JEAN MACALPINE
Artist / Photographer
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TRANSITION
Mary Rose Beaumont
A sea change took place in Jean Macalpine’s work around the year 2000. In the late 1990s her photographs were principally of the cliffs and quarries of Menorca, the space becoming very shallow, although still involved with texture, light and shadow. The sea change, though it took place gradually, was total. From using light falling on objects in real space, she changed to photographing a flat space and using the marks to describe the object. The marks were already there, but whereas a photographer would use the fall of light to describe an object, she used the marks in the same way as would a painter.
With the landscapes she was giving a powerful formality to the image, by pulling it up on to the surface. She deliberately lost the horizon to get rid of the idea of a huge space – although there had been space in some of her photographs, such as those of the Grand Canyon – but now she begins with the image on the surface and through the process of hand colouring she pushes it back, thereby reversing her previous approach.
She is obsessively faithful to the found object and extremely discriminating in her search for the perfect subject, which centres on places such as industrial estates, old army barracks and rubbish tips. Any old flat surface will not do: it may be a wall, a sheet of glass, or indeed a discarded piece of former domestic use, such as an old fridge, but it must offer her some possibility of transformation. The surface may already have had a turbulent history but she needs to create a new life for it, to transmute it into something completely other, imposing on to that surface a mixture of memory and imagination. In the past she had to have her camera to hand if she was not to lose an opportunity, but now she can superimpose the remembrance of some past experience on to the present, thus permitting far greater scope.
It is important to understand that Macalpine’s photographs are all in black and white and that every inch is hand coloured. The structure, the marks, are already there, but, unlike a painter who would invent the marks, she is finding them and using them to create her own scenario. The hand colouring alters the space, shifts it on to another plane, creating the feeling of space with the colour. The range of colour in her work, although generally muted, is astonishing. Dark colours may evoke a gloomy English day, damp and cold; milky hues may express infinite distance of receding sea and sky; a sudden flash of brilliant red will conjure up an explosion.
Whereas in the landscapes the presiding genius was Cezanne, Macalpine’s allegiance has now gravitated towards Turner, for his misty seascapes and blustery skies. Indeed so much of his work is about weather. William Hazlitt described Turner’s work as being “pictures of the elements of air, earth and water”. The same could broadly be claimed for many of the recent photographs of Jean Macalpine.
With the landscapes she was giving a powerful formality to the image, by pulling it up on to the surface. She deliberately lost the horizon to get rid of the idea of a huge space – although there had been space in some of her photographs, such as those of the Grand Canyon – but now she begins with the image on the surface and through the process of hand colouring she pushes it back, thereby reversing her previous approach.
She is obsessively faithful to the found object and extremely discriminating in her search for the perfect subject, which centres on places such as industrial estates, old army barracks and rubbish tips. Any old flat surface will not do: it may be a wall, a sheet of glass, or indeed a discarded piece of former domestic use, such as an old fridge, but it must offer her some possibility of transformation. The surface may already have had a turbulent history but she needs to create a new life for it, to transmute it into something completely other, imposing on to that surface a mixture of memory and imagination. In the past she had to have her camera to hand if she was not to lose an opportunity, but now she can superimpose the remembrance of some past experience on to the present, thus permitting far greater scope.
It is important to understand that Macalpine’s photographs are all in black and white and that every inch is hand coloured. The structure, the marks, are already there, but, unlike a painter who would invent the marks, she is finding them and using them to create her own scenario. The hand colouring alters the space, shifts it on to another plane, creating the feeling of space with the colour. The range of colour in her work, although generally muted, is astonishing. Dark colours may evoke a gloomy English day, damp and cold; milky hues may express infinite distance of receding sea and sky; a sudden flash of brilliant red will conjure up an explosion.
Whereas in the landscapes the presiding genius was Cezanne, Macalpine’s allegiance has now gravitated towards Turner, for his misty seascapes and blustery skies. Indeed so much of his work is about weather. William Hazlitt described Turner’s work as being “pictures of the elements of air, earth and water”. The same could broadly be claimed for many of the recent photographs of Jean Macalpine.
Eruption : 2003
46 x 57cm
extinguish flames, another neatly ironic touch. The ambiguity of the shapes offers many alternative interpretations, but given the title one is directed to think in terms of volcanoes and explosions. Knowing that the surface is flat and that the texture has been created entirely with tonal marks, the suspension of disbelief is complete.
To take a few examples and look at them in detail is to understand how complete is the transition between the real landscapes of the late 1990s and the walls or flat surfaces which are the ‘canvas’ on which she now creates her own imaginary landscapes. Eruption 2003 is one of a series for which the setting was an army base which has now been decommissioned. The wall which she photographed was half underground, where the machinery of a gun emplacement had been ripped out of the wall, an irony in itself, since the picture it suggested to her was one of combustion. The angry red of the wounded wall, and the crusty texture against it is shaped like a flame-thrower. Together the configuration appears to be standing on an illusionistic barrier, apparently consisting of the sort of foam which firemen use to
Storm : 2004
46 x 57cm
Weather is the catalyst for an equally violent subject, Storm 2004. The surface was a window which had been whitewashed out, then leant on by someone, perhaps wearing a jersey, giving the dark mass a particular texture. Angry cloud formations were created by further applications of paint slashed on to the surface of the window, and grubby finger prints surge up towards the storm clouds. Water runs down like a curtain of heavy rain, whilst a liquid moon seems to be forcing its way through the murk. The actual photograph was taken from very close up, a mere three feet away, and the whole drama of the storm has been brought to life by Macalpine’s hand colouring of these wonderfully gestural marks on her black and white print.
Jean Macalpine’s home is in Menorca and all the photographs were taken there, although not all of them refer to Menorcan subjects. As previously stated, she draws constantly on memory for her subjects, which may equally be of wetlands and stormy skies in England as of submarine life in the Mediterranean. A wide range of moods is evoked, from gentle and playful to romantic and fantastic, sometimes poignant, sometimes menacing. All this on the least promising of surfaces, the detritus of human existence, a flat surface to which, through her imaginative recreation of marks which already exist, she gives new life and a new spatial existence. The exciting thing is that she keeps you guessing. The ambiguity of her images, however different those of the 1990s from those of 2000 onwards, continues to be the leitmotif which unites her past and present work.
A contrasting mood to those just discussed is sensed in The Castle 2005, which hovers between the romantic and the dramatic. At one extreme it puts one in mind of Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ with all its grim associations, at the other one may think of Keats’s beautiful phrase about “faery lands forlorn”. Macalpine’s inventive mark-making has created anew a fantasy piece, an enchantment, containing suggestions of an Arabic landscape, perhaps Moroccan, with its towering sand castle and flat roofs. She has highlighted the entire surface with a theatrical flash which illuminates earth and sky, throwing the castle into sharp relief against the purplish, threatening cloudburst. Here I am reminded not only of Turner’s swirling mists but also of the artist he so much loved and measured himself by, Claude Lorraine.
The Castle : 2005
46 x 57cm
February 2006