REVIEW: Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing by Janine Burke
Ann Skea
AUTHOR: Janine Burke
PUBLISHER: Allen & Unwin, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest,
NSW 2065, Australia (November 2009)
ISBN: 978 1 74175 9177 PRICE: A$55.00 (hardback) 432 pages
Reviewed by Ann Skea (a...@skea.com).
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"Creativity is place", says Janine Burke in the introduction to Source. And
that place, she believes, is the beginning and end of every artist's journey.
It is the childhood realm, "the original source of inspiration and identity".
For all but one of the artists and writers in this book, however, it was not
their birthplace but a found location in which they produced their major works.
As the chapter titles in Source indicate, Burke has chosen a wide and disparate
range of artists through which to explore this idea: 'Georgia O'Keeffe and the
Desert', 'Picasso's Provence', 'Karen Blixen's Homelands', 'Jackson Pollock on
Long Island', 'Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in Sussex', 'Ernest Hemingway in
Key West', 'Monet, Blanche Hoched� and Giverny' and 'Emily Kame Kngwarreye's
Utopia'. She outlines the creative lives of each of these men and women,
discusses their desires and disaffections, their marriages, passions, strengths
and weaknesses, and their work. She also visits the places in which they were
most creative and offers her own vision of what inspired them. Inevitably,
given the very unusual lives of all of her subjects, their stories involve
"mourning and regeneration", and "patterns of illness, alcoholism, syphilis,
breakdowns and suicide". But these are also stories of achievement and rebirth.
Source is an interesting book, not just because of the lives it documents but
also because of the similarities which Burke traces between these creative
lives. Sadly, the book cannot reproduce all the artistic work she discusses,
but there is a good range of full-colour plates which help to illustrate her
themes.
Of particular interest, is her account of the work of Blanche Hoched�, the
daughter of Alice Hoched� who became Monet's lover and, later, his wife.
Blanche was part of Monet's household almost constantly, from the time he first
took her family into his V�theuil home when they were declared bankrupt, until
his death at Giverny in 1926. As a teenager, Blanche decided to become an
artist and she began to work beside Monet, learning all that she could from
him. He, in turn, encouraged her and also painted her at work. Eventually, she
became his studio-assistant and, as well as exhibiting her own work
professionally, it is very likely that she helped Monet with his when he became
older and less active. There is some debate over whether she actually worked on
any of Monet's canvasses, but Burke makes a good case for her having done so,
and she deplores the fact that Blanche has been given little recognition for
the help and support which she certainly provided for Monet for much of his
creative life.
The last of Burke's subjects, the Australian Aboriginal artist, Emily Kame
Kngwarreye, is the least known to most people. Emily began to create batik art
work when she was sixty-six years old and she did not paint her first picture
until twelve years after that. Her first paintings immediately won critical
acclaim and in 1997 she was a chosen representative of Australia at the Venice
Biennale. Her work now hangs in major art galleries around the world. She died
in 1996.
Emily's painting grew from her kinship with the land of the Central Desert in
the Northern Territories of Australia. She was a tribal elder, guardian of a
particular Aboriginal food plant, and an important senior woman in her tribe.
Her place of inspiration was the desert land on which she lived, and Burke
visited this land as part of her research for Source. Faced with the reality of
Aboriginal life in a remote part of the Central Desert, she struggles to come
to terms with the "schismatic vision" of tribal people who produce "subtle and
sophisticated art", who are intimately connected to the land of which they are
the "spiritual custodians", and yet live in squalor and seemingly have "scant
regard for their environment".
Emily's Utopia (that is the name of the area where she lived and worked) is not
the Utopia we might imagine. Burke's initial impression is that she has
descended into "one of the circles of hell".She is shocked by the snotty-nosed
children, the desecrated houses, the rubbish and the plastic bags festooning
the desert; and she is angered by the unreproved cruelty that a young boy
inflicts on a dog. Yet, from this seeming neglect comes delicate art based on
tribal beliefs and stories. She recognizes her desire to impose her own
cultural standards and she tries to come to terms with her own lack of
understanding.
No such shock is produced by the creative utopias of Burke's other artists and
writers. She visits their houses with delight and describes them and the
landscape around them glowingly. Perhaps too glowingly at times. It is
interesting to compare her description of Jackson Pollock's studio at Springs
on Long Island with that of art historian Robert Hughes. Burke's visitor
stands, as she has done, in Pollock's paint spattered studio and "feels energy
rushing up from the floor, from the web of painted lines, so fast and intense
it seems she is lifted off the floor". Hughes, in his vast and impressive book
American Visions, describes the "shrine" of "Jack the Dripper" (a title he
borrowed from an early Time magazine feature on Pollock). He sees only the
"Miraculous brushes", the "Sanctified Shoes" and the "surplus drips of the
Master, the sacramental ichor" that went off the edges of his great works.
Nevertheless, Source is an interesting and absorbing book. The illustration are
beautiful, the photographs of her subjects are unusual, and Burke makes a very
pleasant, relaxed and informed companion and guide to the lives and work of her
chosen artists and writers.