A Study of Saint Francis, Ellie Cotton @ General Assembly

I am writing this on Friday afternoon. This time last week I was upstairs in a building behind the Royal Academy, in a gallery called General Assembly. I was looking at Ellie Cotton’s paintings, her show A Study of Saint Francis. The story goes: Ellie Cotton is a painter who went to see an exhibition at the National Gallery, one full of paintings of Saint Francis of Assisi, from the 13th Century to the present. 700 years of paintings of one man. Saint Francis was just that kind of guy. Born in the 12th Century, son of a rich merchant, he gave up his wealth and comfort to live a life of Christian poverty. He became a mystic, a poet, a beggar, a roving preacher, a friar who founded the religious order of Franciscan monks. Ellie Cotton went to Assisi, came back and started painting Saint Francis herself.

In one painting: three cute mini Saint Francis monks kneel on an enormous chocolate cake holding blue birthday candles, two more cute monks clamber up to join them. They’re facing away from us, we’re looking at them from behind. We can see the backs of their tonsured heads, skin all the way down to their peachy pink bumcheeks, blushing and bashful because their robes are completely backless. It’s not sexy, it’s not even really vulnerable. They’re naked like babies, like cartoons, they’re naked in a cheeky silly goofy hehehe way. I am looking at them in the same way I look at instagram reels of cute pigeons sitting in nests, cats eating spaghetti. The paint itself is cute too, like cake frosting. It is kind of matte, kind of gummy, completely smooth. The colours are pastel and solid and striking, blunt, so clear they might as well be glowing. The baby yellow grounds peek out in the gaps where the colours almost touch. The cute monks are fleshy and smooth, they have no eyes or mouths, only round heads and big round snouts. The candles are enormous and bulbous in the sweeping marks of their hands. The whole scene is so big, the smoothness almost feels like luxury, waste, excess, like there is too much space or simplicity or crispness and it’s overwhelming. But I am drawn to it all the same, I cannot stop looking at the cake blue background, the baby pink bums all raw and blushing.

A voice in my head shouts GUSTON GUSTON GUSTON and I yell SHUT UP! back at it because, I love Philip Guston’s paintings so much he leaks into everything I look at, he is always on the tip of my tongue ready to drip right off. But here he is, leaking or not. This is Bad Painting — not bad as in BAD, terrible, not good — but deliberately undermining what we as a culture come to understand as GOOD taste. Here is Guston’s bulbous figures, clunky, cackhanded, deliberate and smirking.

I pulled away from that painting to look around the rest of the room, to another painting: a table laid with a royal green cloth, looking like a lady’s skirt. It parts for Saint Francis, playing with a toy airplane under the table. On the top, two matronly bunny creatures are working on a massive plane that takes up the entire length of the table. On one side, the rabbit lady is piping icing into the front of the plane because it’s a cake. On the other side, another bunny matron is ironing a wing because it is silky smooth fabric. We are reminded that painting is a metaphysical plane — isn’t that something Guston said? The metaphysical prompt of that moment in internet history when everyone was obsessed with normal objects and things that were actually really cake. Clouds settle, the rabbits have huge human feet. Another painting: two cute Saint Francises are peering through the viewfinder of a big TV camera, looking at a robed figure with a hammerhead holding one of those birthday candles. The painting is called Live Stream (Poor Clare), because it depicts Saint Clare of Assissi, one of Saint Francis’ followers and founder of the order of Poor Clares. After her death she was given the status of Patron Saint of Television, because as she was dying and too ill to attend Mass, she had been sent divine visions of it, projected on the wall of her room. The painting is small, like a screen. The scene is hazy and dreamy, with blank middle distance and background, just endless baby blue.

But the pull of those cute cheeky monks in the first painting was irresistable. I couldn’t peel my eyes away, I kept turning my head to steal a peek. The overwhelming smoothness is, I think, the point. Saint Francis has been polished down to the simplest form, like seaglass. So big! A cartoon, so big. I found it genuinely astounding. My eyes kept glazing over the painting, a fingertip pushed into a Krispy Kreme donut’s sugar crust, glueing me to it and crunching the space in between around the contact. Isn’t that lovely? It is so rare to see things that feel new — not just for me, but all of us. We see so many things all the time, there is no respite from the relentless onslaught of images. This painting was so smooth, like a sponge, a balm for my eyes. The cute mini monks and their blushing bumcheeks.