Anne Rothenstein: Stories With and Against the Grain 2024

When Anne Rothenstein was twenty-one, she wrote a short story called A Block of Wood. In it she tells the tale of an artist who is faced with the challenge of shaping a stubborn block of wood into an aesthetically pleasing form. Completely absorbed by the task, he only takes time out from his daily routine to join his wife and two children at the end of their afternoon walk. The summer sun shines brightly, and yet he feels pulled towards this gnarled block of wood, his eyes running over the sinuous web of lines of its grain. When he finally sees his family, he is shaken by a whole new set of emotions – passion, desperation and confusion. “There they walked,” she writes, “a mother and her children, his wife, his son and daughter, beautiful and mysterious.” He thinks about what secrets they have shared, the special times they have had together, and why he doesn’t, just once, leave his block of wood to spend some carefree hours together. When he reaches them, he pulls his wife close and looks into her eyes, which are “always with their quality of sadness and distance, even now on such an afternoon such as this.” He kisses her, but soon his thoughts drift back to the piece of wood.

What is extraordinary about this story is how closely it resonates with the compelling and open-ended narratives of Rothenstein’s paintings. Central to these are the figures that have emerged out of her imagination and that she has placed within interior and exterior scenes. In some works, there may only be a single figure, sitting on a bed, looking out directly at the viewer or walking in an indeterminate landscape. In others we may see two or more gathered in disparate clusters. Bodily details are kept to a bare minimum – their forms mapped out in strident blocks of colour. Facial features are equally sparse, in many cases almost eradicated to the point of oblivion.

Looking at these paintings can feel as if we have joined a drama that has been unfolding but of which we may have missed the crucial part. In works such as Unknown Territory (2022) we see humans seemingly drifting apart or moving in indeterminate directions. Occasionally they are captured in a close embrace. Yet such is the ambiguity of how they carry themselves or how they are placed within the compositions that we can’t tell if what we see is a heartfelt welcome or a long goodbye.

Rothenstein’s figures have an uneasy presence that is hard to ignore. Their gender and age are unclear. And as with the characters in her short story, it is the ambiguity of their intent that holds our gaze. Who are they? Why are they there? Despite the strong sense of narrative, the artist’s artworks never tell us what to think or what to feel. Theirs is a story that echoes the ethereality of an emotion that seems within reach, but that can evaporate like a dissipating mist. What are we left with? An underlying sense of the uncommunicated, of the frustration that articulated thought cannot ever match what is innermost felt.

The potency of these works lies as much in the content as the artist’s technique, in the way in which Rothenstein applies her paint and the tonal breadth of colours she chooses. These rich dark burgundy reds, dense absorbing blues and ominous shades of green have become her distinctive palette. The deliberate choice of using flat wooden boards on which to paint her stories adds to the effect. The surface of the wood, with its beautiful whorls and serpentine lines of its grain, offers an additional, richly textured layer to the pictorial space. In some images the lines almost appear to vibrate. 

Rothenstein’s compositions often include elements derived from worldly events – that she has heard about or seen and that end up intervening without her intention. In one painting in progress in her studio, a figure of a man seen in profile wears a jacket with underneath it a billowing dress, an idea taken from an image of American actor Billy Porter wearing a Christian Siriano tuxedo gown at the Oscars. In another work we see a figure and a dog within a tree-lined landscape that appear to be in flames – a detail added after hearing numerous stories of uncontrollable forest fires across the world.

The result is that we may feel we are entering an imaginary world that defies a specific temporality, where what we observe feels neither historic nor contemporary, hovering between the mythical and the mundane. “I like the idea of not being able to place something, of passing through,” Rothenstein has said. In addition, there is often a subtle yet unnerving tension in these quiet dramas. When we look away, we are left with a lingering sense of unfinished business, making Rothenstein a talented poet of apprehension.

The muted expressions of her figures may seem melancholic, yet they never feel like they are alone. It is a sentiment that comes, in part, from Rothenstein’s own way of living. “I need solitude, not as a sad, Munchian place of desperation, but a desirable place,” she notes. “I enjoy this rather alien feeling of disconnection, of having placed myself somewhere outside of the throng, and this surely leads to my feeling for the art that I love.”

Rothenstein certainly has a keen eye for art, and the quiet complexity of her paintings suggests that she has absorbed the work of many other artists, past and present. Her work feels highly intuitive yet makes one wonder where this approach comes from. She describes herself as self-taught, although she did a foundation year at Camberwell College and has spent decades painting outside the conventional world of art, with little or no contact with other artists.

It therefore makes perfect sense that she finds much commonality and respect in the work of many artists whose work is also self-taught or operates beyond the mainstream. She is inspired by the “visceral energy” that their work emanates and fascinated by the impetus that compels them to create art. “I would love to be able to work like that,” she says, “to be that instinctive […] one gets an element of the curious desire to make marks which are so mysterious and wonderful.” She holds a special place for the African American artist Bill Traylor (1853–1949), a man born into slavery who spent most of his life after emancipation as a sharecropper, turning to art late in life, having his first exhibition of drawings at the age of 87.

She has the refreshing attitude that self-taught practitioners and trained artists have equal footing, and has also been inspired by a wide range of modernist and contemporary artists. She particularly admires the restrained introverted emptiness of Vilhelm Hammershoi’s paintings, in which the gentle daylight interiors and single figures of women seen only from behind are painted in a deliberately muted monochrome. She is “mesmerised” by the sophistication and simplicity of Gwen John’s work and is also greatly moved by Édouard Vuillard’s richly coloured canvases, in which enigmatic figures can sometimes seem to be on the verge of dissolving into walls and pieces of furniture. However, she is most influenced by many contemporary artists, most notably Mamma Andersson, Jockum Nordström, Marlene Dumas and Nan Goldin, whose powerful narratives range from the fantastical to the highly personal.

The strong undercurrent of unease and explorations of contemporary malaise that runs through their contemporary work has parallels with her own paintings. Take a work such as Rothenstein’s Bruised I (2022). A figure looks out at us. Their red shirt with white stripes that hangs open is matched by several wisps of reddish hair that flick across the face In between the reddish-bluish smudge of a black eye. It is an arresting and confronting image. Rothenstein was only aware afterwards that she was paying a subconscious homage to Goldin’s self-portrait from her series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), a work that she regards as a “thing of extraordinary power, beauty and ugliness”.

Rothenstein has long been drawn to the dark side of life and finds a particular fascination in the work of artists who have explored the margins of bodily representation, citing, alongside Goldin’s work, Henry Tonks’s drawings of disfigured soldiers, Francis Bacon’s bodily distortions as well as the historic Japansese art of Kusôzu – watercolour paintings that depict the slow decay of a dead body. “All these images stir in me some unnameable feeling, which somewhere along the line feeds into the way I view the world and therefore my work,” she says. It is a sensibility that she traces back to earlier years. Growing up in the 1950s, she experienced what she felt was an era of repression, and what was going on under the surface was “frightening … and fascinating […] I was harmed by all this, which isn’t to say I haven’t found strength and creativity from it.”

Her father Michael Rothenstein (1908–1993) was a noted printmaker and teacher, while her mother Duffy Ayers (1915–2017) was a talented painter, who she calls her greatest influence on account of her “unshakeable belief” that the life of an artist was the only way to live. Her grandfather was the distinguished painter and writer William Rothenstein (1872–1945). Her early upbringing with her parents in the creative environment of Great Bardfield in rural Essex, living among a group of like-minded artists that included Edward Bawden, Sheila Robinson and Eric Ravilious, may have seemed a catalyst for her artistic path. Yet she feels no strong connection or immediate inspiration looking back to this family narrative – or any other sense of history for that matter – which she puts down, in part, to the fallout of her parents’ separation when she was seven years old. She would soon learn the art of solitary self-preservation and immersed herself into a very productive process of writing stories and later, in painting.

Looking back now, she recognises that there was a “disconnection”, and that turning inwards she found “this self” that she had created very exciting. The outcome of this process was that while having a strong sense of self, she has little notion of an identity. “I don’t identify with any group or place [… I] don’t feel particularly British or particularly female. I have no sense of history or belonging. I’m neither interested in my past nor my future. My grandfather’s autobiography sits on my shelf unread.”

This is an extraordinarily clear vision to have of oneself. For some, this sense of identity could have been oppressive, disorienting or even a reason to look far beyond the self. However, in the hands of Rothenstein it has given her the freedom to access a wellspring of creative force in which to tap into her distinctive singular imagination, in many ways following Joan Didion’s dictum that we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Her curious yet alluring figures, who sit on beds, who stand looking into the distance and who look at us directly with an undiscernible gaze, echo Rothenstein’s own fascinating journey of insightful self-exploration. Like the artist in The Block of Wood, these figures remain as quiet, benign forces, who can neither do harm nor be harmed. They are creations that she can inhabit while looking out into the world.