Jo Brocklehurst painted bodies like battlefields, faces like manifestos, limbs as weapons, and fashion as a sacred distortion. If Egon Schiele dreamed in glam-club neon instead of tuberculosis fever, if Toulouse-Lautrec had been thrown into a Blitz Kid warehouse in 1983, if Jean Genet painted portraits instead of writing novels on the damned, then they might look similar to the art of the British artist Jo Brocklehurst (1935-2006). Just like Toulouse-Lautrec, Jo Brocklehurst also drew live in the queer cabarets, in punk and fetish clubs of the 1970s all the way up to the 1990s, not just in London, but also in Berlin and New York. Still, despite the visual comparisons with Schiele and Lautrec, Brocklehurst was an artist with a unique vision and an electric determination to capture what she way seeing before it all disappears.
Fig.1 Jo Brocklehurst, Poster for Brocklehurst exhibition at 112 Greene Street, 1983
Fig.2 Jo Brocklehurst, Untitled. 1980
Fig.3 Jo Brocklehurst, Miss Jacky Worp, 1978
Erotic Like Razorwire
Her work is not erotic in the pornographic sense. It is erotic in the way Fassbinder is erotic. In the way Genet wrote about violence and longing. It is erotic like protest, erotic like razorwire. Pleasure as something risky and defiant, never soft, never catering to appetites, only igniting. Human figures in her ink and gouache feel like they were drawn at the speed of lust, bodies not seen, but seized. Hair bleeds into shadow, black lips mutate into geometry, limbs taper into vampiric blades. It is fashion illustration meets demonology. Punk resurrected as a court portraiture. Brocklehurst practically lived inside the London’s 1970s and 80s underground, but never to document it. She was a part of it and that is why her artworks have that raw, electric power at the very first glance. Even the colours she uses, the hot pink in Fig.5. and Fig.6., the lavender, orange and green in Fig.4., for example, speak of her passionate approach. One can tell these artworks are an insider work. This was not reportage. The lady in Fig.1. looks so spontaneous, caught in her element, not posed, not painted by a strange observer. In Brocklehurts’s drawings and sketches, the club kids are not youths in makeup but minor deities of erotic chaos, half-human, half-punk demons. The body is never passive. The model is never decorated. They are self-authored. They glare back. They are not subjects, they are co-conspirators.
Fig.4 Jo Brocklehurst (1935-2006), Fetish GIrl
Fig.5 Jo Brocklehurst, Go Away and Blow Your Brains Out
Fig.6 Jo Brocklehurst, Woman in pink feather boa
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