INSIDE STORY: Harton lets her imagination run Wilde

Damian McCarney

For Michelle Harton, an artist can’t help but reveal some of themselves in their artwork. Perhaps the hidden mechanics behind the countless decisions an artist makes when penning a book, composing a song or painting a canvas is where the creative magic resides.

This relationship between art and artist is there for all to see in Michelle’s first solo exhibition, A House of Pomegranates, which will be launched at Johnston Central Library this Friday as part of Culure Night. The intriguing title is shared by Oscar Wilde’s book of fairytales, which inspires the 20-odd paintings.
The Cavan artist’s first encounter with the tales came in childhood when she received the it as a gift from her grandma. As a child she delighted in the beautifully told stories, taking the tales and characters at face value. Revisiting them as an adult brought a whole new appreciation for the richness of the text.
She gives the bones of one of the tales in which a knife wielding fisherman commits murder in a futile bid to retrieve his soul. The Celt states categorically he’ll not be reading that one to his toddler having just bought the book on Harton’s recommendation.
“The way that he writes them is so clever,” she protests. “I think it’s only when you read them as an an adult you see how serious it is, and the messages running through. But it’s never like he’s judging anyone, or judging anything, he’s just shining a light on it in a different way and putting it into the form of a fairy story. It’s very interesting what he did and I think they should be taken more seriously than fairy stories to be honest.”

Fairytales often possess a menacing undercurrent and Michelle’s works captures that creepy sense of uneasiness, in part by her palette of bruised colours weeping into each other. Using acrylics and water soluble pastels, some of the drawings appear like they could have been done by children with crayons.

Downfall
Michelle was also struck by how some of the issues in the stories, and behaviour of the characters foreshadowed some what Wilde was yet to experience himself.
“When I re-read the stories, it’s strange they are a little bit prophetic of things that happened in his later life,” says Michelle, “his downfall was nearly written in it.”
Wilde’s downfall - preposterous and tragic in equal measure - is almost as well known as his sublime plays. He had a love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, also known by the pet name ‘Bosie’. When Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry publicly accused Wilde of sodomy, the socialite felt obliged to defend himself against such a slur in Victorian London, and took an ill-advised libel action. The failed case left him bankrupt, and vulnerable to charges of gross indecency of which Wilde was ultimately convicted, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Prison. His health suffered from the terrible experience and he passed away three years after release, aged just 46.
“They [documentaries on Wilde] said he was very into otherworldly types of things, so perhaps he was having a premonition without even knowing it... without even knowing what his life would become, in terms of him ending up in Reading Prison, and as well, how he was treated by Bosie his lover.
“Stories like ‘The Devoted Friend’ where it’s someone who keeps taking and taking and taking, and the other person keeps giving and giving and giving – but the person who’s taking thinks they are the really good friend, even though they are doing nothing for the other person, and ends up destroying their life.”
Harton agrees that a destroyed life isn’t the typical climax of a child’s story.
“I remember thinking they didn’t end like a normal fairytale – they didn’t end the way you’d wanted them to.
“I think maybe when children read them, they take them with a pinch of salt – they mightn’t bother them as much as they bothered me when I read them again.”
Another example of ‘...and they all lived miserably ever after’ comes in the story Infanta. In this tale a deformed dwarf is falls for the daughter of the King of Spain, and merrily entertains her party guests, not realising that they are laughing at him, rather than with him. When the truth is revealed the poor dwarf dies of a broken heart, yet the Infanta’s response is even more disturbing: ‘For the future lot those who come to play with me have no hearts’. This quote is emblazoned in the background of Harton’s depiction of “big screaming angry girl”. The image also showcases Harton’s training in classical portraiture. She was eager to incorporate this into the works, alongside her freer, semi-abstract style.

Symbols
If Wilde’s subconscious might be readable from his work, could Harton’s also be discerned from her artworks? Hesitant at first, she finally comes around to the idea.
“I notice with this exhibition that there were certain symbols I started to use, repetitively – without even realising I was using them.”
One such symbols is a succession of white dashes – machine-gunned out almost like headstones in a military cemetery. The marks are apparent in the Celt’s favourite artwork from the exhibition, which depict the tear-stained misshapen face of the Star Child’s mother.
“I kept doing them for some reason and without thinking: do I want to add this here? My hand was kind of going for it before I even had the chance.
“The meaning they started to give to me was a counting down of time – the seconds of what’s happening in the story. Sometimes time can go very fast, or in a really horrible moment the time can just go so slow and drag – so it was almost like the heartbeat counting down time.
“I suppose I’m just starting to add meaning to them now, so maybe the paintings are just teaching me,” she says with a laugh at how that might sound a little out there. “Like I’m doing these symbols for some reason that I don’t know and they’re kind of teaching me what they mean the more I think about them.”
What shines through from speaking to Harton is her strengthened admiration for Wilde having undertaken this work. She is hopeful that her exhibition will encourage others to discover Wilde’s fairytales and explore the themes he raises so skilfully.
The theme which resonated so strongly for Harton was that “you don’t have to agree with someone’s lifestyle to treat them with respect”.
“It’s almost like he’s trying to stop the next generations from being as judgemental as the world he’s living in, or he wishes he could live in a more open society, so for me everything links strongly to him being a gay man in a society where it was illegal. Perhaps he was using the stories to work through his own feelings about life or perhaps as I feel when I read it that he’s standing back just showing life for what it is and the great strangeness in it.
“And most importantly I think for him he’s weaving beauty in the stories in the happiness and in the sorrow. He wrote a letter to his lover Alfred “Bosie” Douglas when he was in Reading jail that said: 
‘You came to me to learn the Pleasure Of Life and The Pleasure Of Art. Perhaps, I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and it’s beauty.’
“And I think maybe this is what he was trying to do in the stories because they are so sad but the imagery they create even in the sadness is so beautiful, which was what inspired me.”

‘A House of Pomegranates’ an exhibition of paintings inspired by The Fairy Stories of Oscar Wilde runs at Johnston Central Library until October 26 as part of Children’s Book Festival supported by Johnston Central Library and Culture Ireland.