Eleanor Johnson Retells Men’s Tales of Women
British artist Eleanor Johnson’s gestural paintings weave together references from art history, folklore, mythology, and contemporary sources. There is a strong literary element to Johnson’s oeuvre–each work is grounded in a classical tale, myth, or Old Master painting, which the artist reinterprets from a female perspective. Lacing historical references with contemporary found imagery, Johnson creates sensuous, metamorphic paintings that interweave the past and the present. Johnson combines a multiplicity of references and artistic styles–from Rubens to De Kooning to Saville–to create her own unique language and retell stories that have been told by men for centuries. Interrogating the traditional and classical art historical canon through the prism of her own perception, Johnson’s practice reclaims the power of the female perspective to reveal the full breadth of women’s experience: victimized and liberated, powerless and powerful.
Following a two-month residency at the Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy, Johnson has been widely exhibited in both group and solo shows, most recently as part of ‘Through the Prism’ at Gillian Jason Gallery in London and at the Galerie Hussenot in Paris. Johnson holds a BA in Art History from UCL, London, and she is currently pursuing an MA in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School.
Eleanor Johnson, Their Piggy Eyes Still Wet With the Last of Their Human Tears, 2022
What brought you into the art world? Do you have any memories from your childhood that drove you to become an artist?
When I was thirteen, it became apparent to me that you could have a career as an artist. I think since that age, it was always what I wanted to become - and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Throughout school, I spent most of my free time in the art department. I liked how quiet it was, and since then I’ve always enjoyed the solitude of painting.
Some of my earliest memories were of making art. When I was small, I learnt how to draw horses (I was completely obsessed with them), and loved doing colouring books. In elementary school, I won a national competition to design an outfit based on something from nature for an imaginary fairy. This, and having very supportive and inspiring teachers, propelled me to work hard at learning to draw and paint from an early age.
I dropped out of my first foundation at Kingston School of Art after a few months because I found it so hard to take criticism, and their teaching method intimidated me - I was really shy and fragile at the time. I then almost completed a foundation at City & Guilds of London Art school, but once again found that the structure of art education didn’t suit me. I went on to complete a BA in History of Art at University College London, which I adored, though it was also very challenging. I continued to paint throughout my studies, exhibiting in a few group shows here and there. After graduation, I took on painting full time, and it was Instagram that brought me all of my opportunities. Everything picked up for me at the start of the pandemic - but before that, I wasn’t really exhibiting or selling much at all. I’m now doing an MA at City & Guilds of London Art School, and it’s wonderful.
Your paintings are often large-scale and beautifully gestural, combining art historical references with contemporary imagery. Where do you draw inspiration from?
Thank you! I’ve always loved old things. My parents restore old buildings and my dad is passionate about antiques, so I think that interest has filtered through to me. I spent lots of time looking at historical paintings and sculptures in Italy and France growing up, and in London, I repeatedly went back to look at the monumental Old Master paintings in the National Gallery. I was overwhelmed by their scale, and their ability to suck you in. The colours were always so luscious, and the overall feeling I got from these paintings was that they were from another world - imaginary and fantastical. I really wanted to emulate that in my own work. So I started to reference historical paintings more directly. I learnt to paint and use colour simply by observing and copying, over and over again, the colours and forms in paintings ranging from Matisse to Rubens. Now in my current work, I like to give just a hint of the historical, with the bulk of the work portraying contemporary found imagery. I’ll start a large canvas using the colour palette of a painting by someone such as Annibale Carracci, or Nicolas Poussin, and from there, build up layers of contemporary images–mainly found on the internet, such as on Google images, or the Daily Mail (which I dislike), or Instagram.
Each painting starts with a story that’s inspired me. I especially love myths and fairytales, and this comes from my fascination with witchcraft and the esoteric. I find myself either portraying the atmosphere of a story, a particular character, or something about the story that has really resonated with me. I build up layers of images because I like my paintings to have lots going on in them, in order to keep the viewer looking, deciphering, and guessing. This comes from my love of the Baroque period and its tendency towards excess. Baroque artworks overload the senses, and this is often my aim too.
Can you describe your creative process?
I use oil paint—I love the liquidity of it, and the fact that it can be used in such a wide range of different ways, allowing the artist to evoke so many different things, from atmosphere to lighting. I like to use oil paint quite thickly, mixed with a great deal of linseed oil, making the final image very glossy. I’m fascinated by depicting the human body and I look at many artists who have done so too – from Rubens, who used the medium to emulate flesh more successfully, arguably, than any artist before him, to De Kooning, whose erratic, gestural, and extremely thickly applied use of oil paints not only evokes skin but also the inner workings of the body, and to Jenny Saville, whose masterfully painted, visceral nudes evoke the true breadth of variety in the human form. And her passion for oil paint and rendering of flesh evoke De Kooning’s famous phrase – ‘flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.’
As I’ve been working with oil paint for as long as I have been painting, I’ve become very accustomed to its properties. I like that I can use its qualities in an array of different ways – whether I want to work quickly and take advantage of its slow drying time by working into the paint and reveling in its liquidity, or allow the paint to dry over a period of days while working on other pieces in order to add additional layers of paint and images. I also like that because I’m so familiar with oil paint, I can almost mix the colours unconsciously, and work impulsively in a slightly altered mental state than normal. I’m interested in psychological states, so I enjoy this aspect of the medium and its influence on me.
I like painting on stretched canvas so that I can rotate the painting regularly throughout the painting process. This is to stop the painting from becoming too stagnant or static, and to encourage me to keep the composition fluid. I also enjoy the physicality of stretching and lifting the large canvases myself. It makes me aware of my body – and as I’m almost constantly thinking about bodies as I’m painting, this is useful. I’m also becoming quite interested in painting painful things, so I wonder if the pain and physical fatigue that come with stretching and lifting translates (perhaps subliminally) into the painting itself.
Eleanor Johnson, Vitrine for Your Snakes, 2022.
What was the inspiration behind the paintings ‘Vitrine for Your Snakes’ and ‘Born from Their Mother’s Blood’ you made for the show Through the Prism I curated for Gillian Jason Gallery?
These paintings are about the myth of Medusa, a character who appeared in Ovid’s poem, ‘Metamorphoses.’ They’re part of a larger series of paintings I’m doing about some of the women in the poem who were frequently assaulted and silenced. I’m keen to portray their stories from a contemporary perspective as a way of revealing how the poem is still very relevant today–the regular silencing and distrust of women following their allegations of abuse, often at the hands of men, still persists. The narratives from the poem have been portrayed problematically via paintings throughout the centuries and generally from a male perspective. Their ordeals of abuse were glorified, while the male perpetrators became heroes. As with many women artists working today, I am keen to portray these stories from a woman’s perspective, but I am also interested in retelling these stories, especially as they have been told by men for so long.
The poem is primarily about metamorphoses, and I resonate with this as I want to make my paintings biomorphic and visually in a state of flux, and I am interested in the complexities of the metamorphosis of physical things. I like to think that my paintings have a ‘tension’ to them – hovering on the line between abstraction and figuration. Ovid ‘finds the tension between love and lust, beauty and ugliness, death and redemption, sorrow and happiness.’ (Paul Krause). The act of transformation can confuse and overwhelm; it is beautiful and yet violent, grotesque, chaotic, and darkly magical. I was aiming to convey this.
Medusa has become a bit of an icon in feminist discourse, because like with many women in literature and history as a whole, she’s been misunderstood. There’s so much more to her story than what we’ve read of her on paper. She was portrayed and remembered merely as a monster whose apparent aim was to kill men for fun. She was eventually killed (in her sleep) brutally by Perseus, who gave her no opportunity to defend herself. She’s an early example of a woman who had power - the power to turn people to stone - and her killing was yet another example of men who were threatened by this power, thus feeling the absolute necessity to decapitate it, literally and metaphorically. Many scholars have recently argued, as a departure from the previous narrative, that she was raped by Poseiden in the temple of Athena. For a long time, the narrative was that she ‘succumbed’ to his advances or was ‘seduced’ by him. Regardless - Athena, instead of directing her outrage towards Poseiden, punished Medusa by turning her long hair into snakes and banishing her to a remote island where she’d have little contact with the outside world. She was cursed with the ability to turn everyone she looked at into stone. It was never her fault that she unwillingly became a killer. In these paintings, I’m looking at Medusa’s ordeal with Poseidon - the brutality and universality of it. I’m thinking a lot about women’s bodies - how often, historically, in the eyes of men, they are just flesh and meat, something to be consumed with the eyes and with the body. This story made me mad, and I think these paintings are a response to that anger. Because these are themes women battle every day.
Contemplating the universal abuse of women organically led me towards thoughts about war and women’s plight in this. The paintings became a contemplation on war, birth (when Medusa was decapitated she gave birth to two children, one of which was Pegasus the winged horse), and violence as intrinsic to human nature. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ became a key influence for these paintings. I began thinking a lot about how violence is such a key part of culture, from the way we lace it into language, to our obsession with televised boxing or horror movies.
Eleanor Johnson, Born from Their Mother’s Blood, 2022
Tell me about your artist studio. How would you describe the space and the way you work in it?
I’m currently living at my family home in Oxfordshire for a short period while I find somewhere more permanent to live. It’s an old farm on the edge of a village right next to a church. It’s a big change from London, and I’m much happier here. I literally wake up to the sound of birds every morning. It doesn’t get much better than that! The space I’m currently working in is a disused barn. I’m in the loft with a small window which looks out onto a field. It’s a challenge painting large works in there as the walls are slanted, but I’m able to spill out into the garden so will be doing lots of my work outside this summer.
I’ve only recently started painting with music, and I’m absolutely loving it. It’s gently pushed me to be more spontaneous in my approach, and I like the influence it’s having on my work. Eventually, I’d like to design my own studio space when I buy somewhere in the countryside. It will have high ceilings, lots of space, and tons of natural light. I’m really excited for this.
What would be a dream project for you to work on?
The first thing that came to my mind was to do a ceiling mural somewhere in Italy. I absolutely love Italian ceiling frescoes. I stumbled across an absolutely gorgeous church in Brescia, Northern Italy, called Chiesa del Santissimo Corpo di Cristo, and most of the walls are covered in paintings. I remember thinking I’d love to do something like that one day, and spend a year somewhere just painting the walls and ceilings of an ancient building. It would be so fun!
Which artists have especially inspired you?
Rubens, De Kooning, Picasso’s drawings, Jenny Saville, William Blake, Paula Rego, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Francisco Goya, Raphael’s drawings.
Any exciting plans you’re currently working towards?
I’ve got my first solo exhibition coming up at Gillian Jason Gallery, and I’m really excited about that!