Category: art

This life!

Posted on by Martin Newman

In a tower block in Redfern I take the lift up 10 floors to Theresa’s parents’ flat, where she is stoically navigating her wheelchair around a tight cluster of chairs, tables and couches.

A white cat darts about and her son Sparrow is watching YouTube videos on a laptop. An assistant, Nick, sits off to the side looking at his phone while mum Lorraine hustles up tea and coffee.

Amidst this bustle artist Theresa stops, unable to go forward or back. She sits there, her legs strapped together, a red beret on her head (her hair recently shorn for a performance). She is beautiful, lean and intense.

Despite, or perhaps because of, her disabilities she’s got a strength.

“I have to be strong,” she says. “I have to be a warrior.”

Her speech, affected by her condition, is laboured and I lean in to focus on her words, piecing together unfamiliar sequences of sounds.

“Dealing with other people’s reactions to my world is really interesting. I care about being real. We need to learn whatever we can.”

At 17, Theresa Byrnes was diagnosed with Friedreich’s ataxia, a terminal disease that attacks the nervous system, slowly debilitating sufferers, rendering them immobile, sending them deaf and blind in some cases and dramatically shortening their life.

Having an increasingly difficult existence seems to have only spurred her on more. Theresa has lived an extraordinary life, something she won’t ever admit to. But it’s true.

In her memoir, published at the ripe old age of 30, she wrote: “Courage has nothing to do with the limits of the body but everything to do with the limits of the mind.”

That was 18 years ago. By then she was already in a wheelchair, had been named Young Australian of the Year and exhibited in several shows. Her photo by Greg Weight is in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

In Sydney she had family around her, friends, gallerists, security. But for her, it was too comfortable.

So, in 2000, she surprised many by packing up and moving to New York. She surprised more people by not hurrying back, daunted by the scale of what she had attempted.

Instead she has lived there since and her quick visit to her parents in Redfern is just a stop in between a performance for Maruku Arts in the Central Desert and an exhibition at Sydney’s Janet Clayton Gallery.

She is a mum now – a single mum. Another challenge. But she’s up to it. Son Sparrow, three, a happy, alert child, is her greatest work. She took him to Uluru this past week to acquaint him with the “centre of the earth”.

“I want Sparrow to realise his connection with the earth,” she opines. “But in the end I cannot promise him anything at all.”

In New York her condition has continued to deteriorate and she now requires regular assistance to carry out basic functions.

But her dream of pursuing her career as an artist in New York has never dimmed.

“I was always a misfit, and I found myself when I arrived in New York City,” she says. “Australia made me who I am – rooted in the rich, red earth and the crashing surf – but I have no time to reminisce. I am the amalgamation of all of it.

“The America I know is a place of creative freedom where you can leave your mark and no one will judge or ridicule you. You can be an outsider, a misfit and blossom in a garden of unknowns and who-cares.”

And there is nothing safe about Theresa’s art. She is one of the most visceral, edgy performance artists in the city, confronting her audience with uncomfortable visions, and putting her whole body into her art, from being doused in diesel or ink to crawling through mud along a canvas.

It seems it’s disturbing to everyone but Theresa, who is both unselfconscious and unstoppable.

“I am not afraid to get dirty. I am not afraid of the cold or to hack my hair off; I have a high discomfort tolerance and am not captive to expectations of normalcy,” she explains.

“I accept the limited way my body moves. No one else is wired to move the way I do. Challenge is life and life demands struggle. I want to explore what it is to be human.”

When Theresa first moved to New York she lived in a Lower East Side store front for 13 years.

“I lived alone. My first boyfriend in NYC was an activist priest. We curated events together.

“He broke my heart, but the Lower East Side had totally won mine.

“I put in a pole, ceiling to floor, to help me get out of bed, grab rails by the toilet and a Perspex shelf in my shower. I would pull myself in and out of the shower in lotus. I found a way around my changing mobility to keep independent.”

She revelled in her independence, spending hours writing and planning new performances, organising events, and writing about her work – between making it.

“Three times a week I would go to the gym and pump iron,” she says. “No money for fancy gyms or a trainer, I joined City Gym for $60 per year. I worked out hard and didn’t give a shit how tragic I may look.

“I was aware that what may seem really hard now may soon be impossible – like sliding from chair to floor to stretch and then struggling to get back. I cannot do that alone now.

“One day in 2009 I realised I couldn’t dress, or get ready alone anymore. I took 30 minutes to put my shoes on. I did not want to scald my thighs by dropping a hot coffee pot on my lap again.

“It took me four hours just to get to the door.

“Always with tears of frustration to get through the mundane, I would mop my floor by hand with a soapy towel, leaning over in my wheelchair, wiping, inching the wheels back, whipping.”

But when she did get out into the community it energised her.

“My struggle got my blood pumping,” she says. “It was a good workout, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

“I got an aide for the morning to help me (in Australia you call them carers). I fast realised I was not losing freedom, just understanding it more fully.”

Theresa’s second New York gallery was tellingly named Suffer. It opened in 2010 on East 9th Street.

At an opening of her paintings she met Sparrow’s father. “He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my life,” she says.

“I had to avert my eyes. We became friends, then, a year later, committed lovers.”

Louis, a direct descendant of the heavyweight boxer Joe Louis, was a model and actor. They had been seeing each other for a bit over a year when Theresa became pregnant.

“I realised that if I went through with the pregnancy I would perhaps never have precious alone time again,” she says. “The end of my Bohemian dream.

“I could just barely look after myself and Louis was afraid to be a father. I understood his concerns but it was no longer about me or us.”

Five months after Sparrow was born Louis was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, which had spread to his brain.

Before his death the couple had time to baptise Sparrow under the Williamsburg Bridge by the East River.

“I fought hard through all the stress to keep my studio/gallery,” Theresa says.

“I would paint while Sparrow breastfed or slept on my lap. He has done three performances with me, painted with me.

“In my transition into motherhood I lost some physical independence, my ability to stand, my voice now slurs at times beyond being understood.”

Today Theresa and Sparrow live in a rent-controlled two-bedder in Manhattan’s East Village, a block from her current gallery TBG.

When I first met her at a book launch in London 17 years ago she told me she may be dead by now. The life expectancy for sufferers of Friedreich’s ataxia is about 50. At 48 that’s uncomfortably close, but for Theresa uncomfortable is the norm.

“I am halfway through writing my second book,” she says. “I give myself two years. I will finish it at 50. I look forward to the privilege of being an old wise woman.

“Maybe I can teach something about freedom, how to harness the power of a mistake.”

* Theresa Byrnes’ Mud Bird is showing at Janet Clayton Gallery, 406 Oxford Street, Paddington, Sydney.

September 1-4. janetclaytongallery.com.au

(Originally published in The Daily Telegraph. Pic of Theresa and Sparrow by Rainer Hosch)

Poor portrait of Kate Middleton achieves the impossible

Posted on by Martin Newman

She’s the most vibrant, photogenic woman in Britain, winning over even the most cynical observers with her sense of style, her broad, open smile and common touch.

So artist Paul Emsley has managed quite a feat making the future Queen consort look like a dowdy 45-year-old.

This horrible, soft-lens style painting – which the Duchess emerges from in an almost ghostly way – robs her of any of the sparkle and life she is loved for.

It is like an ‘In Memoriam’ picture etched onto the front of a dark marble gravestone or one of those paintings on black velvet that co-habitate the hallways of everyone’s less discerning grandmother.

Her mouth appears old and pursed and – at odds with what we know about Kate – her eyes portray a kind of wise knowingness that comes with age.

Instead of fashionable, the loosely tied scarf on Kate’s dress looks like a maven’s noose extracted from a moth-balled tea chest.

For £20 and 15 minutes of your time you can get roughly the same treatment from one of the footpath artists that ply their trade off Piccadilly Circus.

Royal portraiture is always hit and miss. For every memorable painting of the Queen there have been 10 others that were erased from our minds for their mediocrity.

Sadly Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge’s first royal portrait falls into the latter category.

It might have been a marvellous picture of a graceful matriarch entering middle-age, but of course Kate isn’t. She’s a young woman, 31 years old and in full bloom (and now, post-sitting for her portrait with a baby in her belly).

Emsley, 65, is a respected and decorated portrait painter, who won the £25,000 BP Portrait Award six years ago with his eery, photo realistic depiction of Michael Simpson.

He has won a host of other prizes for painting and drawing, so has nothing to prove in terms of his prowess. But this, his biggest commission must rank as an abject disappointment.

(Originally published in The Daily Mirror)

One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings

Posted on by Martin Newman

When artist Stephen Taylor’s mother and father and an ex love all died within a year of each other, his own life began to unravel.

Having spent years studying and teaching painting, quietly honing his craft, he suddenly crashed emotionally and psychologically, under the burden of his misfortune, unsure of his place in the world.

But for Taylor the answer to this identity crisis would take time and devotion. Without fully comprehending what he was doing the artist, now in his 40s, immersed himself in his work and developed an obsession with a single tree – one that would take over his life and define him.

He cast himself into the wild, shunned company, and for three years set up his easel every day in a farmer’s field in East Anglia. Taylor assembled himself and his materials in front of a magnificent 250-year-old oak tree – one that he had picked out after examining numerous others in the area and decided it was ‘the one’.

Day after day he trudged through the wheat and rape, in all weathers and at different times of the day and night to paint the tree.

He painted it in detail and in abstract, he painted it so it filled his canvas, and he painted it as a distant dot on the horizon. Among the branches of the great tree he documented the inhabitants: crows, beetles, larks and lichen.

He sat, he lay on the ground, he stood on a ladder. His perspective, moreover, changed with the seasons, the one constant being the farmer and his tractor – who would appear in the distance occasionally, going about their enmeshed business with not so much as a wave or a snort of acknowledgement.

The philosopher Alain de Botton mentions Taylor in his book The Pleasures and Sorrow of Work, alluding to the tragedies which led him to this point and how the business of work had somehow helped him in a stoic, meditative way.

There have been many artists and writers who have dealt with their own sense of personal despair, their sense of failure or perhaps just the fear of failure, by walking alone into a field and lying down to die with a gun or a razor in their hand.

But the story of Taylor, his box of paints and the beat-up old Citroen he would coax through the English countryside each day to his field, bears little correlation to Vincent Van Gogh or Ernest Hemingway.

His is a story that is uplifting in its universal ethos that you do what you know, and you make all that you can of it.

Now, five years after Taylor packed up his easel and left the field for the last time, a book has been published of 50 of his paintings from that time.

Entitled simply Oak, it is itself a workmen like volume, full of analysis of sunlight and shadow, of gradients of paint and how the eye plays tricks on the mind. It is the diary of an artisan, obsessive in its chronicling of technique and the thought processes that led to the final image.

But on personal details it is scant, and on the subject of the tragedies he suffered – which had brought him to the field in the first place – he devotes just five lines in the entire book.

This is the measure of the man, rather than the artist. He does not seek out the limelight, which is why he has never spent much time in it. Nor does he seek some material advantage in mixing his personal life with his craft as a painter. That is too much a foreign concept to him.

What little we know of Taylor has been wheedled out of him by people more astute in the selling of paintings and books, and yet even that is slight and no more than a footnote to a great canvas.

I spoke to Taylor for just over an hour on the phone one day recently to fill in some of the blanks.

He had been living in Colchester at the time of his ‘mid-life crisis’ and when the paintings were made between 2003 and 2006, but now resides in Ely in Cambridgeshire.

Immediately prior to this Taylor’s mother Lillian, 70, died of a brain tumour and his father Jack suffered a stroke not long after, succumbing finally to a heart attack within the year, at the age of 76. In between Taylor’s former girlfriend, the woman he describes as being ‘the closest woman to me after my mother’, also died of a brain tumour. It’s still a sensitive point and he will say no more about her.

Taylor told me: “Father’s death was the last straw. You lose your sense of identity when you lose friends and family and I suddenly didn’t know who I was. I think it helps you to work out who you are if you know where you are, and I think that’s what was going on.

“I walked into this field one day and just sat down and started to paint. I painted the tree from every angle, in oils and watercolours, I drew it and photographed it. I did start to wonder why I felt it so easy to work in this field on my own for such a long period of time. I think I was trying to feel at home.

“I was trying to connect with something much bigger than me and all my concerns.”

Taylor, who studied at Leeds, Essex and Yale universities, said the process was cathartic and the tree was a link to pictures he grew up with in his family home in Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands.

His grandfather, a brewery worker, painted in his spare time, and a picture of an oak tree in a field hung prominently in Taylor’s boyhood home, alongside watercolours of birds painted by his father, a postman.

But his career as an artist had taken him around the world and, for prolonged periods, away from his family.

He added: “My family had been there for 100 years and when that was all finished I was left wondering ‘what am I going to do with my life?’ I went through a mid-life crisis brought about by the deaths of important people in my life that I was coping with.

“At the time I started painting the tree I didn’t think about why I was doing it, but looking back now I think I needed a sense of place. I had lost everything that anchored me. By taking this one little area of England and feeding off it spiritually I found some redemption. I got to know the history of the place and its links to John Constable. I built up this little world that seemed to confirm who I was.”

Taylor was aware, too, of the oak’s powerful symbolism, its solidity and defiance of time and change, adding: “The oak has a feeling of permanence.

“You find it crops up a lot in the paintings of Constable, in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and also in War and Peace, where it takes on a symbolic meaning – the oak tree carries on and that helps Andre make sense of all the loss he’s had.

“And the paintings themselves are very much like ones in my family, ones my grandfather did. Painting was how we knew who we were.”

The time spent in the field also expanded his artistic range.

“I began to work on ways that would help me paint nature in a fresh way and to help me make visual contact with this new place,” he wrote in the book.

“By being in the field so often and by working so carefully in colours belonging to particular conditions, I had developed an understanding of the limitless of natural colour.”

Since the oak, Taylor has spent time in the Rheidol Valley in Wales where he took on a new project, determined to properly understand and depict falling water.

Now his attention has turned to the great expanse of clear sky over the rush-covered fens.

He speaks cheerily of his work and his life. He is keen to discuss theory, both traditional and that which is technologically innovative, and our conversation wanders over Cezanne and Pissaro, Constable and Warhol, colour grids and Adobe Photoshop.

“I embraced as much science as I could. I spoke to scientist friends and found ways to use science to help me see more clearly,” he said.

“You can define a field of colour using photoshop, pick out one colour and see where it falls across a landscape. That’s an amazing tool to analyse how light appears to the viewer.

“I think it’s important to embrace new technology where it helps our understanding of how we see objects and how we see them interact with other objects in a landscape.”

Painting the oak hasn’t given him all the answers though, it hasn’t eradicated problems from his life. He speaks ruefully, almost apologetically, about a rejected recent marriage proposal and how his unrequited love interest is happily ensconced in matrimony with another.

Such is life!

He is guarded about his age, because he feels artists, like every other profession, get pigeon-holed and discriminated against if they have not ‘made it’ within a decreed timetable for success.

But he is grounded once more and happy within his own skin.

He ended our conversation as breezily as it began, and on a positive note about reconnecting with his past and finding himself.

“What I got from my dad,” he said, “was how nice it is to be alive.”

Oak: One Tree, Three Years, Fifty Paintings By Stephen Taylor (Princeton Architectural Press £19.99)

(Originally published in The Huffington Post and mirror.co.uk)