John Macdonald lives on Salt Spring Island where he is a prolific painter whose work deals with a broad range of influences and subject matters. Unnatural Histories brings together seemingly unrelated themes that reflect the diversity of his practice, but find connections in an overarching concern with history. In this context, two drawings exhibited at Prince George Art Gallery in the 1980s when he lived in this City, find a home alongside recent work.
Annotated and drawn carefully in a fashion suggestive of scientific illustration, Macdonald’s wasp’s nest is the conceptual kin of other work painted almost thirty-five years later after an experience in Paris’ Natural History Museum. A line of animal specimens meandering through the exhibition hall drew the artist’s attention. The odd mix of creatures, and the apparent imposition of a pseudo-biblical narrative conflicted with the spirit of scientific inquiry otherwise at the heart of the collection.
The title painting of this exhibition follows in a similar vein drawing people, bears and dinosaurs together into the same view in order to suggest a similarly dubious storyline. Rooted in the experience of a local museum, The Exploration Place, Unnatural Histories suggests a kind of elastic time present in much of his work. Synchronicity, for example, appears to place the same dinosaurs in the context of a beach scene. The painting, divided into planes, suggests a fracturing of time and place creating an ambiguous narrative with figures barely formed as if faded memories or ghosts.
Emily Carr and Tom Thomson also feature in this exhibition in keeping with their characters. Carr is pictured atop a horse with the form of a monkey barely visible; Thomson in a canoe. As if spectres, neither figure is fully realized but, instead, appears to emerge from the paint suggesting both each artist as well as their legacy. Thick with paint, these works reflect their subjects’ indomitable presence in the history of Canadian art and stand in exuberant homage.
A repainting of Robert Harris’ The Fathers of Confederation, on the other hand, is satirical and tongue in cheek. The roughshod foundation of Macdonald’s revision hints at a rickety framework on which an imperfect Canada was formed in the absence of women and its First Peoples. The artist John A. Macdonald’s painting, with his namesake just left of centre, is a work in progress which, like this country itself, could take many different paths as it continues to develop. Presenting three avenues into history, this exhibition reflects the diversity of Macdonald’s work and breadth of influences. It embodies liberties with time and history, and positions a vestigial past in
parallel with the present and tomorrow’s faded memories.
“Substance can express any feeling, any emotion.”
–James Elkins, What Painting Is
Or let us say, rather more ambitiously, the contending of light and paint and meaning in the art of John Macdonald. And let us briefly pursue that progress in the course of what will probably turn out to be not one small essay but two, joined somewhere in the middle. The first is about light. The second is about paint. With any luck, they will coalesce somewhere near the end, thereby echoing what ultimately happens in any of Macdonald’s specimen paintings.
John Macdonald’s art is an art of edges. Not the sharp, graphic edges of geometry or of stricture generally, but rather the edges that animate one another when two modes of being or substance or experience are forcefully juxtaposed. The great juxtaposition in Macdonald’s art is the coming together of light (or at least the semblance of light, the illusion of light) and paint, the one generating the other. And that primary juxtaposition has, in turn, enabled other perceptual sets of contrast, of energizing difference in his painting, not the least of which is his use of the beach—or, more generally, the water’s edge—as the setting for many of his works.
Macdonald is a neo-impressionist. I am not suggesting that he paints like Monet or Pissarro, for he does not. But he is tinctured with impressionism in that he appears to have an abiding interest—shared by impressionists, both historical and contemporary—in the poignancy and the amplified meanings that derive from the idea of transition.
“Impressionism”, wrote Guy Davenport in his essay on Henri Rousseau in Antaeus (Spring, 1985), “kept its innermost purpose a secret, being unaware of it: the idea of transition.” (1) But what makes John Macdonald a neo-impressionist, by contrast, is precisely his obvious awareness of that essential and essentializing idea. Of the sixteen paintings in this current exhibition, only one is an interior. The other fifteen are set either poolside or at the beach. And there is nowhere as transitional as a beach, as the locus of the vivifying contrast between the sea (or lake, river, pool) and dry land. (2)
There was a cartoon in The New Yorker many years ago showing a plucky fish that had hauled its way out of the sea and up onto the beach, only to be met with a sign stating “No evolving on this beach”. But in truth, there is an evolving on beaches: it is an evolving of both flesh and spirit, as the bounded body and the exuberant soul find themselves facing immensity. Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker note in their exhilarating book The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth that:
Impressionist painters were also fixated on transmitting
the hedonistic physicality of the seashore. Superb spectators,
they moved their contemporaries to view the beach as a source
of fresh sensations of the flesh. Their beach was a brilliant
lightshow of fluid, living, unstable forms bursting with colour.
(3)
But the beach has always been more than just runaway colour. As Melville so sonorously observed in Moby Dick, “There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.” The beach is the ante-chamber to the “sweet mystery” of the sea. We are born from the sea. The sea is therefore deeply and quintessentially sexual. “Sex”, write Lencek and Bosker, “is part of the catechism of the beach”. (4)
The sexuality of the sea (or the lake, river or pool) is obviously not the result of the skimpiness of the bathing suits it engenders, or because of the concomitant acreage of exposed flesh any proximity to the water permits and encourages—though a painting like A Quick Change clearly possesses an erotic furtiveness that is fed directly by the female’s brief transit of nudity, a nudity enlarged in its meaning by being presumably available only to the man she is using for a moment of transitional privacy. The fact is, we come to the beach, to the water’s edge, not just to swim and tan but, unconsciously or not, for a brief return to Eden. (5)
And it is the Edenic fragrance of Macdonald’s highly sensuous paintings, their trading in the archetypal, that lends them a great part of their meaning. If you examine the paintings in aggregate, you find before you the whole Family of Man and much of what constitutes archetypal human experience: couples, primal encounters (as in Midday Sun), parents with their offspring, sun-baked madonnas with children. It’s the human, generative romance per se, as well as Freud’s Family Romance, writ large and lush.
Macdonald’s paintings are absorbingly poised, by the way, just where the sociological meets the vaster reaches of the symbolic. Because the figures are, in a sense, isolated within the canvas that features them, and because they take up most of the space in each of the paintings devoted to them (they literally loom large), each of them—single figures or, in a painting such as Current, a mother and child alone with the rush of the sea—becomes monumental, iconic. They are what they are in the everyday human sense (a mother with her child, a man and a woman—the primal couple) as well as finding themselves promoted, as it were, to an embodiment of certain types of being, certain modes of human behaviour—as in a painting like Dreaming of Egypt, where the figures gazing seaward become emblems of yearning, of questing, of musing, of aspiration.
It is the way Macdonald imbues his figures and their encounters with the fragrance of the eternal, the archetypal, which lifts them beyond their role as genre figures, beyond the realm of the endlessly psycho-sexual trivializing that limits the meaning of painters such as Eric Fishl, for example (to whom I suppose Macdonald is often compared). In Macdonald’s mysterious, beautifully composed Allegory of a Truth and a Lie, for example, the deliberately angelic aura of the little girl who stares down at the supine form of the female nude, sleeping by the pool’s edge, rescues the painting from the workaday prurience or coy impropriety with which such a subject might well have been handled by Fishl , and elevates it to the status of pure visitation, tinctures it with the sonorousness of inquiry or judgement.
But all this congress of meaning is ultimately about light, and about how Macdonald manages to wrap light about the dramatis personae of his pictures, his repertoire of figures, carving them from paint and giving them breath. It is the painter’s wielding of light effects—the glare of the sea, the dance of the hot sun on the water, on the flesh, the palpable, contrasting coolness of his shadows—that lends his pictures the power they need to touch us and move us closely enough to them so that we can inspect the artistry from which they spring.
Which leads us to the second brief essay—the one about paint.
John Macdonald is a remarkably painterly painter. And although art criticism and commentary tends, for the most part, to be busy with what paint can be made to depict, how it comes to represent things, very little time is expended—especially now when painting is once again going through one of its innumerable and tirelessly repeated “deaths”—and very little discourse is generated by inquiries into what paint itself can say.
A happy exception to this drift towards a purely imagistic and exclusively philosophical reading of painting has been recently provided by art historian James Elkins, whose book What Painting Is is a charming if rather eccentric corrective to the usual sociological analysis of imagery. For Elkins, paint is a magical, indeed alchemical substance that, taken seriously as more than a means to an end, enables us to ask ourselves “what is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?”
For Elkins, “painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colours and the artist responds in moods.” (6) He has frequent recourse to the word hypostasis, which, he notes, “is the feeling that something as dead as paint might also be deeply alive, full of thought and expressive meaning”. Ordinarily, he suggests, “paint is a window onto something else, a transparent thing that shimmers in our awareness as we look through it to see what the painter has depicted. The art historian Hubert Damisch said it best when he titled one of his books The Cadmium Yellow Window. A painted window can be brilliant with light—think of Matisse’s open windows, with the curtains blowing n the warm ocean air—but it is always also a closed plaque, a heavy mineral deposit that is stubbornly and absolutely opaque.” (7)
Sometimes I feel that the heady enjoyment of pigment for pigment’s sake is looked upon in most circles these days as a sort of vaguely forbidden, onanistic pleasure. The beauty of Elkins’ book is that it takes paint seriously, re-legitimizing our innate feelings of wonder that the skillful manipulation of a substance that is basically, as Elkins notes, a mixture of rock and water (mineral and medium), can move us—sometimes to tears.
So it is with the eloquent “closed plaques”, with the robustly marshaled “heavy mineral deposits”, that constitute John Macdonald’s paintings. How did creamy yellow-white paint become sunlight—or at least arouse within us an almost experiential feeling for sunlight—paint as a galvanizing of shared memory? How does creamy-golden paint become flesh? How can these bones live?
Well of course they don’t live. Flesh is flesh. Paint is paint. But to say that is not enough. As Elkins maintains, paint—as directed by the artist—is flesh, is shadow, is water, is breath. Paint is not a skin covering over a fantasy world of the demented, hyperactive imagination. That is what is so powerful about John Macdonald’s fleshy, miasmic paintings. They are not just depictions of something. They are in themselves that something. When you look at them, they become what you behold. And, for a brief, hypostatic moment, you become what they are.
5) “Whatever the beach, it is still possible, in the presence of the timeless wash of waves, the sibilance of sand, and the warm kiss of the sun, to forget the nagging sense of fealty to cash, work, and responsibility. After all is said and done, we still come to the beach to slip through a crack of time into the paradise of self-forgetfulness.” Ibid., p.286. This self- forgetfulness brings us, of course, to a greater, deeper, archetypal sense of self.
In the opening line of an essay called ‘The Allegories of Painting’ first published in English in 1993, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh says that, “Painting, the most traditional concretization of the aesthetic impulse, sees itself increasingly threatened by extinction.” While acknowledging that painting was still the privileged art form for the dedicated audience, and for art collectors, he saw painting being “…threatened by another development: the territorial claims being made for a newly academicized practice of installation work.”
John Macdonald graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (ECIAD) in Vancouver in 1987, at the high point in a recent decade of paintings supremacy. That year in Kassel, Germany, Documenta 8 proposed to get beyond the “Hunger nach Bildern” – that voracious public appetite for painting, by focusing on a “new historical and social dimension” in art that wasn’t the “latest” trend. ‘Art and society’ was being reawakened as a theme for the nineties; a decade when globalism and personal identity became the dominant tropes, and media and installation art became standard models for production. In the late-eighties the signs pointing to the end of paintings dominance were well in place. Flow became ebb and the climate of reception shifted to disfavor the ambitions of the emerging artist-painter. By this time though painting had a significant stake in a broader contemporary art discourse, and was advantaging its relatively brief historical connection to an interdisciplinary art context including photography, film, conceptual art, and installation. By and large, painting continued to retain its medium specificity, but production methods, style, and content, were increasingly cross-referenced to other art practices and discourse.
For a serious young painter with an abiding interest in the traditional materials and craft of painting, like John Macdonald, the challenges were to keep painting relevant: on a personal level, and to the tenor of the times. Of course painting didn’t go away, indeed painters kept painting; and artists such as Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, and Peter Doig, ensured that painting remained on the international radar screen throughout the nineties. Now, in 2005, it seems like everyone is painting. ‘De-skilled’ painting has been around for a few years. This may be called a ‘bad’, purposefully amateurist style, whose practitioners tend to emphasize subjectivity, fantasy, and life-styles above all else. And, there are those painters whose practice may be seen to affirm the many historical traditions of painting as a site for conceptual, formal, and aesthetic investment.
John Macdonald is in the latter camp. He is an artist who views contemporary painting as an extension of its traditions, and, as a discipline receptive to innovations in form and meaning. His paintings are representations of the world around him. They may be said to present a glimpse, or a moment, of what we often refer to as the everyday world; ordinary scenes such as children playing, dogs swimming, picnics on the beach, room interiors. It would be easy to say that these scenes, these paintings of the anecdotal ‘everyday’ are at best a nominal description of the world as we know it; that they present a narrow window with a limited view. On the surface, such an opinion may be quite true, and certainly his paintings can be understood and enjoyed at this level of reception. Anecdotal narrative has a long tradition of use in literature and art. While the anecdotal may take the form of an entertainment, it is also frequently used in storytelling and in philosophical expositions as a metaphoric bridge, between for example, a commonplace vignette and a universal theme.
A painting called The Watcher, 2004, by John Macdonald, features on the right side of the canvas a man clad in swim trunks, seated on a beach towel with his back to viewer, and on the left side a nude woman seated on a stool, and facing the viewer. Her facial identity is hidden due to compositional cropping, his as he faces away from us. Superficially, one could say ‘the watcher’ is the man, as he appears to be looking for/at something off in the distance. But this assumption is unverifiable. Perhaps his female companion is the watcher; keeping a vigilant surveillance of the beach lest her private nudity be seen by outside, prying, watchful eyes? Or are we the watchers? Would these questions even arise if not for the title? The answer is yes, because painting is a visual art, it is about looking, about spectatorship; the tradition of visual art is also a tradition of representation, of constructing representations. So what the artist has created in this incidental scene of a couple at the beach is, in effect, a metaphoric treatise on art and spectatorship. This can only be said because this specific paintings narrative plot is, in the first place, about looking. One could follow this narrative along the semiotic chain to more speculative meanings, because in John Macdonald’s paintings, a moment is to be understood as a metaphoric juncture in time and space; a synchronous and circumstantial space-time episode in the complex narrative of humanity. In this, the historical and social dimension in his work can’t be described as the ‘latest trend’. Not because it’s not installation art, but because stories of the human drama have always been told and will continue to be told. Ultimately, it’s not the discipline which brings the ‘new’ to the story, it’s the storyteller.