“And what lies under, now”: Overpaintings in Joanna Newsom’s Sapokanikan
Peeling Back the Layers in Joanna Newsom’s Divers, Part 1
Like any artistic masterpiece, Joanna Newsom’s album Divers continues to reward each reading and re-reading. Each time I go back, I see it in a new light, or peel another layer of the onion. As we wait patiently (or try to) for what seems like a new album on the horizon, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts.
I’ve shared a few ideas in other places about Divers, and I’ve highlighted a few moments where Newsom layers many meanings into the same word. Probably the crispest example comes in the word “undarked” and its wide range of meaning, but I’ve mentioned others, too. She’s a master of polysemy.
“Sapokanikan”
In May 2016, when Dave Eggers asked her about her song-writing process, Newsom shed a little light on her approach.
JN: Usually I kind of know what the song’s about […] And sometimes the thing that it’s about carries with it a certain set of extra obligations that make the lyric writing process more complicated or drawn out.
DE: To try to get right? To match the feeling that you’re…
JN: Yeah, to match the feeling or to match the actual subject matter… The easiest example would be on the last record, if there’s a song like “Sapokanikan”, which talks about layering, layering, layering, layering, and is full of puns and stuff… I knew what I wanted to write about, but then I had to wait for a version of that song to sort of resolve into existence, where each line would mean maybe four or five things, because that’s what the song was about, so I knew the formal structure to reflect that.
What fascinates me is — the song certainly talks about the subject of layering, historical and otherwise. And it performs layering in its polysemic word choice. But it also shows us layering! I love a good image.
For striking imagery, let’s look no further than the song’s paintings. They bring drama and excitement to the song — it almost feels like you’re in a Dan Brown novel at times, decoding what the artist left there. Of course, the examples in the song are more believable, and just as riveting.
Newsom names a few painters in the liner notes of the album, specifically Australian impressionist Sir Arthur Streeton and Dutch post-impressionist Vincent Van Gogh:
For liberties taken, my apologies to Messrs. Smith, Shelley, Streeton, Washington, V. Gogh, and Joyce.
The artist certainly references these folks, though I think it’s safe to say this isn’t an exhaustive list for the album. It may, however, be a list of people whose work she’s taken liberties with. For example, “sampling” their art and using it as her own (echoes of “this is not my tune, but it’s mine to use”, anyone?). Or maybe more that she knowingly took their art out of context to illustrate her own artistic thought, or twisted the facts a bit. The phrasing has a hint of respect, a hint of apology, and a hint of sass. I doubt her fellow artists would have minded for an instant — they’d be applauding her, too!
With the caveat that I might be missing some other allusions, and another caveat that I’m not the first to make these connections, I thought it’d still be fun to walk through the 3 established references to painters in the song.
Tiziano Vecelli
I’ll start with the painter Newsom doesn’t apologize to. Perhaps because she isn’t really stretching any facts here? We see the biblical story of Tobias, the son of blind Tobit, who goes on a long journey accompanied by the angel Raphael, who is in disguise. So that lends another meaning to the line:
Tobias and the Angel disguised
But I won’t digress.
Many painters depicted the scene, including Tiziano Vecelli, the famous Italian painter better known as Titian. He painted it a few times, in fact.
When Titian died, he left a number of paintings unfinished. One was painted over by another hand — not the “Hand of the Master”, possibly the hand of one of Titian’s pupils — and made into a version of Tobias and the Angel. As Newsom alludes to, the true Titian painting was discovered underneath. It was first discovered using X-ray radiography to take a photo, and then starting in 1983 it was restored by slowly (people like to use the word “painstakingly” here) removing the pupil’s paint to reveal the master’s. If you scroll to the bottom of this article, there’s an eery image of the X-rays and the restoration process over time.
Tobias and the Angel disguised
what the scholar surmised was a mother and kid
I love the drama and intrigue in these videos promoting the painting, so I had to share them here!
So the transformation appears in front of us — a (male) angel and a boy transform into a mother and her child, a daughter. Even as late as 2017 (after Divers was released), the painting was referred to as Portrait of a Lady and Her Daughter. However, in 2019, Prof. Jaynie Anderson published a book chapter identifying the subjects. Her abstract summarizes:
In the early 1550’s Titian painted his mistress and their daughter which was left unfinished at the time of his death. For some reason the composition was overpainted, perhaps by his jealous son Pomponio, as a Tobias and Angel.
Thankfully, in this case, the “X-ray reveal[ed…] where the Hand of the Master begins and ends”. Almost like the second painter wanted to bury the mistress and the daughter. The work is now referred to as Titian’s mistress Milia and their daughter Emilia. For me, it lends new weight to Newsom’s song.
while, elsewhere, Tobias and the Angel disguised
what the scholar surmised was a mother and kid
(interred with other daughters, in dirt, in other potter’s fields)
Vincent Van Gogh
Scientists pioneering X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF) see it as an improvement over X-ray radiography, the technology we typically think of when we talk about X-rays (think black and white photos of a bone fracture pinned up in front of a light box), and the one used to unveil Titian’s Milia and Emilia. XRF interacts with the chemicals in paint pigments, which lets scientists understand the colors used. I’m reminded of Marie Curie and her connection to Undark paint, and in ways this technology would feel more at home in the science fiction of “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne”. As described by molecular research company Bruker,
XRF describes the process where some high-energy radiation excites atoms by shooting out electrons from the innermost orbitals. When the atom relaxes, that is, when outer electrons fill inner shells, X-Ray fluorescence radiation is emitted. All this happens without touching or damaging the sample.
The emitted radiation is very much like a fingerprint of the atom. Copper fluorescence looks very different from zinc fluorescence and from fluorescence of any other element in the periodic table.
Scholars can then match up what they know about how certain pigments were formed at a given period in history, a given region in the world, different paint makers and their recipes, what artists had access to or acknowledged using… and leverage that to connect the elements’ fluorescence with colors.
When Newsom writes,
the text will not yield
(nor X-ray reveal, with any fluorescence)
she alludes in part to the leap from “regular” X-rays to XRF.
What can XRF reveal about art? I find this tidbit illuminating. It’s from Joris Dik, one of the scholars at Delft University of Technology who’s used XRF on paintings by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and others: “Da Vinci did not paint the shadows in the Mona Lisa’s face with a darker hue, but by stacking layers of almost transparent paint.” Wow. How interesting to get that kind of insight into the artist’s process! It’s not a hidden signal to a secret sect, but nonetheless.
In the case of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Grasgrond (translated to Patch of Grass), XRF let Prof. Dik and team see behind the grass without needing to damage the painting. After all, both Patch of Grass and the portrait of the peasant woman below it were painted by Van Gogh.
Beneath a Patch of Grass,
her bones the old Dutch Master hid
Here’s the painting you would see in the museum today:
Then, turning the canvas on its side, and using XRF, the image of a previous painting — a peasant woman with a cap — emerges.
The painting is in the collection of the Kröller Müller museum, and I encourage you to read their short article on it (including some fun images). And even more illustrative is this short video from Prof. Dik on the process, which compares the result from conventional X-ray and XRF, along with a layer-by-layer visualization of the canvas.
So, with her lines —
Beneath a Patch of Grass,
her bones the old Dutch Master hid
— Newsom deftly transforms the layers of a painting into the layers of earth… bones buried in the soil and grass on the surface. And of course, she’s playing here with the actual, physical earth around Greenwich Village, burial, and layers of history in the landscape. I know I’m not pointing out anything new here, but even after 8 years, it’s still awe-inspiring.
It’s not quite the bones of a woman, but the metaphor is well worth the liberties taken!
Arthur Streeton
Bookending the verses that refer to Titian and Van Gogh, we hear what you might describe as something of a “chorus” to the song. The first time, we hear:
(Sing: Do you love me?
Will you remember?
The snow falls above me.
The Renderer, renders.
The Event is in the hand of God.)
And the second time, Newsom sings:
I fell.
I tried to do well, but I won’t be.
Will you tell the one that I loved
to remember, and hold me?
I call and call for the doctor,
but the snow swallows me whole,
with old Florry Walker.The Event lives only in print.
Remembrance. Love. Snow. The Event. And old Florry Walker.
For a quick refresher on who Florry Walker was, I’ll quote a 2007 article in the CBC News:
Art conservator Michael Varcoe-Cocks had been carefully working on restoring Streeton’s painting Spring for about a year when he came across a microscopic discovery: an inscription hidden in the paint referring to an unknown woman named Florry.
“It’s very, very small — you can’t see it with the naked eye,” Varcoe-Cocks told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It seems that Arthur Streeton had a strong affection for [a woman named] Florence and put her name in the painting,” which the artist completed in 1890 while living in Melbourne.
Intrigued, staffers also discovered other inscriptions, bearing messages like “Florry and Smike [Streeton’s nickname]” and “Florry Walker’s my sweetheart.” After some detective work, gallery officials determined that the woman with whom Streeton was infatuated was Florence Walker, the younger sister of an art school colleague. At the time, however, society would have frowned upon a relationship between Walker, who was from a wealthy family, and a working artist like Streeton.
After the microscopic discovery, the museum then X-rayed the painting, and found (in the place of some male swimmers in a river) a nude female figure that Streeton had painted over. Could this have been Florry?
When Streeton met his classmate Lucy Walker’s sister, Florence, she was a young woman — which is why I’m confused by that expression, “old Florry Walker”. It places her in the past, or it ages her. If we think of someone in modern times saying this line, that makes sense. Or if we think of Streeton as a voice here, even if temporarily or parenthetically, then it seems to situate the painter as an old man, reflecting back or even knowing that Florry was also old.
There’s certainly a note of unrequited love or regret in those lines — “Do you remember?” And there’s that request to pass on a message.
Will you tell the one that I loved
to remember, and hold me?
I can imagine that both as a request to someone standing around the deathbed (as they “call and call for the doctor”), and as a request to something else — the hand of God? a secret message scrawled into a painting? In a song so focused on recorded history and artifacts of human experience, I can see how a speaker might call out to their art, their text, what they leave behind… to perform the act of “tell[ing]”.
And what of that snow? First it “falls above me” and then it “swallows me whole”. Right away, it evokes the layering we see in the landscape, the burial underground, the patch of grass, the snow falling in layers, erasing what’s beneath.
Similar to Van Gogh’s Patch of Grass, which depicts a verdant field, Streeton’s painting where we see Florry Walker etched and possibly overpainted is called Spring — there’s no snow to be seen! This always felt a little incongruous for me, but I tried not to get too tripped up. But then I started learning more about X-ray fluorescence, and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
I came across a scientific study performed by the same restorer who discovered Florry’s name (Michael Varcoe-Cocks) and a few other scientists, including Dr. Deborah Lau, who writes:
Some recent research at CSIRO by my colleagues and I saw us […] analyse a self-portrait by Australian impressionist artist Arthur Streeton.
A self-portrait, not the landscape painting Spring. It had been painted over. Initially, the team tried scanning the painting with other techniques to see if they could unveil the artist’s face. They used infrared and conventional X-ray, but didn’t get a clear image.
The primary reason for that, as Dr. Lau and others point out, is because the self-portrait was painted over in white paint, a common practice for painters wishing to reuse their canvases (Van Gogh did it to the canvas he used for Patch of Grass). Streeton just never got around to painting something new on this particular canvas. And more importantly, for a long time, the primary ingredient in white paint was lead. If you think about getting X-rays done at the dentist’s office, you’ll recall that they place a heavy lead apron over your chest before scurrying off to another room (how comforting!) to snap the X-ray. Lead, of course, is known to block X-rays. And this lead paint serves as an X-ray radiography blocker in researching the layers of paintings. That was, until XRF started to be used.
I haven’t found any images I can share here, but you can catch a glimpse of the whitewashed canvas (left) and XRF scan (right) in this link preview below. And certainly check out the article for more.
You can also watch about 1 minute of this lecture to see the various steps the team went through to analyze the piece.
Coming back to “Sapokanikan”, for me this adds a new interpretation to the layering snow. The words “the snow swallows me whole” evoke the whited-out self-portrait, like some kind of erasure. When read as a dying man’s complaint, the poignant sense of being swallowed up adds yet another layer of interpretation.
Regardless of how you interpret it, the winter image is striking, and of course you can see that JN may have taken some liberties here, but the artistic impact hits you.
Thanks for reading! I hope this was enjoyable, even if I was retracing a few steps in parts. I certainly learned a few things along the way.
As you can see, I’ve chosen the theme of layering for a little closer look. If you’d like, the exploration continues in Part 2.
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