Michael Doherty

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





Fiona Harman & Steve Paraksos: Sinking, Floating

Artist Fiona Harman discusses her latest paintings of water, involving a collaboration with WAAPA Bachelor of Music graduate, Steve Paraksos for the exhibition "Sinking, Floating" at Edith Cowan University’s Spectrum Project Space.

Peter Davidson, Still Life & Super Kitsch

EARLYWORK Gallery
330 South Terrace, South Fremantle, Western Australia.
19-29 July, 2019
Drawn from life in Japan; small scale drawings - ink bottles and oil pastels, clay maquettes and sketches made of them and 'super kitsch' gold plates.

Peter Davidson speaking about his latest exhibition "Still Life & Super Kitsch".

Darryn Ansted, Aspects of a Puzzle

Unity Lane Projects
Perth, Western Australia
3-18 November 2018

                                Darryn Ansted, Walker, 2016, Oil on linen, 71 x 51 cm

 

Looking for Clews

To be confronted by a puzzle can be at once both a charming and an intimidating experience. A puzzle is a test of intelligence, a quality that though always important, has become increasingly valued. A puzzle tests us, and the outcome must be unambiguous–indeed in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, a wrong answer could mean death. But the charm of puzzles is also alluring. A maze is a visual puzzle that has its own beauty, but for Theseus, the Labyrinth was also a life testing experience.

Darryn Ansted presents a series of paintings in this exhibition Aspects of a Puzzle that engage with an architectural motif that appears both modernist and suburban. The colours and light that infuse these landscapes is pleasant and is recognisable as a West Coast phenomenon, familiar in both America and Australia. Titles such as Limelight and Magnolia further impress, with this feeling that ‘everything is fine’, but is this an allurement into the trap of the puzzle?

We are also enticed into puzzles by clues. The Minotaur inhabited a Labyrinth, in the myth, which was designed by the architect Daedalus, who also designed a hollow dummy cow in which Pasiphaë could hide to consummate her love for a beautiful white bull. The Minotaur is the monster love child, half bull, half human, imprisoned in the Labyrinth until he is eventually slain by the hero, Theseus. Such was the fate of monsters, for whom there was no compassion. The maze was so difficult to escape from that Theseus was given a ball of thread (called a ‘clew’) to use to find his way back out. This is an etymological root of the modern word ‘clue’, which we need to navigate our way out of a puzzle.

What are the clues that Ansted gives us in his paintings? A lemon on a table and a figure providing clues for the scale of the spaces represented in the paintings. There is perspective also (another clue), indicating that these may be real spaces, but something warns us that this belief is a trap. The sense of unreality is also ubiquitous in these works. A tiny figure gazes on a glass and stone monolith framed by geometric clouds. If de Chirico had lived in San Francisco or Perth, this is the strange atmosphere he may have painted.  But he didn’t live in either of these places, so this too may be a distraction or red herring rather than an actual clue.

At some point in an exhibition, as in the Labyrinth, we turn a bend to find something that may overpower us. Painting exhibitions always find their final form as a sequence within an architectural setting and in this case there is architecture inside architecture. Around a corner, somewhere in this exhibition, can we expect a major work that puts all our fears and insecurities about our intelligence to the true test? Is this for instance in the massive Garden, where a cube on a table reminds us of the shared artifice of both puzzles and paintings? Is this the clue that lets us safely out of the maze with our reputations intact—or another allurement? Or, it may be in the earlier, small, beautifully simple, abstract works such as “Umber” or “Ochre” that provide a ‘clew’, stripped of portent, showing the path in, in order to indicate the way out.

Aspects of a Puzzle provides just that, different views of the unnamed problem. There is no ultimate conflict point or resolution as in the Labyrinth of Crete. Instead we hover inside one space then glide to the next. Within the presence of these paintings we stay suspended and engaged in their many intriguing qualities.

 

Dr Kevin Robertson, 2018

Kevin Robertson's Heathcote Studio Session.

Painting the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater

Caspar Fairhall: Below is Above

Caspar Fairhall discussing his exhibition "Below is Above" at the Art Collective WA with Kevin Robertson, 2016.