Free Madicals

Catchment Gallery, Nelson
8 September - 3 October 2009

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©The Primitive Bird Group. All rights reserved

The title of this exhibition, and of one of the works in it, is derived from Free Radicals, Len Lye’s 1958 animation artwork film. Free Madicals suggests freedom through craziness or eccentricity, like Don Quixote tilting at windmills and lending his name to all things ‘quixotic’. However, what may seem totally off-the-wall and nonsensical at first glance may become liberating, life-affirming and even imbued with its own inner logic when looked at another way. Perhaps it is the way of looking itself that is too cautious, repressed, or lacking in imaginative empathy: "Because something is happening here But you don't know what it is Do you, Mister Jones?" (From ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ by Bob Dylan)
In my creative process, spontaneous free play comes first, before I start to think about what a painting might mean and come up with a title. The spontaneous and unpremeditated creative flow opens up a connection with primeval or subconscious instincts, as reflected in the title of one work, The Art Instinct (Mine). This was inspired by art philosopher Denis Dutton’s recently published book The Art Instinct (2009), in which he writes: "Preoccupied as we are with the flashy media and buzzing gizmos of daily experience, we forget how close we remain to the prehistoric men and women who first found beauty in the world. Their blood runs in our veins. Our art instinct is theirs."
While I certainly empathize with this on a theoretical level, the speculative question of where the art instinct originates is less important for me as an artist than actually engaging in artistic creation. Two works touch on the theme of creation: Creationismo is a play on ‘creationism’, the academically-disreputable theory that the universe and the organisms within it were divinely created. It suggests a somewhat egotistical pride in creation (analogously with ‘machismo’ in respect to being male): “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” An artist is a type of creationist in creating or re-creating our existence through art, of which a sense of artistic pride is a ‘sine qua non’ (necessary condition).
The Re-Creation of the World stems from the notion that our world-view is, and must be, continually re-created in the imagination to exist as a unified whole. When the sun rises each day, the world is in a sense recreated anew and begins all over again. In some non-Western mythologies, the world or universe is re-created ad infinitum, just as kingdoms and civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history. Similarly, from birth we gradually learn to re-create the world in optimistic, pessimistic or perhaps indifferent terms. This painting represents a point where the world is being re-created out of nothingness, or nihilism (the belief that life is meaningless): somethingness is just starting to emerge.
Each work is also an exploration of the inner self, as reflected in a title such as Inner Manscape:
I-land of Memories and Desires depicts the ‘island’ or ‘I-land’ of the self. Surrounding and permeating the island are memories (white) crowding in from the past, and underlying it are desires (red) for fulfilment in the future - essentially, this is a schema of the stream of consciousness:
A sense of yearning for what seems unattainable characterizes How High the Moon, a title borrowed from the old jazz standard:
Out of the Blue(s) also has a musical connotation, but is more positive, suggesting the transformation of negative emotions into something new and unexpected, something that comes both out of the blue and out of the blues. The blues, and jazz ranging from early New Orleans to contemporary genre-bending music by guitarist-composers such as Bill Frisell, provide a constant ambience in my studio.
Flight of Shamania was inspired by an Eskimo drawing entitled ‘The Flight of the Shaman’. In my painting, the shaman is flying away in the form of a black bird – perhaps in some kind of dream, delirium or mania, or metaphorically:
In Survivors, the 'free madicals' in the bottom left corner of this work have so far managed to avoid merging with, being sub-merged or consumed by, the encroaching amorphous crowd, so still retain their own quixotic identities:
Individual Happiness Now (Homage to LL): Len Lye coined this catchphrase - "individual happiness now" - in 1941, as a mental antidote to the insidious propaganda emanating from Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes. Lye was a largely cheerful and optimistic individual who followed his artistic inclinations wherever they led him. It is above all for his indomitable belief in individual artistic freedom that I consider him the quintessential New Zealand artist role-model. This work, the final one painted for the exhibition, is dedicated to him as an expression of my own “individual happiness now”: