Helena Won’t Let Go
(Winner of the 2023 PNR Creative Essay for Undergraduates)
Consider how insular we are as a species. All our thinking goes on inside; it’s what’s inside that counts; we are taking things in. Pretty selfish of us, don’t you think, to see something and have to consume it, internalise it? It’s all very intricate. Intrepid. The human condition.
That processing ability is informed by our senses—our ability to interact with the world informs our understanding of it. To see a sparrow is to understand the concept of a bird; to touch its feathers is to know its shape, its weight, its tiny beating heart. To understand that it is alive. And, by contrast, to know when something is not. Take silk—it does not breathe, does not think as we do, or as the sparrow does. Silk is given meaning by the hands that made it, that use it, but silk is only material with sensual connotations—there is no in. You will find no soul.
There’s an in with art, though art is not alive (read: breathing, communicating, surviving.) The in is put there by the artist. Painting, drawing, creating—it’s the doing part of art, the action that takes place within it, that brings the art to life. The artist puts some part of themselves into the art; “the entire bodily and mental constitution of the maker becomes the site of the work.”[1] And yet, we think of art in ocular terms; something to be seen but not felt, not heard. We think art is the silk when it is the sparrow.
Art is all about that in. I look at art and I want to put my fingertips against the surface—canvas or paper or ceramic or plaster—and push, have each digit form an easter-egg crater; pluck a plum from the pie, crust giving way to jammy insides. I want to bury myself in the folds of oil-painted fabric, sink inside the smooth marble of statues. Push your hands against the mirror and it does not give. Excavate the soul from battered silver.
Alas, unless the art is your own, it is locked away in galleries solely for viewing purposes. These establishments say keep your hands to yourself—impatient mothers of oil and clay— don’t touch the displays. There is a method to that management; if every grubby five-year-old is rubbing their hands over van Gogh’s landscapes, there’s no intrinsicality anymore. Old masters would be worn away by people like me, come to smooth their fingertips over the brushstroke furrows; the Ruebens’s would be reduced to smudges of colour, Caravaggio’s to flaking darkness. I suppose the Davids and Venuses might survive such a tactile war, but the soft pastels of Degas? The fine-line sketches of Rembrandt? Reduced by our reaching hands in the hope that some greatness might rub off on us like charcoal.
We don’t have to go around pressing our palms to every Picasso we come across. “All the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense . . . all sensory experiences are modes of touching.”[2] We can understand the texture of something by looking, by remembering everything remotely comparable, and reproducing a mental facsimile of how this new thing would feel. Try it—imagine tracing the smooth lines of a watercolour piece. It’s like putting your hand to wallpaper, isn’t it? The grain of the paper, the soft fluff of miniscule over-blended areas.
We must find that middle ground where we can at once inhabit and remove ourselves from the art. Where is the barrier? Time? Place? Self? They all start sinking in to one. And then the inability to touch doesn’t even matter anymore because you are opening your eyes and looking out at yourself looking up at the art looking back at you. Everything everywhere all at once.
You can’t easily put yourself in the place of all kinds of art. A still-life or landscape can be evasive. Portraits are easiest. We can recognise the face looking back at us as human, can put ourselves in their shoes easily enough. If I ask you to think of a portrait, maybe your first thought is “a pale girl painted by Vermeer” or a rainbow-wielding piece by Kahlo.[3] Head-and-shoulders up, painted from life.
Author’s sketch of Helena’s Dream; click HERE for an image of the original painting.
But not all portraits are like that. Marlene Dumas’ portraits are certainly not. They are terrifying. The brain does that thing where it recognises a face, but by only the slightest degree. Almost lost on us. Dumas’ portraits are all like that: slightly lost. They’re painted from photographs, and you can tell—the in is gone. There’s nothing behind those eyes. Empty and frightening. They look alien. Inhuman. Sometimes, the features are less than smudges, look airbrushed beyond comprehension. There’s one, Helena’s Dream, where the shade of the face from afar—before you look closer at the nitty gritty, see the shapes beneath, the way the paint has been manipulated, the tones muddied—is sickeningly blank. Helena’s face is so close to the page you can imagine her on the other side, pressed against it. She looks serene, stuck. Fading. Present and past. Two things at once, juxtaposed. The way her eyes are closed, with their pale lids and dark lashes, speaks to sleep but, at the same time, the way the paint has been rubbed away, smeared, makes your stomach lurch. Dumas has taken a finger and pulled it through the paint, thumbed it away. She has taken Helena’s eyes.
I think that’s the scariest thing about Dumas’ portraits. The way those eyes are always just a little off—smeared, yellowed, blank, squint. Mark Doty says that, with portraiture, “the end of our seeing is in the eyes.”[4] So where do our eyes go when there are no eyes to meet? We sink into the next best thing, of course. We enter the skin.
I am stuck in a body that is not mine. Dreaming and not dreaming. There and not there. So terrifyingly close. I do not want to reach into this painting, I want to run away from it. The surface is like oil. Or marshmallow fluff. You get stuck in the skin. All at once I am Helena and she is me and we are so intermingled you do not know where I end and she begins, where I dream and where you do not—
For a painting so devastatingly blank, Helena is so rich. Iridescent. Full of rainbows. Oil on canvas. Olive green background, strokes of purple and navy in the hair, and the pinkest-bluest skin fading to white, colour draining out right at the bottom. The dream dying. Maggie Nelson wrote, “if you are in love with red you slit or shoot.” There are two purposeful hair-widths of red on Helena’s head.[5] Colour as an omen, a secret. A cracking of the skull, the gruesome reality. The underlying question. I am waiting for someone to pronounce me dead. I am waiting for someone to proclaim this portrait posthumous. I am waiting to be released and I cannot let go until it is done.
The problem with finding the in is getting out. The boundaries start to bleed. I remember how porous my skin is, how hydrophilic the canvas is, and I am dripping, distorting into one of Dumas’ faded portrait-photographs. This copy of a copy of a copy—I am myself to the power of minus three, I am cells expanding and diminishing. Let go, become lost.
In the opposite fashion, Jenny Saville’s portraits are almost too alive. Maybe because she’s doing the opposite of Dumas, working from life and inserting herself. There are several paintings to which she adds her own face. I think they’re beautiful. I have a postcard of her Rosetta on my wall at home, and it might be my favourite painting ever. My sister finds it disturbing; once, several years ago, we visited an exhibition of Saville’s in Edinburgh, and she walked through the whole thing without so much as glancing up. “It’s freaky,” she whined. “Why do they have to look like that?”
It was a long white room, the walls home to about twenty naked women. Gigantic naked women. They were, objectively, ‘freaky.’ In one painting, three women stacked on top of each other like slabs of meat piled in a slaughterhouse—jamón ibérico thighs and stomach rolls like pink supermarket sausages.[6] The dull blue light turned their faces yellow, bloated with death sleep. I wanted to clamber on the pile and lay with them. Feel the cool air of the meat locker on my skin. The press of china-cold flesh. I’d been waiting for portraits that looked like me, and I found them there. I never wanted to leave those wretched corpses.
Doty compares the nude body to the lemon rinds of seventeenth century Dutch paintings: “always in dishabille, partly undraped, the rind peeled away to allow our gaze further pleasure.”[7] Here we are again, comparing the human body to food, specifically, the female body to something for consumption. I take umbrage with the idea that the nude is always a pleasurable thing. Maybe this is because Doty is writing through the eyes of an assigned-at-birth, socialised man, and I am not. Maybe we’re just looking at different kinds of nudes. But one thing I’m damn certain of is that there is no pleasure in Saville’s paintings – not for the one being painted, and not for the one viewing it.
When I say the nude body on canvas, maybe Doty thinks of the Grande Odalisque—oil-on-canvas by Ingres, a concubine on a bed of silks with a spine curvature in dire need of a brace for fixing—but I’m thinking of Egon Schiele’s distorted angles and broken-bone poses. I’m thinking of Bacon’s arcs and lost faces. I’m thinking of Saville’s women— screaming themselves senseless, pushed to the limit. Not meant to be pretty, meant to be real. One woman’s expansive thighs push at the confines of the canvas, the Botticelli arms of another are marbled with veins.[8] They are meant to be viscerally human. And I am there with them. I am in pursuit of bashed out beauty, bruised perspective. I am in the market for raw truth, served up and portioned out on the butcher’s table.
I’ll admit that Doty was right about how our viewing of portraiture relies on the eyes. In Dumas’ paintings, the eyes are almost always lost; in Saville’s they are mostly looking away. Except for one. Rosetta confronts that thesis head-on (literally). She looks out at you, eye to eye, but she doesn’t see—her eyes are two white-blue marbles held between unmoving lids. Blue with blindness. “Portraits often seem pregnant with speech,” Doty says, “or as if their subjects have just finished saying something,” but Rosetta is silent.[9] She’s waiting for you to start talking first. This is a conversation about anything other than sight. See me without your eyes.
Jenny Saville, Atonement Studies, Central Panel (Rosetta)
My tiny postcard copy of Rosetta hangs on my wall, and every day I look at her sapphire set sockets and think she must know the world so clearly. Imagine navigating the world through touch instead of sight—how intimate. How dangerous. How much our day to day lives are not made for it.
Saville and Dumas approach portraiture so differently, it makes sense they approach paint differently too. Dumas’ paintings are smooth, washed and watered down—I get the feeling that if I put my hand to them, they would feel like gel. Wallpaper paste. Slightly more viscous than water. Just enough to have some give. Dip a finger in, it will come back coated. You’ve made a drainage hole in the canvas, and everything is slipping. Saville’s work is top heavy. Rough. Thick layers of oil paint like a mountain range. You’ll have to dig through it, scrape your fingertips through the pastels like mud. It’ll cling to your fingers. The layers crumble; you scramble for purchase, and the painting takes you down like an avalanche. “The distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse.”[10] That’s the difference.
I got my first tattoo at eighteen with my sister: hands, intertwined. Why, when I have hands already—actual, functional hands—with which I can touch and hold, and be touched and held? Because touch is everything. Touch is an art form, a love lesson. The universal symbol for hapticity is burrowed into my skin, needle deep. Art embedded in the skin. Life imitates art. The slip-slide of interior-exterior. I have “chosen to surface what’s inside and wear it brightly.”[11] And isn’t that just what art is? “It takes what society deals out and makes it visible, right?”[12] I am making the pain visible. I am making the love visible. I am making myself for the eye, as art does.
Western world culture is so obsessed with seeing, with ocularcentricism, when it is touch that informs our entire world. We define ourselves by our skin—our scars, our art, our colours—we are the living definition of touch, and art reaches for that. Look at Dumas and witness violence done to the soul; look at Saville and witness yourself in large scale cinema, an exhibition on insecurity. The in of art is the touching. The self is definition. Blended, like colour on a palette, we become the art. The art becomes us. “The sense of self, strengthened” by it.[13]
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[1] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (West Sussex: Wiley Academy, 2005), p. 12
[2] Ibid, p.10-11
[3] Helen Mort, The Illustrated Woman (London: Chatto & Windus, 2022), p. 3
[4] Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), p. 51
[5] Maggie Nelson, Bluets (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 52
[6] Paraphrasing Helen Mort, The Illustrated Woman, p. 66
[7] Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, p.8
[8] Paraphrasing Louise Glück, ‘Letter from Our Man in Blossomtime’ in Poems 1962-2020 (London: Random House, 2022), p. 31
[9] Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, p. 18
[10] Nicholas Cullinan, “Jenny Saville: Painting the Self” in Gagosian Quarterly [online] (2020). Available at: <https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/12/01/interview-jenny-saville-painting-self/> [accessed 10/12/22] (biography section)
[11] Mort, The Illustrated Woman, p. 30
[12] Quoting Atwood in Gillian M. E. Alban, The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) p. 4
[13] Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 11
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Marlene Dumas, Helena’s Dream, 2008, oil on canvas, 130cm × 110cm. Available at: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/mythical-women-of-marlene-dumas
Jenny Saville, Rosetta II, 2005-6, oil on watercolour paper mounted on board, 252cm × 187.5cm. Available at: https://gagosian.com/artists/jenny-saville/
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Alban, Gillian M. E. The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Petrifying, Maternal and Redemptive (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017)
Cooke, Rachel. “Jenny Saville: ‘I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies’” in The Guardian [online] (2012). Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2012/jun/09/jenny-saville-painter-modern-bodies>
Cullinan, Nicholas. “Jenny Saville: Painting the Self” in Gagosian Quarterly [online] (2020). Available at: <https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/12/01/interview-jenny-saville-painting-self/>
Doty, Mark. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001),
Glück, Louise. ‘Letter From Our Man in Blossomtime’ in Poems 1962-2020 (London: Random House, 2022)
Mort, Helen. The Illustrated Woman (London: Chatto & Windus, 2022)
Nelson, Maggie. Bluets (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009)
Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (West Sussex: Wiley Academy, 2005)
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Teddy Rose is a fourth year student at the University of Dundee about to graduate with a degree in English & Creative Writing. Their hobbies include drinking iced coffee and talking at length about the Barbie movies.