Joan Semmel is a legend. At 91, she is still creating intimate art that is provocative and thoroughly her. She maps the relationship with her own body and self, and meets it with female representations of femininity and politics. She is as no-nonsense as any woman who has lived for nine decades and counting. She didn’t make it this far by chance.
Focused and candid, her ethos is all about the now. When we talk on the phone about what keeps her going, I suggest that perhaps meditation is part of her daily life. In response, she says “it’s not part of my practice to close my eyes”, surprised perhaps that this might be proposed. “I keep my eyes open most of the time. A connection to the world rather than a disconnect to the world.”
When Semmel connects to society, her thoughts are conceptual and drive the work. “We all have different ways of relating to the world, but I tend to be a person who is more involved in things like politics and realities than I am in that other kind of introspection. Introspection comes from making sense of my reality.”
Semmel’s reality is hard to dissect. She muses, “I am very involved politically, as much as I can be. There are certain aspects of politics as a feminist which drive my work. Conceptually, I have to find a way to express those thoughts without being pedantic and without being propagandist by finding imagery that will convey those messages for women.”
A survey of her work elicits a sense of fearlessness and vulnerability, such is its resonant rawness, but when she first started painting that wasn’t her intention. “I began as an abstract painter and as I became involved as a feminist, I wanted to connect those feelings to my work and not be doing something that was completely removed from my life,” she explains. “That was the beginning of my use of the body, so to speak. I didn’t think of it as work ‘about the body’. I thought of it as having the ability to affect the way women are seen in the world. And that’s what motivated me.” She was driven by trying to change her life in relation to pre-ordained imposed societal structures, in terms of “positions that we were permitted, the way we had to look, the way we had to act, a position of powerlessness in terms of control in our own lives. That’s what I was reaching for as an artist.”
These urgent themes have evolved exponentially and many have achieved acceptance today in contemporary art, though, as she says emphatically, “it’s taken a long time, but it seems to finally have arrived”. Since 1970, she’s been working on this kind of imagery. “For a very long time, I couldn’t get any traction at all. Now it’s like younger women have come to the place where I was 50 years ago. It’s a good thing for me, it makes me feel relevant still, which is very nice. But it’s also a little bit sad that those issues are still important and necessary for young people to resist.
Her form of visual realism has historically traced women’s sexuality, with its wrinkles, smile lines, folds, softness, the business of ageing, all of it, naturally encouraging self-acceptance. Although, she says, “I don’t think it’s because I paint so realistically… I imagine that might be helpful to people who can respond to something recognisable more than something more abstract. I think from that point of view it’s important, but the return to figuration has happened out of developments and the art community. [I think] it has to do with a shift from abstraction back towards more representation.”
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