Mischief and Grace
by Wayne Martin
Dr Wayne Martin is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex.
He is author of Idealism and Objectivity, and Theories of Judgment: Psychology,
Logic, Phenomenology; he is General Editor of Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Philosophy. His work can be found online at http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~wmartin.
Emma Cameron's new exhibition, Mischief and Grace, opens February 3rd
at the Chappel Galleries in North Essex. Mischief is certainly to be found
there aplenty. Here is a kneeling woman, inscribing an elaborate ink pattern
on a very patient boar. A second woman smirks at an enormous stork while
proudly displaying an egg. A third juggles an unlikely pair of enormous
pastries in the midst of a swirl of light. In one of her many moods, Emma
Cameron is a painter who laughs. But Cameron's laughter is paired with
something else set alongside or beneath or against it. Even with all the
playfulness of the work, the exhibition explores this tension quite systematically.
Call that other thing Grace, perhaps, if we can still recall what that
old-fashioned word means. "Grace" is one of those terms that
has largely dropped out of our working moral and aesthetic vocabulary,
almost certainly to our disadvantage. Like "chivalrous" and
"constant" and "noble," it is a word that seems to
belong to a lost moral age. But if Grace is indeed what Cameron is showing
us, then Grace turns out to be something quite complex, distinctively
human, and very much worth recalling and sustaining.
Grace, it used to be said, is beauty in form. And it has long been identified
as a value that distinctively interpenetrates the ethical and aesthetic
domains. Schiller's famous essay, "On Grace and Dignity", praised
Grace in the moral vocabulary of its day, describing it as the ideal coincidence
of inclination and duty. Against a long tradition of moralism which defined
the ethical against inclination, Schiller found the highest forms of ethical
character in the mutual saturation of the two. For Schiller the figure
of Grace is not the character who struggles against inclination to do
the right thing, but rather the one whose inclinations are so configured
as to elicit the right behavior without being commanded, without experiencing
the moral law as an imperative at all. But Schiller's account can make
Grace seem too easy - at least for those lucky enough to be possessed
of it. And his accounting has distorted what is left of our everyday understanding
of the term, as reflected in the too-ready way in which we use the word
"effortless" to modify "Grace." The Grace which Cameron
portrays is neither easy nor effortless. It is fragile and fleeting, often
born of trial or struggle. This struggle, however, is not the one that
Schiller hoped to avoid: the moral struggle required to do the right thing.
Cameron's work suggests rather that Grace is to be found in the recovery
of balance and orientation in a disorienting, off-balance world.
Balance is a major theme in Cameron's recent work. Painting after painting
show figures off-balance - caught in unsustainable poses or in situations
which cannot themselves be sustained. A dog stands on hind legs; a woman
reads a message while sitting only half-astride a horse or goat; a figure
recoils suddenly from a barking dog; a runner leans forward at an angle
that must surely lead to a fall. Apparently Cameron is able to draw the
human form from memory, conjuring her figures from palette and imagination
without aid of a model. This in itself is a remarkable talent; it is also
a lucky thing, since no model could possibly survive the poses she would
require of them! But the more remarkable fact is that Cameron's characters
don't lose their balance in their off-kilter poses. Indeed Cameron conjures
a vision of the human figure and of human being as a locus of balance,
an achievement of balance, even in a swirling and often chaotic world.
This, I suppose, is the distinctive task and fate of the upright mammal:
the achievement and sustaining of an unlikely balance.
So how do we accomplish this impossible feat? How can we keep balance
and orientation, even in what Cameron calls Turbulent Times? There is
no one answer in these works. What the paintings offer instead is a series
of silent vignettes, illustrations projecting their own stories, in which
this distinctively human balancing act is accomplished. In Red Flower
a male figure leans to his right on one foot while a dog looks away to
his left. His pose is sustainable because of his motion: he is running,
flower in hand, balance maintained in his gait. Tamer presents a scene
of seemingly unsustainable tension in the confrontation of a large wild
cat, ears pinned back in the pose of the hunt, facing off against a large
but vulnerable ox. Yet between the two stands a woman in a slight frock,
feet firmly planted, gaze forward, holding these two opposed energies
in balance. In yet another piece, a sense of place is shown to be crucial
to human balance and orientation. In this case the figure is seated alongside
a dog, itself lying thoroughly at ease: ears relaxed, chin resting on
a paw. The male figure here has found a repose of utter stability - and
an ease which Cameron conveys in every detail of his comportment: hands,
arms, shoulders, facial expression; one can almost feel through his skin
to the muscles at ease within. The piece is called My Place, but the title
is redundant; this is a calm balance one can only encounter at home. So
whether by place or through motion or in sheer strength of presence, Cameron's
Grace is a distinctive and varied human achievement.
But one still wants to know - at least I want to know - how such Graceful
balance is to be achieved and maintained, and how it may be recovered
when lost, particularly amid the intensely hued turbulence that provides
the background for almost all of these paintings and so much of human
life. There are clues about this on Cameron's canvases, but they are hard
to unravel. Animals have some kind of leading role in Cameron's story
and many of the works in the exhibition combine human and animal forms.
In some cases the animals have a recognizable symbolic place: the conquests
of Zeus are explored here, the aforementioned stork, and what seems to
be a raven in outline. Is it significant that the male figure at home
is accompanied by a lamb as well as his dog? And there are angels in Cameron's
world, and fairies as well, and all manner of partly other-worldly beings.
As in Cranach's allegories, they seem to have a taste for extravagant
hats; their presence is announced with a blast of white paint. What is
their role? As a rule they appear as kindly and beneficent: protecting
in Daughter, prompting in The Next Thing, comforting a cat in Voyager.
Is Grace a kind of gift bestowed by these creatures? Perhaps. But angels
and fairies and even birds have wings. If it is they who bestow Grace,
it is we terrestrial bipeds who find ourselves constitutionally in need
of it.
When William Blake published his Songs of Innocence and Experience he
gave them a subtitle: "Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human
Soul." Mischief and Grace are not so much states of our soul as they
are comportments of our bodies, ways of being situated in our world. But
there is nonetheless much in common between Blake's painterly project
and Cameron's. Both combine painting and drawing in a distinctive and
powerful synthesis: human figures drawn in line, set on a colourful and
often turbulent painted background. In this way the very medium of their
painterly enterprise underlines the way in which human existence is both
part of and set aside from the context in which it unfolds. Both use colour
to convey the intensity of human emotional and moral existence. Both combine
animals and humans and spirits in a dreamlike world. Both find human nature,
human being, in a metaphysical context that is not fully scrutable. Both
plumb despair yet sustain hope. In the end perhaps the deepest difference
between them is that Blake provides text for his figures; Cameron's are
invariably silent, leaving the poetry for us.
Wayne Martin
December 2006