One way of describing Emma Cameron's paintings could make them sound almost traditional: her main subject-matter is the human figure, nude or, more often, semi-nude, in physical motion and with expressive gestures. These figures occupy recognizable settings, landscapes, beaches with the sea behind; minor architectural features, like stairs or podia, provide support and articulation, a stage, for the humans. There are many academic painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whose work one could describe in similar terms.

What Emma shares with the best of them is her mastery of the human body. The académie, the drawing after the posed model, was the centre-piece of academic training, and like so many young aspiring academicians, Emma studied the model and drew nudes for three years at Central St. Martin's in London. In her case, and this could not be said of most of the real academicians of the past, this continuous study led to a remarkable understanding of human anatomy and movement, to such an extent that she no longer needs the model in front of her. She composes her figures in her mind, in her imagination, as moving and acting in a three-dimensional world.

However, while it is true to say that this mastery of the human figure is essential to her art, it would be entirely wrong to describe her works as traditional. They are emphatically modern, contemporary. They are neither about the classical notion of human beauty, nor are they traditional history or genre scenes. And yet they are narratives, they tell stories; and they do so in two distinct but interactive ways. One has to do with the creation, or perhaps it would be better to say, the emergence, of her figures; the other with her handling of the most basic means of picture-making, namely drawing and colouring. And as the human figures that inhabit Emma's pictures seem to grow out of the very process of painting, we should look at this process first.

There is a well-established dichotomy in western art, of drawing and painting, disegno and colorito, dessin and coloris. Sometimes they are seen in competition with each other, as when the Venetian colouring of Titian is held up against the Florentine drawing of Michelangelo. Yet generally speaking, the two are understood as complementary, so that drawing would define form, to which painting would then add colour, volume and texture. In Emma's pictures drawing and painting do not act to complement each other, they remain separate means. One could describe their nature as dialectic, and it is their interaction that plays out one kind of narrative. It is a narrative that develops out of Emma's working procedures. Again, these could be described as rooted in well-established practice. It was Leonardo who, around 1500, described a 'new aid to contemplation': 'And this is, if you look at any walls with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns...you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations. Or again you will be able to see various battles and figures darting about, strange-looking faces and costumes, and an endless number of things which you can distil into finely-rendered forms.' Elsewhere he comments on the artist's ability to see figures and forms in moving cloud-formations.

What Leonardo considered as a way of the artist practising his visual imagination, is for Emma Cameron an integral part of her working process. She would normally start by creating, on her canvas and in undefined patches of paint, the kind of stains and patterns that could give rise to Leonardo's image-forming in the mind. Perhaps Emma's procedure is not quite as haphazard as Leonardo's stains, patterns and clouds; she prefers to start with bluish or purple tones, using colour from the start as establishing an emotional key to the creative process. And I suspect that even before her imagination begins to give shape to specific forms, she already knows that certain patches will become ground for figures to stand on; others, lighter blue ones across the centre, will become the sea; dark ones above are likely to be transformed into clouds; and bright yellow and red in close proximity will be suggestive of fire. Faced with a motley array of largely unformed patches of colour, Emma's imagination will then pick out some more or less accidental shape that might suggest a figure or object, or it will envisage contrasts, setting light figures against dark ground or vice-versa.

What is important, and in this her working-procedure is entirely anti-traditional, is that she does not aim to bring together drawing and colour, form and ground, to work to the same end. The human form remains largely drawing, the ground remains largely paint. Even if we can, like Leonardo's imaginative artist, see the ground as landscape and setting, it still primarily remains paint and colour. Equally, while there is no doubt about the dominance of human figures, they still remain primarily drawing. And that is so even if, as is often the case, colour is used to give to the actors a limited degree of modelling, or is used literally to 'dress' them: where the human body may remain drawing, some minimal clothing may be painted over parts of it. The relationship of drawing to colouring remains fluid throughout: the drawing may pick out a shape pre-defined by the colours of the ground and develop it further. Conversely the paint may define parts of the drawn body. Yet neither ever fully engages the other in the traditional business of three-dimensional, spatial or bodily illusion.

It is in this that Emma's pictures differ from those of most modern painters of the human body. For Lucien Freud, for instance, to name one of the most famous figurative painters, paint or colour is almost always a means of evoking the sense of flesh, of the material surface of - often fleshy or meaty - bodies. In Emma's work we see the paint more as creating its own expressive colour harmonies that act as ground or environment and often play over and across the drawn figures; and we see the human actors more as outline drawings of figures in movement. Colour may sweep across the drawing, or the drawing may cut across the colour patterns. And yet the two are partners in creating the image, in a dramatic and sometimes difficult dialectic of the fundamental means of painting.

This, then, is one sense of pictorial narrative. The other emerges out of it. To the extent to which Emma's figures move and act in a recognizable setting, they suggest or evoke a sense of action, of an event. Yet the nature of this action or event remains mysterious, always more suggestive than explicit. This, perhaps, is due to two reasons: we have already seen how the figures, in a leonardesque fashion, result from the artist's imagination as it contemplates a given array of patchy colours and shapes. There is a twentieth-century version of Leonardo's experiment, practised as 'automatic painting or drawing' by the Surrealists. In this, some haphazard external stimuli can be used to help activate the artist's imagination at a deeper level, that of the subconscious.

If we apply this model to Emma's art, we may understand the emergence of drawn figures from a painted ground as more than just a play of forms. When she paints, she is in a heightened state of drive and creative energy; work starts only after long and concentrated contemplation, during which the artist cuts herself off from the outside world, eschews company and, helped perhaps by music, seeks to experience her own inner, spiritual self. The figures and shapes that project themselves in this process onto the canvas are profoundly expressive, they speak of extremely personal feelings and emotions, on the one hand of an exuberant sense of life, a 'joie de vivre', but on the other also of fears and phobias, of oppression and escape. This initial pouring-out of emotions and feelings is often followed by a period of stepping-back, of a more passive contemplation, and of taking control. Nude figures may now appear too frail and vulnerable and are half-dressed in paint for self-protection. Others want to be moved or turned.

The outcome is a pictorial narrative that digs deeply into the subconscious, into suppressed memories (or vaguely remembered ones). The relationships between the different participants of this narrative are not defined by logic or by a superficial sense of realism. There are abrupt changes of scale, threatening giants and small spiritual creatures or large portrait-like heads juxtaposed with small figures that act like a running commentary or like a visual speech-bubble; there are mystical beasts, human bodies with monstrous heads, clowns and jokers and circus performers; mocking imps; and there are reminiscences of Eastern and Egyptian myths and European fairy-tales. And these are all projections of the artist's inner self, of her subconscious, her personal life, of childhood recollections or impressions of recent events, all of it filtered, as Baudelaire might have said, through an artistic temperament.

At the heart of Emma Cameron's art is the paradox, and this is perhaps one of the most defining features of modern art, of a deeply private vision seeking to find an outer, an objective form in which it can communicate with the viewer. In this it is sometimes like the nature of dreams, and, like dreams, it largely evades clear articulation and understanding. Or it can be like poetry, evocative and spell-binding, haunting us and occupying our minds long after we have ceased reading or watching. For this to work we must not approach Emma's pictures rationally, seeking logical and clear statements; we must abandon ourselves to the image and its narratives, both that of its colour harmonies and contrasts and that of its human and mythical figures, in order to find within ourselves echoes, reverberations of similar emotional stirrings.

Thomas Puttfarken, Professor of Art History, University of Essex
29.3.2001

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