Page 9 - Art First: Joni Brenner: At the Still Point

Lucid Stillness 2015

the layers and changes. But, as much as each painting is an end, ing considered the multiple meanings of the word, point: the first
it is also a beginning, giving rise to new questions that demand is the one we all would immediately engage with – the imaginary
new answers. Satisfaction is there, but always partial, the end mark of position in space or time (or both), the axis of the turning
often less certain than certain. world, which itself does not move and yet which forms the pivot
Other of the paintings’ names refer to the recognition of some for the dance. But ‘point’ has a secondary meaning. It also means
aspect of the sitter that has emerged and made itself felt during the main or particular idea: the silent purpose of this body of work
the making of the work. Brenner has spoken of how, unlike her is far larger than the individual works themselves. In looking at the
other sitters before, Hazelhurst does not engage in conversation. works during the naming, Brenner wished that the portraits could
The phrase that came to mind as she spoke was Yeats’s ‘compan- always be together as a single, composite work. If one spends
ionable silence’ – he is there, present, giving of himself perhaps time looking slowly from one to the other, it is clear that, beyond
as only a mate can. Lucid stillness (2015) is one such of these, the calling of love for the sitter, the calling of love for the very act of
where the sitter’s presence, his gravitas even is unmistakeable. In making is also the point of the works, the intrinsic purpose.
her Master’s thesis, Brenner spoke about the desire to reproduce It would be remiss only to talk about the portraits, when
the actual contours of the sitter’s face and body, and in a portrait alongside them there are also some evocative new paintings in
such as this, one sees it in the assured arcs of the collar bones, the Brenner’s skull series. Her approach to exhibitions has been to
confident rendering of neck and forehead, the bold brushmarks view an upcoming exhibition as a moment of summation, as a
of the hair. The ineradicable desire to capture the present – to point of selection from the array of works produced since the pre-
be conscious like that is nót to be in time – at least for that instant vious one. While we were looking at the skulls on canvas, she
squeezed between future and past which pervades these portraits, commented on how an observation by South African artist Penny
and Brenner’s work strives always to be at that conscious interstice Siopis had made her rethink her approach to putting together an
before its inescapable reduction into the past. exhibition. Siopis, in her catalogue, Time and Again, (2015:
I have so often used Eliot’s phrase, ‘the still point’, without hav- 251–252) writes:

9