Piers Greville
What was your first experience of an art work?
I continually come back to my first art monograph, a book on Pieter Bruegel given to me when I was seven. At that age, it led to historical questions about life in 15th C. Europe, but the psychological content of these paintings is taking me a lifetime to unpack.
When I was eleven I attended a school holiday at Studio One print workshop in Canberra. The punk rawness of the director Dianne Fogwell was transformative. The unexpected images peeling off the press, those colours and smells of ink, the punk music and dancing across the studio are still model studio practice. Not until my twenties did I meet this kind of energy again, when I encountered the Imperial Slacks collective.
The ‘Slackers’ were a studio cooperative running an artist run space, but also a social experiment.
It was an intimate group with values of intense community collaboration. I see it now as a relational artwork, which spilled into a broader local generation of artists working to affect political and cultural change. At this time I was an observer, still engaged in a graphic design practice, but I started experimenting with paint and video myself, in and out of the gallery setting.
I only exhibited twice in the space, however the artistic discourse was engaging and urgent, and related to our immediate political situation. From a contemporary perspective, the artists and work that emerged out of it did a lot to shape current Australian art. Looking back at those two years, they are worth a decade, and started my social and intellectual relationship with the art scene. I currently share a studio with one of those ‘Slackers’, Shaun Gladwell, and the collaborative ethos continues.
Did you have a mentor or someone who encouraged you?
As a child, my grandmother taught my brother and I to paint using a chinese watercolour technique. It is still probably the most important lesson I’ve ever had. Over the years I have pestered friends for their wisdom, but a couple of years ago I was provided a formal mentorship with artist Irene Hanenbergh.
A remarkable artist, her work reflects on the idea of landscape in painting, riffing on the baroque and sublime. Hanenbergh opened up a rich seam of her own research to me, and an ongoing conversation deep into the nuances and place of romantic painting. It is a shared space to discuss conceptual and technical painting matters, touching on specifics such as painting snow in deep dusk light, or how an unfinished Breugel painting makes you feel.
Could you identify any significant influences or inspirations?
Growing up, my mother and I spent a lot of time at the Australian National Gallery (now NGA).
Seduced by the building and its grounds, I still find beauty in eucalyptus trees staining concrete architecture. Within it I was introduced to layers upon layers of contemporary art.
One particular room stands out to me. It contains the work of Louise Bourgeois and her The blind leading the blind, 1941-48, and its obvious connection to Breugel’s The Parable of The Blind, 1586. Connections like this between artworks expanded the possibilities of art for me, highlighting the embedded value of each work as a node in a network of ideas.
In this same room was Joseph Beuys’ installation, Stripes from the house of the shaman 1964–72, 1981-2 which haunts me, leading me to eternally question the division between art and gallery. The ambiguity of that installation still causes suspicion of objects in galleries like thermostats, curtain rails or seating, lest they have artistic intention.
Beuys substantially reconfigured the work to suit the gallery after its purchase and it seemed to be a space haunting another space. It stayed in that room for decades.
Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, 1952 was also an irresistible force there, never separate from its localised controversy.
I found myself standing in a quiet corner of the gallery next to Gough Whitlam, both of us staring at a Eugene von Guerard painting North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko, 1863, another of his 1973 acquisition approvals.
I was distracted from the painting, cognisant of him in the context of this building and the iconic, albeit problematic nature of the picture we gazed on. I have gone on to work with this painting as a marker of colonial and romantic viewpoints of Australian landscape and the planet. The National Gallery hosted so many formative moments, I still find myself back there regularly.
What initiated your interest in landscape? And what are the things that you identify in expressing the landscape that you consider are critical?
After a small body of works informed by Icelandic geology and geo technology in 2011, I returned to mostly depictions in urban or enclosed settings, oneiric scenarios only occasionally hinting at landscape.
These narratives have always stemmed from an awareness of dwindling ecologies coupled with urban and technological expansion. I had not reflected on the extent to which landscape depictions prevailed in my work. A focused self analysis re-calibrated my approach, and I proposed a research for masters based on the alienated human figure resulting from urban isolation.
I found my way to a re imagining of ‘landscape’, not apart from human or urban spaces, but as the product of human agency.
Until then, my environmentalist stance had been expressed through activism, but rarely confronted through art, and it felt like I was holding two separate conversations. An urgency of political action seemed to cloud out the search for philosophical problems as root causes.
Resetting my philosophical assumptions about the idea of ‘nature’, my position within rather than apart from it, rearranged the chairs in my mind on many levels. For example this shift applied to my love of national parks, as precious reserves of vulnerable systems. In a sense I came to see their existence as a kind of licence to destroy everything right up to the fence line. I aim to critique such divisions to undermine their constructed dichotomy.
Apollo of Delos, 2020. Oil and acrylic on board. 61cm x 92cm. Photograph Bridget Mac.
Do you work in the site of the landscape – en plein air- or in the studio?
I am often driven to a particular landscape because of an underlying significance or memory, so these come with material to begin with. I also work en plein air, not in the literal sense of merely sitting with an easel, but I experience a landscape and collect data while present within it. Combining these modes: I consider ecology and environmental forces, such as water flows and fire; I traverse the terrain on foot, capturing drone imagery and video; I collect geolocation coordinates; and in some cases I draw or paint observations while there. Usually this is preceded and followed up with further research. Through this material I have gathered a story of the place which I am painting, and this story is what I base my painting on. Painting en plein air remains a part of the process to develop an eye for seeing a landscape. It forces me to detect nuances which may be overseen by purely mechanical data collection.
What do you consider is the role of technology in negotiating landscape?
Often at a certain stage I use source images constructed from 3d map data.
The source is not incidental, but central to the intent of the work: the role of technology in my work reflects the role of technology in my life: constant mediation and negotiation. Also, this multi-modal approach reflects my ethos of painting through phases of technology.
Your latest body of work focuses on anthropomorphising individual foliage. Can you talk about your intentions in doing this?
I have been considering the idea of isolation and what incredible violence there is in cutting people off, either from ecology or other forms of community.
El Tres Mayo En Madrid, 2020. Oil and acrylic on board. 61cm x 92cm. Photograph Bridget Mac.
The obvious connections both symbolically and visually between trees and ourselves is playing out in these paintings.
I am concerned with dissolving distinctions between human and non-human life. Seeing this through the framework of life forms being processes, as opposed to entities, reveals a commonality with trees, waterfalls and stalactites. Framing these trunks in this way, I am setting up a two-way simile between trunks and torsos. The tree trunks not only have their branches cropped out, but also the rest of the organism deleted, their surrounding ecology. Much as humans in this current moment of social distancing.
Beyond anthropomorphism, the works connect to cultural narratives through their titles, which are taken from particular artworks and images representing the human figure.
What is the significance of the colour palette you use? What is special about the medium of painting?
These monochrome palettes stem from a material presence or technological mediation of some sort.
The ultramarine blue monochrome was stimulated by different historical sources, ranging from depictions of nature on chinese pottery to the holographic projections in Star Wars films. These colours imply the mediation forced by culture and technology.
The romantic act of painting carries the weight of its history as a medium and the performance which brought it about. As a language within western culture, it speaks directly to questions around how we historically viewed nature.
The painting act symbolises these historical viewpoints, but also the value of painting in making a picture is in the inflection found in brushstrokes, it can be a very deliberate act. The use of photography automatically implies so much complexity around empirical evidence or degraded communications. Such narrative layers are not necessarily present within painting. I would like to work more with photography in these ways.
What do you consider to be the implications of shifting from a general to a more intimate view of the landscape?
The large sections of terrain in some way representational of the surface of a terrain, therefore the skin of ecology over the landscape.
The paintings of the trees have similar concerns, such as the violence in severing it from its environment. However the tree paintings allow this narrative to unfold more acutely, focussing on what we already think of as an organism.
Even though this still applies to the paintings of large terrains, those become more explicitly concerned with thoughts around technological mediation: satellite or drone views, digital mapping, and a top down position.
How does your drawing practice relate to your painting practice?
Drawing starts as a task of posing an idea on a page, functioning collectively with each drawing adding something to the overall collection.
In this way, it is a tool for developing visual thoughts, however it often takes over as a medium in its own right. I think of the states a painting goes through as drawings which I will never completely see again, this is part of my motivation to think through drawing, a way of storing thoughts.
Some of my drawing projects operate independently from painting for a long time before crossing over to painting, and some cross the other way. I have a growing body of drawings I call Emu Calligraphies, each of which is a kind of love letter to emus. It started as a painting which I realised needed the immediacy of a drawing, using a fountain pen and A4 paper. It then took the form of a regular meditative ritual in a private emotional space. I start most days in the studio with a single drawing like this and store it in a book.
Cover image credit: Pedder Prime Cuts, 2019, oil and concrete pigmented acrylic on board, diptych total 180cm x 120cm. Photograph Bridget Mac.
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Enquiries to Dominik Mersch Gallery https://www.dominikmerschgallery.com/
