Closet System: Rowland Bagnall
This week on the blog, Rowland Bagnall discusses the cover art of his first collection A Few Interiors. A Few Interiors is published this month, and is available to buy from the Carcanet website with 10% off and free UK P&P.
I first met Aaron Aujla in Los Angeles in the summer of 2016. He was briefly over from New York, visiting a mutual friend of ours he’d grown up with in Canada. We spent a day driving around LA, stopping at a gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard where he was due to show some work, then visiting a guy called Lucas in Mid-City who had moved to California several years ago and who now spent most of his time surfing and making sculptures which involved inscribing wooden surfaces with cartoons, marks and bits of text then somehow casting them in solid steel. I saw Aaron again about a month later in New York, two weeks before my return to England, after which we stayed in touch.
Around the time that A Few Interiors was beginning to take shape, I asked him to send me some photographs of whatever he was working on. Among the images he sent were a suite of small unfinished oil paintings of his apartment on Henry Street, which I’d visited when I was in New York. I became mildly obsessed with the paintings and asked him to send me updates of their progress. A year later, I asked if he would let me use one of them – Closet System (2017) – for the cover of my book.
The paintings came at an important time. I had already been thinking about the balance between inside and outside in my poems, some of which are interested in windows, borders, boundaries and frames. I was also interested in looking, especially the difference between looking out and looking in, which is often what occurs to me when standing before certain paintings.
A handful of the painters whose work had influenced my poems were interested in painting rooms – Matisse, Vermeer, Hammershøi, van Eyck – though rooms with windows, doorframes and mirrors and even their own paintings and images hanging on the walls, which complicate and multiply their ideas of seeing and perspective. Aaron’s paintings appealed to me for some of the same reasons. Their compositional views are strange: an almost-empty empty closet, a curtained window with a radiator skimmed by light, the corner of a table with a glass of deep green branch cuttings. They are both intimate and on display, a passive invitation to observe the room unaided; they seem to offer glimpses, as if about to be replaced, but remain quietly fixed and permanent.
I like Closet System because it reminds me of certain Vermeer paintings in which we seem to be viewing everything in secret, where the figures in the painting don’t seem to have noticed us or where they sometimes startlingly do, as in Girl Interrupted at Her Music (1660) or Lady Standing at a Virginal (c.1670). The voyeuristic quality of Vermeer’s paintings always makes me think of the scene in David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet (1986) where Kyle MacLachlan’s character Jeffrey Beaumont hides in the closet and watches the deranged, oxygen(?)-mask-huffing Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) engaging in a sadomasochistic role-playing game with Isabella Rossellini’s character Dorothy Vallens. The closet in Aaron’s painting doesn’t have any doors, but I expect I’m making some connection here.
Above all, Aaron’s paintings remind me of the work of the American painter Jane Freilicher. Freilicher’s paintings are almost always of interiors, often looking out through apparently glassless windows to the world outside. The first painting of hers I ever saw was on the cover of my Carcanet edition of Frank O’Hara’s Selected Poems, which seems appropriate to mention here.
Freilicher was friends with most of the New York School poets, including John Ashbery, who wrote the introduction to a catalogue of her paintings in 1986, the same year Blue Velvet was released in the US. In it, he praises her ability to paint things as they honestly appeared to her, a quality he says is absent in the work of many other artists, who have a tendency to correct or heighten whatever it is they’re painting to try and make it seem more real, ‘forgetting that the real is not only what one sees,’ he writes, ‘but also a result of how one sees it – inattentively, inaccurately perhaps, but nevertheless that is how it is coming through to us.’ Without having realised until now, it strikes me that this has been an important guiding principle behind my poems.
I feel extremely fortunate to have Aaron’s painting on the cover of A Few Interiors. It is a beautiful entrance and companion to the poems. I cannot imagine the book without it.
Aaron's website is available here