THREE TYPES OF WATER, FIVE TYPES OF FALL

By Tom Jeffreys

“There are,” we're told quite categorically, “only three types of water.” In Naomi Frears' short film, Study in Hindsight (2016), poet Ella Frears (the artist's daughter) slowly speaks this strange assertion over an empty black screen. There's a pause. And then come the images: to the left are stacks of chairs – like you might remember from the back of a school assembly hall. To the right is water, glittering a bit, yellow-blue. It's a shallow-looking pool, but beach or leisure centre I can't really tell. Both images are cropped so close that there is no context (temporal, geographic) in which to find your bearings. No where or when. So my eye is drawn instead to the rhythms: the repeating lines of the chairs, their curved wooden backs and straight metal supports, and the rippling dance of the water. Soon Ella's voice returns to classify the three types of water: “Falling. Holding. Light.” Yes, yes, yes, but which is which?

Ella's poem was commissioned in response to an earlier film, Still Here (2014). In both works, text and image sporadically synchronise; more often, things slide around. The soundtracks for Still Here were completely separate from the film. But in Hindsight there is sometimes a correspondence between what we see and what we hear (a boy opens his arms wide “like Jesus at the seaside” or two shots of “that pond there, with the leaves”); at other moments, as Hamlet had it, “the time is out of joint”. Often, the poet speaks of subjects that have faded from view or that we have yet to see: topiary as a form of parenting, lightning as editor, the artist's reflection as film-maker's signature. As a condensed revisiting of the earlier work, Hindsight functions (as its title suggests) like memory: focusing attention on times or ideas that feel more significant now; forgetting other things altogether.

Still Here was Frears' first foray into film. Up to that point she was primarily known for inscrutably atmospheric work across drawing, painting and printmaking. Since then, while continuing to paint and draw, Frears has produced multiple works on film. “My brain is filming all the time,” she tells me, although the actual act of filming is usually done in secret. Six years on, Frears' excitement remains palpable. “The whole phenomenon of recording something in time, to rewatch, edit, re-edit... That's still magic to me.”

A number of Frears' films bring together text and moving image to provide snippets of narrative against still or slowly moving backdrops. In Doom, Theft, And Other Stories (2018), scrolling bright-coloured texts recall adolescent romances or secret crimes from the cusp of adulthood. Frears gives us intimate moments, but held at a distance by the passing of time. The worlds shown in this film (the bottom of a swimming pool, the shadows across a curtain) are just backdrops to memory. A concrete staircase becomes a sheet of writing paper, considerately lined with white paint. I feel like I'm sitting on a train, allowing thoughts to wander as the world blurs by outside. But where is Frears taking us? Her language is straightforward, clear: present tense, few rhetorical flourishes. But so much is left unsaid. If a narrative is a way to make sense of the world, do Frears' films make sense? I mean, why would they? Like her paintings, there is something enigmatic about speaking so very clearly.

There are other similarities between painting and film, most obviously in terms of scale. For the most part, Frears' paintings are modest in size and her films are hardly more than a few minutes each. Blue Sleep (2020) is just a tick over a minute. Paradoxically, as writer Simon Garfield has pointed out, the result is not the frenetic energy of a pop song or a television advert, but “slowness”. Just as a small painting encourages you to get right up close, a short film suggests you should pay attention to even the tiniest detail. For there is no fat in Frears' work. With narratives trimmed as tight as can be, there is always a before and an after that remain untold.

There are similarities too in terms of process. Frears works on numerous paintings at once, returning again and again to the same canvas over a period of several years. The same, more or less, is true of the films. In both media, there is an extended process of adding and removing material, bringing things together and editing them back again. Both painting and film-making involve processes of gathering, sorting, selecting, filtering and framing. Every work is made up of layers, but most of these layers are hardly visible. Often Frears tries out every possible permutation – keeping everything in flux as long as possible – before returning in the end to simplicity.

To work in this manner requires an archive of gathered materials, and all archives must be ordered somehow. An artist's studio is a familiar kind of archive: sketches and postcards, photographs and notes pinned up in loose arrangements; an open book; a half-worked canvas. But I wonder what the virtual equivalent looks like: a paint-spattered Dropbox account? Stacks of unprimed hard drives? “I'm the worst filer in the world,” says Frears – disorganised, she admits, but also afraid of loss. It's a surprisingly fertile combination: “I sometimes come across a cache. It's like discovering a seam – like a vein of copper – of a particular memory, a time, a sound, a place... I started filming gnats a while ago. There are gnats everywhere, hiding in folders, but I haven't found out what they have to say yet.”

This tangle of order and confusion is potentially vital. In a 2019 essay, Alice Spawls describes Frears' sea-facing St. Ives studio. But “[t]he sea and the seascape through her window aren't subjects of Naomi's painting,” she notes. The implication, I think, is of an independent (perverse?) attitude unswayed by the obvious beauty that has attracted so many artists over the centuries. Today, however, Frears is working on several new films and, in contrast to her paintings, the sea is a prominent presence, not for its beauty but for something else.

Men Falling part 1 (2021) combines the artist's response to the death of her father from cancer in 1999 with a wealth of footage showing surfers falling into the sea. Men Falling part 2 (2021) tells of half- remembered moments from his final days against the rumble of the waves. “There are five main types of fall,” runs the text in part 1, in notable echo of that line from Ella. We watch as surfers fall forwards or sideways, jumping up or stepping off, one after the other in carefully synchronised rhythm. What forms is a typology of finality. The desire to keep everything open meets the necessity for categorisation and there must be a negotiation or maybe a battle. No sense without categories, right? To make sense of the falls is not only a metaphor.

I'm tempted to reach for Jacques Derrida, writing on the deaths of his closest friends: “Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde” (2003). Same, same, same, never the same. But nobody quotes Derrida any more. Instead I'd reach for Melissa McCarthy's strange little book, Sharks, Death, Surfers: An Illustrated Companion (2019). It reminds me of Frears' concision and rigour and the way her work functions so lightly like multiple temporary gatherings of so much and so little. McCarthy borrows a phrase from Chris Marker's extraordinary film La Jetée (1962): “Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments.”. I'm not really sure what this means, but it chimes. It's the sorting I'm interested in, and the “nothing” that is doing it: in this case, Frears' moving image works – “strange little films of nothing,” she has called them. Frears' work keeps asking us what really matters: the big things (life, death...) or all the tiny little things. And how can we really know one from the other? There are three types of water, in the end, and five types of fall – and the lingering sad absurdity of trying to sort the world into sense.

Tom Jeffreys is a writer based in Edinburgh. His work has appeared in publications such as art-agenda, ArtReview, Frieze, The Independent, Monocle, New Scientist and The World of Interiors.He is the author of Signal Failure: London to Birmingham, HS2 on foot (Influx Press, 2017) and The White Birch: a Russian reflection (Little, Brown, 2021). He is also the editor of online magazine The Learned Pig.

Essay by Alice Spawls

Naomi’s studio opens onto a tropical stretch of Cornish coast. On a bright day, sand and sea are saturated: there is too much colour, too much light. St Ives, dense and lush, rugged and pretty, sits on a peninsula looking out across a bay, which holds the sea like a glass bowl and keeps the warmth of the sun close. The weather changes quickly. The picture framed by her studio window continually shifts. Figures come and go on the beach; the tide draws in; the sky darkens. But Naomi works away from the window, facing a white wall – a once-white wall, now marked with paint and traces of past paintings. At the canvas, a different scene emerges. 

There is no complete world here. Perhaps one painting of those exhibited will have an internal space that conforms to any realist measure. For those who recognise her work’s distinctive atmospheric qualities, Naomi’s paintings are always in conversation with one another. Juxtaposition – as significant between the paintings as it is fundamental within them – has a dissonant quality here. The relationship of a woman’s face to the patterned motif that partly overlaps it or of the figure on one side of a canvas to the dark foliage on the other: these scenarios have an artistic integrity but a pictorial instability. Across the works, we see contrasts of scale, but also the melody of placement and arrangement, the different forces that embolden some works and obscure others. This isn’t a decisively imagined world; at most these emanations make their claims from a place somewhere just beyond authorial intent. Nonetheless, they are undoubtedly, coherently, the creations of the same restless intelligence.

A tree in these paintings isn’t just, or straightforwardly, a tree.  It might be, as Naomi puts it, an imagined tree pretending to be real. Her paintings aren’t theatrical, nor do they have the carefree charm of the fête galante. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t concerned, by accident if not intent, with questions of masquerade and imitation. In the most basic sense, the organisation of figures and objects in space, and particularly the creation of set-like interior spaces, prompts us to ask what is being performed here. Occasionally Naomi’s subjects occupy a defined space but more often the space around them is detached, abstracted; not formally perfect but a zone. It may have an indeterminate quality – its colour, for instance can’t easily be described ­– but it is an active substrate in the painting, never merely a ground. Here, there is space that is foreboding in its expansiveness and space that it clotted, claustrophobic. Here, there is an idea of containment and then the desire to break out into openness.

The inverse of realism isn’t necessarily artificiality: if Naomi’s paintings aren’t realistic representations of the world around us, that does not mean they are fantasies or dreamlands. But they do seem to belong to a place that won’t quite settle, that threatens to change again any moment. Her process is one of rest and flux. Paintings can stay at a particular stage for months, even years, before they are resumed. Sometimes they then change completely, are painted over, turned on their side. But often some scraping back of the most recent layer follows, exposing, if in unrecognisable form, vestiges of their previous life. Where another artist might plan a painting in preparatory sketches and studies, or cast aside unsuccessful prototypes, Naomi starts every work without a view of how it will develop. Even if some part of it may prove unsatisfactory, the canvas can still hold possibility ­– dissatisfaction is itself an interesting stage ­– and wait as an open-ended question to be resolved another day. One painting may contain ten, twenty, paintings beneath its finished form. It isn’t necessary to have seen the earlier incarnations (though a glance along the unframed edge will give some hints) but it explains something of the uncanny and complex force of the paintings to know that they have not been created to a singular end, but have many selves under the surface. 

The strange histories of her paintings – even the frame of a re-stretched canvas can echo with the images it previously held – appears in their wonderful, suggestive layering. There is no attempt to create a particular surface texture, but the process of painting and lifting off paint, of painting brighter colours under muted ones, of making and modulating pattern or silhouette, creates lyrical, tactile effects (Naomi won’t like that word – she doesn’t seek particular effects – but the paintings do have an effect us). Sometimes woodgrain seems to appear, or detailed brocade, or the cracks of desiccation in dry earth. Sometimes the images float as though under gauze, or reflected in a tarnished mirror, or suggest a photograph printed in a painstaking process of silver and salt. Naomi’s training as a printmaker gives her an eye for these unreadable surfaces – in isolated areas or extending across the canvas – and an ingenuity in their application. Printmaking is significant for the rhythm of her painting process too. The printmaker pauses at each stage of the work, assessing what has transpired so far, deciding how to proceed to the next step. Naomi proceeds in the same manner. Each addition to a painting means a recalibration, and each step is governed by unpredictability. 

One thing that has changed with these new works is the quality of paint itself (the paint and also the line, which is bolder). The oil paint given a bit more room to be itself, things have been worked out in the act of painting ­– moving the paint around on the canvas, say, until a head emerges. Brushstrokes are a little more visible, the paint juicier. Is this an end in itself or a way onto new things? When you ask her about her working methods, it is newness that Naomi returns to: not as a novelty but in a radical sense, as a constant re-beginning, or a form of play; a refusal to be bound by any particular outcome (which would change exploration into study). ‘In every single piece of work I’m trying things I’ve never tried before, in a colour I’ve never used, looking at it a certain sort of way.’ The oil paint, the painting itself, have an agency and a set of limitations that the artist tries to excavate or subvert. Sometimes one small thing – a detail of foliage in a corner – can be attempted repeatedly, all day, and still the painting won’t accept it. Not knowing where these moments of resistance (and then, surprise or release) will occur and without a fixed endpoint in mind, the process is like finding answers to an unknown question, or attempting to solve a puzzle that hasn’t been set.

 Where does the artist possibly start this? A piece of landscape might hold the key, or placing one postcard next to another. Perhaps picking up a canvas that has sat still for a long time; perhaps a breaking out a strong colour to invigorate the day. There are many decisions to be made along the way because the biggest decision is constantly deferred: ‘I’m not painting something I’ve decided I’m painting. I’m not carrying out my own wishes in order to get to a certain place.’ The work emerges out of this deferral ­­– or perhaps a stronger word is needed, refusal. This isn’t to say Naomi works without confidence. She is not afraid of beginning. She knows how to use colour, when to dirty it up or cool it down. She knows what she is drawn to and where to work against that (whatever is happening in a painting at a given point will have its opposite somewhere in the studio). Most important, she knows how hard-won the gains in painting can be and the risks involved in changing what has already been achieved. When she says ‘I’m very capable of losing things,’ we should recognise what is so very rebellious in this. To work at a painting over several years, to slowly build its character from layers of colour, from figure and object and pattern, to painstakingly establish an internal a register of concordant and discordant elements, and then to undo this, sometimes totally, in the search for something else or out of a subtle dissatisfaction, indicates a commitment to painting as making and satisfying difficulty.

The sea and the seascape through her window aren’t subjects of Naomi’s painting. When she paints water, it is contained in pools and fountains; it is symbolic and it is often still. But the unfixed life beyond her window – the figures continually arranging and rearranging themselves, the weather playing out its lovely moods – is a metaphor as well as a view. The intelligent, unsettling elegance and the tonal loveliness of her work, its quiet defiance – making a language for itself – finds an echo in the poetry of Lorine Niedecker, who lived her life by water but for the physical world was no more substantial merely for being visible. Poetry, like painting, is a means of recomposing.

My life is hung up

in the flood

         a wave-blurred

                   portrait

Don’t fall in love

with this face –

         it no longer exists

                   in water

                            we cannot fish

Alice Spawls is one of the two editors of the London Review of Books and one of the founders of Silver Press.