Love school

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

‘Most of my work has an ongoing sense of the fragmented — a feeling of overload and lack of control,’ commented Séraphine Pick in 1999.1 Love school is a major painting from that year, produced while Pick was Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago. In this emotional maelstrom of a work, Pick’s swirling ‘fragments’ are drawn from a variety of sources, including the popular cultural images she clips from magazines (the big-eared chihuahua puppy has appeared in many of her paintings), details reworked from pre-Renaissance and contemporary naïve paintings, and objects and images recalled from her domestic environment.

Like many of Pick’s paintings of the past decade, Love school depicts a private, psychic space shaded by a vague air of menace. The drama unfolds on a background like an old blackboard on which the chalky outlines of half-erased figures remain. In the foreground, a male and a female figure lie together on a mattress supported by ghostly representations, reminiscent of ‘the sobriety of relief figures on the sides of funerary monuments’.2 The sleeping woman is straddled by an old-fashioned wooden school desk, out of which streams a cloud of tiny figures in various states of undress and transformation. While her naked partner opens one eye, a single homunculus exits his body — like a caesarean birth or a depiction of the soul leaving the body at the moment of death — stretching up its arms to be lifted into the wild dance of imaginary figures emanating from the woman. Like a contemporary version of Henry Fuseli’s The nightmare, 1781 (Detroit Institute of Arts), Love school shows not only the monsters of the subconscious but also its primitive, austere processes.

Pick frequently incorporated renditions of talismanic objects from her childhood (red boots, party dresses, paper-bag masks, iron bed-frames) in earlier works, leading her practice to be viewed misleadingly as autobiographical. While dreams and half-glimpsed memories suffuse Love school, its narrative is more indistinct, less specific. What Pick leaves out of her works is critical. Her erasures, blurs and revisions are compositional devices that leave space for the viewer’s narrative imagination — and for the activation of other memories. ‘You fill in the chaos of the process of memory through imagination,’ Pick commented.3 ‘Memories are by nature very cloudy and tremulous. Perhaps this is what makes them so inspiring.’4

Lara Strongman