A Preview of
Paintings
Oatlands Gaol
27 October – 1
November 2012
By Lucy Wilson
Jesse Eynon chose to paint the Tasmanian Midlands for the
light, its theatrical light. From her Cygnet studio she liberated herself by
packing just what she needed to embark on a six-week Tas Regional Arts residency
based in Oatlands. Having surrendered to the demands of mothering three
children, the youngest now being six, she left her family behind to devote
herself purely to painting.
It takes Jesse a long time to find a fragment in the world
she wants to paint. She always knows when she finds it. It speaks to her gut
instinct. The fragments she found were stretches of road, moments in
cloudscapes, archetypal images like a man walking with dog, and old town
buildings. The images she exhibited in Oatlands speak of a powerful meeting
between her paintbrush and the fragments she found – almost as if they’d been
waiting to be painted by her.
To work `en plein air’ is appealing to Jesse, but the
reality of the extreme cold and notorious winds of the Midlands winter means
she chose to paint indoors. The process starts outdoors though with small detailed
drawings. She also takes photographs but explains they have much less information
than the naked eye.
While Jesse is hesitant to explain her painting method as
traditional, wary of the implications of what `traditional’ means, she says, “Getting a painting to work is about
resolving a lot of abstract elements and forces”. She paints left-handed
using brushes that are too big so it encourages her to generalise and play the
big components off each other. As important as the paint going on, in her right
hand she holds a rag and takes it off. With the forces of skill, high intelligence,
intuition and palpable style, Jesse is free to make a lot of changes and rapid
adjustments while she paints. Sometimes she mixes her palette up to ten times;
sometimes she scrapes a feature off half a dozen times until she gets it right.
All the while she doesn’t let the paint get too layered and troublesome and
keeps her canvases clean with the paints varying thick and thinness. She does
lose sense of time though, as she enters the visual and sensory experience of
colouring and shaping fragments. There’s no thought, there’s just the doing,
the hands, the brush, the paint and rag.
Up close some of the images are almost indiscernible in rich
and luscious colour and shape. But at a distance the whole landscape comes
alive and into focus. The atmospheres in the highway paintings and cloudscapes
are so evocative that I’m held in their moving moment. They tap into my
childhood memories of country road trips with sweeping contours and light
a-dappled or a-blaze, the relationship of land and sky and dreamy transience.
I arrived in Oatlands the night before Jesse took down the
exhibition. We had a Closing, with a
glass of red from the Opening. It was wonderful to sit with her paintings and
engage with her intensity and worldliness. Like the other seventy or so people
who visited from around Tasmania, I want to live with her paintings. Most of
the works could have sold many times over. The exciting thing is, Jesse is
inspired and there’s more to come.
*******
Part of the experience of visiting Jesse and her paintings
in Oatlands (about half between Hobart and Launceston), was the journey to get
there. Oatlands is a significant old Tasmanian town, now bypassed by the
Midlands Highway, with 107 heritage-listed buildings. It’s not kitsch with history
but is well preserved. In the Old Gaoler’s House where Jesse stayed and
painted, is a hub of archaeology. It’s set up for accommodating visiting
archaeologists while they study the human activity of colonial settlement
through recovering artefacts from shards of glass to fabric fragments,
analysing, labelling and cataloguing them. Clearly huge resources are focused
on recognising this heritage of Non-Aboriginal Australia over the past 200 odd
years.
The major route from Hobart to Oatlands is on the recently
made controversial Brighton bypass, over the Jordan River Levee bank near
Brighton. The earth there contains a unique undisturbed archaeological record
trapped between layers of silt from the repeated flooding of the river. In one
meter of soil Aboriginal stone artefacts and tools are recorded, going back
from 200 years to 20,000 to 40,000 years, encompassing two ice ages.
While archaeological work is valuable for any community, I
can’t help feel the sharp pang of injustice and disrespect from the dominant
Non-Aboriginal society towards Aboriginal heritage. The hypocrisy turns my
stomach.
Jesse’s work is not about those issues but it was part of
the adventure of visiting this regional exhibition, and left me pondering the
layers of history in the silt at Brighton, the history in the bricks, buildings
and under the floor in Oatlands, and in the layers of paint on Jesse’s
canvasses. After all, she called her exhibition History & The Senses.
(Photos of paintings will be posted soon...watch this space...)
(Photos of paintings will be posted soon...watch this space...)
