NIGEL BROWN
ALBATROSS NECK
ALBATROSS NECK Denys Trussell 2015
Many different ideas and people are pulled together in this exhibition. Nigel Brown has united them in a series of works built around Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Each painting is a tableau connecting with the poem through the use of its verse and themes. Each is also a unique assemblage that can stand alone as a visual unity. Albatross Neck is not a series of illustrations of a famous literary work. It is a re-enactment of that work in new terms. The poem was first published in 1798. Brown uses material directly from it, but includes events, people and technologies that have arisen since then. In particular there is consistent reference to that increasing emergency of the twentyfirst century – the destruction of the natural world. Even in 1798 The Ancient Mariner could have been interpreted as an ecological parable. Despite the complex, troubled and, finally, conservative temperament of its author, the poem has ‘reverence for life’ writ large over it and gives to the skinny, haunted mariner the role of intoning such lines as:
‘He prayeth well who loveth well Both bird and man and beast. He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small: For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all’ The poem is, at one level, a Christian drama of redemption through learning to love; but it takes the leap into deep ecology by indicating, not just the love of the human and the divine, but the whole reach of living beings. As such it was, and remains in our still
Ancient Mariner Lost the Albatross, oil on linen, 800 x 600 mm
stubbornly anthropocentric civilization, a profoundly radical counter-statement. The mariner, envisioned by suffering, is compelled to prophecy – not in the naïve sense of foretelling a future, but of telling truth, and telling it to those ready to hear it:
‘I pass, like night, from land to land I have strange power of speech; The moment that his face I see I know the man that must hear me; To him my tale I teach.’
The huge arc of meaning that is this poem has been in Nigel Brown’s mind since his beginnings as a painter. The series title, Albatross Neck, came out of his kinetic and graphic experience. ‘As an artist, I became mesmerized by the necks of albatrosses when painting them.’ On the title painting of the series he quotes lines from the poem that suggest a further reason for his use of the phrase:
‘Instead of the Cross the Albatross About my neck was hung.’
The bird’s neck, curved sometimes voluptuously, broken sometimes in death, figures many times in the paintings. The neck of the mariner and the albatross are fatefully linked as well in the poem. The ‘rime’ is highly visual in its depiction of the oceanic environment – this despite the fact that, by the time he wrote it, its author had not been to sea, except as a passenger on the Chepstow ferry, venturing the waters of the Bristol Channel. But he had studied light and atmospheric effects carefully. We know of his long walk with Dorothy and William Wordsworth in the West Country; a walk timed to start so they could study the transitions from sunlight to moonlight over the sea. He had also read from the literature created by ‘south seas’ exploration. From the time of Cook’s voyages this was making a big impact on the artistic, scientific and general public of western Europe. Visual material from these voyages was extensive and was quickly published. It’s possible, for instance, he might have seen paintings and sketches by William Hodges that record Southern Ocean seascapes and ice-scapes. The most famous of these, ‘Ice Islands and ice-blink’ (1773?), attributed both to Hodges and Georg Forster, shows Cook’s two ships, deep in Antarctic seas, dwarfed by surrealist/romantic ice-forms resembling materialized ghosts, frozen. Did such an image (landed back in England in 1775) affect the young Coleridge writing twenty years later:
‘And Ice mast-high came floating by As green as Emerauld.’? As a painter in his poem, Coleridge had an inverse role to Nigel Brown in Albatross Neck. Brown builds poetry into his paintings. Coleridge
Bloody John Keats, oil on linen, 800 x 600 mm
extracts the visual from words and even made a metaphor suggesting the mariner inhabits a painting: ‘Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, ne breath, ne motion, As idle as a painted Ship Upon a painted Ocean.’ Unlike Coleridge, Brown inhabits an actual oceanic South. He paints words, almost sculpturally, around his images. The words become structures, objects complementing other objects – the visual forms
of humanity and nature. Yet they remain ‘linguistic’. He also ‘lights’ The Ancient Mariner. This is perhaps the first systematic lighting of it by an artist native to the deep southern hemisphere. He was born below latitude 45 South and has lived many years on our southernmost mainland coast. He has also traveled further ‘down’ than Cook (on the second voyage) or Coleridge (in his imagination) by going to and painting the source of ice and its southernmost light – the Antarctic.
The Albatross Neck paintings have an even diffusion of light that contrasts with the shadows of chiaroscuro lighting, important in European art since Rembrandt. Each is a visual field where things stand equally before the eye – a democracy of light without shadow. There is gradation of colour, but little gradation of light. This shows in works like Happy Living Things or The Trance of Now. The Ancient Mariner is translated into the light of Australis, a vast South – its phenomena sharply visible. Into this light-world Brown introduces a composite ‘person’ who connects with the mariner. This being contains Gulliver, Cook, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thoreau, James K Baxter, Nigel Brown, Sue McLaughlin and a young nerd/technologist. They interact and represent key developments over the past 250 years: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Industrialism, Environmentalism. Meetings occur. Coleridge and his mariner become interchangeable. Baxter/Christ becomes mariner. Cook, the servant of scientific enquiry, talks on the coast at Pahia with Coleridge, the spirit of poetic intuition. Other Romantic poets hover around the core paintings of the show. They are here as heads, portrait emblems of consciousness, troubled by the unfolding of history. Only the nerd, locked in his self-image as More Advanced Than Ever, seems wholly unconscious. This composite ‘person’ makes up a ‘lifetime’ reaching from the early eighteenth century to now. The core group beginning with Blake, born in 1757, and ending with Wordsworth, dying in 1850, coincides with the charting and European settlement of Australasia.
More Advanced than Ever, acrylic on canvas, 800 x 600 mm
It contains the imaginative voyage and sufferings of the mariner. Is our antipodean history then a destruction of nature, symbolised by the mariner’s destruction of the albatross? That is the question posed by the exhibition. The exhibition also is composite – a single composite work. In it the twin visions of Romanticism and the Enlightenment are contemporaneous. Shelley, for instance, contains both visions in the person of a single artist. The ‘Conversation, Cook and Coleridge’ is laced with cross-references
between progress-knowledge and poetic intuition: differing ways of reading the world. Brown throws in to the argument of the poem the image of Faustian science – the Hadron Collider. This device smashes particles together, but its materialist under-pinnings also smash imagination. Brown writes Coleridge a note: “Dear Coleridge, gravity is so weak. The poetic particle smashed in collision.” Coleridge, now Maori, locked in the painting with the albatross roped around his neck, can only hold up his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
Heavily framed by text, these images work like a counter-poem. They mingle Brown’s, Coleridge’s and other words, making a twenty-first century commentary, grown from the moral and spiritual tree planted so firmly by Coleridge in 1798. Its argument is now critical. That’s seen in words round the head of Blake, spelling out the consequences of mechanist, materialist beliefs he had attacked so fiercely in the eighteenth century: ‘In days of Biotech materialism plastic Jerusalems.’ Genetic engineering and consumerism are laying the foundations of plastic Jerusalems even as we ponder the meaning and messages of Albatross Neck. Sometimes the words leave the framing of the paintings and invade the fabric of the earth. In the ‘Dance of Religion and Science’ they act like a virus of disturbed phrases embedded and feverish in the body of nature. This work references William Hodge’s ‘Cascade Cove, Dusky Bay’ (1775-76) The original is a classical/romantic vision of the noble savage in a sublime natural setting. Brown’s version, its fragmented phrasings, tells us there has been no utopian outcome in the ‘south seas’. Blake, Shelley and Thoreau also end up in the postHadron Collider, oil on canvas, 800 x 600 mm
sublime Dusky Bay, leaving their thoughts and questionings inscribed on the hillsides. To actualize The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the environment where it had been set, originally as an act of imagination alone, is a coup. To then contextualize the poem, with a dramatis personae belonging both to its period and ours, is a further coup. In a painterly style, ruggedly antipodean, Brown achieves this. He adds to the argument of the poem. He gives new residency to its ideas,
its history, its contemporaries in the southern hemisphere. This makes it plain that the philosophies, the failures and achievements of their human protagonists, are not just a past. They are ongoing in their consequence, painting themselves into our present, our future.
Cook with Falling of Birds, oil on linen, 400 x 300 mm
A Conversation: Cook and Coleridge, oil on linen, 1200 x 800 mm
Albatross Neck, oil on linen, 1200 x 800 mm
Cover Image: Albatross Road, oil on linen, 800 x 600 mm
Conversation with Coleridge in the Wild South, oil on linen, 800 x 1200 mm
www.ArtisGallery.co.nz 280 Parnell Road Auckland New Zealand artis@artisgallery.co.nz Ph: +64 9 303 1090