Interviews, Issue 7

Chantal Joffe

A Painter For Today’s World

Words MATTHEW HOLMAN

Photography LAURA STEVENS

Chantal Joffe is a painter for today’s world. In her paintings of friends, strangers, critics, her daughter, other peoples’ families, and unflinchingly of herself, Joffe does much with little. Her deceptively complex compositions layer oil paint in a way that identifies the idiosyncrasies of her subject’s aspect–an uncooperative line of hair, a slouched shoulder, or piercing eyes–without ever reducing them. Even as features are extenuated or emphasized, made long or short, scaled up or down, Joffe never loses sight of the irreplaceability of who the sitter is, in that chair and at that moment. When I’ve visited Joffe’s studio in the past, there have been huddles of portraits congregating around the room, staring back at you like guests at a cocktail party. New work is on the way. As early spring light floods in through the 10-foot windows, we sit down and drink tea. “I’m here to ask you some questions about togetherness,” I say. With a wry smile, Joffe responds: “Togetherness? What else is there?”

MATTHEW HOLMAN: Let’s begin at the beginning: art school. This is the moment when many artists feel, often for the first time, feelings of togetherness and belonging, but also the friction that comes with meeting like-minded and ambitious peers. What were the important friendships and relationships when you started out?

CHANTAL JOFFE: I did a foundation degree at the Camberwell School of Art in the late 1980s, which was a revelation. Whereas at school you’re counting down the minutes until 3:30 pm., I was in the studio until 9 p.m. every day – or until the porters threw us out. I’d even walk there when there was a hurricane in London, and of course, the building was often closed. There were so many great people whose names I don’t even remember, but whose teaching lives in my head. One time, Sargy Mann, who was himself taught by Frank Auerbach and who was nearly blind, took us to the Barbican Centre to draw the London Symphony Orchestra. We were given these big sheets of paper, and we’re drawing the musicians’ gestures and movements, swooping in sync, but also the emotion of the music. It was so exciting.

MH: Fantastic. Do you paint to music now?

CJ: Oh, my daughter, Esme, who is a musician, often laughs at me. She says, “Mom, you know nothing about music!” I often listen to the same things, all CDs, which I play for 3 days straight. I like J. S. Bach’s Goldberg variations, Joni Mitchell, Nick Cave, or Ella Fitzgerald. And when the music stops, I stop painting.

MH: Esme often features in your work. What do you learn about your relationship with her through your paintings?

CJ: Esme is one of the most intelligent, funniest, smartest, fiercest people I know. And so I listen to her, and even her criticism I like. I enjoy that. It’s a little bit like in “Franny and Zooey,” by J. D. Salinger, when Zooey is talking to his mom and it’s like he’s fencing with her. It’s a little bit like a fight, and a little bit like a dance, but there’s respect there. It’s a life of knowing each other. We live in east London, so there’s always lots of foxes in the back garden, and when Esme comes in, often with cuts on her hands and with her big eyes, I say: “Oh, look! Here comes the fox!” It cuts both ways.

MH: You painted Esme for your recent exhibition, entitled The Eel, at Victoria Miro in Venice (September/October 2023). What made this series distinct? And why the eel?

CJ: If I’m honest, I wanted to be in Venice as much as I wanted to make the show. I am so afraid of flying that I took the train from London to Venice, which is fantastic. My idea for the exhibition began with Francesca Woodman’s photographs of Italy and of the eel in the bucket, and with her body lying beside it. So, I went to the famous fish market on the Rialto Bridge, and the fishmonger had it all set up on the stand: a giant tuna head with an eel arranged through the mouth. I’m with Esme and my friend Olivia Laing, the writer, and I buy the eel. In fast Italian, the gentle fishmonger was advising me how to cook it, with tomatoes and in a stew, and I start feeling embarrassed and guilty because I’m not going to eat the eel – I’m going to paint it. So then before he cuts the head off, we take the eel through the streets, and it smells foul, truly disgusting. It’s incredibly heavy, lurching over the plastic bags with its grotesque monster’s head, and all the flies are buzzing around and the blood starts seeping out. I finally get it to the studio. I start trying to arrange the eel on a plate, but then it slips off headfirst into the sink, like a horrible Freudian nightmare. I was screaming, disgusted by the eel’s slimy, heavy, dead weight. And then I thought: I can’t paint this and, as fast as I had bought it, threw the eel out. I feel even more guilty. I had bought this creature and then not even respected it enough to eat it. The whole experience of being there together with the eel, with its deadness and its darkness, became a metaphor for Venice itself: the beauty and the sense of death. We had recently had a bereavement in my family, so the eel helped make sense of that.

MH: Families are a recurring subject in your work: expectant mothers, recalcitrant daughters, group portraits. You recently showed as part of the Real Families exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The “real” in the name isn’t to say that there are “real” and “fake” families, but that art must get closer to the complexity of family life in contemporary Britain. What did you learn by taking part in this exhibition?

CJ: I met the curator, Susan Golembok, who is Professor Emeritus of Family Research at Cambridge University, around two years ago. Susan did research in the 1970s about the state’s interventions into people’s family life, such as when social services would take away children from lesbian families. Susan is an amazing woman, and I loved that she looked at art with the passion of someone thinking about what a family could be and, being not strictly an “art person,” was so excited about the possibilities. Alice Neel, Winifred Nicholson, and Cathy Wilkes were all in the show. It felt true to my understanding of what a family could be: the nuclear family, sure, but also friendships, and how much people love pets. We did a talk with Olivia and Charlie Porter, who has just written a fantastic book on the Bloomsbury Set and fashion. On stage, I had been moaning about my mother fighting with my father about a cookie gun, or something mundane like that, on a cold Sunday afternoon, and then immediately afterwards, people came up to me and just started telling their life stories. One man told me that he had just found out that the woman whom he believed to be his mother was not his mother through genetic testing – and I’m there just signing copies of the book! I love how everybody feels that all the trauma and the joy in their families is somehow unique. It is unique, absolutely, but it’s also universal. We’re all in the drama of our own lives, aren’t we? I like to hear about the details of people’s lives, and I love to read memoir and biography. There’s a photographer called Matteo Losurdo, who I met in Venice who took pictures of people’s breakfast as a kind of portrait of their life. I thought that was genius. In art and life, I hate generalization: that leads to fanaticism and fascism and all other kinds of horrors. Hating generalizations is what keeps us human. Never lose sight of the fact that somebody cares as much for their baby as you care about your baby. Pay attention to what they have for breakfast.

MH: You mostly paint family and close friends, and you’ve just noted how strangers have changed your life. Who was the nearest person to a stranger that you’ve ever painted?

CJ: About ten years ago, I was walking past an art shop near my studio, and I saw a mother and daughter. The mom was probably my age now, and was wearing this extraordinary Siberian coat, and the daughter was twentyish. They looked fantastic to paint. I’ve always been obsessed with how Neel and Diane Arbus, my heroes, would approach strangers, and I thought, “Oh, I’m going to try, what’s the harm?” I reassured them that I was a real painter and asked if they would sit for me and, extraordinarily, they agreed. When they came, it was excruciatingly awkward. I started painting them, and it was horrendous for everybody. It felt exploitative; there was no intimacy. I just wiped the painting off in the end. It was such a bizarre experience that I realized I need some kind of rapport with the people that I paint.