Megan Williams

SHIPWRECKED FROM A DESERT ISLAND

/10 Arryn and I often talk about art. The matter, being and the stuff of it. The push and pull, the surface and depth, and the joy and madness. It’s messy talk. We also talk about life. The fun stuff and the hard stuff. Loneliness, love, boredom and overstimulation. Arryn talks a lot about light. The differences in the light of Berlin, where he resides, and Australia, his home. This is magical talk because in these moments he transcends the ocean that separates him from here. Australia is an island. Growing up and living on the east coast means the Pacific Ocean has been constant for Arryn. He yearns for the ocean; to swim, to fish, and to disappear into. In comparison, Berlin is landlocked, so when the city recently came out of an intense period of pandemic lockdown Arryn sought out the nearest thing to an ocean experience. An old housemate had left a blow-up dinghy in the basement of Arryn’s apartment block. Folded into an IKEA bag and worn as a backpack, he and fellow artist (and expat Australian), Stephen Russell, bicycled their way to the nearest lake, inflated the vessel, and set sail with a BBQ chicken and a six-pack of beer. It is both surprising and unsurprising that Arryn has made Slack Water—a work about the Pacific Ocean. Arryn’s prior works, particularly his large paintings in oil on canvas, are conversations with modernism and the everyday. The monochromatic images respond to common phenomena such as steam rising from a kettle, the breeze blowing sheets on a line, and shadows dancing with inanimate objects. They are austere and restrained. Their smooth and complex surfaces are the result of patience, precision and time. By comparison, Slack Water is loose and full of colour. For four years, Arryn has worked out of a series of poems by the poet, Nathan Shepherdson. Arryn and Nathan talked about making work about the ocean, but as the ocean is big and complex, they chose Grants Guide to Fishes as a place to start. Nathan created 77 poems from the Guides 900 pages, each poem made from the words found in the text on a single fish. Like the ocean, the poems are expansive, visceral and contain their own surreal logic. Arryn’s first response to the poems was to paint them. In black tempera on hundreds of pages of warm white paper, Arryn painted fragments of phrases, lines and words from the poems. It was direct, and he approached the text in a similar way to how Nathan had constructed the poems. Arryn became obsessively interested in the rhythm and pattern created by the negative and positive shapes in the letters. These experiments in text, shape and pattern came together to form Slack Water Mammoth (2017-ongoing). Pinned directly to the wall and endlessly reconfigurable, the work is the ground from which the further Slack Water works have emerged.i The quality of line in the Slack Water works is different to Arryn’s earlier paintings. Their hand-painted edge, complete with trembles and wavers, is a result of the openness of the process whereby the line or shape is not predetermined, rather, it emerges out of and through the process. I’m reminded of Tim Ingold when he says that art “is a question not of imposing preconceived forms on inert matter but of intervening in the fields of force and currents of material wherein forms are generated”. Arryn continued to explore the poems and patterns as individual paintings on canvas at a larger scale and introduced colour. He began with chromatic greys but found himself chasing ‘magic grey’, a colour he associates “with air, with atmosphere, with reflection”ii This pursuit, along with the many references to colour in the poems, encouraged Arryn to work in colour. When he began Slack Water, Arryn also started compounding paints from raw pigments and binders. The process presented him with endless

possibilities and a desire to document his discoveries through complex colour studies and notations. These experiments in colour continued in tandem as new paintings on canvas and paper emerged. The paintings begin with a grid, or a net, through which line and colour are layered until a painting emerges. These works contemplate the relationship between surface, colour and abstraction.

Arryn says that “paintings are vessels for meaning, like a bowl they want to fill up with things, no matter how much you empty them out. It seems the emptier a painting is, the greater the size of the metaphors that come to rest in it”iii Perhaps empty paintings have much in common with the surface of the ocean; for the most part it is just light and movement, but the depths promise metaphor and meaning. The peculiarity of physics in both the physical world and in the process of painting has been a constant for Arryn. His work has always been iterative, oscillating between contained and expansive structures where ideas and process feed each other until they both fall apart. Slack Water had its beginning (and will likely find its end) in the magic of light, movement and surface.

Megan Williams

i Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 211. ii Arryn Snowball, Slack Water: Process notes (Melbourne: Nicholas Thompson Gallery, 2018), 18. http://www.nicholasthompsongallery.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Slack-Water-Process-Notes-Arryn-Snowball-2018.pdf iii Ibid, 22.

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