Body & Sole
Brecknock Museum, 8th March-13th April, 2003
 
Jean Walcot
An Appreciation

Paintings need space to ‘breathe’ – to generate for the viewer the life implicit in the particular disposition of line and form, tone and colour that mark them out from the relative chaos of everyday visual experience. With smaller works this can be reasonably achieved by the isolating effect of the mount or the frame, like the proscenium arch in the theatre. But bigger paintings pose bigger problems of interference in general, from the unsympathetic proximity of other works to uneven lighting, low ceilings, radiators, fire extinguishers and, above all, inadequate viewing distance.
 
Consequently it is one of the pleasures of Jean Walcot’s current exhibition – ‘Body and Sole’ – in the Brecknock Museum that her work is seen in a space which does it justice. Not only does it allow these generally large works to ‘breathe’ individually and command due attention across the substantial width of the main gallery, but also to relate effectively to one another and reveal the range and character of her distinctive sensibility.
 
Plainly the key element is colour, as it was when I first sensed her potential as an artist during a brief course on Basic Design I ran shortly after my arrival at University College, Cardiff. However, another 25 years spent in bringing up a family, working in an architect’s office and gaining an Open University degree, were to elapse before that potential was put to the test in Cardiff College of Art in the mid-nineties.
 
The test was the inevitable challenge of the large canvas, and certainly by the first year of the Degree Course the main elements of her strategy were apparent. They were quite simply the development of an instinctive appetite for bold colour coupled with a fascination, born of the life class, with the drama of the foreshortened human body. By 1998, in works like ‘Body’ and ‘Body, body drawn’ – characteristic enigmatic titles – they had metamorphosed into free floating ectoplasmic elements in deep space, creating a rhythmic balance by the sensitive directional force of warm and cool colour contrast. But in the course of a subsequent six months studentship in Ball State University, Indiana, this comparatively conventional, if vaguely surrealistic, abstraction of forms in space was radically transformed. In later ’98 paintings like ‘Cramped’ and ‘Ouch!’ the focus falls firmly on the tension inherent in the basic act and development of painting per se – namely, the induction of sensations of form and depth on what remains defiantly … “a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order”, the 1891 definition by Maurice Davis which provided a theoretical foundation for the Modern Movement.
 
It is this fundamental tension, emphasised by scale, which Jean Walcot has continued to pursue in her professional career. With the Footfall series of 2001 there was a brief flirtation with the phenomenon of figure/ground reversal. But its reliance on a measure of symmetry in the division of space and its reduced role for bold colour limited its potential and seems to have prompted a return to the freer approaches of 1998 and 1999. Particularly significant was the revived thematic appeal of Roosevelt’s aphorism ‘A radical is a man who plants his feet firmly in the air…’, the inspiration in 1999 of the ‘Radical Feet’ series and given fresh life by Jean’s growing involvement with the ‘cutting edge’ of digital manipulation of the image.
 
And the outcome? The witty, ironic, upside down ‘Dancing Feet’ of 2001 – a Miro-Masson biomorphic ballet of vivid limbs resonant with spatial energy in an almost imperceptible stage in precise geometric tension with the painted surface of 50 square feet. For the moment, the highlight of the exhibition, but an exhibition in which even loose ‘ends’ like ‘Cosy Toes’ and ‘Cushioned’ might well become departure points for the future.

Lewis Allan – March ‘03