Notes on a Fireplace

In the summer of 1967, H. C. Westermann began work on a studio for his wife, the painter Joanna Beall Westermann. The couple had recently moved to rural Connecticut, where they were staying in a cottage on Joanna’s family property. Space was tight for two working artists, so building the studio was a priority. Eventually the Westermann’s would build a house with an adjoining studio for Cliff, but Joanna came first. The crowning achievement would be a massive chimney, built of hand-shaped bricks and topped with a concrete mushroom cap; inside the fireplace was equally detailed, with stamps of an anchor and heart in the brickwork and fieldstones from the property embedded in the mantle. The project served as an inspiration and a lesson for Cliff when embarking on the chimney for their house six years later - but for Joanna as well it was a learning experience as she worked alongside her husband throughout the construction.

The Westermann’s were extraordinarily close, besides their cloistered lifestyle, and the exchange of ideas, preferences and techniques flowed between them, both in their private lives and artistic ones. Cliff had spent his early days in Chicago working as handyman and a carpenter, skills that translated into his sculpture and construction projects. He also taught Joanna his techniques, which she applied to her own work (particularly the frames she built for her paintings) and when assisting him with construction. In turn, her paintings turned up from time to time in Cliff’s work, as well as numerous references to their relationship. They shared an interest in acrobatics - he performed with the USO following his service in WWII; she toured with a Canadian troupe in 1966 but was sidelined by an injury the next year. The couple met in Chicago in 1957, a city where both had moved to pursue their artistic careers, an environment whose influence is evident in their artwork, though in radically different ways. Joanna’s paintings reveal an artist synthesizing many different sources - her husband’s artwork merely one of many. In fact, in much the same way as Cliff alluded to Joanna and their relationship in his work, so did Joanna in her own.

There are several paintings featuring fireplaces in Joanna’s oeuvre: it is a subject that brings to mind the rural life she lead, the American folk painting that she was fond of and the surrealist ideas she was exposed to early in her career. Yet more so than any of these, the fireplace is a clear statement of love to her husband and their life together: a fire burning warmly in the hearth he built for her. The crisply shaded flames and atmospheric lighting in “Fireplace with Rope” (1970), are hallmarks of Joanna’s style; she was a direct painter, perhaps less concerned with the technique of painting than the correct rendering of the ideas she wished to present. This is not unsurprising, considering that her father, with whom Joanna had a close and supportive relationship, was a successful graphic designer and it was his property that the Westermann’s lived on. The main house - and the home Joanna grew up in - had four working fireplaces. With the construction of her studio and later the house she and Cliff built for themselves with his studio attached, three more fireplaces were added. As a subject therefore, the fireplace was ubiquitous in Joanna’s life, though in her hands it is transformed from a simple portrait of a fixture in her life to a symbol of her marriage. The details within the painting suggest that the fireplace she is painting is the one in her studio: the object on the mantle is almost certainly a fieldstone, as was abundant on the property, while the stump in the foreground alludes to the arduous process of clearing the land that she and Cliff undertook before beginning construction of the studios and house. Furthermore, the surrealist motif of the butterfly wing transforming into a rope is also a personal reference: the rope symbolic of the acrobatic feats she and her husband performed (Cliff had a rope hanging in his studio that he climbed regularly) and the butterfly a reference to Joanna herself, in both her own work and her husband’s.

Within the broader context of Joanna’s painting, 1970 was somewhat of a pivotal year. She was beginning to look beyond the ideas that had driven her work through the 1960s. For years she had explored ways to create tension in her paintings, through her use of subjects, composition and style. Many of these earlier works juxtapose disparate elements, much in the way she was using collage around the same time. Joanna often worked in contrasting ways of painting “that related to their respective subject-matter more than [each other],” the aim being to “make a noticeable separation between them… and still try to make them work together.” This is evident in “Fireplace with Rope” where the softly - almost romantically - rendered fireplace contrasts with the shadowy ground and the graphic wing and rope that float in front. It also presages the direction her painting would take throughout the 1970s, becoming more reductive to the point of total abstraction. She later noted that by 1975, “it seemed as though I was just painting a transition itself. I was isolating something and just painting that.” The wing and rope (or ribbon), became important subjects, particularly in tandem, with their allusions of weightlessness and impermanence.