A paintbrush in one hand and a beaker of milk in the other, artist Chantal Joffe and her siblings started painting when they were very young. It was the natural outcome of their late mother’s creativity, who, Joffe tells me, was always making toys, clothes and costumes for and with them. We exchange anecdotes of these infantile joys, the nostalgic smell of poster paint comes back to me as we indulge. But childhood isn’t always joyful nor are family relations always easy. As humans, we metamorphose and so do our dynamics. It’s the intricacies of this that the Vermont-born, North London-raised Joffe has spent decades exploring.
Joffe’s recent series, Story, features a number of paintings of herself, her siblings and mum, Daryll. Exhibited at Victoria Miro in London, Story is named after one particular painting of Joffe with her two older sisters as children reading a bedtime story with their mother on the sofa. Painted before and during the pandemic, Joffe set out to make sense of the complexities surrounding the ever-changing relationship between a mother and her child. Joffe notes how one’s relationship with their mother can change, recognising feelings of frustration, resentment, independence and distance for which, by reflecting on the courageous life Daryll had led, Joffe hoped to reconcile.
RD: Chantal, tell me about your studio space.
CJ: I’ve been in this particular building in North London for twenty years now. I did move rooms about eight years ago but I’ve got the same view of the canal and one particular tree. I can paint most places but my studio is that place that as soon as I walk in and shut the door, I feel safe. It needs a good clearing out as it’s full of stuff; something I always say I’m going to do and never do, but I can move stuff around. Some days I might paint in a particular location, on other days another. And, I can walk there from home.
RD: I feel like the artist’s studio is a peephole into their mind, which more often than not tends to be an organised chaos of process and thought. Do you feel as though you’re familiar with your creative voice? And, if so, how might you describe it?
CJ: I guess if I thought I’d found it, I wouldn’t bother – which might seem like an obvious thing to say but it’s true. I’m always chasing it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: if you can turn your everyday life into your art, that’s surely the best thing and for me, that’s what I want to do. I want to make my art and my life sort of interchangeable.
RD: Using it as a tool to make sense of what surrounds you and evolving with it. Can you pinpoint a particular emotion or sensation you feel when you’re painting?
CJ: No, it’s constantly changing and I think every artist has a different experience of this. What was it Phillip Guston said?
“I believe it was John Cage who once told me, ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.’”
— Philip Guston on John Cage
I think it’s just the most brilliant description of when you’re painting.
RD: So much of your work broaches the concepts, complexities and emotions good and bad that surround family. Ten of your paintings were featured alongside the works of Cathy Wilkes, Hardeep Pandhal and Tracy Emin in ‘Real Families: Stories of Change’, an exhibition at The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. What is it that fascinates you about familial dynamics?
CJ: It’s difficult to think about from the outside but to me, it’s my life – as a daughter, as a sister, and now as a mum, which I’ve been for twenty or so years. How our family dynamics shape who we are, you know, how we were talking about painting with our mums and how you experienced your father, it shapes your whole sense of the world. It’s interesting to be both a daughter to your mother, then suddenly you’re the mother to your own daughter. There was a night recently when my daughter came to talk to me in my bed because she wanted to tell me about her evening out. While she was talking, I suddenly had this vision of me at nineteen talking to my mother after I’d come in from a night out. To know what it is to be both is extraordinary. I wanted to say to my daughter at that moment, ‘I’ve been you, and one day, you might be me.’
RD: That’s beautiful. Is there anything in particular you’ve learnt about yourself or about relationships?
CJ: Sometimes I think I know less now than I did when I was young. Though one thing I truly want to say to my daughter is don’t worry about me. I worried a lot about my mum when I was young and now I think, perhaps I didn’t need to. She wouldn’t have wanted me to.
RD: I resonate with your younger self, I often worry about my mum. Of course she tells me I needn’t but I can’t help it.
CJ: They know how it is to be you. You don’t have to protect your mum. I promise.
RD: Your recent collection, Story, accompanied by an artbook with text by Olivia Laing, focuses on the changing dynamics of relationships between one, as a child, tween, teen and eventually an adult, and their mother over time. Was it your relationship with your mum that inspired this?
CJ: As I got older, I found myself getting angry at my mum for different things. As she aged, she became more complicated and I wanted to remember how she’d seemed to me as a child, and who she’d been and how she’d changed. She was brave and courageous. She’d gone to America, pregnant with a second child. I tried to imagine how that felt, what the world looked like through her eyes, taking myself out of the equation. I wanted to think about her whole life.
RD: Do you feel as though this time helped you move past these frustrations?
CJ: My mum recently passed away but she wasn’t hugely happy about the paintings. I also did a lot of thinking about the hubris of trying to imagine your way into someone else’s life and the false notion that you can. That being said, I’m glad I spent that time with her painting her both old and young. I’m glad I made her into a whole separate grown up real person.
RD: It’s a difficult thing to do, accepting your parent as their own person with their own emotions, peculiarities, contexts and experiences outside of being your parent. What if we flip it? What have you found difficult about parenting?
CJ: Of course there are difficult times, very difficult times but for me, motherhood has been a gift of which I’m aware I have such privilege to have received as there are people who perhaps don’t want children and others that can’t have them. I’ve been incredibly lucky to partake in this extraordinary journey and raise a child whom I’ve watched grow up and become a person that contributes to their surroundings. It’s an amazing moment when they separate from you and become their own self, with their own friends, talents, and their own voice.
RD: To finish us off Chantal, what is ‘Mother’ to you?
The sun. My mother was the sun around which we orbited.
