Interview

An interview with Amy Mechowski, commissioned by 163 Gallery, we discuss the themes and ideas behind the new paintings in my solo exhibition Snow Covers Ashes.

Amy: The series that you created especially for this exhibition has been likened to a collection of ‘film stills’ that allows the viewer to imagine their own ever-changing drama. Could you tell me more about the place of narrative in these paintings and how that narrative unfolds?

Janet: When I made this work, I was consciously trying to create a narrative and sense of drama, with key characters cropping up across the paintings. Sometimes the narrative only made sense to me in the finished work, but throughout I wanted to create a female narrative and paint women back into history.

This developed out of a series I did a couple of years ago about well-known artists visiting a brothel in Paris. I wanted to emphasise the females in this genre, positioning them alongside the patrons, giving them equal status. Some of the same characters appear in both, but for this series I made a conscious decision to move away from interiors and the heated world of the city. By depicting them in the altogether different context of a mountain scape, I wanted to gain a new point of view.

The grey and blue palette reflects a cooler narrative and is different to the previous work, which was full of hot reds, pinks, and fleshy colours. Blue is a distancing colour, which makes the drama feel more emotionally distant as well.

A: So the pictorial distance and cooler palette aligns with an emotional distance for you?

J: Yes, my response to reading about brothels was to paint scenes that used humour and anger. It was a knee-jerk response and raw. For this series, I use pictorial space and cooler colours as a means of conveying a more considered approach and understanding. There’s a lot of blue in this work, which I hadn’t used very much before.

A: The development of aerial perspective as a technique is so important in the history of art – when artists realise that distance changes the value and saturation of colour and they render mountain peaks in shades of blue. So, to have your own journey of discovery with the colour blue, specifically in the rendering of these mountain-scapes feels significant. You’ve even described them to me as a curtain or stage backdrop ‘in front of which the action can happen’…

J: I’ve been obsessed with the artist Alberto Giacometti as a character to paint and he spoke about it being an important part of his psyche that he was born and spent his childhood in Switzerland – in the shadow of mountains. Snow and mountains played a crucial part in his imagination and fantasies, so for me that became the perfect backdrop.

My own experience of mountain-scapes comes from a strong memory of visiting Snowdonia. I remember monumental shapes looming overhead and the horizon being cut off because I couldn’t see beyond the mountains. My references for these paintings weren’t drawings though, they were picture postcards I collected. I like working from small photographs. I wasn’t trying to be faithful to any particular image or place – the mountains became the motif that linked these paintings. I emphasised their horizontality and thought of them as amphitheatres.

A: That seems to relate back to the paintings’ theatrical quality and the performance of the characters within this mise-en-scène.

J: Returning to the idea of narrative and theatre, the characters aren’t really walking on and off scene – they’re very much posed within it. Like a tableau. They’re definitely telling a story – but it’s a paused moment in that story.

A: So, they’re caught in time – almost literally, in a frozen moment. Are the characters performing then? And if they are, are they performing for us?

J: The characters are performing, but they are motionless and inactive. They’re not in the middle of doing anything or going anywhere. The women are waiting; waiting for history to notice them; waiting for their role or their chance to participate in history. For me, this connects to time and how time feels like it’s stopped in these paintings but with the anticipation of future change. Two critical themes in this series are time and history.

A: You mentioned that when you were working on this series, time appeared to behave differently.

J: When I’m waiting, time does appear to behave differently. It’s slow and then suddenly speeds up. After weeks and weeks of a slower pace during lockdown, life suddenly began to speed up again as I started to get ready to go out and meet people and travel further.

A: It depends on what you’re waiting for.

J: Yes, and how you perceive it. For me, time moves so much more slowly when I’m on my own.

I’m thinking of a 2012 Austrian film, The Wall. A woman goes on holiday with some friends in a mountain cabin and when they go to the village to buy supplies, she’s left on her own. While they’re gone, something strange happens and an invisible barrier seals her off from the rest of human life, trapping her on this mountain top. The film is about how she copes with that. It’s a psychological barrier as well as a physical one and perhaps represents the invisible barriers in society that exist especially for women.

When you’re alone and there aren’t any distractions, time moves differently. That’s certainly true for me.

A: Do distractions make time move more quickly or more slowly?

J: It can go either way. Thomas Mann explored this in his novel from the 1920s, The Magic Mountain. It’s set in a sanatorium where a man goes to visit his cousin who is a patient. He goes just for a few days but ends up there for nearly a year. What stays with me is the imagery of the clear light and whiteness of the mountain and the way the main character experiences time. The idea that time moves more quickly when there’s nothing to impede it – I visualise it as an avalanche. Or the reverse. In the way I’m visualising it, it could be either, if you regard time as something fluid.

That said, I’m conveying a sense of time in these paintings, not through movement, but through stillness. There are several paintings where someone or something is trapped in ice or may be frozen, such as Sliver of Ice.

A: I wondered about Double Gaze and how it looks as though the same woman looking out at us is also trapped in a block of ice. Or Dissolve, in which two people have a vortex between them that resembles a glacier.

J: Double Gaze, is about being trapped, but it’s also about visibility. I am interested in the fact that barriers can dissolve and seemingly permanent situations can change – ice melts and disappears revealing what was hidden beneath.

There are parallels between figures sleeping beneath the ice and what is buried in our subconsciousness. I had been looking at a series of photographs by Roland Penrose of Lee Miller and friends who are pretending to be asleep for the camera. The painting Snowdrop references those photographs and more generally the Surrealist interest in dreams and sleep. When asleep, you’re like a bulb underground, saving energy before waking up. The title of the exhibition links to this belief that people and society do change. They can start again. Like the traces of a fire smoothed out by a fresh layer of snow. Everything can be reappraised.

Recently, I read Adrian Searle’s review of the Mixing It Up: Painting Today exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and there was a particular line that struck a chord: “everyone interrogates history differently, and anyone who decides to paint has already been colonised by history and attempts to reclaim space for themselves.” That really resonated with me, because I’m preoccupied with time and history, as are a lot of contemporary painters. It’s embedded in our discourse.

I’ve been thinking about artists from the past like Giacometti and reappraising them. I’m trying to reappraise them with a cooler head and think about their behaviour in the context of the time in which they were living. We mostly have a male version of history – how artists lived and worked. Annette and Alberto Giacometti are in these paintings, but I’m not sure how important it is for people to know it’s them. I don’t want this work to be too tied to individuals, but then again it may be a useful way in.

A: I recognised the same person’s face in several of the paintings – looking out in Home and Away, smoking in Old Rag, and with his arm around the shoulders of one of the women in Delicious Night – so it felt significant that it’s a recurring portrait of an individual who has a key role to play, even though I didn’t know who it was.

J: Having recurring characters adds to the suggestion of a narrative running through the series. They’re all based on real people. For instance, Annette, appears frequently – that’s her in Double Gaze. I want to emphasise her existence, by making her visible, by repositioning her in the narrative and literally centre stage in the painting. So, these are portraits of real people, but they are not completely about them as individuals, which is a conundrum I want to explore further in my work. These relationships are my starting point but it’s my interpretation of them, so it’s more about me.

A: Then they function as actors?

J: Yes, but they have to start off being based on real people. If I try to paint people that I’ve just made up, it doesn’t work. If they’re based on someone, they have more solidity and reality and I believe in them. I start off by looking at photographs and get to know their faces so well that I don’t need them as reference points anymore.

A: That takes me back to thinking about Double Gaze and Dissolve – I look at them differently when I know that they’re inspired by Giacometti’s wife.

J: Those are the last two I did in the series. They came late and were done back in the studio when lockdown ended, but by that stage I wasn’t basing the figures on just one person – so they’re partly based on Annette and partly on others. For instance, in The Same Trembling, there was a shift in who I was representing and the women I had in mind became amalgamated into one.

A: It reminds me of something you mentioned earlier about dreams. And how, when you’re dreaming, you can start out dreaming about someone you know. Then, at some stage in the dream that isn’t really decipherable, that person isn’t that person anymore. They’ve morphed into someone completely different. In the context of the dream, you aren’t shocked by one person suddenly becoming someone else. It’s seamless. Then you wake up and it all feels strange and enigmatic.

J: I think that must be something universal in dreams – that characters morph into each other and swap round. In The Same Trembling, the three women look like they might be the same woman. To challenge perceptions, I merged their identities, dressing them alike and giving them the same colour hair. I’d been looking at the artist Georg Baselitz and how he reverses perceptions, by painting figures upside down. This is a different sort of reversal in that they’re male poses and male clothes but based on female artists. I wanted to create a tension that isn’t necessarily easy to unravel.

A: It feels like there’s a readiness about these women. With sleeves rolled up, arms crossed or by their side, as if they’re standing their ground.

J: Yes, I think the women are standing their ground – they’re ready for a more female oriented art world. I’ve tried to convey in this series of paintings my aspirations for change. Each scene depicts a moment in which I hope there is an inherent suggestion of a possible shift in perceptions around time and history. In The Same Trembling the sheet of ice has melted, the women are present and visible, staking their claim to a place in the world.

These paintings are about my re-appropriation of art genres; using the symbolism of ice, snow and thawing to convey that change has and will continue to happen.

In a way, they are my own personal response to living in the Anthropocene epoch.