Leila Fanner: An accidental and surprising journey

I video call Leila Fanner on a Wednesday afternoon. I am in London and she is in her studio, north east of Cape Town. Just in shot, I can see Winter Took A Sip Of Spring, one of her new paintings, on an easel. It is a picture of a faceless woman sitting cross-legged, her whole body apart from her hands and feet replaced by a semi-abstract floral pattern, nursing a mug with both hands. Behind the woman – and somehow also covering her face – is a wash of green and grey brushstrokes, which look to me something like a dense wood. Behind the wood is a corner of purple sky, from which a moon no bigger than the subject’s toe looks over the scene. Though she looks nothing like me – she has no facial features, for a start – the figure feels somehow relatable.

As we speak about how she came to make paintings like this, she draws. Just out of her webcam’s view, she is sketching a character with a baby on its back. “I couldn’t see the abstract shapes in a figure,” she tells me. This is hard to believe, given how gracefully her work flits between abstraction and figuration now. It was abstraction that came first, I learned. A daily meditator, she explains “the spiritual side of life is extremely big [...] it totally permeates my work.” As an artist Fanner was, and still is, interested in representing concepts rather than specifics. What she wants to paint isn’t something that we can see, it doesn’t have a physical shape like people and objects do. For this kind of representation, the rules of figuration felt needlessly strict.

About 15 years ago something changed, and female figures began to appear in her paintings. They didn’t, and still don’t, look like anyone in particular. Sometimes they almost stop being figures at all, turning into indeterminate forms or empty spaces on the canvas. The characters in her work are either devoid of colour or – as the woman in Winter Took A Sip Of Spring is – filled with patterns. “The figure to me is a holding place,” she explains. It is not an attempt to paint a realistic person, this or that woman, but to represent a more foundational, ineffable feminine energy. This, a move away from rules towards intuition, is how figures like the woman and baby, taking shape as we speak, found their way into her work.

Today, each painting is, as she puts it “an accidental and surprising journey”. A human figure, a gaggle of gestural brushstrokes, a meadow of flowers, a person-shaped void, a cloudy sky: all have their place in Fanner’s world, and all take shape without any planning. She doesn’t like to go into a painting knowing how it will end up. In fact, she describes the way she works as “childlike”, keeping her rational mind out of the process, watching a picture unfold in front of her and only thinking about what it might mean when it is finished. I am amazed by how, acting on pure intuition, Fanner is able to conjure these images that so deftly tread the line between the figurative and the abstract; the physical and the spiritual.

When I ask her if she feels like a master, she laughs. “It feels like I am a conduit [...] it’s not my conscious mind that is painting.” Her work comes from a side of her that is attuned to the things that we can’t see: the concepts, feelings and ideas that she discovers in meditation. These things cannot be expressed in the language of strict abstraction or figuration, so she has formed her own. Some of its motifs – the women, the flowers, the moon – we recognise. Others we don’t. Together, they form images that we as viewers can relate to on a level that, like her own process, is childlike: more a feeling than a conscious thought.