Two Painters

Lottie Consalvo and hayley Megan French

Sydney April May 2016

Showing at 2 of Sydney’s youngish and more adventurous exhibiting spaces during April/May2016 were exhibitions that celebrated the unique possibilities of paint. The first was by Hayley Megan French at Pom Pom in Chippendale and the second by Lottie Consalvo at Alaska Projects in Kings Cross.  It was refreshing to see such strong work and acquainting myself with the projects underlying the work has been interesting and informative. Both use paint with unabashed joy and the paintings sit and sing with sure independence. There is a strongly developed plastic space in both artists’ work; individual, independent and sure.

Plastic space remains such vague and/or romantic term, whether used in either scholarly or popular writing.  But how to talk about it?  How do you measure it? So much of the writing about painting is either nostalgic for some previous idea of grandeur/ intimacy or else swirls around notions of the death of this or the end of that; endgames, pat surfaces, zombie formalism or irrelevance. But how do you talk about the results of an immersive painting practice?

Both these artists have strongly developed tropes centred on land, earth, and/or landscape. For Consalvo it has grown out of her performance and durational pieces and informed by her journeys around Ireland, evokes a near pantheistic approach to earth and land, referencing stones and altars. The only photo in her exhibition ‘mid-fall (study) 2016’ is a fitting metaphor and to me suggests her wish to internalize these earth/land-based experiences.  For French it is her desire to absorb and work through the indigenous paintings of North West Australia and their approach to land. Dealing with the formal and lyric ease in the best indigenous paintings is a familiar ‘problem’ faced by many urban white painters.  The land-based worldview of the Kimberley masters, already abstracted via aerial and ambulatory angles and then filtered through familial and symbolic stories (and with a dash of western influence) is further removed via French’s program; her crisp intelligence. It suggests those known indigenous pictures, but in fact is far removed from them.

A striking aspect of both painters was their non-reliance on line or mark to hold the picture plane. The history of modern Australian painting is defined by mark, gesture and/or line. Whether the mid century masters, Fairweather, Williams, Kemp, Miller, Tuckson, the later ones, Sansom, Whiteley, Senbergs, Kovacs, Audette, Whisson or in the majority of indigenous painters, the use of line and gesture to separate, symbolize and measure is ubiquitous. Both Conslavo and French use paint in large mass areas and achieve shape by edge of paint zone as opposed to line or mark.  It is immediate and immersive.

Consalvo seems to be attempting to define a space as it approaches her, rushes at her; you feel time is running out; she has to grab it before she is completely enveloped. The magic she is attempting to capture seems elusive and can only ever be suggested; the smoky tonality suggests earth and soil and holds the remnants of the hand made charcoal she uses; the enfolding space at once sucks you in while the bold forms hold you at the surface and gives the pictures their tension.

For French, although the look suggests those indigenous painters of the Kimberly she is studying, I see a broader, less linear or reference filled picture and like her program, a larger and more open planar space. I see Clyfford Still more than  Rusty Peters. In her work the space is expansive, crisp and somehow clean and the breadth of the large and often multi panel pictures is unusual in Australian painting.  Her sureness hides the obvious struggles that inform and keep her surface taut. 

For both of these painters there is a written exposition of their stated positions, their intellectual and psychological intentions, their aesthetic aims, but when I stood in front of the pictures uninformed by these projects I respond to their ‘singing’, the taut and developed picture space and the sheer love of painting. I trusted them. My one regret was that the readily available support material for their paintings was written expositions and I would have loved to see the sketches, and visual notes that evidence the development of their visual languages.

Both painters embark on their expressive journeys with utter respect for the materials they are using, and leave their theoretical and psychological obsessions to be a fermenting element that adds to the emotional soup required to do this thing painting.  The both take big risks; they are both well rewarded.

I look forward to the next showings of both of them.