Paintings are to be looked at, and their reality in paint is an inextricable part of their being looked at—far different from their representation on screen—and so, last month Ryan Daffurn, Adolphe Piche and I banded together to exhibit some recent paintings. Since coming back to Brisbane in April, I’ve shared an artist’s residency with Ryan at the Sculptors Queensland shed at the back of the Old Museum in Bowen Hills, where Adolphe had likewise spent some time. Our show, held in the Museum itself—a grand red-brick, art deco construction set amongst lush, flowering gardens and palm trees—commemorated our time with Sculptors Queensland and displayed the fruits of our labours.
The arched foyer of the Old Museum quickly filled with a flood of people, and showing in Brisbane proved a surprising experience. I was reacquainted with people I hadn’t seen in five, seven years, people from many parts of my life, from café jobs and university, even my philosophy honours supervisor. It was a great big soup of my past and present lives, and it was really thrilling to stand behind my work and have something to present for the intervening years. Yes, I’ve been busy.
It’s always surprising to hear people’s response to your work. I rather apprehensively showed a self-portrait whose slow and painful birth produced an intense and dark painting, with crudely designed shapes for arms, with thickly-built-up hands that betrayed a long battle with planes and forms, and with a face perhaps among the most painterly-mature I’ve painted, certainly not effortless, but with a firmer control of paint, bearing a harsh expression (my very involved painting-face). And despite my reservations, it was well received, and people were even disappointed not to be able to take home prints of it.
Since paintings are to be looked at, and since we would prefer them not to be seen as luxury commodities, we freely offered hundreds of postcard prints of our best works. It’s nice to offer a memento, to permit a little piece to be taken home, to implant a memory of the night and of the work in someone’s mind.
I was surprised to learn that many people—even those familiar with my work—consider me more of a writer than a painter. This is a dire new predicament in which I find myself. Though writing is undeniably important to me, and something I intend to pursue in a very serious manner, I think of myself first of all as a painter. I don’t consider my writing journalistic, but more philosophical and more about exposing the contents of a painter’s mind. Perhaps I’ve steered off course somehow, or let my writing—a skill I’ve had greater opportunity to flex—do more of the work than my drawing and painting. I feel that I might need to rest the writing a little more in deference to more painting and drawing, and that I might need to push a more visual presence on the internet. Certainly, it is important to write, and as Joshua Reynolds (1997: 167), himself a very adept painter, wrote: ‘The knowledge which an Artist has of his subject will more than compensate for any want of elegance in the manner of treating it, or even of perspicuity, which is still more essential; and I am convinced that one short essay written by a Painter, will contribute more to advance the theory of our art, than a thousand volumes such as we sometimes see.’ But it is good to have an opportunity to reflect on how you are publicly perceived, and to seize the opportunity to modify that perception.
It was incredible to show with two painters I very much look up to, and to be raised up next to them. My work isn’t as strong or as complex as theirs, but I am, after all, a few years behind in terms of experience. And yet, they consider my work respectable company, and I relished the challenge of standing proudly in the shadow of people greater than me.
The artist, so long hidden in her painter-cave, mixing pigments and scrutinising the fall of light across still and silent objects, must also be a very public creature, and must thrust the efforts of her labours on the outside world as regularly as she can. Our quiet diligence is rewarded with bursts of stardom, and the act of putting on a show is both a celebration and a very important feedback loop. Seeds of new ideas have lodged themselves in my brain, and I feel more certain of my course.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua. 1997. Discourses on art. Ed. Robert R Wark. Yale: New Haven.
