Before the Image

Cleidi Hearn

When does a painting really begin? A painting is usually thought to begin with the first mark. It is as though the support were simply waiting for the image to arrive. However, some materials carry histories that cannot be set aside so easily.

Linen is one of them.

Before it becomes cloth, linen begins as flax. It has already passed through cultivation, harvesting, retting, spinning and weaving before it reaches the studio.

Each stage depends on particular environmental conditions and skilled human work. None can be hurried without changing the fibre itself.

Linen is not a neutral support, and this changes the relationship between image and material.

When a cultivated plant is painted on linen, image and support no longer belong to separate worlds. The cultivated plant depicted and the linen beneath it both begin in cultivation, although each has followed a different material history. One remains recognisable as a plant. The other has become cloth.

Linen matters because cultivation is already embedded in the material itself. The painting does not introduce cultivation onto a neutral surface because it begins with a material that already belongs to the same history.

Working with linen also makes this difficult to forget. Paint does not simply rest on its surface. It settles into woven fibres that remain visible beneath each layer, so that the woven structure of the cloth never completely disappears beneath the paint. However carefully the plant is painted, the linen insists on remaining present.

Leaving areas of linen visible prevents the material from disappearing behind the image. The cloth continues to reveal its woven structure and, with it, the cultivated plant from which it was made.