Private collection, Rotorua. Acquired from Bath Street Gallery, Auckland, c2008.
Jaqueline Fahey – “If you have nothing to say, don’t paint!”
Essay by ELIZABETH NEWTON-JACKSON
After seven decades of producing vibrant, energetic paintings, Jacqueline Fahey’s message is clear: “If you have nothing to say, don’t paint!”¹
Modernist New Zealand artists were largely turning away from figurative methods in the mid- 20th century, focusing instead on broad themes and abstracted forms. Amid this trend, Jacqueline Fahey’s style remained distinct.
Railing against abstraction, the artist has sustained an astute visual commentary on her own family life, as well as urban and suburban experiences. By maintaining her authentic personal style, Fahey has remained at the forefront of New Zealand art; a constant figure, full of lifeforce and provocation.
Fahey’s conscious marriage to a figurative style has not been merely a stylistic choice, but a social and political one. As a self-proclaimed feminist artist, Fahey recognised that abstraction had primarily resulted from centuries of Western art based on male-centric themes.² A basic history of European art involves a steady progression through a range of figurative styles, to a modernist period of divergence into abstraction. From a woman's perspective, however, the gaps in this history of figurative representation are vast. By expressing themes of motherhood, sisterhood and suburban entrapment through her characteristically riotous figurative forms, Fahey has contributed to opening the way for varying viewpoints, and audacious feminist statements.
As early as her art school days at the Canterbury University College School of Art, from which she graduated in 1952, Fahey recalls being told: “you’ll have to change, old girl, or you’re out.”³ However, not finding what she needed in the abstract methods of the day, Fahey shrewdly concluded that there remained ample space for relevant social commentary through the figurative.
Fahey has been unswerving in her drive to paint what she knows. In the 1960s and 1970s she produced a flurry of domestic scenes in which she juxtaposed the delights and frustrations of suburban life. In more recent years, Fahey has ventured outdoors and into the streets with her subject matter, addressing the chaos of metropolitan life with humour and dexterity.
In both her untitled (Lot 93) and Can Painting Change Anything? (Lot 95) works Fahey deftly captures the social and cultural melting pot of urban Auckland. The narrow compositional structure of untitled (1998) provides a flurried snapshot, the merest of moments captured amid the buzz of the night. Intent that a painting should speak to its viewers, Fahey utilises words to express further meaning. While the truncated vehicles on the road indicate the movement and speed that drives the work, this inner-city motion is enlivened by the written thoughts of the painting’s occupants. The word “go” is prominent in relation to each. The Aucklanders in Fahey’s snapshot understand their urban existence in terms of movement and flux, as busy and as active as the city street that forms the backdrop to their lives. Although each figure embodies a common verb, “go” they remain disconnected from one other. The pÄkehÄ mother and child at the left, focused only on their weekly grocery run, represent urban gentrification. They look outward and beyond, apparently unaware of the anguish and confusion expressed by the figures behind them. Their dialogue is internal, or it is with the city itself. Due to the flattened, condensed perspective of the painting, the urban setting appears as not merely a backdrop, but as a fifth portrait in the scene. Vivid and pulsating, the city is as alive as any of its occupants.
In Encounter with the Past (Lot 94), Fahey again utilises the verb “go” to emphasise motion and progress in an urban context. A winding path leads the viewer through a disordered scene, comprising a set of jumbled and disconnected figures, none meeting another’s gaze. Each is entrapped in separate experiences of past and present, of motion and stasis. The linear progression from left to right, carved out by the vivid, orange path, is disrupted by a car brazenly driving in the opposite direction. The vehicle is incongruous in the picturesque city park, complete with fluorescent grass and flowering hydrangea.
The title of this work implies an internal snapshot of Fahey’s own life path. Although each character may represent variety in a restless metropolis, the painting also provides a glimpse into the artist’s own encounters. The contemplative nun may have journeyed through time from the Dominican convent at which Fahey’s grandmother taught.â´ The woman standing by a pink suitcase on which “Fahey” is scrawled is no doubt the artist herself. By intertwining a personal narrative with a scene of apparent urban chaos, Fahey reinforces her role as the architect and central figure in her works. Rather than claiming to speak for others, Fahey candidly expresses her own experiences, and her own insights; so much so, that she often makes a visual appearance in her works, signifying her deliberate subjectivity.
This is true of Can Painting Change Anything? (2003), in which Fahey also appears. The paintbrush in her hand is both a tool of gesture, and a tool of conception. The artist simultaneously creates and responds to the scene behind her. The red paint still on Fahey’s brush suggests the immediacy of the painted passage. The fiery sunset is unflinchingly rendered in thick, continuous strokes. Its vibrancy recalls the daily beauty of the city, while offering more than a suggestion of violence. The vivid evening sky melds with the street scene below, and the now sinister red visually encloses and dramatizes the threat of an upheld fist. In contrast to this urgent threat of violence, a mother and child unconcernedly traverse a pedestrian crossing, heads down, unaware of the vicious attack that plays out before them. Although they live side by side in this city night, citizens remain estranged from one another, determinedly entrapped in the trials and triumphs of their own banal urban routines.
Fahey captures with lively disorder, the delightful interplay between themes of darkness and light. As a contemporary of fellow female innovators such as Doris Lusk and Rita Angus, Fahey has long been a towering presence in New Zealand art. Her consistent style coupled with her enduring ability to capture the current has secured her lasting renown. With each painting she produces it is abundantly evident that Fahey has plenty to say. It is the abounding energy of the pulsating colour and line in her works that ensures their own continued, independent discourse with their viewers.
1 “Jacqueline Fahey - seven decades of paintings,” Radio New Zealand.
2 Thomasin Sleigh, “Women's Work,” New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te PÅ«kenga Whakaata.
3 “Jacqueline Fahey: In her own words,” Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o WaiwhetÅ«.
4 Pat Rosier, “Painting Her Life,” Broadsheet, 1984.
