Archibald and Wynn 2000
Vistas I (The Wynne Prize)
This painting was executed last year and followed a sculpture commission in Canberra. The sculpture comprised a sixty metre long screen of fifteen panels of figure groups ( 'Pictures at an Exhibition' is also reviewed in the most recent issue of Art and Australia). These were joined by more or less horizontal bars that connected the figures and provided security for the building. By the end of this work I was sick of figures but I loved the effect of the bars and the endlenly had to arrange them to make sense of them collectively. Vistas I becomes the Canberra commission where the figures become colours.
These works were also motivated by my disappointment with much contemporary painting which is colour shy. Exuberance and joy, which colour describes is not the mood of the day and I say Stuff that! I will not be controlled restrained and cool. I had too many ideas about what I could do with colour. Painting became colour shy when the freedoms promoted by the sixties had degenerated to 'Hippie' values. Freedom was a dirty word that led to self indulgent excess and time had shown that such attitudes were not productively employed either to life or to art. Mostly they were right, only the minimalist approach which became the expression of these reactions was a bit boring.
Colour here refers to nothing within art. There are no oblique references. It is intentionally anti-clever. I found a poem which I wrote before I painted the stripe paintings which sheds some light and helps to define the work as landscape. This is the subject free world of speed to which shapes cannot cling: we are in such a hurry. Perhaps we are composed and the world is moving past us in a blur. Perhaps the blur is a state of calm; the hypnotic rhythm of the carriage gliding over the tracks.
Vistas II and Vistas III were in my last exhibition at The Mori Gallery in December and January, where Vistas I was also exhibited. These works can still be viewed at the gallery along with 'Glimpses' which are single panel works, 'mono-panels'.
• My poem "Reality is" (see poetry) serves to shed light on the painting rather than serve as a work of literature.
Stephen Mori (The Archibald)
Click here to see Stephen Mori
tephen Has slipped away to New Zealand and will not attend the opening which protects his record of never having been to The Archibald. Among contemporary artists the Archibald, Wynn and Sulman prizes represent an aspect of art practice that has lost its relevance. Those who cater to a commodity fetishising practice enter such prizes. The method of selection for hanging over the years has discouraged 'serious contemporary' artists from entering. It is also terribly demeaning for an artist who imagines themselves to be significant and rejected simultaneously. Prizes also were deemed uncivilised by a cultured elite. The art gallery was failing to attract the noble practitioner to an event that attracted large audience and interest.
Recently however, artists have started to emerge from the woodwork. For me personally, portraiture has always represented an area whose potential had not been tapped. There was a relationship between the lofty formal aims in a work and the unavoidable requirement of the portrait to capture something of the subject. Those two objectives have at times over the past century been disconnected. It was my view that one could be ambitious artistically and capture the spirit of the subject at the same time.
I hope that my explanations for Vistas I has not been separated from these Archibald notes. The two works are obviously related. How surprising therefore and how disappointing it is to find continuity so discontinuous. We would prefer that things made sense in a nice straight line, but like in our lives, the road turns mischievously.
The most striking similarity between Vistas I and Stephen Mori is the dimension. Having made 'Pictures at an Exhibition' in Canberra, I was able to conceive of a multi-panel work making up one work. Stephen has also been broken up into seven parts. Those parts are much more diversely painted than the stripes. What the portraits have in common is their difference. I have for the moment got colour off my chest. These panels are bunched by intervals of white gloss paint licked with a little mean spirited colour. The eye moves in and out as you move along. Like with the stripes I attempted to make each part autonomous. They agreed to come together only after they had become integrated singly. A portrait seeks to describe the subject in a profound way. I have not been able to achieve that with one picture. That says something about Stephen or my failing. I believe that it ought to be the aim of an artist to do it with one. In the context of my current work, however, of multi panels, that did not happen.
The work has been described as calligraphic in approach. I have not attempted to construct a facsimile in a conventional way. We are not being eyeballed. In this case the individual cannot be individuated. There is no separation of him from the crowd. He is in fact another crowd.
Over Christmas and the new year I spent a lot of time with Stephen while my show was on. I was so full of him that I only had to make a mark and it was Stephen's something. These works were made out of memory, out of assimilated unconscious observations. I had spent the summer trying to place my tower. Henry Mulholland suggested I paint Stephen. He was painting Paddy MacGuinness and suggested all you had to do was do a lot of hair and you basically had it. It was time for me to back off trying to place my sculpture so I gave it a go. It has led me very happily back into painting.
The paint is oil paint worked into wet white enamel paint. With the simpler components working into the wet paint forced the line to slow down considerably which allowed for more subject to leak in. It forced me to slow down; to be less impulsive. It also made what would have otherwise been more like a drawing more physical, more sustaining and more like a painting. The simpler components or panels were made over a shorter time. They were timeless. The heavier worked parts were layered and scrutinised. Both approaches make up the whole.
A portrait makes us depict another human being. We have to define the subject. We also have to define the human. The animal that we are. It is a monstrous and frightening task.
The trustees have shown a remarkable generosity of spirit to include these works. I am enormously pleased and relieved.
© Michael Snape 1973-2008
