DOING A GOOD THING IN ONE PLACE
Louise McClary is a native of Cornwall and is well known for producing evocative landscape paintings with an emphasis on colour, linear rhythm and an effective use of chiaroscuro. Her work is informed, geographically, by the Lizard Peninsula and from her own expansive garden developed with her partner, Matt Robinson. With a Quaker background and an interest in Buddhism her practice is more broadly, and politically, affected by vital ecological concerns.
McClary’s paintings are held in many private collections in the UK and USA, and several galleries represent her, including Artwavewest in Dorset. I travelled to Cornwall in the summer of 2016 to see the latest developments in her painting. On this occasion, I was left alone in the Caervallack studio at her home in St Martins, near Helston. In retrospect, this was a mini-writing residency, lasting just two hours or so. The subsequent realisation, and gestation, of this text took a further nine months to complete.
‘Doing A Good Thing In One Place’ not only constitutes an experiment in a form of reviewing a body of work, but also attempts to connect with the spirit of McClary’s painting that accompanies the visual into the metaphysical. Like the works in the artist’s studio, a text can be speculative, where language trips and meanders: extracting questions rather than answers. And, unlike a more ‘journalistic’ review that is written with some urgency to meet a deadline, the prose poem, with many possibilities for form and content, demands time to dig deeper into the relationship between the visual and the written form.
DOING A GOOD THING IN ONE PLACE
(Louise McClary’s painting studio, Summer 2016)
In the silent studio
From the comfort of the sofa
Ambient sounds add a contingent counterpoint
To the visual contemplation
An invisible fly
Buzzing
Then birdsong from outside
One thing
After another
Then all is fused
Searching for a narrative
Interpretations of an imagined Eden emerge
Ominously, as questions are raised
The various hortus conclusus
Offer small vistas that perplex
And the canvases become portals
To lush gardens and intimate landscapes
Places of the cycle of life, death and re-birth
An immersive experience manifests strangeness and mystery
Germinating the numinous space of the imagination
All is energy where, incessantly,
The growth machine hums quietly and
Fixed liquid colours flow and dissolve into painterly mists
Suggesting forms, solid or ethereal
Echoing the Caervallack garden we walked in this morning.
The paintings reveal a spirit of place
Where seeds are sown
In the wind and the rain
In the light and dark hours
Forming a slow burn,
That engages with tacit, sympathetic looking
Igniting an increasingly restless gaze
Revealing the phenomenal
As event and material form.
*
After the downpour
The quietest place
Is now bursting from within
Evolving into a critical mass
The inner sanctum of the studio
Takes on an ever increasing sense of disquiet
Where the paintings toil against idealised notions
Of the picturesque landscape
Composing chaotic meanderings
Weaving disorderly diagonals
To celebrate impermanence
And new patterns in nature
In rhythms of visual energies
Variegated carpets of colour
Form a series of undulating nets
And structure can appear definitive
But with capricious qualities
A sense of change persists
Yet symmetry prevails, and
Balances are built
On quirkiness and uneven growth
Presenting an entangled domain
A liminal threshold
To be realised and entered by the observer
In patches of colour
Extracted from keen or dreamy observation
Intimate recollection or intuition
As spaces and forms are constructed
Guiding the eye purposefully
As the best paintings do
Forming a nucleus –
A Cubist-like configuration of pictorial space
The images are provocative
Allowing the indicative flatness
Of a particular kind of visualisation
To reject logical, selfish perspective
Wherein the viewer is never exhausted by variety
As the scenarios oblige active participation
To see through the dark glass
That clouds perception.
*
An alchemical process
Combines time
With visual experience,
Creating new territory
On the largest canvas
A crimson river, winding
Travelling across the multi-faceted surface
Via the twist and turn of a round headed brush
Ending in a single leaf-like form
And adjacent,
A scumbled light green
Suggests a leafy branch
A linear limpid overhang
Gesturally applied, reaching
Forward into space
Towards the viewer
Alternatively, a wall, a rock, or a tree form
Holds the two-dimensional plane and
Impedes the eye by occlusions
To send the looking on alternative routes
Backwards then forwards
Pushing and pulling an elasticised space
Where new thresholds open out, extending dimensions
Then to enfold, pinpoint, into small voids
The enclosing backgrounds
Which turn into foregrounds
In grey, gentle lime-green, or raw umber
Surfaces over-layered
By snail-slime white weaves
Forming entangled pathways
Mapping journeys
Towards a terrain without borders
Although this initial confusion requires time to digest
It is meditatively resolved
Prompting a still gaze
That gives way to accumulative scanning
Taking in detail, colours, shapes, textures
Then simultaneously, all variety is resolved
By the orchestration of content
To produce harmony and wholeness
Making relationships of contrasting colour fields
Skeins and linear strands
The mind’s eye feeds eagerly
As new configurations are constructed
And surprisingly
This conjured revelation
Comforts a poignant moment
Of potential loss and devastation.
*
On the studio sofa
A book has been discarded:
A page is randomly, or fatefully, opened
Skimming the lines a comment is noticed where the author has written:
“…doing a good thing in one place”
To fortuitously acknowledge the purpose of McClary’s labour
Where suspended and reconsidered decisions
Loosen into gestural outcomes
Offering a lingering sense of things falling
Apart, fractured
And where final images may not consciously conspire
To state anything profound
A metaphor of The Fall is coaxed from the imagery
Pricking the conscience, so subtly
A cryptic pathology bears itself
Of protest in the face of
Induced pandemonium
Divined in this localised subject matter
But the wild places are fighting back
By way of persistence
Becoming abstract, deregulated, burgeoning forms
In an enhanced cartographic language.
*
A warning is embodied
By skilful applications on the canvas surfaces
In a budding galaxy of small
But insistent, landscapes
These incomplete paintings reveal evidence
Of momentary skirmishes
Apparent dead ends
And chaotic entanglement
But, actively and obstinately
The paintings astound and seduce
With an indulgent palette
And chiaroscuro indulgence
From atmospheric islands of colour
Scumbled into deep shade pools
Leading to luminous passages of light
Making the compositions
Immediate and inevitable.
The imagery become fixed
Sieved through a relentless process
Realised in painterly configurations
That declares an ecstatic dance:
Seeing the moves, in silent rapture.
Note:
The book on the sofa – ‘Buddha Mind, Buddha Body’, by Thich Nhat Hanh. (Parallax Press, 2007)
Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews 