Michael Doherty
The Great Storm of 2020, oil on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
The Western Australian coastline with its associated current, past, oral, written and painted histories, along with the clear sunny weathers, storms and maritime stories are now a major part of those communities’ societal memories across all peoples who reside in that state.
Michael Doherty is a painter who lives in Perth’s southern metropolitan coastal area of Waikiki which is a beautiful part of Western Australia and deceptively picturesque due to the wild storms that hit the coastline in winter.
As an artist Doherty paints a wide variety of subject matter from many varied sources but it is no surprise to me that he has a passionate connection to the shorelines around Point Peron. This is a great place to paint with its rocks, beaches and off shore islands and right on the edge of one of earth’s most powerful oceanic wildernesses.
Often some very heavy gales rage over that part of the Western Australian coastline in winter from the deep wild primeval southern oceans and in the painting above by Doherty titled The Great Storm of 2020, one of those storms sits ominously in the distance for the time being yet its effects are being transferred through the surges in the ocean, creating a tossed and turbulent sandy shoreline that Doherty has so masterly revealed through his unique system of applying brushwork and fingers in oily paint marks onto canvas.
Doherty is not alone in his awe of marine nature with its associated power. The French painter Gustave Courbet in the late 1860s completed a fantastic series of Wave themed paintings from his observations on the French coast, several which I have viewed in Japan; it’s majestic viewing.
And in Western Australia prior to Doherty there was another noteworthy coastal painter Audrey Greenhalgh (1903 – 1991) who appears to have had a similar passion for painting the seascapes and again, like Doherty, used a very interesting systems within studio painting praxis, especially in some of her more successful works, where she rendered the seas with loaded brush strokes of oily colour.
It now appears that Doherty is painting with a fluency and competency that very few Western Australian painters can do or have achieved so far in rendering the calm/wild seaside of Perth’s metropolitan southern coastal waters coupled with its clear atmosphere of clouds racing across the sky, pushed by the strong winds of the southerly seas into the vast landscapes of Australia and, in so doing, he is the process of producing some of the most iconic Western Australian seascape paintings for future generations to come – reminiscent of Courbet’s Wave series.
Dr Peter Davidson
Painter