Book Review: dark. Frances Aviva Blane, Anna McNay (2023, Starmount Publishing)

“…I have been a Jungian for a long time…painting is a state of being…Painting is self discovery”. Jackson Pollock

I feel like a fan, waiting for the next album from one of my favourite solo artists to be released, so I can immerse myself into their inner world while also trying to make sense of my own psyche. I wrote about Frances Aviva Blane’s last book, august which she released at the time of the relentless hot summer of 2022.

This latest collection of drawings, paintings and works on paper is brought together under the title dark., accompanied by an illuminating essay by academic/arts writer/curator Anna McNay.

McNay positions Blane’s work within a Jungian framework, and it makes complete sense! Jackson Pollock comes to mind; I have always seen an aesthetic correlation between Blane and America’s abstract expressionists, particularly Pollock and Rothko.

However, where Jungian thoughts lurk there is also the shadow of Freud (as I wrote in another essay on Blane and Basil Beattie’s work) present in the darkness of Blane’s art. Like Pollock, Blane doesn’t care for labels, but art historians do, and it is hard to pin her down to a movement or concept. Abstract Expressionism was a misleading term. As Pollock said:

“I don’t care for ‘abstract expressionism’…and it’s certainly not ‘nonobjective’ and not ‘nonrepresentational’ either. I’m very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you’re painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge”.

The figures that emerge in Blane’s works are the heads. As McNay writes in her catalogue essay:

“Viewers frequently find Blane’s Heads more difficult to look at than her abstract works. They are drawn to them by that initial recognition of self, but then confronted by the abject violation of aesthetic and the savage emotion….Even Blane finds her drawings hard to be with. ‘I don’t really like my head drawings’ she admits. ‘I think they’re probably about things that have happened to me in the past. And when I stop, it’s always because I’ve understood something and I’ve seen something – something I don’t particularly want to see.’”

I am abjectly drawn to Blane’s head paintings and drawings. They are haunting, unsettling, uncomfortable; there’s a sense of the monstro/monstrare about them. Monstro is Latin for monster, monstrare is a Latin verb meaning to show or reveal. Both terms have the same etymological roots. But these are not kitsch works of gothic-style horror or Munchian screams of despair. They’re deadpan.

Portrait Susie Orbach. charcoal/bockingford 38x38cms

Blane’s work are hardly a bellyful of laughter, but within those deadpan heads, there is a dark sense of humour present. Her charcoal drawing of British writer/therapist/social activist Susie Orbach reveals neither happiness nor sadness, but an everyday ‘humph!’; the wonky eyes, the slightly downturned mouth are close to deadpan. Deadpan in art, particularly in photography is an aesthetic that is unemotional, dispassionate, detached.

According to artbook, deadpan was first used in Vanity Fair magazine in 1927 as a compound word: ‘dead’ and the slang word ‘pan’, meaning face. The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines the adjective deadpan as “marked by an impassive matter-of-fact manner, style, or expression”.

Before Hollywood film superstardom, the 1999 Turner Prize winning artist Steve McQueen, created a black and white video called Deadpan (1997), a tribute to the great silent movie star and film-maker Buster Keaton whose nickname was “The Great Stone Face” because he never smiled on camera. In both McQueen’s re-enactment and Keaton’s work, there is far more tension and drama going in their expressionless presence.

And Blane’s heads? Look at her painting Summer head. The mouth is a layered block of dark indigo and burgundy, the eyes don’t even stare at the viewer, they’re dark blank, dead; the face framed by a gorgeous lush green that conjures up summer lawns, is flecked with splashes of dripping red. The dissonance between lush colours and dead-face are unsettling. Drowning is stripped of expression, Blane’s leitmotif red lips are a blotchy gloop.

dark. also features Blane’s non-figurative abstract works, which really need to be seen on the walls of a gallery space. The oil paintings Black on pink and Electric are both 122 x 122 cms in size. The blackness is intense in the former painting, a forceful darkly presence enveloping, smothering the hues of pink and fiery red. Could this be Blane’s Barbenheimer moment?

There is an ugly beauty in the intensity, the monstrare/monstro, the thick shades of black, blues, reds, pink and yellows and like the heads, these abstracts too are deadpan. They don’t dance, they don’t shimmer and delight, they don’t express emotions, dogmatic messages or a love for nature or landscape. They suck you in, they are paint on linen, and you cannot casually pass them by.

Frances Aviva Blane 2024 solo exhibitions will open at The Shippon Gallery, UK & De Queeste Art, Belgium

dark. can be purchased online at Waterstones, £40

Manick Govinda

Deadpan