| JOAN DAY biography |
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| The following account of Joan Day's life was written by Joan's granddaughter, Elizabeth Day. It was a Sunday and the Grantchester meadows stretched out like a green brushstroke. I was walking, with my then-boyfriend, to my grandmother's house. "She's an artist," I said. "She paints." When we arrived, our shoes dampened from the uncut grass, I took him straight into the studio. I slid back the thick double doors and a shaft of light hit us from the high chapel windows. He walked in and, without a word, stood in the middle of the room staring. Canvases hung from every corner, leaned in piles against the wall, or stood half-finished on easels. A wooden palette, dotted with globules of burnt sienna, lay on an upturned tea chest. There was a smell of linseed and sunlight. A ferocious swan in half-light, painted in purplish colours, stared at us from above. My boyfriend kept on looking through the corner of his eyes without a word. "What?" I asked, mystified by his impenetrable silence. "When you said your grandmother was an artist, I expected lots of pale watercolours," he replied. "And these are nothing like that." When my grandmother, Joan Day, lay dying of pneumonia in a grey hospital ward in January 2004, she remembered this incident. She was having difficulty breathing, but had taken off the oxygen mask in her familiar, determined manner. Holding my hand, she said, quietly: "I always remember him standing in the studio with that sideways glance." I was surprised that Joany still recalled the intimate details of that brief moment in time, but I should not have been. She was always an observer: a seer who prompted other people into new ways of seeing. Joan Day, as my boyfriend was quick to surmise, had never been one to live by other people's expectations. Born on 2nd June 1911, the third daughter of John and Elsa Loewenthal, she grew up in a large Victorian house off the Malone Road in Belfast. She attended Richmond Lodge School nearby but she was no ordinary Northern Irish schoolgirl. Her ancestry sweated exoticism from its pores. The Loewenthals were linen merchants from Hamburg who came to Belfast in the mid-19th century while her mother, Elsa Ikle, came from a family of French lace merchants and was descended from the Jewish Derenbergs. With such multiculturalism running through her veins, perhaps it was no surprise that Joan chose an unconventional life. She won a scholarship to study modern languages at Bedford College London, but turned it down. Instead she chose to train at Chelsea Polytechnic and the Westminster School of Art to become, not a nurse or a teacher or a modern linguist, but an artist. That was no mean feat for a young Northern Irish woman in the early 1930s. Her determination, however, knew no bounds. In 1937 she was already exhibiting alongside her contemporaries in the 'London Group'. The Group included artistic luminaries such as Mark Gertler (who taught her), Mervyn Peake, Graham Sutherland, Victor Pasmore and John Piper. A year later she won the commission for the Northern Ireland exhibit at the Empire Exhibition held in Glasgow. This involved painting a mural on the Standard Bank of South Africa Sports Pavilion - an uninspiring area of reinforced concrete. The work itself was a glorious blaze of art deco inspired energy and several surviving photographs show the mural in progress. They depict Joan in black and white grain, hanging precariously from a piece of scaffolding, paintbrush in hand and beaming, clad in workmanlike trousers belted at the waist. These photographs were printed in a number of prominent publications including The Daily Telegraph, The Illustrated London News and - a feat unrivalled by anyone else in the Day family past or present - in Tatler. She looked very happy and very young; attributes reflected in the fantastic kineticism of the mural itself. By 1940, she was exhibiting regularly alongside artists such as Otakar Gregor, Colin Middleton and Sidney Smith. Her paintings from this time - 'Carryduff Quarry', 'Mounted Police', 'Mourne Mountains' - were indicative of much of her early oil work. They were representational canvases, their themes dominated by the Northern Irish coastline, wartime and its effects on people, and industrial desolation. In one of these paintings, 'Lagan Canal' (1940), Joan introduced the first example of what was to become the most recurrent theme in all of her later work; a painted swan. That swan made another appearance in 1941 when Joan organised and hung a series of four exhibitions with the Joint Committee for Adult Education in Belfast at Queens' University. The object was "to keep music and the arts alive during war-time," and the advertised exhibition times were "9.30 to blackout." In between all this organising and hanging, Joan found the time to marry Tom Day, a University Demonstrator in Pathology at Cambridge University and, at the end of the war, they set up house at 86, Talbot Road in Highgate, North London. Joan did not lose her links with Northern Ireland entirely, however. In 1946, after the birth of her two children (Sarah born in 1942 and Thomas, born four years later), she completed a series of nursery school mural designs for the Northern Ireland Ministry of Education. Motherhood did not leave much time for professional commissions, although Joan carried on working throughout the next few years, often painting portraits of her own family that related to the earlier nursery school commission. There is a particularly striking portrait of her son and my father, Thomas, from this period. He sits, rosy-cheeked and sulky-mouthed, looking just beyond the artist's shoulder. He seems to be pondering something very important and the flesh between his brown eyes is crinkled slightly at the thought of it. Knowing my father, he was probably working out the aerodynamics of flight or how to build a clockwork radio. Joan manages to convey this static sense of deep thought contained in a little person wearing a bluey-green v-necked jumper, with an understated assurance and subtlety. It is a lovely picture. In 1950, the Days moved to Ilkley, in Yorkshire, where Joan quickly found an outlet for her talents by re-forming and chairing the Ilkley Art Club and teaching art classes throughout the subsequent two decades. The Yorkshire landscape, with its rugged monumentalism, encouraged Joan to experiment with more abstract forms. In a 1963 exhibition at the Manor House Art Gallery, Ilkley, she showed a series of abstracts based on microscopic forms of plant and animal cells and some further semi-abstract work based on the themes of bird and insect flight. In her seminal 'Yorkshire Abbey' series, painted in the early 1970s, Joan combined this semi-abstraction with glazing - using successive thin layers of colour to achieve a simultaneous sense of transparency and depth. The glazing technique also allowed her colour to achieve new levels of subtlety. It lent her work a solid, almost mystical, eeriness that one can never quite define. The 'Yorkshire Abbeys' (Fountains, Kirkstall, Jervaulx, Rievaulx and Bolton Abbey) were bought by St Hilda's College, Oxford, where they can be seen by appointment. With her work entering a new phase of creative technique, Joan moved to Grantchester in 1971 and found that her surroundings would have a lasting impact on her painting. In Grantchester, she continued to distill the essence of her environment into semi-abstract form. She returned to earlier themes of bird-flight with a succession of studies of swans moving through air, water and land. She also started incorporating mythological elements into her work, but always in relation to landscape forms - rocks, sky, earth, sea and cliff. The intersection of these elements is particularly noticeable in her study of Icarus from this early period. A young boy, drawn with angular whiteness, stands against the sun, his father bent down on one knee before him measuring a vast, moon-crescent, wing-span. The canvas, painted in reds, oranges and terracotta, reeks of arid heat while the large, static human shapes echo the scorched stone of the cliff-top. Here nature, geometry and mythology have harmonised. The result is balanced and contained but still manages to hint at the doomed outcome. While Icarus and his father are at one with their landscape - their bodies delineated in sturdy rock-like form - their attempt to defy nature jars with the rest of the canvas. The crescent wings seem too perfectly man-made, too flimsy, to become part of their surroundings. The figures' experimentation is not engaging with nature and that, the artist seems to be saying, will be their undoing. The same thing could never be said of the artist herself. Joan was passionate about nature and landscape - often preferring the company of her environment to the company of humans. She loved travel, particularly to Italy and France with her great friend Ann Finch, and would come back to the Grantchester studio teeming with new ideas. She once told me that the painting she was proudest of was a depiction of a thunderstorm in Florence: the Duomo caught in thunderclouds, the lightning spiked across a bruise-coloured sky and black shadowed birds circling above. Here, again, nature reigns supreme. In this work, the least interesting thing is the depiction of Florence. The man-made edifices are left deliberately pale and washed out so that we can concentrate on the most important thing - the vivid, angry sky above. This obsessive relationship with the natural world was highlighted again after an operation to remove Joan's cataracts. She declared herself delighted at the results because she was once again able to see how the fluff on a bird's throat sticks out when it sings. When, the night before she died, Joan was told that there was a blizzard raging outside Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, her response was simple. "I want to see the snow," she said, determined not to let pneumonia stand in the way of a visual experience. The importance of natural phenomena in her work meant that Joan was always deeply dismissive of any kind of art historical critique of her own life. I can see her point. It does sound needlessly pretentious to explain why a swan is a beautiful when it quite evidently is, painted or otherwise. But perhaps this is her work's greatest quality; that it does not seek to over-elaborate beauty, but instead tries to extract its core. A swan is beautiful, but Joan was able to paint it in a way that somehow explained its beauty. For this reason, Joan's paintings nearly always elicit a strong reaction in the viewer. "Being around Joany meant developing early on a sense that art should be something to which one reacted, preferably strongly, and it wasn't necessary to like what one saw just because someone else thought it was 'good'," says her grand-daughter Catherine Day. "She showed me the great enjoyment to be had from looking for patterns, the satisfaction to be got from the pleasing arrangement of things. How it is possible to see the true shape of something by looking at everything else but it. That actually doing painting and drawing, not just looking, helps to see the world from different perspectives, to deal with it. It is a way of thinking through problems, uncertainties, disconnecting for a bit while random black lines collect themselves into recognisable form. Perhaps looking at her paintings will get other people to do more of this sort thing. She would be pleased about that, even if she muttered a bit about the end result." The aesthetics of her canvas aside, Joan remains an artist of great historical interest. "I notice that, looking through all of her paintings and her drawings, she seemed to try out each movement of art in the 20th century" explains her youngest grand-daugher, Ruth Watkinson. "I thought it was very interesting to see an artist who had lived so long reflecting a century of artistic styles and emerging with her quite distinctive style of painting in glazes as a sort of a final amalgamation of her experience. The progression of her work, showing the wider development of art during such an important period of art history, and the honing down of her interest, is what makes her so special." What also made Joan Day special was that, through her art, she invited us to see more simply the beauty of things. She used to tell the pupils in her Grantchester art classes that "a painting must be about a single idea expressible in not more than three words." There are so many words that we could use to explain what Joan's paintings mean to us, but the most powerful descriptions remain the silent ones. For that reason, I exhort you to forget these mangled syllabic sentences and to "turn the page." By looking at this selection of paintings, you will be paying the most fitting tribute of all. (c) Elizabeth Day, 2004 |
