I
The exhibition title, “Still life in it” is very Merrick Fry. A cheeky pun masking a questioning seriousness. Is there still life in the subjects of these works, or in the works themselves, or in the still life genre? Is still life only part of what is in each of these works? Or is it that when things are no longer/not alive there can nevertheless be life in them for us; that we can vividly recall or call up that life? That there is more to see or to say about these things and so they are alive in that sense?
There is also a defiant or argumentative tone to the title. Again, very Merrick. As a realist artist he has a great respect for the still life tradition and its masters, but equally sees still life work as part of our time, as contemporary. The way we relate to and depict things in the world that we are part of can never cease to be contemporary, even if it ceases to be fashionable.
II
“The artist …. must in some sense set the world free to have a new go at its business”.[i]
From the outset still life as a genre was seen as a lowly form of painting, being the furthest removed from the human centred world. To the extent that it involves merely holding a mirror to the world it became seen as a nostalgic idea which diminishes rather than interprets reality. These days (notwithstanding Janet Dawson, Jude Rae, Tim Maguire and other well known exponents) the genre is widely viewed as safe, tidy, banal, inert and as involving little risk.
But while a genre is defined by its conventions, it “always potentially exceeds the boundaries that bring it into being”.[ii] Seamus Heaney saw this potential as part of a proper artist’s duty to answer and respond to the world in their way and with their imagination and sensibility. In Merrick’s case, the early conventions of depicting nature tamed and arranged, symbols of impermanence and reminders that everything dies, are not rehearsed. Rather the ongoing life of things is emphasised. They are exuberantly out in the world, in some cases they seem to have broken out, to have escaped into the landscape, into the world. The subject matter is not still but animated and set free. Fruits and vegetables do not register as food ready for the eating (they are never cut or peeled) in order to conjure memories of smells, textures and tastes. Rather they prompt our feeling for nature and our connection to the world beyond ourselves, just one of the ways that these works operate in part like landscapes.
In each work there is an imaginative response to the things that are the subject of the composition, a response built from a real interest in and connection with those things. Whether growing up in a family that for generations were fruit orchardists near Bathurst, or years of living with curios collected during his travels, it is imagination fed by years of seeing these things, engaging with their reality and their properties and potentialities. Plastic foxes turn toward us from a snowy landscape, or perhaps a rumpled bed/dream, and a small wooden Burmese angel serenely hovers in camellia strewn clouds. Close attention to the thing itself is the source of inspiration, but there is also strangeness and risk.
III
Merrick has spoken[iii] of his respect for the achievements of the past, including of painters such as Chardin, Cezanne and Morandi for whom still life work was important. In his time Morandi said that his study of past achievements made him “aware of how much sincerity and simplicity was involved [in their work] which takes reality as its constant source of inspiration and is deeply enchanting for this very reason”.[iv]
Examining reality closely and re-examining how to represent it, testing what it is that is really seen, with your particular sensibility, is the challenge that was sharpened and refined by Cezanne. To paint what the artist sees, not a likeness of it that might (in the case, say, of apples) be more “apple like”. If this can make things seem more alien, less stable and knowable, so be it.
In these works Merrick’s interest in his subjects is clear. An interest both in their physical reality and its representation (the sleek firm plumpness of the eggplant, the dappled shine of apple skins, the knotty texture of a loose stack of cane sugar, and in every case the play of light and shade on forms and colours) and in their uncanny ability to register a presence, a life; to have an impact that goes beyond being inanimate objects.
Things tend to be shown as (multiple) individuals rather than in a tightly arranged group (cf. flowers in a vase or fruit in a bowl or objects arranged on a table top). They are often placed in a world of their own, a slightly ambiguous world (where are those eggplant? At rest like wet seals on a rocky beach? Have those rambutan been washed ashore by a tide? Are the quinces on a boat at sea?) that is not clearly indoors or out. A world that may involve imagined or dream elements, particularly in the case of the curios like the fox, the Burmese angel or the Laotian lion). Even where there may be a more conventional indoor human world (the lemons and limes) there is a sense of movement, of spilling out into a wider world or at least of that potential (often through use of a horizon, or of hints of a sky, an opening out). While carefully staged, the compositions manage to suggest that we are not totally in control of these things, that they have some agency, that they may be on the move or about to move (pears almost bouncing like kittens under the amused eye of the miniature Laotian lion).
IV
This series of larger drawings was worked on over 6 months or so in 2018. Unlike series of works where an artist works on many or even all at the same time, moving from one to another and working through ideas or themes or approaches across the series, here the process was quite different. The subjects of a single drawing were chosen from things close to hand. These would usually be worked into a diorama, an assemblage of objects that Merrick could toy with, testing the effects of light and shadow (for example, the contrasting shadows from natural light and candle light on the quinces), refining a composition, adding and subtracting elements (to which further additions might later be made in the drawing process).
In the case of arrangements that involved fruit, vegetable or flower elements there was a limited window of time to work with the arrangement, a week or so, before it deteriorated. This dictated that the work was started and finished within this window and so it was Merrick’s exclusive focus for that period. He describes being forced by the process to slow down, of the discipline of having to meet the particular demands of that work before moving on to consider the next, even what its subject might be.
This process and the focus and slowing down that it required suited Merrick’s needs at the time but also shapes the character of the series. There is an individuality to each of the works beyond the differences in subject matter. The benefit of a fresh start, of a consideration of the new elements, their significance and resonance. How they combine, play off each other. The imaginative responses are as varied as the subject matter – it is not a matter of different combinations of flowers in vases or fruits in bowls. In the case of the curios that are incorporated into works, these are representations of representations of the real. They have a reality, a life in the imagination, beyond their materials. In the case of the fox, because the plastic model is a replica the thing becomes quite realistic. In the case of the little lion, the form is not made more lion like, it is closely based on the reality, but it has a surface and presence that suggests flesh and blood; life. Likewise the chubby angel assumes the lines of her real appearance but becomes more angelic, her reproduction in wood no longer keeps her tethered atop a short metal pole attached to a plinth. She floats, casting a soft shadow on the camellia heavens below.
What is largely unchanged across these works is the medium, primarily watercolour and pastel on paper (the quince and candles work on board an exception with its lower light, softer lit composition achieving a more solid, meditative mood). This combination lets light in to illuminate the colours of things so that they have a depth, freshness and sheen that signal their life.
V
The exploration of matter and space, of light on forms, of forms in rest and motion are recurrent themes across the series. The use of fabrics as both subject and ground is central to this exploration as well as being a vehicle for colour, ornamentation and artistic flourish.
A crisply folded, single colour cloth on a table top was a staple of the earliest Dutch still life works. In Cezanne, the cloth might still be arranged on a surface but was likely to be rumpled into shapes, perhaps jagged peaks like a rocky mountain so that the cloth becomes an object in the composition.
In many of the works in this series the cloth is the entire ground of the work, it replaces the paper. It may be a folded landscape like element, a field of shadowed valleys marked by tonal contrasts across which a fox treads or capsicums wobble or loll, or a shifting seascape for a boatload of quinces.
In some cases the simplicity and colour of the fabric make landscape possibilities more likely (the rocky beach or desert where several eggplant rest) whereas in others (lemons and limes) the exuberant patterning emphasises that it is a fabric form that we see. But that form may still read as a hill, that reading aided by the crimson glow of a perhaps sky above (in lemons and limes) or the small openings to the world beyond in the corners of other works (apples and cane sugar, the fox). The cloth elements are rarely rigid but rather suggest a flowing out beyond the frame, into the world. A suggestion that is aided by the fluid, somewhat porous borders to the works against which the subject(s) push, sometimes breaking through (the rambutans).
VI
Discussions of Morandi’s still life works often refer to them as being imbued with poetry. Usually in his case a reference to their contemplative, even meditative attractions. Seamus Heaney wrote of the poetic as something which generates a response which has “a liberating and verifying effect on the individual spirit”.[v] Verifying in the sense of allowing us to see things that we recognise to be true but which are obscured by our day to day lives.
Heaney goes on to note that a poetic element in art or literature is almost never a conscious, deliberate element in a work. Rather it must “spring from delight”, and the artist’s keen interest in the subject is an essential start. In this vein Morandi, who viewed Chardin as the greatest master of the still life genre, noted that Chardin’s still lives “managed to suggest a world that interested him personally”.[vi]
While Merrick would not presume to aim for or to claim the poetic in these works, he has certainly concentrated in them his delight in their subjects, in their presence as things and in the hold that they had on his attention. His delight in looking, and in what a critic[vii] referred to as “the elusive life of things”, stimulates us to look afresh and take pleasure in them. As Heaney speaks of doing himself in these lines from his poem “Derry Derry Down”:[viii]
In the storybook
Back kitchen
Of the lodge
The full of a white
Enamel bucket
Of little pears:
Still life
On the red tiles
Of that floor.
Sleeping beauty
I came on
By the scullion’s door.
His surprise and delight in being struck by the presence of these little pears in this modest context is made manifest. Likewise Merrick’s obvious joy in the elusive life and power of simple things like the apples and cane sugar. When such works generate a poetic response in the individual reader or viewer Heaney describes the impact so well: “at such moments, the delight of having all one’s faculties simultaneously provoked and gratified is like gaining an upper hand over all that is contingent and …inconsequential”.[ix]
Ross McLean
August 2020
Notes:
[i] Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry
[ii] Derrida, The Law of Genre
[iii] See Ann Hale’s catalogue essay, ‘Through the Eye of the Artist: A dialogue with Merrick Fry”, December 2012
[iv] Exhibition notes, “A Backward Glance: Georgio Morandi and the Old Masters”, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2019
[v] Heaney, op. cit. 1.
[vi] Op. cit. 4.
[vii] Christopher Allen, The Australian/Review, 27/28 June 20
[viii] Seamus Heaney, Human Chain, Faber and Faber (2010).
[ix] Heaney, op. cit. 1.