Two feet in the past
R.M. VAUGHAN
Portraitist Kirsten Johnson has turned a white
tube sock and a Stanfield's grey woolly into the subjects of an intriguing
suite of paintings that quietly celebrate the comforts of childhood.
When Toronto painter Kirsten Johnson fell off her bike three years ago,
the last thing on her mind was a new suite of paintings. Left with a
mangled hip, she was bedridden for weeks while strung out on painkillers.
Naturally, Johnson's mind began to drift, and, after the initial
hordes of worried visitors dwindled down to her boyfriend and her
parents, her loneliness caused her to retreat into a childlike state of
self-indulgence. She began to seek solace in old toys, favourite
childhood mo vies, and mushy foods - what she calls the "totems of
comfort."
Once back on her feet and ready to paint, Johnson began talking to
other adults who had undergone traumatic illnesses, and was struck by
how intelligent, grown people will suddenly cling to teddy bears, baby-soft
blankets and sugary treats as part of their healing process. The
resulting series of paintings, Comfort, first shown at Toronto's Zsa Zsa
Gallery in 2001, was a disturbing and yet oddly cheery collection of
portraits of wounded adults sucking their thumbs, wallowing in pajamas
and playing with toys.
But one image from Comfort continued to haunt Johnson - that of a young man surrounded by a caressing gaggle of homemade, button-eyed sock puppets. At one point in her convalescence, Johnson says, she had dreamed of hav ing her friends stage a sock-puppet show at the end of her bed - an idea she had nixed because, as she puts it, "I was rapidly using up favours."
Johnson's oil-on-chalkboard
giddy: overt infantallism
and the purity of nostalgia.
Johnson is unapologetic about touchy-feely's overt infantilism.
"I'm hardly alone here - there is
a purity to nostalgia, because you know how the story ends. That's
why so many people find so-called childish things comforting. We get
rid of a lot as we get older, go through a toughening up, and maybe
that's not an entirely good idea. And I can't do it, can't get rid
of everything from my childhood. I wonder where this idea comes from,
that we have to get rid of things that once made us happy?"
Johnson admits that her two puppet models - a plain white tube sock
and that most Canadian of garments, a Stanfield's grey woolly - are,
at first glance, difficult to regard as subjects worthy of fine-art
portraiture, especially since Johnson has applied the same rigour and
meticulousness in her painting of these humble subjects as she would
one of her much coveted portraits.
"Every once in a while I would stop and ask myself: sock puppets? But I had
so much fun making the work, and so much fun getting my friends to play
with the puppets, that I kept going. At one point, I was at a
restaurant with a bunch of friends and the puppets came out. Within
minutes, the whole restaurant was hovering over our table, watching us
manipulate these mangy old socks. I realized then that, as toys,
the puppets had a kind of seductive simplicity - because when all you
have for a toy is a sock, the toy naturally becomes all about you
and your imagination."
Johnson's enthusiasm for her subjects has paid off. When immersed
in the paintings, the viewer begins to see subtle differences between the two
characters: and Johnson's almost fanatical attention to detail, to the
way the fabric folds, curls in on itself and hangs, like skin off the
puppeteers' hands, gradually gives the two worn-out socks distinct
personalities and a palpable physicality. What could have been a handicap
- hyperrealist applies talents to seemingly mundane subject - instead
becomes the method by which Johnson imbues the paintings with life
and character.
"I've always enjoyed taking the sting out of formal painting. I love
the classical style, but hate the stuffiness, the museum feel of that
style," she says. "But the process, puppets or people, is the same. I
became just as obsessed with accurately recording their emotions as I
do with live subjects."
"For months," Johnson laughs, "I tried to get them to express
co-dependency. I had to work my way through coquettish to mutually
apologetic before I got it right."
As the interview progresses, I begin to wonder if Johnson is suffering
from Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy syndrome, becoming a little too
attached to her hosiery pals.
"Well, at least I didn't give them names ... although I do think of the tube sock as Her and the woolly as Him, because it's bigger," she says. "But now they're sitting on my studio shelf, looking like they want to be played with again. Or at least washed."
