‘Paintings are windows through which I regard life.’
Deborah Poynton
As a child, Deborah Poynton made drawings to create a safe world for herself. Although her life often felt unsafe, on paper she could invent new worlds. The imaginary landscapes and doll’s houses that she drew offered her a new perspective.
Poynton still uses her art to reconcile with life. Every weekday, she works in her studio from seven in the morning to five in the afternoon. She does not paint to think about herself or to contemplate her life. On the contrary, she paints to escape it.
Childhood
Deborah Poynton was born in 1970 in Durban, a city on the east coast of South Africa. Her British mother had an unplanned pregnancy while on a trip around the world and gave her up for adoption immediately after birth. When she was three months old, Deborah was adopted by the Poyntons. David, a South African, and his English-born wife Jean lived next door to the anti-apartheid centre that they were running at the time. The large, wild garden around the house and the view across the Valley of a Thousand Hills made an indelible impression on young Deborah. Although her life was pervaded with a sense of anxiety and insecurity due to her parents’ political activities, Poynton mainly remembers the magical and mysterious world in which she grew up. In 1972, Deborah’s father died after a car crash. Her mother continued to run the anti-apartheid centre for a few years afterwards. In 1979, she and her daughter returned to her home county in England, Kent.
In Kent, nine-year-old Deborah was sent to boarding school. The contrast between the freedom of her early childhood in South Africa and institutional life in grey, cold England was huge. Deborah escaped it by drawing. In South Africa, she had taken her first lessons in the visual arts when she was three years old in a drawing class taught by Ilsa Boswell, a friend of her mother’s. Deborah used a fineliner pen to draw detailed landscapes full of animals and cottages. [AFB 2] She made her first attempts at portraits and copied illustrations from her mother’s art books – Leonardo Da Vinci, in particular, held her interest.
When Deborah was thirteen, her mother died of pancreatic cancer. During the last six months of her mother’s illness, Ilsa lived in their home, and it was during this time that Deborah first drew her. This portrait was the first in a long series of drawings and paintings that she would make of Ilsa, who became one of Deborah’s most important models.
A constructed reality
After her mother’s death, Deborah returned to South Africa. She was taken in by friends of her parents, American missionaries who lived in Swaziland. Because Ilsa worked as an art teacher at Deborah’s new boarding school, they kept in touch. When her guardians returned to the United States in 1985, Deborah – who was still a minor – had to go with them. She continued to draw in her final years in high school. After graduating in the autumn of 1987, Deborah was admitted to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied classical drawing. When she discovered painting, she found that she was quite different from her peers, since she was not interested in the conceptual notions they were pursuing. She wanted to paint materials, objects and figures, which she juxtaposed in new combinations to construct fictional situations.
Although she did well in her studies, Deborah’s restless and unhappy childhood still affected her. She suddenly felt inspired to return to South Africa and left for Durban at the age of nineteen. After several weeks, she moved to Cape Town, where she entered the third year of the Michaelis School of Art of the University of Cape Town. She felt out of place there. Art with a political message was all the rage, and the art of painting seemed to have been dismissed as irrelevant. There was no room for her constructed reflections on life. Deborah dropped out before the year’s end and began painting full-time. Isolated from Cape Town’s artistic circles, she worked on her paintings for five years. Then she started ‘coming out’. She participated in a few group exhibitions, and in 1998 she had her first solo exhibition. That year, Deborah married a German man who was living in Cape Town. The couple had their first son in 2000. A year later, the family emigrated to the Rhineland in Germany, where their second son was born. Shortly after their return to Cape Town in 2005, the marriage broke up. Early in 2008, Poynton met her current life partner. [AFB 3]
Bits of illusion
For Poynton, a painting begins with an idea or a feeling, without a specific image coming to mind. It can often take months before she starts painting. In those months, her ideas, for example about space or light, become more detailed. Once the painting has taken shape in her mind, Poynton starts photographing objects or models. She regards photography as a tool: she can use it to cut out bits of the world, which she puts on the canvas in new combinations. She starts painting with a large brush, applying several layers with a light touch. Because it takes a long time for each layer to dry, this is a slow process. To fit the authentic elements into her new, constructed reality, she changes the light and the colours of an object or the texture of a plant. If a figure should be part of the painting, she asks a model to pose for her. During these sessions, Poynton is in total control. She places her models in various poses and takes pictures of their posture, and details like hands, hair and skin. After making a sketch, Poynton uses a pencil to map out the points of a grid on the large canvas to achieve the correct proportions. Then she starts to loosely paint the figures, layer upon layer. Each new layer adds to the image’s verisimilitude, and the final layer gives the painting its depth. Some elements will be more detailed than others, and sometimes Poynton will leave parts of the canvas in rudimentary form or even devoid of paint. She paints an illusion, but reveals it at the same time.
The experience of perception
The few life models that Poynton uses, particularly her sons, her partner and Ilsa, are immediately recognizable. However, she does not paint portraits. She uses her models as extras in the worlds that she constructs. Because she paints the same figures over and over, Poynton can use them with increasing ease. She places them together and creates a new reality without a story, message or morals. Because of the way in which she combines figures and objects, however, viewers will automatically come up with a story. Poynton is aware of this effect and uses it to show that all viewers have a unique perception; she paints to reflect this experience. Moreover, she plays with their perception and wants to mislead her viewers. Her – sometimes suggestive – titles are part of this misdirection. ‘Little Girl Lost’, for example, evokes an oppressive and anxious feeling. ‘Morality Play’ reinforces the association stirred up by the image of a naked younger woman and a clothed older man. [AFB 4] Although the woman and the man are not in a relationship, Poynton paints them as if they are. She has viewers think that there is a connection between these two figures, which prompts them to make up a story. According to Poynton, there is no story; it is all deception – it is emptiness.
Connection
Through her paintings, Poynton seems to want to connect to viewers. She creates a new place, which she can visit in the company of the other. The nudity of her large figures emphasizes their humanity and thus adds to this sense of connection. At the same time, their intimacy is so overwhelming that it also repels viewers. [AFB 5] Poynton invites them in and pushes them away. She hopes that this contradiction will promote authentic viewing. Particularly in a world that is full of images, viewers no longer know how to look at paintings. Poynton wants them to look with their bodies instead of their heads. Viewing should be intuitive or instinctive, without the mind looking for words to understand the work or turn it into something logical. The large format of the paintings helps viewers to do so. It creates a physical experience because it gives them the idea that they can step into the work. They can submerge themselves in it and get absorbed by it. Because the paintings are so realistic, Poynton’s world is close by. Because they are visually attractive, viewers are drawn in even more easily. And yet, despite their realism and nearness, Poynton’s art is a total illusion, and this is at the heart of what she paints: images that reflect reality, but are devoid of meaning.
Invention
Poynton does not mix with the art circles of Cape Town or her former German home town, which she still visits regularly. She works at home, in isolation, seldom goes to exhibitions and does not look at the work of other contemporary artists. Although the poses of her models are reminiscent of paintings by 18th and 19th-century artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacques-Louis David and Édouard Manet, she is more inspired by earlier artists. She is attracted by the work of the 16th-century painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, for example, who did not preach morals and painted his figures as part of nature. She is also attracted by the dominant role of nature in 17th-century landscapes. In the classical, Arcadian landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, Poynton likes the idea that viewers can let their eyes wander across the canvas and step into it whenever they want. She is interested in the 17th-century concept of ‘invention’, with artists intensely studying nature, anatomy, geometry, optics and light to create fictional landscapes that feel more real than a rendering of an actual site. Poynton, too, does not paint factual situations or actual landscapes. She sees invention as an abstraction of reality, a way to see the world as if it were real. Although reality cannot be preserved, invention is framed reality. According to Poynton, it is a safe place for the imagination.
Beyond Belief. A veil across the void
Viewers of Poynton’s work might mistake her virtuosity as being a goal in itself. However, such a shallow reading would make the assumption that her art is reactionary and immature. Poynton’s art goes beyond the banality of realist painting. In her paintings, which seem to contain reality, she reflects on the essence of life. Their realism allows viewers to believe in their illusion. Poynton, however, sees this illusion as a thin veil that can be pulled aside. Behind the veil is the void. Some are frustrated by the fact that her work reflects this emptiness. Most people try to protect themselves against the void, by filling their lives with possessions and distractions. Poynton fills her canvases with objects and classical references. She paints provocations to grab the viewers’ attention. With her realism and playful use of light and space, she pulls viewers into her world, lifting them out of their own reality for a moment and thus making them aware of the filter through which they look at the world. Poynton shows that the reality which they have always relied on simply does not exist. It is a veiled emptiness.