Judith Mason’s painting portrays the animal state of the human subconscious. Alex Dodd talks to her about Calvinism, sexuality and Bernard Shaw
Judith Mason is the kind of artist who brings out the purist in you. That voice that says: yes, great art does require sweat and toil. It’s not just about clever, hypey tricks and easy shots in the dark. Her paintings are an affirmation of the fact that hours of isolated toil can turn that messy goo called paint into an alchemical language beyond the alphabet.
Of course she’d be the last one to admit to it. You’re unlikely to meet an artist more brutal and demanding of herself. A far cry from the self-congratulatory air that fills too many empty rooms with abstract video projections, Mason’s honesty with herself borders on self-deprecation.
She lives on her own in an old wooden house filled with private treasures, bones and shells metres away from the sea in Simonstown. “I lack a capacity to imprint myself on people on a person to person basis,” she says. “I tend to lose my identity and worry about how I come across and about other people’s comfort. In painting you can be honest and let what you make relate to the outside world. I need the code.”
Although she shies away from people, she maintains a deep connection to the goings on of the world through her near compulsive consumption of media. Above the distant yoiking cries of penguins, comes the sound of the radio – always tuned to talk shows. She doesn’t just skim the newspapers. Contemporary issues rage in her mind as she sits alone in her studio meticulously drawing the intricate insides of a shell with an HB pencil on plain white paper.
Mason’s work is heavy stuff: skulls, open hands with wrists exposed and seemingly inconsolable cries from reddened mouths like caves in the head. Intimations of great bloodiness haunt her canvases. Some frames house an impenetrable stillness, beyond the quiet of a museum or morgue. An adjacent image shocks with the sudden, almost psychotic movement of a lion going in for the kill.
“Henry Moore said you are more or less fixed from the age of about seven in your iconography. I was born in Pretoria and grew up in the Lowveld very close to the game reserve which I think has quite a lot to do with mine. I left there when I was about six but it stamped itself on my image head,” she says. “My father was a magistrate and we lived on what was then called a `native reservation’. We lived a very solitary life with very reclusive parents. I liked making pictures from when I was very small. It’s one of the things solitary children are drawn to – you work in code.”
Mason’s beasts are always unnervingly if not terrifyingly human, forcing one to engage with the dangerous possibilities that lurk in our animal selves. There’s this creeping sense of the huge reserves of human energy kept at bay by morality and manners – of the unmediated violence that can be unleashed in the absence of regulation. “I’ve always been interested in painting, emotively using people as metaphors for my own navel gazing – animals as descriptive of human states and humans as descriptive of animal states. Except for a bit of abstract pretension at university, I’ve always been a figurative painter. I’ve always wanted to illustrate ideas.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, out of which her last body of work emerged, was territory that Mason couldn’t really ignore. “I wanted to express the sort of courage that few people can have and the sort of actions that made the struggle worthwhile rather than the criticism – bad guy stuff,” she says.
The thread running through her most recent show, currently on at Johannesburg’s Karen McKerron gallery, is perhaps a little harder to pin down. Some of the works, like her large upsetting portraits titled Relatives Laughing, of Calvinist ancestors with smeared mouths and slit eyes are a continuation of her engagement with this country’s history of violent, fascist impulses. The humans are dressed for church, but their animal selves are only thinly disguised. The link to an image of a lion ripping through a circular shrine of barbed wire with its huge teeth and vicious, untamed roar is hard to miss. This is classic Mason territory: the flimsy forms in which we clothe our primitive instincts.
“I know my work often disturbs people,” she says. “But I’m often very shocked when they say that it’s frightening, because I don’t feel it is at all. My concern with violence is to stop it. The things that deeply interest me are compassion and respect. A lot of my work is very painful, I know. But it’s about expressing how awful pain is.”
Two works that take this theme into new territory – the late 20th century obsession with models, fashion, voyeurism and pubescent sexuality on parade – are the paintings Catwalk Boy and Catwalk Girl.
“I’m passionate about politics and I’m very moralistic. I often respond with anger or distaste,” says Mason. “I dislike the fashion of self-mutilation. I find it extremely disturbing and dangerous that a lot of models wander around with virtually nothing on the catwalk. It’s a flaunting.
“But when I do a good painting it actually teaches me to overcome the analogy of what I first wanted to say.” In Catwalk Boy and Catwalk Girl both beings are strangely stoic. Neither have arms and there is something almost foetal about their faces. Both are wounded: the female’s vaginal area is bloodied as is the man’s solarplexus. And yet their wounds are not repulsive. They radiate with a soft magnetic energy like chakras illustrated on a new age chart, beautifully capturing Mason’s contradictory feelings for the subject.
“I’m completely in love with fashion, although I’ve never been drawn to wear any, thank God. I think it’s beautiful and a great art form, but there’s a perversion about it.”
Mason’s capacity to capture the raw contradictions of emotional reality is what makes her one of the most powerfully affecting artists in South Africa today. It is perhaps one of the reasons that women – especially adolescent girls – have responded to her work more forcefully than men.
“I find my work is very female,” she says. “It’s often got menstrual, menopausal or hysterical overtones which I tend to deplore. But I think I deplore it for false reasons – for cultural reasons. I come from a pre- feminist, apologetic Afrikaans/German background and when I was brought up I was literally taught that men were brighter than women – that the male concretises rationality and authority, and women characterise the opposite.
“My experience has been quite to the contrary and intellectually I’ve overcome it, but on an emotional level it’s something that I intrinsically feel. I think it sometimes gives a genuine tension to my work. I don’t relish it, but I do think its there.
“I’d love to be a super-cool modernist, but I’m actually an overheated female. I work from a visceral, almost genital level in some ways. My work has no appeal for young men. I think young men have got to have swagger. I’m not interested in swagger. I like expressing the vulnerability and the resignation of people.
“I haven’t got a personal faith and I think resignation is something people who haven’t got a personal faith have got to have. Someone once said to Bernard Shaw: `I’m resigned to the universe,’ and he said, `Well you bloody well better be.’ That’s always made a lot of sense to me.”
Judith Mason’s exhibition runs at the Karen McKerron gallery until September 1