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John Heward: The "Coming into Consciousness of Art and Music"¹

As a graduate student in Art History, working on the exhibition Ensemble: An Exhibition of Art and Jazz I had the opportunity and privilege to meet with John Heward (b. 1934), internationally recognized as painter, sculptor, and musician. In this essay, I will explore the relationship between Heward's art and his music, based on what I learned from Heward about his creative endeavours in my discussions with him, and my observations of the process he shared with me in creating Untitled (clamps) (2006-2007), the work for this exhibition (fig.1).

Before the interview I gathered as much information about John Heward as possible. The artist was born in Montreal, and still lives in this city. Although Heward only started painting in his thirties, he has a strong record of solo and group exhibitions. Heward has been exposed to art and culture all his life. Prudence Heward (1896-1947), the well known Canadian artist was his aunt. She had many artist-friends whom Heward met as a young person including fellow-members of the Beaver Hall Group, and Alexander Y. Jackson (1882-1974), from the Group of Seven. Heward studied history and literature at university, an important source for his concerns about markings and demarcations of time. Heward is also an accomplished percussionist. He has played in a number of jazz bands, specifically free forms of jazz and contemporary improvisational music.

The written sources I consulted lead me to believe that Heward's musical and visual art are difficult, not easily understood by the uninitiated. James D. Campbell (b. 1957) writes: “Granted, it is difficult work. But it has rich rewards for those who study it.”² Campbell approaches Heward's artistic production philosophically, in a manner that might discourage the average reader. Discussing his paintings and sculptures in relation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1908-1961) notion of phenomenology, he explains that Heward’s forms are not static, but change according to time and the viewer’s perception: “His forming works, their living forms seen as the flesh of the visible, as signs or even as utterances, bring such a world into being for us.”³ It is because they hold on to the memory of time, because they are continually in the process of being transformed by the markings of nature, that they are like modern ruins.

I had only seen one painting by Heward at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery. The painting belongs to his forming series from the mid-eighties (fig. 2). In this series, Heward marks a shape on an unstretched piece of either canvas or rayon that is then stapled directly onto the wall. The coloured shapes are black, red, blue, or yellow. From my readings I discovered that soon after completing these works Heward started to rip the shapes into multiple smaller pieces, thus creating new material for his installations. These new works, composed of segments of early paintings were then hung from the wall or the ceiling, held by metal clamps. The weight of the material suspended in the air creates a new sculptural result, because of the three-dimensional aspect imposed by the clamps.

I met John Heward at his home and studio on 25 October 2007. I asked him how music, especially jazz, had influenced these artworks. I began hesitantly, questioning him about how music came into his life. He answered that as a teenager, when he started listening to jazz music and going to jazz clubs he took up drumming as a hobby, not as a potential profession. As an adult, he gave it up for nearly four decades, until he sat down one day and started playing drums as if he had never stopped. As a percussionist, he said, his interest was always free jazz. “This is the music that I can best play… Freedom of movement in the music, not constrained necessarily by the arrangements or notes. You listen for it and do it. So it started and I was lucky, I happened to meet great musicians, and they liked my playing.” Heward then explained how he understood the relationship between his music and his art:

“Drumming, so called free jazz and improvised music, they’re like sculpting space and time… But I tend to keep them separate. One is always influencing the other but I don’t play music when I paint and I don’t look at a painting when I play music, but they come from the same sources. They’re both an expression, statements of being, but not within their forms, but in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Definitely for me the two things are very parallel and in constant communication with one another.”

His paintings, he explained, could be compared with living beings that come to life, live and “slowly decay”, marked by “the stains of perception and the mind.” The concept of time is not as the marking of time by minutes, hours and so on, but in the sense of the past, the present and the future expressed through time. “Concepts of time are very important to me… Measurement of time is artificial anyway. In terms of music and painting or sculpture, I like to get the essence of not exactly a beat, but an under rhythm, a continuity which is there and you play around it, you push it and pull it back, as in the push and pull concept in painting.”

According to Heward, the tradition of painting fixes images and ideas in time and space. Our holding onto the paint as a finite object however is very impractical, because fixed notions actually change physically and conceptually in time, through the perception of the viewer. Simply put, the process of life, of nature, takes over the fixed image. As such, Heward's abstract forms and raw canvases explicitly reveal the materiality of the medium behind the paint, letting it absorb dust, stains, light. Heward exposes its material basis, tearing the canvas apart himself, leaving the edges uneven and frayed. Always in the process of transformation, of simply being, this is where his paintings have been assimilated as living creatures. They hold onto past experiences at the same time as they reveal a possible, yet uncertain future.

The transformative processes of art are also present in music; “the coming into consciousness of music,” as if it were already out there, displacing physical and mental air. As a musician, Heward explains that he only grabs it, or pulls it, and pushes it back through the beating of his drums. In the case of free jazz, a performance can never be played twice. Its uniqueness is like a work of art and in some sense, the music is like a painting, it also “slowly decays” in the air.

Continuing our conversation about the relation of music and art I then asked Heward if he considered himself a synesthete. Does he experience synesthesia, a condition that causes a person to feel another type of sensation in association with the one being stimulated? When listening to music, for example, does he see colours like the artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) did when listening to Wagner's music? Or, when painting does he hear musical sounds? Heward replied:

“That’s not a process that I go through. I don’t associate a colour with an emotion. My work has not much to do with that. I use primary colours. I’m not interested in the subtleties of colour, it’s not my work, it’s the viewer’s work. My colours, in some way, give aesthetical and psychological pleasure in itself. Also to me, it is, in a sense, the mask of the actual form, the structure underneath. You don’t see the colour if there is no light, but you can, almost, see the form. That kind of process is intellectually stimulating.”

In hearing Heward talk about the “mask of the actual form”, I looked around the room where we were sitting with more attention. I saw with new meaning the many and various masks hanging on the walls. I started to understand now Heward's fascination with the mask, how it reveals the surface and yet hides what is behind. One of Heward’s first painting series I remembered was called mask. In this series he explored the surface of the canvas by applying layers of dark paint one on top of another, each individually marked by accidents, thus building up a rich and very textured facade.

In my interview with Heward, I had discovered a great deal about his artistic process. He had generously shared with me his thoughts about art and music, his understanding of materiality, time, transformation, form and structure. Before leaving, he also showed me potential pieces he could lend us for the exhibition. Rolled up or folded in a big box, all the pieces had formerly been parts of now destroyed artworks. The sizes, the shapes, the colours, the textures, all were different. I left with a fuller understanding of Heward's paintings, wondering still how these pieces would come together in Heward's installation of Untitled (clamps).

The second meeting with Heward was when he installed his work at the FOFA Gallery. Heward arrived with Eric Lewis, professor of philosophy at McGill University who is writing the catalogue essay for Heward's 2008 solo exhibition at the Musée du Québec.⁴ As an observer, I was witnessing the actual creation of an artwork. Heward arrived while the technicians were hanging the other works for the exhibition. He watched the technicians carefully unwrap each painting from its protective plastic bubble wrap. Then, to my surprise, Heward emptied his bag directly on the floor, careless of the dust, and technicians walking around the gallery. Slowly, he observed his pieces, the wall, the space. He selected the largest piece, placed it towards the centre, and stapled it directly on the wall. The other pieces seemed to naturally follow: a small yellow piece on the left, and a medium sized one on the right. A fourth, longer and thinner piece was almost put up, but Heward decided to leave it out. The only consultation Heward had was with Eric Lewis and I on whether or not he should replace the staples by clamps or leave it as it is. When we saw the result with the different type of hanging, the effect was completely changed. The clamps, as Heward had explained to me earlier, made the work look almost sculptural. Being off-white for the most part, it was the right decision to make them stand out from the white wall.

As he left the gallery, Heward reminded me that he encouraged visitors to the show to manipulate each piece, thus transforming its appearance. With trepidation, now alone in the gallery, I touched the piece. I turned the smallest piece around, where Heward’s stamped signature is visible. I thought it was interesting how what normally gives an artwork its own identity and authenticity, the artist’s signature, is here mechanically reproduced. The reverse side of the largest piece side clearly shows signs of a previous painting. What if somebody flips it? We can only imagine… or do it ourselves. I dared my classmates to manipulate the work, but most of them did not want to disturb it. We are taught to value artworks, not to touch them, to preserve them, to focus as Heward had explained to me on the finite materiality of the paint.

Moving the pieces myself in the gallery and then listening to Heward's jazz pieces at the listening station, I now finally and more fully understood what Heward had told to me when we first spoke. Heward's art contradicts the sense of permanence, allowing the viewer to contribute to its transformation, to impose our own passage of time onto his work. Heward has set the piece in space, creating its possible motion in time and he then gives us permission to participate in the process. Musically, the under rhythm is already there, he only pulls it from the air in order to push it back through his instrument. For Heward the two activities, music and art, are separate and yet there is this resemblance, a process of forming zones marked by the temporal materiality of shapes and sounds.

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