Out of Saint Martins
I met Jan Coutts when she was a BA/Fine Art student at Central St Martins where I was a tutor in the Sculpture area.
Jan invested an unusual amount of energy and curiosity into her three years on the course. She was always experimenting with materials and continually searching for the appropriate form of expression for her ideas. She was one of the few students who had no qualms about harnessing her discoveries and pushing them to serve her aims - be they in sculpture, drawing or in print.
I became aware of her skills as a draughtswoman when she returned from a trip to Africa with a portfolio of vibrant wildlife drawings. She started to make prints from the drawings and found a new range of materials to experiment with in the print room. The drawings began to acquire layers of texture and atmosphere through their contact with various acids, pigments, presses and papers. They were mutilated, resurrected and manipulated until a signature began to emerge. The conversation between sculpture, drawing and printmaking served to inform and enrich each discipline in its own right. The culmination of all this learning came later once Jan was established in her own studio. It was there that the wildlife canvases came to life.
Animal art is a dangerous area - sentiment is an invidious predator; it lies in wait to turn the explosive beast into a cute, furry pet or a noble ornament. Rodin, in his Testament Artistique exhorts the artist to imitate Nature in the 'way she works' and not in the 'way she looks'. Nothing, except for a gun, nobody, apart from a hunter, can arrest the racing cheetah in pursuit of its prey or stop the stampeding herd in full flight. We are privileged if we can witness a moment of the chase - without interfering or killing. Film capture these moments, it can speed them up, slow them down, stop them dead; the still camera seizes the split second and saves it forever. They record nature, they unveil mystery, they dissect movement, they stop time and they diffuse awe. In Jan's paintings the beasts have not been tamed, they retain their dignity and their mystery, they are not hunted, nature is still operating and there is no final outcome. The tension between the materials used on these canvases works to compliment the movement of the subjects. Some of the images are almost entirely obscured, and yet we still sense rustling in the bush and are compelled to discover the source beating under layers of paint.
The eye does not become bored and takes nothing for granted.
The beasts in these paintings are as elusive on canvas as they are in their natural habitat. They reveal and camouflage themselves through patterns in the mists and shadows in the sun, they hunt and flee beneath layers of texture, their journeys are mapped by eroded patches of gold, silver and bronze leaf, their landscapes are cracked by layers of oil paint, glazes and resin as if they had been literally baked by the African sun. No technique has been shelved, each decision has been made to suite the creature and its habitat. Gestures of the hand, wrist and arm are still visible in these pieces communicating the passion and excitement of the artist in the face of this ungraspable landscape. These are not lifeless portraits - they speak of freedom, power and survival.
Jan has managed to capture speed, movement, light and pattern in her personal view of the wild. The beasts have a dreamlike quality, the images contain a sense memory, almost convincing you that you were there. They tap the subconscious, where, you too, knew cheetahs and zebra and experienced the vastness and trembling illusion of the African planes.
Viv Levy, MA RCA,
Out of Paddington
Jan Coutts' studio in west London is set beneath the bleak escarpment of the raised section of the Westway, looking across a gravel yard to the sweep of railway lines leading from Paddington towards the setting sun. At first sight, it seems an unlikely birthplace for her striking images of Africa and its wild animals.
Her association with that continent extends through numerous visits and many years, but it was her first visit to Tanzania's Serengeti which made the deepest impression. Here was a place that spoke of time infinitely extended: a landscape in a state of continuous ossification. Against the silent metronome of evaporation, cracking, blistering, whitening - the animal appeared as spectral flurries of speed and shimmering elegance, occasional explosions of life at its most intense were taking place.
This she realised was what she wanted to paint. What was required was the vocabulary to express the brief explosions of life inside this haunting stillness. She was already an accomplished draftsman, but Jan realised that the techniques she had evolved during the previous years of training as a sculptor, had been a preparation for this moment.
Whilst in Africa she assembled a body of sketches and observations and photographs. She began to paint her animals upon 'funeral bark' - a paper like bark removed from indigenous trees and used by the local people for wrapping bodies - reminded by its texture of the continuous processes of decay, blistering, fissuring, peeling and degradation going on around her. Bit by bit she began to use the paint itself to express this. Multiple glazes were overlaid upon the animals she painted, obscuring them with patterns of heat and mirages of motion. When they crazed and inter-reacted, the animals themselves were revisited, re-conjured from the elusiveness she had imposed. As her techniques evolved, she would abandon the work for a while, so that chemical reactions would be going on in her absence, fusions and opacities as unpredictable as events in the landscape she was representing. This process was repeated as many as twenty times, in pursuit of a magical convergence in which the colour and textures of the works themselves appear transfigured by the winds and the dust they depict, curled and twisted by the fierceness of the sun that illuminates them, and the animals themselves fleeting and elusive beneath the paint they inhabit.
Africa is a place many of us think we know - if only from our living rooms. We've all watched the wide screen documentary world unfolding at our feet, caught glimpses of distant savannah between the take away cartons, as the sofa sweeps us along green crocodile infested rivers. But the easy familiarity of these pre-digested moments has devalued them as effectively as the great white hunter whose only way of capturing the living was also to shoot it. The unique achievement of Jan Coutt's images of Africa is to go far beyond recording the grazing zebra or the sprinting cheetah.
Imagine the cheetah for a second in its totality; the eye transposed into a zoom lens as you are running down through the grass and the light; through the fur and muscles to the bones; to their motion inspired by hunger and neural electricity. But move back to your position as observer and you are watching the distant elusive shapes transfiguring and moving amongst hot breath and swaying grass: the hunger of patterns lost to view. In these elegant paintings the traces of the artist as tracker stand beside the footprints of the animals she observes; hunter and hunted, the observer and the observed, live beneath the same corrosive sun.
As I left her studio it occurred to me that perhaps it was not such an inappropriate location after all: unseen, above us, the continuous thrum of a hostile wind; in the distance fragments of movement in the bright light. Nearby, a waste of sand and broken whiteness where unseen engines of destruction crushed rocks with the occasional unexpected roar.
AJ Tipping,
Out of Tanzania
In the early 90's Jan joined my husband and I in the Serengeti/Ngorongoro Conservation Area where we have lived and worked for the last 25 years as wildlife photographers and filmmakers of documentaries.
At the time we were producing some of our first coffee table books on the wildlife and the special landscape. Jan was in the middle of her art degree at Central St Martins, even so there was a great affinity between her artistic sensibilities and us. Even at this time her work was expressing movement, patterns and capturing the location. What better place than the Serengeti to allow this interest to really take root and evolve in a special way relating to the landscape.
Spending our professional lives getting to know different animals as individuals, involves us being with them all day and often throughout the night as well gaining many insights which so few people are given the opportunity to see. During Jan's stays with us she naturally accompanies me in the field on a daily basis. Usually I am working on cheetahs and other plains game during her stays and we have shared many special and intimate experiences. On many occasions we would follow a pregnant female cheetah until it gave birth, and record the raising of the cubs; teaching them how to hunt for themselves and generally gain self confidence to survive in the harsh East African landscape. It is some of these amazing moments that I can quite clearly see in her work. Jan's passion for experimentation, fully compliments our way of life here in the bush.
It was obvious from the beginning that she has a natural and close affinity to both animals and the environment, in whichever habitat my work took us and also in and around camp. She has a rare ability to focus and observe and an even rarer ability to then commit her emotions and personal revelations to canvas.
Jan's original work on bark cloth, using clay/earth and ash images created an unique way of expressing the ultimate timelessness of savannah life. Her succeeding forays into these endless East African plains created a series of huge leaps in the development of her work. For those of us who have the privilege of living and working here, the complexity and the stark simplicity of Jan's paintings, capture the extraordinary moments we normally commit to memory and wish we had got on film.
Lala Kuenkel
Filmmaker/Writer