Matt Coyle - Worry Doll

M AT T C O Y L E WORRY DOLL THE

COMPLETE

SUITE

OF

DRAWINGS

M AT T C O Y L E WORRY DOLL THE

COMPLETE

SUITE

OF

DRAWINGS

Worry Doll Reason can be such a thin veil: paper-thin, retina-thin, so easily warped, ruptured and scrawled upon by the irrational. We know this every time we close our eyes to sleep, allowing our minds to wander and the pillars of language to tumble upon groundless space. In the words of Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos: the sleep of reason brings forth monsters, a phrase since applied to many broad human conditions, from religious ignorance in 18th century Spain to contemporary political rallies. Just open a newspaper. That said, every artistic image, no matter how profound or allegorical or politically apt, begins with a personal moment of solitary daydreaming, as I’m sure it did for Goya, playfully doodling bats and owls cavorting over his own slumped figure at the desk. ‘Carumba!’ I imagine him thinking, ‘Maybe this craziness really means something…’

Our primary nightmares are personal, so much so that few things are harder to communicate in the light of day and outside of their own weird context. The sheer irrationality of them is beyond waking words. And it’s this very irrationality that frightens us the most. Not monsters or enemies, spiders, snakes or mortifying social situations, not even the dark: the worst stuff has no label at it, it’s the thing we can’t explain, the thing that erodes the very foundations of sense and language, the boundaries of self and other, the stable reality we all tacitly crave and perhaps too often take for granted.

Enter a group of mismatched dolls wandering through stark suburban and rural landscapes, somehow dredged from an unconscious well and pinned to the bright white page for all to consider. And worry about. The first thing I noticed when I came across this stunning book was the sheer condensation of clinically precise black marks, hand-rendered with what I thought might be common artline pens. Which they were, it turned out, and moreover without any digital safety net, or corrective white-out for that matter. While most other readers might approach an illustrated book wondering what the story is about, as an illustrator – another of that strange breed that wilfully chooses to spend hours hunched over a desk, preferably in the dead of the night – I first and foremost look at the marks. Like any technician, I have a special fondness for the elementary particles of my profession, and it is lines above all other elements that seem to indicate commitment to an idea, the authority of artistic conviction, especially when the subject of a painting or illustration is actually evasive. Nobody I know does line-work – or evasive subject matter – like Matt Coyle. His scenes are rendered with such deftness and precision in one of the most unforgiving of all drawing media, where the smallest error or fickle hesitation sings out like a scratched record.

And just like the grooves of a record, Matt’s use of hatching, those fine parallel lines that delineate contour and tone, never lapse into cross-hatching (where lines intersect) it’s more forgiving offspring, which most illustrators, including myself, gladly fall upon when things get woolly. It’s a technique that brings to mind those arts since lost to industrial and digital print processes, particularly engraving ¬– think Gustave Dore – the secrets of which where often guarded by practitioners, as if by a guild of magicians. What is the fascination with this line-work, both for the creator and a reader? Why choose such a simple yet difficult medium for the expression of a complex vision?

I’m guessing that Matt might answer this question the way I do, that the question itself misses an important point. We don’t really choose a style or medium, rather it seems to choose us: it happens to align with a vision, to the extent that form and content seem to be one and the same thing. It somehow bottles time and feeling and thought (this was certainly my own intuition while working on meticulous pencil drawings for my own graphic novel, The Arrival). And this is where artistic conviction comes from, I think, realising that a voice and a song, a mark and its effect, are one and the same thing, relating to what the sculptor Henry Moore called ‘truth to materials’. The artist respectfully becomes something of a cipher, a medium, a conduit. In the case of Worry Doll,

While it’s easy to describe a mediocre visual narrative, of the kind we are subjected to everyday via ubiquitous media, to describe an excellent one is almost impossible: it’s language defies any substitution, it cannot be circumscribed. It cannot be given a sufficient written foreword for that matter. Which is not to say that I don’t have a complex interpretative reaction to Worry Doll as a story, if I can call such a novel piece of visual sequencing a ‘story’ in any conventional sense, I just don’t want to presume that my personal reading is worth your time, or is in any way aligned with your own. The best stories evade such fixed interpretation and Worry Doll is no exception.

Yet deep below the surface, there is some inexplicable unity and purpose, a strange current that we all know and understand. It’s the same thing that drives an artist to draw and write peculiar fiction, often at significant personal cost, because conventional communication doesn’t quite cut it.

I’ll also refrain from writing as much as I’d like about the graphic innovations of this work, and why it must be regarded as one of the most significant illustrated narratives of recent years, in any genre, bar none (and like many other readers, I’m particularly thankful to both Dover and Mam Tor for publishing such innovative work, which is too rare a thing these days). Suffice to say, I keep returning to study the layouts, image framing and narrative omissions and wilful discrepancies like a student researching a thesis on the subject: insets, slicing and splicing, weird temporal shifts, negative spaces, I could go on and on. They stream out with apparently effortless ingenuity and resolve, as if merely witnessed, while I know from personal experience these scenes are anything but; that every composition is a matter of careful deliberation. And then there are all the minute details, from foliage to skin, car doors, fabric hemlines and decapitated dachshunds – could one say lovingly rendered? A better word might be forensic. Every piece of stark evidence only reminds us that all the things we really want to see are impossible to exhibit: the human psyche, the soul, reasons and motives. Words, our flimsy go-to guide for meaning, only serve to draw us deeper into a tangled paradox.

And rightly so. Matters of the soul are best left untold, invisible and unillustrated. They are rather evoked, you might even say dreamt: the writer or artist pressing our collective triggers and subconscious associations using whatever materials are to hand, trying to conjure some kind of pervasive feeling that we can ferry back into consciousness. In Worry Doll that feeling is strong, infectious, even hypnotic: a sort of trembling clarity, a charged atmosphere of the sort you might experience in a recurring nightmare.

You know the one. At first everything seems fine. Ordinary objects remain ordinary objects, nothing is especially hidden from view and the sun shines down neutral and benign, even a little too brightly. The landscape is familiar: familiar houses, gardens, streets, this should be comforting or banal, and either way, unremarkable. And yet all is tense with unrest, trembling in stillness, screaming in silence, and the closer you look, the more you can’t help but realise that your own eyes are nothing more than a thin and watery membrane, a layer of reason so easily punctured.

Turn up the contrast, distil every outline, step away to examine the stark patterns of black and white, all to no avail. The world only flattens out like a picture on a page, framed by nothingness, and it’s getting really, really hard to breath. And, god help you, here come those dolls again… and there’s nothing you can do but look and worry, and turn page.

Shaun Tan, 2015

01

Recounting the events 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 32 x 47cm $4,000

02

My friends are a couple of classics 1998 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper, framed 36.5 x 55.5cm $5,150

03

The living room 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 28.5 x 42cm $3,800

04

“Oh gosh!” Whatever will we do?” 1998 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 30 x 44cm $4,000

05

The big wide world 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 33 x 50cm $4,400

06

Working through it 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 31 x 45cm $4,000

07

Setting out 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper, framed 30 x 45cm $5,850

08

Fun in the park 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 33 x 49cm $4,400

09

In the grip of something 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 33 x 51cm $4,400

10

“I don’t know what possesed me” pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 38 x 49cm $4,400

11

“Our car’s arrived!” 2002 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 31 x 49.5cm $4,400

12

The mysterious driver 2002 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 32 x 45cm $4,000

13

Time out/Taking stock 2001 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 35 x 52.5 $4,400

14

Getting into the bush 1999 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 27.5 x 42.5cm $3,800

15

Night Vista 2005 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 35 x 53cm $4,400

16

Show us the way please 2001 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper, framed 36 x 62cm $5,550

17

A sense of disquiet 2001 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 30 x 55cm $4,400

18

Concerning developments 2000 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 35.5 x 52cm $4,400

19

Confrontation in the couch house 2000 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 38 x 52cm $4,800

20

An awakening 2001 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 35 x 55cm $4,800

21

Hitching 2000 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 32 x 52.5cm $4,400

22

An offer of a ride 2000 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 33 x 60.5cm $4,800

23

The Elm Motel 2002 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 36 x 54cm $4,800

24

Homing in 2003 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 35 x 53cm $4,400

25

A reunion 2002 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 30 x 52cm $4,400

26

A salesman at the door 2004 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 35 x 53cm $4,400

27

It had been an eventful few days 2003 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 35 x 51.5cm $4,400

28

The suitcase 2003 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 32.5 x 49cm $4,400

29

Arrested 2005 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 36 x 54cm $4,800

30

The resident 2004 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 33 x 52cm $4,400

31

Closure 2004 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 32 x 49cm $4,400

32

Excess Luggage 2003 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 33 x 55cm $4,400

33

Another opening 2004 pure pigment ink on Arches 300gsm paper 33 x 52cm $4,400

Worry Doll A Graphic Novel by Matt Coyle Foreword by Shaun Tann Published by Dover Publications, New York 80 Pages $27.95 Individual drawings also available as digital prints: Enquire with gallery * all prices stated are unframed prices except catalogue number 2, 7 & 16 which include framing

MATT COYLE 1971

Solo Exhibitions 2015 2014 2013

2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999

Born Canberra, lives and works in Hobart

The Good Room, Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney Endling Bett Gallery, Hobart Warm Blooded Playthings Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne Hive Penny Contemporary, Hobart From Earth Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne You and Me Day, James Dorahy Project Space, Sydney Worry Doll Ink & Pixel: Post year 10 Librarian Conference, Launceston The Shades: New Drawings and Prints Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne The Shades 1 – 8, Prints and New Drawings Criterion Gallery, Hobart The Silent Drama Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney Worry Doll @ Willow Court, Ten Days on the Island Night Stills Uber Gallery, Melbourne Worry Doll Criterion Gallery, Hobart Worry Doll Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern, Sydney The Fall, Bett Gallery, Hobart Available Light, Dickerson Gallery, Sydney Available Light, Dickerson Gallery, Melbourne The Other Side, Dickerson Gallery, Sydney The Other Side, Crossley & Scott, Melbourne Badlands, Dickerson Gallery, Melbourne Cul-de-Sac, Dickerson Scott, Melbourne The Sweetest Path, Contemporary Art Services Tasmania, Hobart; and Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne

Selected Group Exhibitions 2016 Art-Athina, Athens, Anna Pappas Gallery 2014 Melbourne Art Fair, Anna Pappas Gallery 2013 Wonderworks The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong 2012 Melbourne Art Fair, Anna Pappas Gallery 2012 Hello Dollies Penrith Regional Gallery and The Lewers Bequest 2012 Things That Go Bump in the Night Walker St Gallery 2011 Korea International Art Fair, KIAF/11, with Anna Pappas Gallery 2010 Melbourne Art Fair, Anna Pappas Gallery 2010 Scrutiny Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland 2010 Group Action 5 Criterion Gallery, Hobart 2009 Horror, Come Darkness Macquarie University Art Gallery 2009 NEXT - The Invitational Exhibition of Emerging Art, Chicago 2009 Group Action 4 Criterion Gallery, Hobart 2008 Ecchymosis Criterion Gallery, Hobart 2008 Recent Acquisitions – Australian, International and Asian and Pacific Collections Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery

2008 2007 2007

Hong Kong International Art Fair (with Uber Gallery) I Am Afraid Uber Gallery, Melbourne Fine Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland

Awards and Grants 2016

Finalist Sunshine Coast Art Prize Finalist National Works on Paper, Mornington Peninsula Finalist Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing

2015 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008

2008 2007 2006

Finalist City of Hobart Art Prize - Highly Commended Finalist Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award Arts Tasmania Grant for Individuals Finalist Hutchins Art Prize Finalist Sunshine Coast Art Prize Finalist Dobell Prize for Drawing Finalist Paul Guest Art Prize Finalist Hutchins Art Prize Finalist City of Hobart Art Prize Finalist Stan & Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize Finalist Sunshine Coast Art Prize Shortlisted Ripe: Art & Australia/ ANZ Private Bank Contemporary Art Award Shortlisted London International Creative Competition Rue Morgue Magazine (Canada) Best Graphic Novel/Comic Artist 2007 (for Worry Doll) Arts Tasmania Grant for Individuals

Collections NGV Art and Australia Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art Selected Bibliography Empty Magazine, featured artist, February, 2013 GQ Style, Artist series commission, September, 2011 Vogue Living Feature article, July/August, 2011 Making Art Connections: Visual Arts Years 7 and 8, 1st Edition Imprint Winter 2010 Melbourne Art Fair 2010 Art & Australia Vol 47/3 Artist Pages The Shades 2010 What’s On this Quarter, Australian Art Collector, April, 2010 Open Gallery, Sydney Morning Herald, October 2009 Sunday Arts, ABC TV Arist Profile 12th July 2009 Art & Australia Vol 47/2 Artist Pages The Shades 2009 Art & Australia Vol 47/1 Artist Pages The Shades 2009 Art & Australia Vol 46/4 Artist Pages The Shades 2009 Art Monthly, Ten Days on the Island review June 2009 Artlines, Queensland Art Gallery magazine, Issue 3 2008 Radio National Artworks, interview, October 2007 Reviewed Rue Morgue Magazine (Canada) September 2007 Cover, Art Monthly, Issue 198, April 2007

Reviewed in the Weekend Australian, 3 March, 2007 Interviewed on Stateline, ABC TV, Hobart, 2 March 2007 Interviewed in The Mercury, 24 February 2007 Interviewed by Clara Iaccarino, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 Feb 2007 Reviewed by Sebastian Smee, Telegraph (UK), 8 January 2007