Ruth Addinall: Private Lives

A woman sits by an unseen window, her body very still. She looks into the light, but her eyes are blank. She’s not looking through the window, or even at it. She’s somewhere inside herself, wrapped up in hidden thoughts and dreams. To her left is a dark, empty space, where once Ruth Addinall had placed a standing woman: the physical counterpoint to this elusive, floating mind.

Not happy with the second figure, Addinall removed it. A rippling mass of horizontal brushstrokes creates a dark vacuum in its place, leaving the Seated Woman alone with her thoughts. There was no need for the second person: dualism of body and mind is perfectly encapsulated in the first.

The woman’s body, closely worked in Addinall’s distinctive style, suggests a stone vessel. Trunk, limbs and neck are cylindrical echoes of the “tubism” of Fernand Léger, while white light gently models curves in the best classical tradition. A symphony of tightly-hatched colour conspires to produce a surface as muted as marble.

Addinall’s figures have much in common with the stoneware of her flower paintings: simple jugs and vases containing writhing, exotic blooms in vibrant displays of colour. But if the people are vases, where are the flowers? Our woman’s rich internal world, however vivid and intoxicating, is not for us to see. We see only stillness, even emptiness, but while empty vessels make the most noise, this silent woman is full to bursting.

Ruth Addinall spends much of her time alone, painting and sculpting, and if circumstances allowed, she would immerse herself even more in these solitary pursuits. The act of painting, for her, is “both painful and therapeutic”; starting loose, she uses brushes of decreasing size as she works slowly towards the finished result.

Addinall never had a formal training in art, learning instead by looking at the work of other artists: an eclectic mix of Post-Impressionists, early modernists, 17th century Dutch painters and masters of the Early Renaissance. As many Scottish painters did a century ago, she saved up and headed for Paris in 2000, devoting four and a half months to art and nothing else. Unlike those painters, she didn’t make for the bohemian cafés of her continental counterparts, but instead embraced her newfound solitude.

Addinall rented a bed-sit just behind the Moulin Rouge, and tacked to the door opposite hers was a postcard of Vermeer’s Woman Reading A Letter. Amidst the high-kicking commotion of Paris’s red light district, Addinall had found peace, seclusion, and the image of a woman alone with her thoughts at a window.

What is on the other side of the window? Addinall is, by her own admission, not an outdoor person. The windows, when visible at all, tend to give nothing away, like the glazed eyes and absent-minded expressions on her subjects’ faces. Instead of landscape we have decorative wallpaper; dado rails become our horizon, bouquets and coffee pots our flora and fauna.

Figures are pressed up against these claustrophobic interior spaces, becoming part of the overall pattern. Tables tip up, vases flatten out; conventional rules of perspective are flouted in pursuit of the perfect composition. It’s a nod to naïve art and a wink towards cubism. Most of all, it’s heavily laden with the influence of Japanese art, as filtered into western art by the Post-Impressionists.

One need look no further than Degas’ portrait of Diego Martelli, on permanent show in Addinall’s home town of Edinburgh. The bulky art critic sits, absorbed, while the room around him rises up to meet the viewer. Bonnard – a key influence on Addinall – owned his own collection of Japanese prints, from which sprung his love of flattened, decorative compositions, and of solitary women engaged in private tasks.

Flowers On Flowers pays Addinall’s most obvious debt to Japonisme, setting a modest jug of carnations against an exotic floral table-cloth. The writhing stems of the real flowers tangle themselves amongst the imagined flowers of the fabric, in an exuberant celebration of colour and pattern.

Addinall’s flower paintings tend to be much richer in colour than her figure paintings, and this she attributes to the fact that they are drawn from life, rather than her imagination. In Grey And Red, however, the tulips are seriously anaemic, while the table and pottery are drained almost entirely of colour. Without the bold curtain streaking down the right hand side, this would almost qualify as a grisaille.

Grisailles were often painted by Renaissance artists in imitation of stone sculpture, creating the impression of low relief. Addinall conceives of her paintings through the eyes of a sculptor, slowly chiselling away at the stone, as it were, with her ever finer brushes. There is a constant tension between the weighty mass of urn-like vessels and limbs, and the flatness of tables and walls which cut into the picture plane like two-dimensional wedges borrowed from a Malevich.

Monumentality is key to Addinall’s work: ordinary figures in domestic interiors become timeless heroes, like Atlas bearing the world upon his shoulders. Women and men are caught at that moment of introspection when time loses its grip. Our “essential isolation”, as the painter puts it, weighs heavily, but the profound power of our inner lives is celebrated.

Nowhere is this interplay between monumentality and the mundane more clear than in the artist’s one bas relief to date. The medium immediately brings to mind Greek and Roman architraves populated by thrusting, muscle-bound warriors frozen mid-action. Addinall’s Reading Woman couldn’t be further from that heroic ideal: a gawky woman sits, elbows on lap, reading a small book. Her crumpled skirt hints at the dynamic drapery of her classical forebears, but the physical adventure of those reliefs is absent. We can’t see what’s in her mind’s eye – no person can fully share the experience. Her inner world is a territory free from invasion, and that’s the triumph which Addinall honours here.

Addinall’s is not a fast-paced, post-modern world under constant media barrage. None of her figures is watching the television, and the nearest she gets to new technology is the inclusion of an old-fashioned rotary dial telephone. Her characters slow time down to a crawl while they escape, with books, letters and daydreams, into deep mental lagoons.

But physical pleasure is not entirely forgotten. Jaffa cakes, lolly-pops, liquorice allsorts and cherry buns all play starring roles, and coffee (at one time the painter’s “drug of preference”) is ubiquitous. If you look closely you will notice that each of these is an indulgence caught at that exquisite moment of anticipation. The lolly-pop is still whole. Open hands are poised, ready to fall on the sweets and the bun. The jaffa cake is held aloft, almost as a priest would raise the holy communion.

There is one unusual painting in which a young girl holds a doll. This is her natural doorway into the world of imagination, but compared with Addinall’s other, more comfortable images, Girl With Doll is uncanny. The girl’s hairstyle exactly matches that of the naked doll in her lap. The poses of the two are identical. The whole composition draws our attention to this tiny, naked figure, her back turned towards us.

Like the unspoken monologues in Addinall’s other paintings, this is a dialogue which is hidden from our view. The full-size girl looks down at her precious toy, which, though nude and vulnerable, is shielded from our gaze. Perhaps the naked doll also holds a miniature human in her lap, in a Freudian hall of mirrors.

Thinking beyond the picture frame, it’s easy to imagine Addinall herself, seated in a grown-up chair, cradling the painting in her lap. Her escape from this world comes not through a doll, or through the little girl who holds it. It comes through her paintings, mundane and monumental, sculptural and flat, colourful and pale. These products of Addinall’s internal world hint at other realms unseen, and through those endless passageways, if we gaze for long enough, we will find ourselves in one of our own.

Catrìona Black, artist's catalogue November 2008