JENNI AND THE POETS
Henry Lawson by Jenni Mitchell
In 1935 Justus Jorgensen came to the hilly forest at Eltham and built a pise house, inspired by places he had seen and loved in France. From this beginning grew Montsalvat, with its tiny artisans' cottages, all higgledy piggledy on the hillside, and at the foot of the green slope, the vast romantic great hall, medieval dining room and the swimming pool. Painters, poets and muscians came to live there, forming a bohemian community on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Jenni Mitchell
grew up in Eltham, and still lives on the site of her childhood home,
quite close to Montsalvat which has deeply influenced her life. Jenni
is a painter whose first love is the landscape of Australia. She has painted
a number of series of landscapes and seascapes, the deserts of South Australia,
the Flinders Ranges and Lake Eyre, as well as coastal places in Victoria,
wild expanses where sea and sky appear to merge. She painted a series
on the Ash Wednesday bush fires at Mount Macedon. And she has done some
large, atmospheric pictures of the Shoalhaven River at 'Riversdale', the
former home of Arthur Boyd. In a picture of the fog-shrouded entrance
to Barbara Blackman's home the canvas swirls with mystery and promise.
In 1983 when the poet Alec Hope was a guest at the Montsalvat National Poetry Festival, he stayed in Jenni's house, and Jenni painted his portrait. Thus began the project which has developed into a collection of a hundred portraits of Australian poets. This collection will be completed by the end of the century.
I first visited Jenni at her house in 1998. Jenni had asked me, as a novelist, not a poet, to sit for a portrait. The yellow road, just off the main road at Eltham, is narrow and dusty, and the house, designed by Alistair Knox and made from mud brick, nestles among the trees down below the road. The walls inside are hung with Jenni's landscapes, great glowing, eerie fields of wheat, vast sheets of water reflecting the heavens, haunting night skies, the moods of nature. We move through the house on our way to the studio which is down the hill; the land falls away sharply, and from the garden the only visible sight is the sky and the trees. Beside the studio is the workshop where Jenni's partner Mervyn Hannan, a musician and sculptor, makes picture frames. A rickety hand rail made from tree branches edges the steps under trees and ferns, and then we are in the clearing by the studio. A mandarin tree, from the garden of a princess in a fairy tale, dark gloss on the leaves, small orange fruits, glowing sweetmeats. To the left, the studio, and winding down the hillside before us, a brick path which moves through beds of flowers, fruit trees, vegetables and herbs.
Above a blue-green haze of leaves float the dreamy purple heads, the splashing scarlet heads of the opium poppies. The deep red rose, the black-silk burgundy hollyhocks; the fluttering lilac flags of irises. And everywhere shifting shades of green. Two dogs and a cat are resting in the shade. A likeness Mervyn has carved of one of the dogs sits beside a barrel of water lilies. We come to the chook house, and then we are in Grace's garden. Grace is Jenni's mother whose house, lower down the hill, is filled with her large serene carvings in wood or stone of such subjects as Noah's Ark, and filled also with her quilts, embroideries and soft sculptures. This day Grace is working on a collection of thirty giant golliwogs.
Speaking of Grace brings me to the time when Jenni did the portrait of Alec Hope. The portrait of the poet, the Professor, in his suit is quite formal. When it was finished, Grace arrived wearing a red sunhat which the poet removed from her head and put on his own. On a small canvas Jenni quickly painted a portrait sketch of him in the hat, a free, light picture which is quite a contrast to the other one. There is a third portrait of Alec Hope, painted in 1989 at the poet's home in Canberra shortly after his wife had died. This portrait, framed in gold, often hangs in the entrance to Jenni's house, a large and moving picture of the poet in a bright blue shirt, his eyes steady, wise and sad, looking straight at you. The golden brown chest of drawers behind him suggests to me a coffin, although in fact it really looks nothing like one. There is an air of solemnity and solitude in this portrait, as if the artist has caught something present in the air.
Over time, as other poets came to stay, Jenni would paint their portraits, and gradually she saw that she had embarked on a particular kind of series. She began to look for poets she didn't already know, and in some cases she visited them to do the work. Judith Wright is pictured out of doors in her beloved landscape at Half Moon. Many of the portraits show poets who have been Jenni's friends for many years, and others are poets she had never met before, but whom she sought out.
Hanging in the studio - a light room in the garden filled with a huge number of canvasses in racks - is the portrait of Shelton Lea. There is a burning stillness in the poet's gaze, a deep doe-like softness in his dark, dark eyes. The face emerges from an abstract flurry of intense reds and blues which suggest explosions of flowers and fireworks. Applied to the canvas is a cloud of gold leaf, parts of which fleck and speckle the whole picture. The story is that Jenni was in the process of doing a painting of a storm at the time when she was working on her portrait of Shelton. As she set about her work on the portrait, she now says that the storm painting kept 'screaming out at her' and finally she left the more orthodox portrait of Shelton, and imported his image into the storm. It's fabulous.
Contrast this with the powerful picture of Judith Rodriguez who sits squarely in the centre of the canvas, her white shirt buttoned up to the throat, her gaze steady, challenging, faintly ironic. And again, consider the portrait of Dorothy Porter who emerges from a blotchy scarlet background, arms crossed. In an almost pixie-like fashion Dorothy speaks from her sketchy features, the picture deliberately left in an unfinished state. There is something of the Alec Hope portrait in the red hat here, a likeness produced with speed and the sure touch of inspiration.
In all the portraits we can see the eyes, except for two, the portraits of Gig Ryan and Emma Lew. The picture of Emma Lew whose partner, the poet John Anderson, had died suddenly not long before the painting was done. Emma, backed by a profound darkness, is seated in a chair, a book open on her lap, her eyes downcast. Is she reading? Is she sleeping? Meditating? She is very, very still and the viewer is drawn again and again to the soft lids of her closed eyes. The portrait of John Anderson was painted at night and is full of dark shadows so that the gentleness of the poet merges with the deep green all around him.
Jenni speaks of her task as a portrait painter as one in which she tries to make the viewer feel as well as see, in which there is a visual likeness to the subject, but also an insight into the spirit. And she speaks too of the pleasure she has in having her pre-conceived ideas about a subject sometimes confirmed and sometimes altered by the reality of the person who sits for her. Then things happen, like the storm picture and Shelton Lea. And Fay Zwicky, who was at first reluctant to sit. Jenni decided to give Fay a background of turquoise and cerulean blue, and learnt in the course of painting, that these were colours Fay would have chosen herself.
Jenni said she often paints in the background and the clothing of the subject very swiftly at first, and doesn't necessarily work on them again, although sometimes she is moved to change the colour of the background completely after getting to know the subject better. On the second and third sitting she will work on the face. When she painted Clem Christensen she began with a background of deep alizarin and burnt sienna, and later she loosely covered this with ultramarine and cobalt blue so that there was produced and electric glow that was the right effect.
Blue eyes, blue chair, blue trousers, blue pendant on white shirt, Geoff Goodfellow sits as if about to lean forward and speak out very loud. The wall behind him is rich red; one hand has the fingers curled under, the other has them splayed, long, pale fingers tracing the parallel lines on his pants. Alan Wearne in his red and black football jumper is pensive and almost glowering, his dark eyes seeming to look inward on himself. Jennifer Strauss is alert and sweet, poised in the sand-coloured armchair, her shadow on a wall of deep, warm apricot. A bunch of daffodils lightly held in Graeme Rowlands' hand is detailed, and seems to be something he has plucked from the flat yellow world behind him. A small black book open in the hands of Alex Skovran, its pages a mirror image of the poet's white collar. Alex frowns a little; he is thinking. Michael Sharkey in profile, characteristic ironic smile visible, a green book cradled in his hand. Books, shelves of red and blue and white and grey and pink books, form a vivid background for the solid presence of Tom Shapcott who looks almost sleepy, lulled by the wisdom on the shelves behind him.
There are three portraits of Ken Taylor, who, as well as being a poet, is a film-maker and a painter. One picture shows him with the deeply sorrowful look of a man who has recently lost his house in the Ash Wednesday fires at Mount Macedon in 1983. Then there is the painter at work on a watercolour by the window of his studio; and the third is the poet, full of quiet optimism, wearing a shirt of horizontal blue and white stripes. As with the three portraits of Alec Hope, the three portraits of Ken Taylor reveal a man in three very different moods.
Geoffrey Dutton, his eyes dreamy, his mouth gentle but firm, fills the canvas and seems to float before a background of silky blues, his own shadow a strong presence on the left, a perky red shirt collar hooked over his dark grey sweater. Although his hands are not completely visible, they hang loosely in front of him, creating a kind of reflection of his face. This portrait was painted in the year of Geoffrey Dutton's death, 1998, reminding me that this series of a hundred portraits is a record of passing time. There are other sitters who have died before the hundred portraits were done: Gwen Harwood, Bob Brissenden, John Rowland, Lance Loughrey, John Anderson. And it is very sad that John Forbes died before Jenni had painted him.
This is an enormous project, and Jenni says that if she had realised what she was starting, she might never have begun. Clem Christesen said he thought she was brave; he was right about that. But it is clear that in a sense she was truly meant to do this, was uniquely placed to do it. There she was, growing up in Eltham, a painter, the lives of the poets at Montsalvat entwined with hers. Even before she painted A.D. Hope's portrait, she had done portraits of Geoffrey Eggleston and Pete Spence and Cornelis Vleeskens. One of these, a picture of Pete and Cornelis, is humorous - most of the portraits are more serious than this. Jordie Albiston is a poet who lives near Jenni in Eltham, and hers is a recent portrait, a face whose gaze is penetrating, whose demeanour is almost severe. Jordie sits with a kind of determination in the wicker chair, her arms resting on the arms of the chair, her simple black dress scooped at the neck, revealing her smooth creamy throat. There is no shadow on the almost white wall behind her. She is a presence.
So the portraits sit in Eltham as the project gets closer to the end. By mid-January 1999 there were eighty. Jenni will soon travel to the Blue Mountains to paint Dorothy Hewett and Kate Llewellyn and others. Some of the pictures hang on the walls of the studio, some are in the racks, and some are stacked against the walls. Selections of them have been hung for a time at the Victorian Writers' Centre and at Latrobe University. But what do you do with a hundred portraits of Australian poets?
Jenni is working on a book which will contain a poem by each poet, with biographical notes, and colour prints of all the portraits as well as an introduction by Gary Catalano and a narrative by Jenni. She also nurtures the hope that perhaps funding will be found so that a gallery can house the pictures. This is a curious project, but a most imaginative and important one. It is not only a matter of cultural history and document, but is also a chapter in Australian poetry, and an artistic enterprise of great significance. The State Library of Victoria has expressed interest in publishing the book of the project, but, as always, funding has to be found before this can happen. So far Jenni has met all the expenses of the project herself. The collection is a painter's diary of her response to and friendships with the poets, and when I spent time with Jenni it became clear to me that this project could probably only have happened here, in this rich and vibrant centre of artistic life.
I speak of the vitality and of the serenity about the house and garden and studio, of the trees and the warmth and the sunlight. Yet as I sat for my portrait, my eye kept returning to a creamy white death-mask hanging on the window frame. Surely it was L'Inconnue de la Seine? The death-mask of an unknown girl who drowned in the Seine early last century. Is it? I say. Yes, Jenni says, that's right. There would be thousands of these throughout the world, and the idea of them has fascinated me for a long time, but it was a surprise to see L'Inconnue hanging there, backed by the treetops outside the window. A crow sits in one of the trees, and an occasional bright parrot flashes past. I became so excited about it that next time I sat for the portrait, Jenni gave me the mask to keep. A strange memento of the sittings.
The other thing that drew my eye constantly was Jenni's palette which is a large rectangle of board, polished to a glassy finish in the middle, but decorated around three edges with blobs of oil paints in varying states of solidity. All the colours there ever were, like the petals of weird flowers or underwater plants, glowing with sharp and rounded surfaces. Some part of every portrait is there on the edge of the palette, some little scrap of the soul of every sitter.
And the driving force behind all this is the artist herself. She is small, bright, vivacious, determined, with bouncing brown curls, large grey-green eyes and a beautiful wide smile. And painting has been her life. The number of canvasses stored on the property is quite astounding to me, and I realise that there are also works in galleries and private collections in Australia and overseas. So much energy. So much vision. So much paint. In a shed which Mervyn has recently renovated and fitted with racks are pictures Jenni painted when she was a child, and on the easel in the studio is the latest portrait, this time of a politician. The artist's whole life documented in her works.
There's a painting she did when she was recovering from an illness. This is a picture which particularly attracted me. The joy and vitality in it sing. It's the mandarin tree, mythic, mysterious, heavy with dark gold fruit. The grasses in the foreground are golden and filled with a whispering movement. White moths flit, one, two, three, four. And in the heart of the picture a sacred blue kingfisher sits in the mandarin tree. It was the only time, Jenni said, that a kingfisher had ever been seen in the garden. The picture has a strange incandescence, a spiritual lightness.
A deep spirituality inhabits many of the desert and wheatfield landscapes, and the portraits of the poets, particularly as a collection, suggest the vast realms of inspiration that have moved these people to write the millions of poems they have written.
The poets whose portraits have been done so far are: Robert Adamson,Jordie Albiston, John Anderson, Eric Beach, Barbara Blackman, Ken Bolton, Bob Brissenden, Gary Catalano, Clem Christesen, Rosemary Dobson, Geoffrey Dutton, Rebecca Edwards, Ann Edgeworth, Geoffrey Eggleston, Barbara Giles, Terry Gilmore, Peter Goldsworthy, Geoffrey Goodfellow, Alan Gould, Maggie Gray. Tom Grant, Jennifer Harrison, Kevin Hart, Gwen Harwood, Kris Hemensley, Kristen Henry, A.D.Hope, Coral Hull, Evan Jones, Robert Kenny, Lance Loughrey, Shelton Lea, Joyce Lee, Emma Lew, Ern Malley, Chris Mansell, Ian McBryde, Peter McFarlane, Mal Morgan, Les Murray, Mark O'Connor, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter, Adrian Rawlins, Bev Roberts, Nigel Roberts, Judith Rodriguez, Peter Rose, John Rowlands, Graham Rowlands, Gig Ryan, Philip Salom, Tom Shapcott, Michael Sharkey, Alex Skovron, Pete Spence, Jennifer Strauss, Ken Taylor, Tim Thorne, Cornelis Vleeskens, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Alan Wearne, Lauren Williams, Judith Wright, Fay Zwicky
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