Clare
Shenstone

It might be surprising that I’m focusing on the works that Shenstone calls the ‘chair people’, after all here’s an artist who is renowned for her portraits of the countless celebrated people who were part of her close circle… Bowie, Bacon, Iman. The chair people have recurred throughout Shenstone’s career, and while the relationship between sitter and chair has been one of her ever-pressing fascinations, these people appear to land from a different realm altogether. In reality, however, that’s not strictly the case; drama, humour, the macabre, pain and all sorts of fleshy humanness are embodied in even the most ‘classical’ of Shenstone’s portraits.

Look at her paintings and you’ll see that Shenstone handles the human form with such meaty intimacy that the surfaces are often tangibly sculptural. She always has a way of showing us that she was there in the moments she created her art, up-close with her subjects, physically grafting, extricating and implicating the unseen spaces their presence ignites. And what consistently marks the power of Shenstone’s art is that her portraits are never boastful statements, instead they feel like they nudge us into new spaces of our own world. The chair people, with all their strangeness, are skinned of identity but bursting with personality. They’re abundantly human, excessively human, and we’re all in there somewhere.

Chair and person intertwined as a single sinuous being, and for an artist who is consumed by all the unseen inputs that create us, that makes total sense: in reality, aren’t chairs and bones wrought for the same simple purpose, to prop us up? And whatever realm these chairs take us into, their serial reappearance is a touching homage to Shenstone’s lineage in portraiture. So often serving a quiet but dependable supporting role to the real meat of the subject – the human being who sits in it –  these chairs somehow charmingly remind us that they’ve been here all along.

And therein lies some of the character and tension of these scenes, that the immediate reality of these beings – a mix of human and chair legs and arms – appears to be an absurd predicament, a jostle both for and against their co-dependency and own identity. In some of the works the figures are spot-lit, casting their own dramatic shadows on stage-like platforms, which dials up the sense of drama into allegory, and these chair people feel like caricatures performing in some painterly theatre that’s based on their own true stories.

They’re genial and ponderous figures; always preoccupied. Some are elongated and seductive, others are craning, tangled riddles. They all seem caught in a palpable annex that straddles the real and non-physical world; captured between a static, everyday reality and restless disembodied distraction. Shenstone once showed me candid photographs of Francis Bacon that she deliberately took right at the moment she asked him a question. There’s something of that approach here – that moment the body concedes its external form to all of its thoughts.

So for all the visceral contortions that at their most extreme could push these scenes into some tortured psychosis, they never become that. They feel meticulously real. Some of them – an armchair in a household room – even feel mundanely familiar.

Shenstone habitually draws from moving life, often in series, depicting the same figure from multiple angles or in different postures, as if she’s tracing her own witness to passing moments. She never really claims to own those moments but in doing so allows them to be all the more vivid. These graphic hallucinations feel legitimately part of our complex reality: the physical is only a sliver of our existence, planted as we are in this world, resolutely curious, propped up by chair legs.

Clare [first row, first left] photographed to mark the First Holy Communion.

I had never considered art as a way of earning money. It was part of me and I called it my personal research. When I grew out of wanting to be a mermaid, I wanted to be an actress. I played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was 6 years old.

One early memory from school was my First Holy Communion. We were given a special breakfast afterwards and I remember my best friend Miren, on being offered a bowl of cornflakes, replying, “I couldn’t possibly. I’m too full up with Jesus.” My disillusionment set in aged about 10 or 11.

Moving to London from Essex I continued my art but was pursuing acting as my career, working mostly in live theatre but also in TV and film. By the time I was touring Europe with The Prospect Theatre Company, I was spending all day in the most wonderful museums… I was completely obsessive about what I was looking at.

Clare, photographed in the ’60s

It’s no small achievement to reach a position where you’re sure you know what you’re pursuing, moreover to create a situation in which you can function within that choice. I was acting to pay my rent; creatively the theatre relies on many people coming together and working selflessly, and that’s seldom the case.

In ’76 I was still performing Ivanov at the Aldwych at night when I started at the RCA. One day, just as I was leaving my studio for the theatre, David [Bowie] rang me. He said he needed me to come to Berlin and be with him, he told me it was really urgent. I told him to ring back after the performance.

I rushed off and Zoë [Wanamaker], who I shared the dressing room with, could see I was worried. “Okay, what’s going on?, she demanded. I told her about David. “I can’t just disappear to Berlin, I have the RCA and the RSC.” Zoe pointed out that we did not have another performance until the following week. So I told David I could come. He met me at the airport.

Berlin became symbolic of our dream of being married, but as the line in Heroes surmised… “nothing will keep us together.” I never understood it at that point and we were both close to having breakdowns by the time what we both knew became undeniable… he could not give up making and performing music and I could not produce art if I was following David around.

I stayed with my painting and he with his music. We did not make a choice, either of us, we just had to be ourselves, forever. And that will always be my path.