Infant Naturale

Whilst chatting to a fellow volunteer at Braemar Gallery in Springwood NSW, (a small village of about five thousand people in the Blue Mountains, Australia) today, I showed him this, a small watercolour I pained during my last year of university. Twenty-six years ago, I was studying at the Australian National University in sleepy Canberra, and I was obsessed with horses, or Horses as I insisted to write about the quadrupeds in those pre-Corona Virus and even pre-Olympic days.

You see non-mimetic imagery was the rage in that era. So was Star Trek! I wanted to transpose my brief dailiences (a fresh love affair, you might say) with watercolour as a media with the ‘serious’ discipline of oil painting. Of course I went through an earlier preoccupation with the arabesque curves of drapery and flesh that only Henri Matisse could encircle with a few deft brushstrokes, jaunting across the voluptuous haunch of a black haired niece woman with a cerulean blue-tipped brush, or slicing through the southern French landscape on his little Chevalier, like a seamstress’ long scissors through claret-red wall drapery? I was also a student of the obligatory studies of the many treatisie on anatomy, nature and painting. Volumes of forms, organs, inventions, observations. I even smirked at my knowledgeable mind, happy in the fact that I secretly knew that the Great Master had slept with his favourite pupil, Salaí. Well who could blame him, he was young, had muscular legs, a halo of blonde fuzzy hair that even Brett Whitley in his 20’s would be envious of, surely Da Vinci couldn’t be blamed for one or two blemishes upon a hermit’s life as crisp a clear as the pale latte coloured parchment that he circumscribed the world of the Renaissance?

I am remiss, because, it was from these elating beginnings I drew my inspiration for this little watercolour, combining an x-ray of a benevolent god-like hoof, like the sun pulsing through a blood red sky. Across which is the appropriation of an anatomical study by George Stubbs (da Vinci’s studies of ‘Horses’ being of not quite a high enough standard for my graphic investigators’ eye!). This equine toe meets the cold regard, the iron clad exterior of a Borg, an evil tincture of man and evil machinery, almost a fallen angel from space. In this I dreamt I drew from my recent reading of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and contemporary cinema. The first a spiritual aspect of Nature seen through the lens of Marie Curie, the second: the archetypal enemy of brave Captain Picard, a cool vermilion rage kept in stasis by the epitome of a scavenged object hoarder, a cyborg in a cobalt blue airless world concerned with only his self preservation. A furtive dark blue contemporary anatomy schematic diagram of a ‘Horse’ figure, repeat with humerus...links the two fields. For the artist as a young man is short, but in this interplay, he takes delight!

I think this is the perfect way to start a discourse on my art...