Johnny Izatt-Lowry: By day, but then again by night
A text by Rachel Snider
I rub sanitizer into my hands. Lock down is lifting and I am making my way to Johnny Izatt-Lowry's studio in Wandsworth. It is the first time on a bus in four months and as we speed down Tottenham Court Road, I am struck by how quiet central London is. It is the morning rush hour and there is a stillness I have only ever seen at night. But there are no revellers here now, just a scattering of strangers in face masks. A ghost town I think before going back to reading my book. We adapt quickly to ghosts and new normals and pandemics now. We have to in order to survive.
In the quiet of the studio I meet a smoker at night. Broad shouldered and flat chested, they wear an over coat with sharp lapels. The smoker stands in a doorway in Soho in the 1940s. The smoker stands on the pier at Brighton. The smoker stands on an empty train platform. He wears a fedora. Although we don't see his head, so I can't be sure. The smoker is burly, a gangster, someone you wouldn't want to mess with. The smoker is benign, a cardboard cut- out like the ones you see in cinemas of characters from the film. You could carry it away under one arm. The hand of the smoker that holds the cigarette has a shadow that flickers playfully. The other hand is pressed to his side, thick and limp. In the moonlight it looks like a slab of butter. Nothing is as it seems and yet it is perfectly clear. A smoker at night. The only thing that we can believe is the smoke from the burning cigarette. And that it is night.
And with this smoker at night, whose face I can't see and hands I don't quite trust, I step into another world. I follow the smoke.
There is a chair. The background is a dusky pink. The type of colour they dye cashmere, because this is a pink people pay a fortune to wrap themselves in. The chair is a wooden chair. A simple pine. The grain swirls like a hologram, making your eyes strain to adjust. The chair doesn't look comfortable. In fact, looking at this chair, the last thing one wants to do is sit in it. It doesn't make me think of dining rooms or libraries or home, but of Andy Warhol's screen prints of an electric chair.
A bird is falling through the night air. Its wings are billowing and the tender paunch of its tummy exposed. The birds head is tilted backwards and eyes open as if in ecstasy. It is a moment of beauty. The bird is falling to its death. Like an insect in amber, our bird's death is solidified forever in night.
There are crows on a log. The first crow is perched on the on top of the log. The second is on a branch. The third is upside down, as if it isn't on the log at all but performing in the circus. This third crow make me chortle. For like the work of the surrealists whose trauma and laughter echo through these paintings, Izatt -Lowry's work is witty. It is sombre and it is a court jester, playful and resistant to be being put into a time and place.
I come to the self- portraits. One where the artist is painting and another where he is smoking. The steadiness of the artist's hands settles a disquiet that lingers in the other paintings. They remind us that these painting are of this world and of this time. We can follow the smoke back to ourselves. Trust that it is night. The self portraits tell us that these paintings are alive.
These hands that have created this work hold the quotidian delicately and tenderly up to us. We are able to see the fragility and the beauty of it all. Over and over again he shows us. And as we emerge, nervous and blinking from the time in lockdown, this work feels achingly relevant. What we thought we knew is altered. The world is filled with threat. The world is strange. The world is beautiful. But it always was. We can adapt. That's how we survive.