#bryan charnley

[tklee-jfk]

This is in memorial of Bryan Charnley (9/20/1949-7/19/1991) , an English artist who tragically lost his life due to suicide

[departingthefirmament]

"Leaving by the Window" - Bryan Charnley 30 x 30 ins, Oil on Canvas 1987. The painting shows Pam Jones’s room at night. She is the green cropped figure about to walk out of the window. The subsequent fall damaged her back and caused serious, life long injuries. Bryan Charnley blamed himself for this suicide attempt, caused he believed by his failure to commit to their relationship celebrated in an earlier painting “Pam and Me” 1978. The two fighting birds in the foreground symbolize their quarrelling, the harsh light, the white noise on the television and the unsettling diagonals in the composition all contribute to the crisis the picture portrays.

[berlinauslander]

Indecision

This work by the British painter Bryan Charley, who suffered from schizophrenia, shows the indecision of a man who seems to be considering which way to turn. Two slightly open doors can be seen behind him. The floor beneath his feet does not appear to be solid ground, and the man's situation is further complicated by his blindness. Perhaps he cannot even see the two doors which may or may not offer a way out.

[themountianquotes]

Self Portrait Series 18th May 1991, Bryan Charnley / Answering the Phone, the Mountain Goats

[juliansummerhayes]

One of my favourite artists.

[ahumourlessworld]

The muse of madness: The final self-portraits of schizophrenic artist Bryan Charnley

Art and adversity.

“When reading Bryan Charnley’s final diary entries this appears to be the dilemma that he continually faced. Part of his mind could recognise the problem and experience the pain and distress of alienation, paranoia and loneliness yet these distressing conditions were being generated by his mind. The enemy is inside, internalised and very strong. His inner dread and anguish had become his reality in a nefariously exaggerated analogy of someone fleeing a wasp, forced to hide it from the world, and retreat into an insular realm of torment and doom. Even with the continued insistence that his delusions were merely the imaginings of a fevered mind, they became a reality which he could not seek the mercy of. He could not arrive at the seemingly unfathomable zen-like calm of experiential reality. How do you even begin to face this enemy? It is no accident that the penultimate painting in Bryan Charnley’s Self Portrait Series was of a battlefield.

He had, in a very real way, battled against succumbing to madness, but this tormenting muse – that proved to be both a scorching captor and creative flame – was not arrived at in a linear journey. Bryan Charnley’s tortuous path is as complex one with a depth of character almost as abstruse as his chaotic dance upon the canvas, and it is one that his twin brother James has been trying to understand ever since.

(…)

The mission statement of Bryan Charnley’s Self Portrait series was simple: “I intend to paint a series of self-portraits which will stand as an important document as to life at the end of the twentieth century… Self Portrait will state in depth what it is like to be human and schizophrenic.”

The wider call of his work contained multitudes. As Bryan wrote in 1988, three years before his suicide, when he decided to transition from photo-realism: “Increasingly I became aware that my paintings had no bearing on the darker aspects of my life which threatened to overwhelm me… I came across the idea of art as a form of exorcism and the theory that the cave paintings of early man were painted to gain control over the animals portrayed… I saw that painting my inner upheavals was perhaps to gain some measure of control over them.”

(…)

However, this relief was fleeting and by the time of the 16th self-portrait the diary entries had stopped, and the paintings no longer depicted a human form, but a mere chaotic splurge of symbolism. Remarkably within this melee of the self-evident torment is the Bob Dylan lyric: “The cards are no good that I’m holding / Unless they are from another world,” from the bootleg track ‘Series of Dreams’.

(…)

In the end, in layman’s terms and in in the first person as I ditch the usual royal we, what I see in Bryan’s final works and indeed to a large extent in the slaloming precursors that went before, is a collection of some of the most immediately arresting and captivating pieces of art you are ever likely to come across. What they are, it seems to me, are personal corroborations and a reconciliation of the impossibility to express the inexpressible through anything other than symbol, appropriated iconography, and metaphor, which is, ultimately, poetry. Thus, indelibly entwined with his paintings is the undeniable fascination of the curious human condition to clutch at a meaning out of reach.

This makes Bryan’s grasp both painful and life-affirming because, when you consider it, the art in itself is its own singular miracle not in spite of the horrors that spawned it, but as something, barring transcendental tendrils, that stands completely aside from it. That someone could face the harrows of their own sliding sanity and the bedevilling meshugaas of delusion and still manage to create anything at all is a remarkable thing indeed. The fact that they now colour our lives with interest, no matter how morose, and importantly elucidate the experience of mental distress, transfigures them with beauty and meaning in of themselves, beyond the creativity and skill of the brushstrokes, in a resolute sanctity of art’s soul salvation.

Ultimately, perhaps Bryan’s last ever diary entry is the most telling; as he wrote: “I find myself in some strange subterranean world ruled by loved.” Even still, with the darkness that tormentingly howled around him, there were glinting flickers of deliverance in art and the love that he received, as he once said himself, “The only answer to madness I know / see the stars through the scars.””

[thespyhangar]

Bryan Charnley

[robertwalserfan1999]

Bryan Charnley