering of light through
trees and foliage.” He says his paintings are not of those places, but he
thinks of them collectively as “some sort of landscape and somehow connected to
places familiar to me where I grew up.”
His studio is in St Leonards on Sea, near Hastings.
A seaside location suggests light and space, but it’s actually cluttered,
smallish, with small windows, and he finds himself working mostly by
strip-light. PitScape, the painting
for which he won first prize, in the Contemporary British Painting Prize, 2018,
is typical of his recent pictures, which all seem to be about emanation, light
radiating from a certain point, not quite the centre. There are three of these
paintings in the CBPP exhibition. In PitScape
and Heartland the glow comes from the
lower centre, and in Darklingthrush Wood
2, the origin is a zone in the upper half over to the right.
The paintings prioritise light and transparency,
which sounds airy, and at the same time they have an unavoidably opposite
character as objects. Their buildup of physically substantial paint, resulting
in surfaces that glow but are also crusty and gnarly, is a meaning in itself.
It tells you about his particular way of painting, as a process of finding or
uncovering. Unearthing, digging up, revealing a rhythmic unity via an approach
of bit-by-bit stumbling – it’s an interesting idea. It implies that ideas as
such might be overrated.
He says of the imagined reality each painting offers
that it is “contained within the paintings’ own internal logic.” They take a
long time to finish and he typically has several on the go at once. There can
be long gaps between sessions on a particular work. Sometimes he needs to stop
caring about or being attached to what he already has. The end result in any
one case tends to be an accumulation of several paintings.
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In PitScape an inner frame can be made out. It has been painted-over
at certain points. Some marks in one session in a certain loose structure, over
that submerged frame, were added-to in other sessions. These areas built up
after many sessions into their own independent structures, related to but
separate from everything else. Microworlds. A patterning that visually talks
both to the main area of the painting and to its outer edge, and to itself.
The paintings share a sense of crude things: marks,
shapes, contrasts of light and dark, that somehow find a way of bouncing around
that makes visual sense. We see the world as subjects of it and as somehow
outside it looking in: in the special way his paintings have of gradually
coming into being he seems to be saying something about that. He offers
atmosphere; memories of a place someone has known. Believable not because
there’s proof we as viewers can consult. But because, even if there is no scene
or view, the balance of elements in the paintings has a feeling of reality.
Each of the three paintings has something in it
suggesting or resembling a visual property both the others have to some degree.
The paintings feed off each other while also looking quite obviously different.
A red one, a green one, and one with black. Next to Heartlands, which seems all red, Darklingthrush Wood 2 is all green. Then when you’re “in” the
latter it is clearly all blue atmosphere, and innumerable variations of yellow
leading to green. It is not “all” anything but a web of differences. And Heartlands when you are in it is deep
crimson grading into all sorts of differences: into black, into dusky pink,
bright pink, and light green. Light cascades in Darklingthrush Wood 2, from an area around a shape like a knot in a
tree or an opening in a human body. It rises in Heartlands, pushing out in the middle so the glow and space are
both at maximum intensity there.
PitScape has
black seaweed bladder shapes against light. Towards the bottom of the painting
is the tentative beginnings of the grid that Heartlands has with fullon strength. The scape could be sea or
land. A pond, a swamp, a distant place, a jungle, the woods outside the door.
One zone is a ghostly drained white. It has a band of black below with a curved
edge. And above the white, which is really short strokes of muted dirty blue,
is a stinging yellow-green, which holds within it tangles, fronds and pods.
A complication of the paintings is the weird way
wooden frames are made pictorial. They are made to seem almost organic as much
as sawn-up and nailed. In Heartlands
the painted broken grid structure, is answered by a grid of frames, with
surfaces glazed in the same way transparent effects in the painting itself are
achieved by glazing. In a zany logic painted wood cuts into painted transparencies
denoting a “wood.”
Heartlands
is like looking into gaps between boughs and leaves. It has a lattice or
trellis structure, not streamlined but clearly recurring everywhere. Your
perceptions are played with in relation to it. The painting might seem at first
to have a geometric grid below and formless loose open marks above. These are
actually a continuation of the grid, however, not a departure. Although they’re
that, too. Contrasts and similarities, variation and repetition: this
opposition is a principle of design where something being slightly different to
something else causes you to perceive the whole thing in a heightened way.
Design in paintings doesn’t mean rules that must be obeyed for the painting to
be good. A painting can be good by any route whatsoever.
It just means seeing. We see the world in a certain
way, by virtue of our humanity. Design is a condensing and compression, an
idealization, and intensification, of that seeing.
Heartlands
can seem to be one thing below and another above. With both things actually
joining and continuing to make one thing everywhere. Crimson and black
side-to-side and up-and-down blunt strokes, countered by a cloud or swarm of
loose, open, lightly done, thin, curving strokes of yellow. They jointly make
up a shimmer.
This is the structure which reflections in a metal
and glass skyscraper have, as well as views under water in the sea when it’s
clear and there’s bright light above. And the same structure mottled darkness
coming through a dramatic sunset has. In all those cases an optical effect has
no particular substance or physical underpinning. There are no objects that can
be seen somehow coming together to produce the shimmer.
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But Heartlands
is pleasurable precisely because of the presence of them. Obdurate stuff –
grungy bluntness – is caused to transform in the eye into airy depths.
Is a painter a designer? They might be. But in his
case a design is not conceived and then executed. It is arrived at by trial and
error, making and unmaking. Nothing in the end is like what there was at the
start. What was it, then, to begin with? Only a feeling about what a painting
could be ultimately, and how the presence it could have could be produced by
how it was made. The actual stuff at the beginning, the marks on the canvas,
were only that: a few contrasting marks. Something to work with. And
accompanied by a certain amount of self-consciousness. Will a mark made on Day
1 still be seen as a remnant at least in a year’s time? If a set of tonal
contrasts looks immediately lively can’t it be accepted and preserved even if
it came easy? Should you avoid what comes easy? Repeated worries.
He went to art school in Norwich,
then the Royal College of Art, and he tried some neat ideas when ideas were in,
and then evolved the way of working he still pursues. He is a smart guy and has
always been interested in what goes on in painting, what is accepted as the
right thing to do by the institutions, the market, the popular audience. “I
think my work probably does fit in, if that is the right term, with a general
renewed interest in, or a renaissance, for want of a better way of putting it,
of modernist ideas. Particularly the modernist belief that a painting can have
an unashamed integrity.” He finds himself often thinking about and looking at
paintings done a hundred years ago, by Picasso and Braque, where a new kind of
folded space was jointly investigated. As the beginnings of modernism, it could
be seen as old fashioned. He sees it on the contrary business. Matthew Collings, January 2019
