Exhibitions
Dunedin
PETER LEECH
Jeffrey Harris
Graharne Sydney
'The Inner and Outer of Painting'
Particularly in figurative painting, there tend to be two polarised extremes. At
one, the artist appears primarily to project himself and to depict his own inner
world. At the other, the artist gives the impression of denying self and of
simply depicting the outer world. It is characteristic at the former extreme for
the spiritual temperature to be high and for the work to roar with raw
expressivity; at the latter extreme the temperature is cooler and the work more
quietly reflective.
There could be no mistaking at which extremes Jeffrey Harris and Grahame Sydney operate. But it has been an illuminating experience to ~observe their markedly different modes in successive exhibitions at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. (It is also satisfying to be able to record the revitalised exhibition policy at the Gallery under its new direction.)
Jeffrey Harris's April retrospective included eighty-six works from 1969 to the present, and the (often harrowing) exhibition could be said to constitute a pictorial diary of the artist's turbulent inner life over those years. Haunted and morbid images are seared into the paintings in Harris's characteristically harsh and unforgiving colour; and each work seems barely to contain an explosive scream of pain and anguish.
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JEFFREY HARRIS Two
Young Russians 1981 oil on hardboard, 1202mm x 1202mm (Collection of the artist) |
There are, for Harris, a number of artistically fixational points in his work. His own childhood and development is a recurrent theme - declared, for example, in Childhood Memories (1970); and the continual pursuit of self is manifest also in Harris's numerous self-portraits (though these works might better be called 'self-examinations'). The death of a child exposed an artistic nerve which pulses through the series of paintings entitled Imogen's Grave (1979), following the magnificent jumble of Magnolia Bough, Imogen's Crown (1977-8). And death itself constantly lurks in Harris's paintings through the motifs of crucifixion, hangings, severed hands and heads. With the series of Judith paintings from 1979 and 1980, the figure repeatedly asserts its presence, like some unexorcised ghost.
In fact, the Judith paintings exemplify a distinctive trait in Harris's approach to his subjects. The Judith figure has an inescapable presence, but, as with so many of the artist's figures, there is a startling blankness of facial feature - nothing which reveals the nature of Harris's daemon. Invariably, the figure is rendered merely as a presence with minimal outline strokes: as if the artist himself cannot or will not fill out the detail of this fixational point.
More generally, the unfinished appearance of many of Harris's works - where the canvas, or more usually the hardboard can be left virtually naked in certain areas - suggests something of the quality of the inner world which is their subject. Here, fleeting and gestural images never seem to achieve full finality and finishedness: as in dreams, once attention is turned upon a particular content it becomes elusive and faint.
This fact further suggests the real difficulty which any artist of Harris's temperamental address must face: the difficulty. that is. of somehow figuratively translating inner preoccupations which can in themselves be wholly inchoate. But in a surprising new turn for the artist in, paintings from earlier this year that particular difficulty is brought into perspective. For after ten years of painting-or painting out-personal torment, Harris seems to have turned his gaze outwards. The pain and suffering remains in the content of such new works as My Lai, Leningrad and Two Young Russians, but it is the pain and suffering of others. In these works, interestingly, the unfinished appearance has been markedly reduced, and the pictorial content has gained stronger and simpler definition. This perhaps suggests that the modes of feeling for others can more readily achieve resolution and finality than the feelings one directs upon one's self.
If one feature of Grahame Sydney's paintings in his June exhibition is insistent it is, in stark contrast with Harris's work, the quite impersonal nature of his figurations. His concern is with objects, not subjects: and of course in this sense alone the much-applauded finish and minutely detailed resolution of Sydney's paintings is readily explicable as a function of the fixed solidity and out-thereness, the outerness, of objects. Once again, it is easier to focus outwards than inwards.
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| GRAHAME SYDNEY Weatherboards at Cluden 1979 |
But there is an important sense in which Sydney's aesthetic outerness is taken to a point of near exaggeration. Frequently, for example, his painted buildings are in fact derelict and empty shells. Charlie's Bar (1977) has been a long time vacant, and the interiors of In the Woolshed (1975) and Dogtrials Room (1980) are disturbingly bare and barren. More curiously still, even Sydney's portraits have this same air of impersonality. The sitters are not so much subjects for the artist, but objects-just as much as the hchen-encrusted footwear in Clutha Shoe (1975) is an object. In both Roger Hall (1980) and Shirley Skinner (1979), the painted figures seem turned to stone: inanimate human shells - and this despite a richness of figurational detail which is quite absent from Harris's work.
Paradoxically, behind the obvious painterly detail of Sydney's art there is, I think, a deliberate intention (which is becoming more pronounced) to force the spectator to come to terms with blankness. For example, in the superb painting, Weatherboards at Cluden (1979), the disconcertingly broadened field of vision pictures a virtually unrelieved blank wall. Only a tiny triangular indication of the sky beyond at the top right of the painting intrudes into the pictorial frame.
There is, one suspects, a good reason for this severe reduction of specific content in Sydney's painting. A common tendency has been to regard the realist as merely a virtuoso display artist whose art depends heavily upon the nature of its content. Sydney, I think, has been concerned to produce an effective response to this attitude in his reduction of content and panorama. In this respect, he may be thought to have performed an important service on behalf of realism. For, with realism, we are far too accustomed to leaving off contemplation at the level of recognition of the object painted-to look through the painting, as it were, rather than to continue to look at it.