14th October 2021
After breakfast as Geraldine and I were going for our morning walk, one of Geraldine’s studio assistants came up to her with a colour print-out of some galaxy surrounded by stars.
“What galaxy is that?” I asked.
“The Milky Way photographed from the Hubble Space telescope,” she replied. “Last year I saw some photographs taken from the Hubble and I was interested. How could I combine that sort of image with the flowers I have been painting? This is for one of my paintings in my show in Arario Gallery, South Korea next year. I am also thinking of a Japanese artist who works with flowers who sent a flower arrangement up into space. He sent a flower arrangement to the sea as well.”
15th October
There is a geology to paintings. The Danish painter Per Kirkeby, who had been a geologist, wrote of his paintings as being likewise a layering of sediments. The same is true of Geraldine’s more recent paintings.
The Hubble painting is still only an idea in her head, first she has to finish the portrait of film maker and gardener Derek Jarman. She wants to add another layer of sediment, flood on another layer of mud that will turn to shale or granite, all the dead animals, crustacea, trilobites, fossilising into rock under the pressure of geological time.
This layer will include a quote by Jarman about gardening, how being in a garden is being out of time, however her handwriting is too neat. In contrast my handwriting has always been bad, erratic, messy, like a five-year old. She asks me to write the words. For each letter I dip and load the brush again. Drips don’t matter: everything becomes part of the final complex texture. She photographs me as I write.
Already underneath other lines are embedded, the poem by John Donne that Jarman had placed on the side of his cottage at Dungeness – traced out precisely from a printed text. Washes, images, accretions settle upon them. I write in the top half of the painting, in the bottom half of the painting the most recent sedimentary layer is of browns and tiny circles linking like chain mail or the hide of some wild cat, made as camouflage in the bush or shrubs.
16th October
Like most painters today Geraldine often listens to an audi-book. Currently she is listening to the four Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. We had watched the very good serialisation of the first two on DVDs. She wanted to know what happens next, but has listened to the first two books first. “What did you learn?” I asked. “More detail. Complexity. We understand the main character Lenu much better as the story is told through her. We hear her think. The other main character, Lila, is more complex too.” In her paintings of the last few years there is much more detail, much more complexity.
17th October 2021
A Sunday when she does less work but she has taken a blow torch to the Jarman painting – as it is painted with encaustic it melts well. She has not gone at the melting with as much gusto as in the past but just melted a few small areas at the top so that paint has dripped down over the words I wrote, but not enough to obscure them. Unusually this painting has already been painted and exhibited twice, once in Seoul in 2008 as a portrait of herself carrying her old, ailing dog, (Everyone leaves a mark) then later in Manila reworked as an abstracted flower painting. The torching has excavated parts of them. “it has opened up the old paintings,” she says happily, “it makes it more interesting.” Here and there you can see plant forms from those old rejected paintings. Digging into geology. Digging into the past.
18th October
Jarman’s gown has been waxed. “It reminds me of one of Francis Bacon’s popes,” I say. “Yes, I know,” she says, “but once I have painted it pink it won’t do that. I wondered if I should have made Jarman bigger, but I needed space for all the flowers I will put in.” For her, above all else, Jarman is not a film maker but a gardener. She was much taken by the beautiful book on his garden with photographs by Howard Sooley.
21st October
She calls me into her studio. “Look what is happening to the painting!” She is using a small blowtorch to blend the paint on Jarman’s pink/purple robe. But over the lower area of the robe the wax and ink used to draw the small circles underneath have reacted – the ink acting as a resist. The surface has grown crusty, pock-marked with holes. For her it is “unexpected” but “interesting.” The blow torch for her is a liberating tool – things happen with it. “This is very different from the paintings I did for my last show at Art Informal,” she says. “There was nothing in that show like this dominating figure or these written texts.”
22nd October
“You won’t be able to see anything,” she says when I enter the studio to see what she has been working on all morning. She is right: I can’t see any difference from the painting as it was the day before. “Look there!” She points. Close up you can see she has engraved in precise detail a tall flower – a foxglove? – into the paint.
“This is slow work!” I say “How long will it take you?”
“A week maybe.”
“is it relaxing?”
“Sort of. But I have to take breaks periodically as my neck hurts”
23rd October
Life goes on. Life, as always, goes on. Geraldine does not spend all her time in the studio. Every day, several times, she will go out into the garden looking at the plants, sowing, weeding, pruning. And for each day last month she has been be on the internet, campaigning for Leni Robredo’s as president. Retrospectively she wishes she had done more against the election of Duterte six years previously. Why was it not known then that his campaign was bank-rolled by the Marcoses? The thought of Bongbong Marcos becoming president horrifies her. The more she reads the more she is angered by reports of corruption. She is shocked at how abusive the Marcos and Duterte supporters she speaks to on Facebook are. Political debate under Duterte has become toxic. She wants more honesty and decency. She hopes Robredo can bring that. Having once seen the vice president waiting patiently for the same plane as us, chatting amicably to all around her, she feels her to be sympathetic. She has her assistants making banners for the campaign. Today the first one was hung up on a small property she owns facing the main road.
26th October
The banner has been torn down and ripped into several pieces. Geraldine is phlegmatic: it will be repaired and rehung, but higher.
In the studio she had finished engraving and has been colouring the flowers she has “planted” around Jarman’s feet. They are all very dark. I can see that these are all plants Jarman actually grew in his garden in Dungeness. I wonder when she will add the poppy – a flower so important to Jarman. I always like to see its simple, honest redness.
“I painted them the proper colours,” she tells me, “but it was too bright, too jarring, so I toned them down.”
“When will you add the poppy?” I ask.
“It is there, but it has more black than red.”
I go back and look for it. It is there, the blackest, blackest crimson conceivable. The painting now seems nocturnal. As though Jarman has remained sitting in his garden, long after the sun has set and only a few last, lingering rays of light tinge the world with colours.
28th October
As I join her for lunch she tells me “the painting is finished, but because I had no pink encaustic Jarman looks a bit like a zombie, but it is fine.”
“More like a ghost than a zombie,” I reply when I see it. “It has become a nocturnal painting.”
“Is it a good painting?”
“I think so,” I reply. “It is not harmonious as the garden paintings you made for your last show were. There are lots of different things going on. It looks like a transitional painting.”
“Yes, there are lots of things there to explore in the next set of paintings. I am happy that I am still experimenting, not repeating myself.”
A few hours later I go back into the studio to photograph it. I put my long-distance glasses on, the ones that I wear when I go to museums. Funnily enough, the painting seems more harmonious. “It must be my glasses, the painting looks more harmonious,” I say.
“I painted his face again,” she says.
His face is a light brown now. “You have made him into a Filipino,” I say.
“Well, I reckoned he spent so much time in the garden he would be sun-tanned. The painting is definitely finished. I have asked the gallery to pick it up.”
The sun has, if not returned, at least sent a last few glimmers of light back to illuminate Jarman’s garden.
31st October
As we walk in the morning after breakfast we talk. Mainly about the forthcoming election. Sometimes she will disappear to weed or talk to the gardeners, but the painting comes up:
“I am going to add more flowers.”
“So, it isn’t finished quite yet.”
“No, maybe not. I feel the need to paint more flowers. And I am going to engrave his face – give it more character.”
But when I go into the studio later that morning, she is making another banner for Leni Robredo.
1st November
She asks me to see Jarman’s face. She has reworked it. Just a few subtle touches. He looks younger, more forceful.
I take a photo of the photographs she put on her studio wall two years ago before she started on her “five gardens” paintings. Having been to see Hauser and Wirth’s gallery and garden at Bruton, Somerset on a trip to the UK I had shown her photos and films I had taken of the garden designed by Piet Oudolf, with its subtly blended colours, where even the dead and dying plants, drying out or fading in the autumn chill were integral. She found other images of that garden on the internet and had them printed out.
Now they are blotched and discoloured – that wall in the studio suffered from damp in the previous rainy season.
Soon she will replace them with printouts of photos from the Hubble Space Camera.
2nd November
By the end of the day Geraldine is having to use a walking stick to get around. This happens periodically after a full day’s painting. Perhaps she leans forward too much when she paints, but now her back and leg hurt. Many painters develop back problems: no art school ever teaches the students how to sit properly when they paint! Tomorrow she will have to rest.
3rd November
“I have finished,” she announces early that afternoon.
“Are you sure?” I ask jokingly.
We go to look at it.
“With these new dry pigments that I have started using I am getting some colours that are impossible with acrylics. I am really happy with it.”
I look close at the many flowers now engraved and painted around Jarman’s feet and agree. “it is rich.”
Standing back, I remark that with all the words it is about Jarman the writer rather than Jarman the filmmaker.
“And Jarman the gardener,” she replies, “and the photograph I based this on was of him when he had been acting in one of his films.”
“It is very much about Jarman. I hope whoever buys the painting knows who Jarman is.”
By dusk a new Leni banner has been made, backed securely and hung higher between coconut trees. We go and watch it floating between the trees, a luminous pink in the gloaming.
10th November
The Jarman painting has been taken away. A large canvas, five by six feet, is propped against one wall. On another wall there is a double row of print outs from the Hubble space satellite.
They look so bright and pristine compared to the faded and discoloured Hauser and Wirth garden photos they have replaced. There is nothing on her easel. On a low table near the easel four small canvases are waiting. She wants to experiment, find ways of painting the star systems, try doing different things with the pigments she used in the Jarman painting.
14th November
There are small paintings in the studio – four of them. They remind me of those odd paintings of Strindberg with their hyper active brushwork and their repeated motif of light emerging from darkness.
17th November
For the last week she has been working on the four small paintings. Not all the time: she has set her assistants to copy banners for the Leni campaign, but she has to spend time correcting and finishing them. She sits in a sea of Leni Robredo cartoon figures.
However, each day the four paintings look different, the surface builds up on them: swirls of colour in the black sky, small swathes of encaustic, tiny engraved flowers or leaves. When I ask how they are going she is dismissive. “They are just experiments.”
But after a week she has sudden confidence, “It’s working. I can tell this is going to work on a big painting. I wish I could do a really big painting of the star systems, but I can’t send seriously large paintings to Arario as the shipping costs go so high if the paintings are not rolled and with all the encaustic I use that is impossible.”
Before lunch, I am sitting outside her studio, drinking coffee and staring at the mountain. She comes out of the studio, one of the small paintings held in her hand.
“Look at this!” she says triumphantly. Hundreds of stars shine.
I don’t have my glasses on so I cannot see it precisely, but enough to know this works.
“Did you spatter the starts on,” I ask
“No, each put on exactly with a Q-tip.”
“Will you include the four small paintings in your show in Arario next November?” I ask later.
“No, I will sell them to support Leni’s campaign. I will sell them as a set.”
18th November
GJ calls me to see the set of four paintings. She is right: they work as a set. I ask if she had intended to work together. Not so. They were just experiments, but have turned out as a successful art work.
19th November
She is working on the first big painting: laid flat on a table. Broad brush-marks delineate an ellipse or elongated whirlpool. Or you could call it a big swirl.
20th November
The big swirl is being built up. I ask whether she will engrave images of flowers on these as she had on the four small paintings. She says so. I wonder whether that is too specific. “Should you not include images of other life forms: ferns, molluscs, animals even to suggest life in general. Just having flowers seems very specific.”
24th November
It has achieved a certain density
Every day she goes on line to comment on the trolls, refuting their lies. In English or Tagalog I ask. “Tagalog – we must reach ordinary people.”
25th November
And built up and built up. That certain density that the paint has arrived at, the weight, the depth and complexity of paint: it is a solid to represent a void – a paradox
Like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Geraldine’s painting of the night sky begins not with a flower but with an ape. The first image she engraves on the canvas is of the head of an ape.
26th November
She is searching for images. I order books by Ernst Haeckel for her: Art Forms from the Abyss: Ernst Haeckel’s Images from the HMS Challenger Expedition and Art Forms from the Ocean: The Radiolarian Prints of Ernst Haeckel.
I am reminded of Adam Elsheimer and his wonderful painting of the flight into Egypt now in Frankfurt. The first painting to show the moon as it was, with shadows and craters, not a plain white sphere. The first painting to depict the constellations correctly – astronomy, not astrology. He had looked through his friends Galileo Galilei’s telescope. We can see these things with our naked eye, but no one had depicted them correctly before Elsheimer and Galileo. Likewise, we could only see these smaller creature properly after we have seen them through a microscope.
Details from Adam Elsheimer, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1609, Frankfurt, Städel Musuem.
28th November
Wednesday the 8th December will be a big day. There will be a campaign event for Leni in Geraldine’s road side space. There will be lugaw (porridge) for everyone who wants it.
4th December
The banners are up in the space. “I had not realised,” she tells me, “that there is a real optical effect in how the red panels appear in front of the green.”
It has made her change her mind about how to use the space – not to lease out of for some sort of community space but leave as it is, albeit tidied up – somewhere for kids to play. So much open space in our barangay is being bought up and enclosed. I suggest if nothing else we add two benches so people can sit down and rest. And maybe a rubbish bin.
8th December
The big Leni day. Her campaigners give speeches, give out information. A stream of people from the barangay come to see and hear and eat lugaw.
9th December
Geraldine shuts herself in the studio.
10th December
The studio is empty. Geraldine takes a day off with her two assistants, going out for a nice lunch, sourcing more plants.
I sit in studio and look at her previous days’ work: I count 36 animals, fish or birds. 11 are already worked up in gold, the rest engraved into the paint are nearly invisible. You have to look really hard to spot them
At the moment this is like two separate paintings with no apparent connection. The big swirl and an encyclopaedia of animal forms. Candidates for Noah’s Ark.
Does it have to be animals in subsequent paintings in this series, for this exhibition? Why not objects or languages (letter forms)? They too are part of creation. I know the next painting will focus on the sort of small marine creatures Haeckel researched, but after that…
11th December
I have to go into hospital for an operation.
14th December
I come out but I am barely mobile, certainly unable to walk down the step to her studio.
30th December
My first day in studio for nearly three weeks. While I have been bed ridden the work has been slow, detailed and meticulous. Now 88 animals roam the canvas.
Also, in this interim she has been very involved in the election responding to the trolls of Marcos Junior. And she has been nursing me. Of course, she initially trained as a nurse: she is brilliant at it: resourceful and patient.
4th January 2022
And it has all been covered up! Well not entirely. Another layer of sediment forms trapping, sometimes hiding, the forms below. At first the sediment (paint) comes in brusque, chunky brushstrokes.
Then comes the blowtorch, more paint…
In subsequent days I have severe attacks of gout and am unable to take my normal medications because of other medications. I rarely get to the studio.
22nd January 2022
Slowly another sedimentation, of animals, forms, slowly engraved, one by one.
26th January 2022
And a forest grows above them.
31st January 2022
Finished! It is, she admits, an attractive painting – pretty even if you like. She smiles: “my work often comes out looking pretty even if I don’t want it to.”
“Yes,” I add, “but that is not the only thing about it. With the colours and images of animals and leaves it is at firsts sight very attractive, easy on the eye, pleasing, yes, even pretty, but then one starts to ask questions: ‘Why all these animals? Why are they poised (posed) so equably above a background that looks like a turbulent sky? What is it actually about?
We have been discussing Magritte whose work she does not like but I suggest she has something in common with him. Her animals are clearly copied from line drawings – almost to the point of being ideograms. So, it was with Magritte – he always copied any animal in his art from his Larousse Encyclopaedia.
Magritte was always insistent there were no symbols in his work. He wanted his work to have mystery. Hence his paradoxical use of mundane images and a style so apparently style-less.
I have been reading Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit, a book on George Orwell and his gardens. In the sixth chapter she talks of how the garden Orwell began in 1936 was a response to the suffering and exploitation he had seen in the industrial areas of England; an act against “deathliness, uprootedness, alienation, sheer ugliness… To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you see both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth, in which you understand fully how something came into being.”[1] Making whole again – this is I think what links her gardening her painting, her political work
What more will she do to this painting? She tells me she will darken the sides and try and make it a bit more matt – it is too shiny or reflective at the moment.
Geraldine and team campaigning 31st January 2022
1st February 2022
How to title this painting? Think of its origins: images of galaxes from the Hubble telescope. Its ingredients: a multitude of animals floating apparently in space. Images that have somehow materialised: a landscape seen a frame of the darkness of trees. What we might call subtexts that have appeared, deliberately or not: a turbulent sky. Problems that tease one for an answer: why the shiny pigments? Why are the animals so formulaic? What would be a straightforward explicatory title: Another galaxy with familiar animals. Which is appealing uncanny. Made more explicit if we rephrase it as A different galaxy with strangely familiar animals. Too obvious.
Start again. How about 88 animals in search of their other. Which has a delicious echo of Pirandello’s play Six characters in search of an author.
Or Waiting? Or some other activity within the painting, such as Germination – which suggests a connection between sky/galaxy and the animals.
The New World rediscovered – with fauna. Which suggests both discovery and the strangeness of the familiar.
Those are my thoughts.
What is a title? What relationship should it have to the painting?
“The title is not the icing on the cake,” said David Sylvester, “it is the cherry in the cocktail.”[2]
What will she title it and why? She tells me she will decide that when all five paintings are completed.
The canvas was originally painted mauve. The sides, if not the front, are still mauve, and are disruptive. Today she is repainting them black. Tomorrow when it is dry it will be stored away and she will start working on the next painting.