Paul
Moncrieff and the Road to Paradise. |
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Roads round Ballidu twist and turn between tiny
hills. Postage stamp paddocks slope up and down, speckled with purple
or yellow crops, red dust and green shoots in season. Leafless trees
explode on the crest of a hill. One occasionally thinks of England,
the colours of the countryside. But this is the country. There are no
lush meadows. Rock piles rise in every paddock, skulls of dumb giants
long dead. Here one survives by slow cunning and anticipation . Everywhere
dams, set in the land like jewels, catch the cloudy sky in
diamond bright ripples, sheets of shifting sapphire and ultramine.
Even they cannot keep the country intact, cannot stop salt rising, flesh
falling from the bones. Raw skeletons of empty homes, broken barns,
show crisp against the sky line.
Paul Moncrieff spent many childhood days here on holiday trips with his draftsman father. Childhood country shapes you for good. It remains, your only landscape of memory and discovery, through which you will wander, in day dreams and idle moments, until you die. Eventually it will become a map of your entire life. Memory matters more than one might suspect for these paintings. Clad as they are in the style and manners of modern art, they are nonetheless always about being folded into this particular space. Far from appropriating the scenery for his stylistic imperatives, like so many before him, Moncrieff tests his art against the truths of vision and memory.The land itself is shaped by all that has happened in it. This country has been farmed for more than 80 years, every feature marks a struggle, joy or disaster.
To diagram, draw or paint what one sees requires
a passionate eye, a willingness to follow the folds of memory, as carefully
as the contours of the hills. To do this Moncrieff chose watercolour,
pencil and ink the tools of the passionate cartographer. He has spent
two years watching the land, open to everything, looking as Max Ernst
once said with one eye inward,
one outward to the world.
Pencil makes a fine line in landscape, however dense it may seem to the artist. Moncrieff's ten panel panoramic view of Ballidu country is built from a seemingly endless range of small marks, lines blunt and sharp that have settled over the scene like a net of recollection, tiny points where memory touches and shapes the scene . Each panel contains an incident, an encounter with the life lived here At one end beams prop a shaded sagging structure, a stack woven from cobwebs of dark line. Next to it are panels showing the harvest, spiral stooks and bales, laid out across striped and textured fields. At the other are rock piles, a cross roads wedged into a quilt of paddocks. Framed by life and death, the panorama 'reviews' day and night, the passing seasons in the country.
Pencil seems impotent before the land, unable to bear the shaping strength needed to make a living image. Moncrieff resolves the challenge both through his impressive vocabulary of gestures and his ability to map the dynamism of the land through the system of memories he deploys, through visual mimesis in which the very processes of drawing echo the life of the land. One pencil study, Death of an Interior echoes the knife sharp, dark shadows that fall across the centre section of the panorama, country split and ruptured by salt. Shadows appear only through violent pressure that congeals shiny impenetrable graphite, light filled paddocks require only careful tender caresses. Silhouettes of words slowly soak to the surface of the skein of marks like salt, a metaphor for the inevitable inscriptions of human presence. Dotted red lines suggest hidden shapes, diagrammed longing, unrealised plans or the ghostly residue of times past, desires fulfilled or denied. |
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Watercolour and ink are the perfect vehicles for Moncrieff's feeling for the inscription of humanity across the country. Ink makes sharp lines, but blossoms and explodes at the touch of a wet brush. Watercolour can settle densely on the spot like enamel or form meagre layers that barely cover the paper. It can bury shapes and symbols one beneath the other so that they emerge like memories in the process of looking or remain latent in the shifting patterns of the surface Above all watercolour is an avatar of the passionate eye. It can overflow its bounds, swamp an image with desire, but leave its shape, its profile in the land, undisturbed. In another image of a dam hangs alone
in the empty page, a tough crystalline enamel flower with a dirt road for stalk, a road one can hardly travel
a jewel one may never grasp. Usually it is rain but wind and shifting
shadow can also bring for ward patterns, associations long hidden in
the mind's eye. Charcoal and pencil studies show buildings and trees
reshaped for the moment by storms. Moncrieff's sources are not necessarily obvious. True Paul Nash, the British surrealist made images similar to these, filled with subtle desolation and decay, honoured by time, but Moncrieff was far more affected by the late "figurative" work of American painter Philip Guston, when it appeared here in the 1980's. Guston's massive gestures were left unrefined so that their full rhetorical impact remained imbedded intact in the figures or objects he depicted. Moncrieff seeks a similar rhetorical effect but the scale, space and memory of his subject and his vision requires completely different media. Similarly Moncrieff's use of displaced panels, each with its own spatial logic, its own perspective and of geometrical constraints, rules applied uniquely to individual paddocks or roads has suggested a comparison with cubism but this misleading. Fragmented imagery is common throughout modernity. It can refer to many different experiences. In this case each plane might be seen as hinge for memory.In the turning of the spaces between planes we encounter the turns and twists of memory. |
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Each pictorial plane might also be a gate, a door that has swung ajar through which can be glimpsed the road to a place and time when everything was new, a seamless. joyful reality to match the seamlessness, the eternal present of memory
Perhaps the road to Ballidu is the road to paradise |