Christiana Spens


A North London Light

Joshua Press works from home. More specifically, he paints from home, and in a project that predated the pandemic by two years, his body of work relies on this fusion of domesticity and graft, interiority and intimate, if subtle, human connection. Now, the relevance of his series, Different Bodies, is clearly very timely and immediate in a way he cannot have foreseen; as such, his private meditations on light, London and the passage of time provide a crucial and moving perspective on the shared experiences of confinement we have all grown accustomed to – even as it remains a surreal and strange era to live through and comprehend.

The individual and group portraits that make up Different Bodies were all painted in the same flat in Highgate. When I go to talk to Joshua, and see his paintings, I sit on the same sofa that a couple and their baby sit on in Marie (2020). Behind me is a raised level with a dividing banister, which is where his easel stands presently, along with stacks of paintings awaiting framing for his exhibition. In the painting, the couple and their baby sit in the middle of the sofa, wearing black and white, with a red blanket around the baby, Marie. The painting captures the light as it seems to settle in the couple and baby’s white clothes, in a natural spotlight, as if they have, as a young family, attracted the intensity of the light in their family unit. Though I sit in the same place alone, I can also feel that light on my face, and a similar sense of peacefulness.

Joshua sits by the window, his back turned to the light, but nevertheless illuminated by it. This, which he calls the ‘special North London light’ is the subject and means of his paintings as much as the people are; the two coalesce to form an impression, not simply of how one affects the other, but how the ideas and forms of light and people can be remade and understood differently through their depiction in paint. In this room, the light spreads and settles and diffuses, creating a softness and intimacy, an almost sacred atmosphere, which Joshua clearly appreciates and nurtures. This comes through in the paintings, of course, but in such a way as to evoke the artist’s relationship with these things, and his communication with and through them.

All the subjects in these paintings are Joshua’s close friends and family, whom he has intimately and dedicatedly observed over many months, even years, for each work. All of which harmonise as a set, as well as individual pieces; containing a moving atmosphere of familiarity and patience, and a sense of almost spiritual devotion to the practise of painting. For each work, the subject would visit the home studio once a week for a sitting, lasting at least an hour.

Sitting here, I get an idea of what it must be like to be the subject, and how therapy-like the situation is. I am even sitting on something resembling a therapist’s couch! However, in this moment, it is the other way around, since I am asking Joshua questions, and he is doing the talking. Perhaps, even in the artist-subject relationship, since both can talk at least some of the time, there is a dialogue that works both ways, and a relationship that is inherently therapeutic on this level. This is not to say that painting is ‘therapy’ as such, only that Joshua’s particular practice resembles that dynamic. Perhaps this partly explains how such a sense of intimacy comes across in the works. There is also an inherent meditation on the passage of time, and how it builds and changes such a relationship between artist and model, as well as the physical appearance of the subjects themselves. As Joshua has said of the title of the show, Different Bodies, ‘[As a student in France], I read a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. I memorised the first few passages. The opening line was: “Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed. Into different bodies”.’

This dialectical, transformative relationship between the painter and subject is in many ways a very traditional, classical one, but today, for a contemporary artist, it is also an unconventional way to structure one’s practice. It is a way of working, too, which Joshua sought out from the beginning, as he tells me:

‘In a way, I took a more conventional, traditional route of study in response to what was institutionally available at that time. I went off the beaten track… I was eighteen looking to go to university. I wanted to study history originally and then art, but I couldn’t quite find the right course. I was obsessed with drawing and I wanted to learn how to ‘see’. To work with a model every day. The subject fascinated me. I attended every life drawing session in a five mile radius and visited the National Gallery fanatically. I read nineteenth century drawing manuals, that stressed that anatomy was the key to drawing the figure well. Somehow, I got my hands on a box of bones from Spitalfields market, and drew those daily, I was mad for it.

A formative moment for the young painter was when he saw a Sickert exhibition at the Courtauld Institute, Camden Town Nudes – which left him mesmerised: ‘It really struck a chord, and I started taking myself very seriously after that… Eventually I started studying at a garage in Clapham, where they had models every day.’

There, he learnt the specific and restrictive ‘size method’ of observational drawing and painting with a model. ‘I think I was their only student at one point,’ he recollects:

‘and then there were a few others…. I was trying to pay my fees by recruiting other students and by cleaning up! It was good exposure to working with the model, and they were cool people. I started chatting to people in that circle, all the figurative painters knew each other. I met a guy who advised me to go and look up aschool in Paris and he said ‘they’re the real deal’.’

This led Joshua to Paris, which he funded through working in TV commercials: ‘I did that for a while! I was in the Argos Christmas commercial at one point!’ Along with staying rent-free with a friend, this enabled him to join Studio Escalier, where Joshua found the discipline and aesthetic he had been searching for:

‘They could really draw, and demonstrate it too. Showing you exactly the principles they would talk about on the paper. It became something tangible, less about elusive knowledge, and more something that I could aspire to. It was an amazing course – half of it was in Montmartre which is where they lived. Their studio was Toulouse Lautrec’s old studio, so we had this beautifully lit room with a model in the mornings. The other half of the course was in the Louvre. I’d walk across the whole of Paris each day, it was magical. I went onto study with them as part of their main programme in the Loire. We were in this quaint little village, on the lake, and my teachers have this beautiful old house and on the top floor is the studio. It was just like Paris, but even more concentrated. We had the model for eight hours a day, and five days a week… It was great, exactly what I wanted, but very difficult. I remember having all of these ambitions – it would take three years to learn how to paint like an old master – but it was more like my eyes were opened to how vast the subject is.’

As a ‘London kid’, not used to such a level of discipline and concentration, he struggled at first, but continued studying with Studio Escalier for the next two years. Over that time he found that he was most fascinated by what he had been taught about colour, and in particular the method of creating small ‘poster studies’ where the students would summarise the light in the room and the light on the model, with a small handful of brushstrokes. ‘It was the first thing I got good at, and I did them all the time and became obsessed with them. It became, at that stage, the most natural way for me to paint in a diaristic fashion. I started doing more of them when I moved back to London.’

Once there, he moved to Limehouse, to the infamous Cable Studios. ‘I don’t think it was very legal,’ he remembers:

\There was a mosque, a sex club, a kickboxing academy and recording studio, and all these young artists living there… One studio I was in was like living at sea. There was this incredible mezzanine and it was like being in the bows of a ship. There was nothing but plywood separating the three of us and we had to climb down a ladder into this dim space. Eventually I moved into a nicer space and just kept painting. To be perfectly honest, I was petrified because I had no money and tuition was expensive. I kept making paintings, but I was definitely reconsidering it all…’

Luckily, around this time, Joshua met Nutty Williams of the recently opened Cob Gallery in Camden.

‘I told her I had this idea to fill a gallery with paintings from across the spectrum, a hundred green, a hundred red, and so on. She liked the idea and gave me space to paint. It was really a whole new lease of life. And so I got to work and made lots of them, in the Cob Gallery. People would come in and I’d do these little portraits, day and night, most days of the week. It was when the gallery first opened, so all sorts of interesting artists were coming through. She was amazing to let me do that. I don’t know what I would have done without that.’

After this stint at Cob, Joshua continued to work on his studies, and went back to France for more tuition, before enrolling in the Jerusalem Studio School for three years, where he further developed his practice, diving deeply into painting, and finding his own particular style and vocation. ‘Studying there opened my eyes to how abstraction and pictorial thinking, preceded everything in painting.’

After three years there, Joshua returned to London where he began this series of work. Citing British painters such as Sickert, Coldstream, Auerbach, Freud, and Henry Moore as crucial influences, as well as Spencer Gore of Mornington Crescent whom he refers to as ‘North London’s Pissaro!’. There are also clear influences of French painters such as Degas, Vuillard, Bonnard and Cézanne, showing in the brevity and subtly of Joshua’s style – in his continued fascination with the concepts and depictions of light and time. And, to my mind, an underlying aesthetic rooted in Romanticism, not only in painting and drawing, but in poetry, too. John Keats lived not far from where Joshua lives and works now, in Hampstead, and there certainly seem to be echoes of his style and philosophy in these recent paintings and the way in which they were produced. As Keats wrote in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Keats perceived this North London light too, remaking it in poetry, in pursuit of beauty and the truth to be found in it. There is a certain timelessness to this vocation, which Joshua continues now, in paint and pencil. Indeed, Joshua’s approach to painting is ultimately as an exercise in optimism and love – an effort to transform and transcend life and space – and finding in this true beauty and human connection. In such painting there emerges a form of love that is far-reaching and idealistic, even spiritual, and certainly beautiful. Is it real? Does it exist already? It does, but the painter unmakes it and remakes it, disrupts it, elevates it, making a new reality from the one he knows and studies well, one brush stroke at a time.

And yet, for all this idealism and connection, the faces and figures in these recent paintings are also hazy and at a distance, even in their small, intimate spaces. There is both a freedom and restraint present. The figures retain some privacy, seem somewhat withdrawn. They retain their elusiveness. ‘Beauty is a mystery’, Joshua says, and perhaps therefore that beauty is in some sense necessarily detached from intimacy and domesticity. It is always slightly at a distance, slightly unreachable.

Joshua shows, here, that both forces, and ideals, can nevertheless coexist in harmony. Such subtle tension grounds these figures, making them feel real and human, drawing us into their moods and hidden, ambiguous selves, and therein that of the painter, too. They are not only a meditation on what it is to be close and familiar and safe, but also what it is to withdraw into one’s own world, to recreate what exists around us and between us, in the pursuit of beauty and elation.

Christiana Spens has published several books in the past, and writes about culture and politics for publications such as The Irish Times, Art Quarterly, Studio International, Prospect and Elephant Magazine, among others.


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