death lurking beneath the paint, the phrase

As much as I've written about what becomes alive in art, it was death that made a surprising connection for me recently. A connection between two artists, who I deeply admire, but also between their very different forms of making art in a time where the dead and the living couldn't always be clearly told apart. It begs the question: how do we put death on a canvas, between the lines?

The Scottish painter Joan Eardley and the Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy offer some answers.

I have been in awe of Joan Eardley (1921-1963) for a long time. Her bold wind-swept coastal landscapes and austere portraits of children in Townhead in Glasgow are famous, and once again on display in a stunning exhibition at Modern II in Edinburgh at the moment. More than her paintings themselves, I'm fond of how she painted. Taking her little motorbike to the coast, as soon as a storm approached. Tying her easel and canvas to stones and rocks, and letting herself and her paints be blown about in the wind. You can see grit, blades of grass and sea salt mixed into the paintings, and it gives me shivers to stand so close to these elements that were flying around Eardley 80 years ago. In photographs by her lover Audrey Walker, you can see that elemental energy in her face, her posture. No storm could seem to throw this woman.

In her personality, Fleur Jaeggy couldn't be more different. The Swiss, Italian-speaking/writing author, 85 now, adorned with most Italian literary prizes, lives quietly and reclusively in Rome. She is a delicate person, graceful, with a mysticism about her that speaks of a profound intellectual rumination about the world, or so tells us Dylan Byron who interviewed her in 2021 for the New Yorker. I've recently read her book "Sweet Days of Discipline" that takes us to a girls boarding school in the Swiss mountains and the smouldering desire of the protagonist; and Jaeggy's newer part memoir, part narrative account "Die letzten Tage von Ingeborg" about her love for the monumental poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who died tragically in Rome in 1973. There is something in Jaeggy's sparse writing, full of longing while teetering on an eerie edge of despair, that wouldn't leave me. Death is an undisguised presence wherever Jaeggy takes us.

Two Children, Joan Eardley, 1963

But it wasn't until I visited the Joan Eardley exhibition that the affective qualities of the two works began to speak to each other.

Both artists intertwine the playfulness and carefreeness of children with the cold, hardened reality of post-war Europe, ridden by death and horror. Horrors that were ever-present in the collective memory, yet borne in silence. The way that this strained relation to the past is laid out over children is symptomatic for growing up in the presence of collective trauma. There is a detachment from the world, yet there are glimmers of joy that can't be helped. Or is it the other way round? It is the concurrency of both that makes life possible to move on, somehow.

And this concurrency is also what characterises the children in Joan Eardley's paintings and Fleur Jaeggy's narration of "Sweet Days of Discipline". When I looked at Eardley's paintings in the gallery, all I saw was death. And it instantly reminded me of the deadness inside Jaeggy's characters who feel something for each other but are restrained by a strange, self-inflicted sense of control.

Children and Chalked Wall, Joan Eardley, 1962.

Yet, the two artists do something very different. While Eardley makes the street urchin's humanity known, despite all the poverty and deprivation, Jaeggy withholds it. She dissects the girls' psychology with disturbing distance. Sheila Heti, for the New Yorker, puts it this way:

'... the strenuous precision of Jaeggy's work reveals an aesthetic resistance to the soul laid bare.'

In a previous post, I've written about revealing the soul of a being, even an object, in photography. And strangely, I've circled back there, even in a discussion on death. (Maybe not all that surprising.) I feel the soul is fully laid bare in Eardley's street children. She gives us what we couldn't see on the black and white photographs of that same time. The kids are joyful, and simultaneously strained by deathly demise. Their sunken eyes, the ashen skin. The dread of their time, post-war, poverty-ridden Glasgow is written all over their faces. But while we see it, I'm not necessarily sure that they do. It's also the vibrancy of Eardley that shines through them, her energy for life mirroring theirs.

Jaeggy never gives us that. Her characters seem children on the outside, but they're dead, already at the end of their lives on the inside. Longing, passion, desire have all grown utterly cold. 'Our minds are a series of graves in a wall', she writes. A girl lets herself 'be caressed like a corpse'. Flowers that the girls give to each other are 'Sick flowers. Grave flowers.' When they touch each other, their touch is 'so anatomical that the thought of flesh or sensuality eluded us.'

It would be scary if it wasn't held in the wise and authorative hands of Jaeggy. She tells us that that's just how it is. Everything is dead, so there is no need to be scared.

I so dearly wish I could have witnessed a conversation between the two women. I imagine a wonderful clash in thought, sentiment and character. For now, the two of them are meeting in my mind. Their works next to each other on my table. I love these dialogues between different authors and their forms of articulation, all the new endless lines of thoughts that can be spun.

To finish off, the immanence with which writing or painting can portray emotions, preserve them across time is incredible. The way that they can capture the torn spirit of a time for us to experience decades later is a gift to us. An important one that we should treasure.