Opens: 6-8pm Wednesday 27 May 2015 Closes: 5pm Saturday 13 June 2015
Watters Gallery
Cover: Kengaroo with book, Waiheke Island charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 37 x 54cm Exhibition catalogue Watters Gallery, Sydney Artist: © Chris O’Doherty aka Reg Mombassa Photography: Martina O’Doherty and Diane Larter This catalogue is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, critism or review as permitted by the Copyright Act no part may be reproduced by any other process without written permission.
2. Peeling bark trunk and fallen trunk
oil on board
30 x 21cm
109 Riley Street, East Sydney NSW 2010 Ph: (02) 9331 2556 Fax: (02) 9361 6871 info@wattersgallery.com Hours: Tues and Sat: 10am - 5pm; Wed Thurs Fri 10am - 7pm
3. Black wattles weeds and clouds oil on board 40 x 30cm
Chris O’Doherty aka Reg Mombassa Further experiments In Hallucinatory Anthropomorphism essay by Dr Chris McAuliffe
People seem to have trouble working out what kind of artist Chris O’Doherty is. Painter, designer, musician, choreographer of pageants? Answering “All of the above” doesn’t make it any easier. To me it’s pretty simple; O’Doherty has always been a romantic artist. Not the colloquial, warm and fuzzy kind; he’s a romantic in the technical sense of the word, an artist working in an idiom established in Europe more than a century ago. A classic romantic, if that doesn’t sound contradictory. The roots of O’Doherty’s landscape reach into the romantic tradition. It’s a landscape of sensibility, shaped by lingering, enigmatic sensations. It can seem immaterial and elusive, even when the artist names it as a specific place. That’s because we’ll never see it as it is, we’ll always view it through the filter of the artist’s sensibility.
The romantic landscape is often eerily empty, as if detached from everyday people and their run-of-the-mill concerns. It’s an allegorical landscape, more hieroglyphic than topographical. In O’Doherty’s hands, it’s a terrain where three utility poles turn a nondescript hill into Golgotha. O’Doherty’s landscapes ache with urgent but unfulfilled offers. Lush and inviting at first glance, they are stocked with barriers; fences, roads, stands of trees and rolling hills. Every horizon hides an unreachable place where we long to be, every hillside implies an opposing slope that we’ll never know. The terrain is about the journey but the picture is about never arriving. Painting a picture of the world is a bid for a place in that world; romanticism’s challenge is its recognition of how frail that bid is. Time and especially time of day, are signs of O’Doherty’s romantic sensibility.
A romantic landscape will be dream-like, a little blurry around the edges.
The long shadows of dawn and dusk are stretched across his landscapes.
Or imbued with softly pulsing anticipation and gnawing stillness, both inviting and unsettling.
Those are the transitional moments, when the cycles of day and night, consciousness and dream, encourage reflection,
alternately melancholic and optimistic, on time passed or yet to come.Time is embedded in the terrain; the deep geological time of rock strata revealed by a freeway cutting, the seasonal time registered in the peeling bark of a tree, the quotidian time of sheep trails worn into a hillside, the dreamtime of a childhood home. Time delivers one of romantic art’s great conundrums; the paradox of the transient moment that lingers forever in memory, becoming a ghostly presence that still shapes the here and now. Time and memory, now and forever, are the latitude and longitude of O’Doherty’s globe. Have you ever noticed how curiously depopulated O’Doherty’s landscapes are? A couple of years back, he told a journalist that humans “are really dangerous creatures—irrational, violent, governed by intense competitiveness.” Another romantic trait, those misgivings about humanity and materialism. As is the substitution of surrogates for people—trees especially. They’re loners, O’Doherty’s trees, standing around in paddocks and on hillsides, looking stoic but never grand. Just watching the traffic pass. Every so often one of them cracks up and starts
clawing at the sky with leafless limbs, to the embarrassment of the trees around it, I imagine. Being an artist in the twenty-first century almost seems to demand a romantic mentality of O’Doherty. “Being alive is a constant ruthless battle. There’s nothing relaxing about it,” he says (to the same journalist, who clearly got him on a good day). In his paintings, drawings and prints, O’Doherty works on developing his capacity for empathy; he tries to figure out what’s going on inside of a wallaby’s head, for example. He thinks a lot about what lies beneath the surface; under the water, beneath everyday consciousness, behind Australian Jesus’ distant gaze. He develops an updated folklore to plot the machinations of evil. In his dark fairy tales, troll-like property developers have replaced the witches in the forest. (Are O’Doherty and his brother Peter our new Brothers Grimm?) O’Doherty pictures two versions of our world: one luminous and pastoral; the other, dark and terrifying. The nineteenth-century
American painter Thomas Cole dubbed these two varieties of landscape “a calm” and “a wild.” One is a world temporarily at peace; Owhanake Bay suffused with summer holiday languor. The other is violent and crepuscular; a world spewing dark materialism, lapping up its own vomit. Often both worlds exist in the same location, such as the Hunter Valley or Sydney Harbour. O’Doherty’s strength lies in his capacity to keep both in view simultaneously; not so he can resolve or reconcile them but in order to reassure himself that art can still grasp the world. Back in the early fifties, the sculptor Tony Smith called freeways an “artificial landscape without cultural precedent;” he thought they heralded the end of art as we know it. O’Doherty has a great affection for freeways; I think they’re the spine of his work. The Hume Highway is to O’Doherty as the Pilbara was to Fred Williams. And in his eyes, freeways do have a cultural precedent. Freeways represent that deeply instrumental culture that romanticism resents; materialism, engineered efficiency, the specious freedom of getting from A to B at high speed. But they also answer
O’Doherty’s childhood longing to follow the telegraph poles over the horizon, to set off in pursuit of something that he’ll know when he finds it. It’s ordinary things that O’Doherty likes. But it’s his determination to discover the extraordinary within them— his “aristocracy of the normal”—that makes his understated romanticism so effective. Dr Chris McAuliffe is Professor of Art (Practice-led research) at the School of Art, ANU.
Trunk with vestibule oil on paper 20.5 x 10.5cm
Van and red sedan on the M1 oil on paper 6.5 x 12cm
Ochre and orange monolith on the M1 oil on paper 11 x 14.5cm
Black sedan on the M1 oil paint on paper 12 x 17cm
Descending bend on the M1 oil on board 14.5 x 20cm
Courtyard with tomatoes charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 16 x 21cm Treeline in fading light, Cassilis charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 24 x 34cm
House and garden in the gloaming, Culburra Beach
charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 34 x 23cm
Mown paddock in gloaming charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 23 x 35cm
Wet paddock in cloud shadow oil on paper 13 x 17cm
House and windbreak near Rotorua oil on paper 20 x 26cm
Lights on hill approaching Goolwa oil on paper 16 x 18cm
Lane markers and milky way, M1 oil on paper 8.5 x 12cm
Looking north from the trig station near Owhanake Bay, Waiheke Island charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 18 x 25.5cm
Olive Trees at Onetangi, Waiheke Island charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 23 x 18cm
Fenceline with sheep induced striations, Waiheke Island charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 17 x 22cm
Telegraph poles and fenceline above Man’o’War Bay, Waiheke Island
charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 24 x 35.5cm
Opera House from MCA, early evening charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 15.5 x 20cm Opera house from the MCA I charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 18 x 24cm
Opera House from MCA II charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 21 x 17cm
Opera house from Dawes Point charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 17 x 24cm
Looking north from the lodge at Waiheke Heights charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 25 x 36cm
Blue House and Pole, Waiheke Island charcoal and coloured pencil and glitter on paper 26.5 x 37cm
Headland at Owhanake Bay, Waiheke Island charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 24 x 37cm
Gray Day, Sawpit Gully charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 36 x 53cm
Business Horse and Thunder God
Gumscape with Road and Creatures  edition of five, limited edition archival digital print on canvas  92.5 x 177cm per panel
Australian Jesus on Golden Motorbike
Kengaroo and Dog Trumpet
Station of the cross No.2: Australian Jesus stages a re-enactment on the Golden Highway (Hunter Valley) charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 38 x 55cm
Australian Jesus staring into the distance, Waiheke Island charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 36 x 55cm
Station of the Cross No.2 charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 51.5 x 34.5cm
Gazing, Waiheke Island charcoal, coloured pencil and glitter on paper 37 x 53cm
Maggot infested business horse gives birth to an art horse, Circular Quay charcoal, coloured pencil and glitter on paper 38 x 52cm
Procession, Upper Hunter Valley charcoal, coloured pencil and glitter on paper 49 x 68cm
Deeper Water IV charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 26 x 37cm
Winter Coat II charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 32 x 24cm
Soft Rock Wallaby with Flax and Toi Toi Grass 2014 charcoal, coloured pencil and glitter on paper 36 x 51cm
Cigarette break, Anzac Cove oil on paper 16.5 x 21.5cm
Jim Cook Mugshot II charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 47 x 37cm
Cigarette break on the astral plane oil on paper 15 x 18cm
Pictures with musical references charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 26 x 21cm
Mambo Dialogues: Australian Jesus Discusses Climate Change Policy with Superman charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 24 x 26cm
Mechangaroo Celebrates New Years Eve
charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 28 x 22cm
Mambo 30 years of shelf indulgence
charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 28 x 18cm
Dead sparrow on timber deck charcoal on paper 22 x 34cm
House and pole with toi toi grass, Waiheke Island charcoal on paper 22.5 x 34cm
Ironbarks, Cassilis charcoal on paper 24 x 34cm
Utzon Multiples charcoal on paper 34 x 24cm
Gums and stumps, Sawpit Gully, Cassilis
charcoal on paper 52 x 37cm
Gum torso, Cassilis charcoal on paper 34.5 x 23.5cm
Gum with Cankers etching with aquatint, edition of 25, printed by Cicada Press 22 x 30.5cm
Bones and Wires etching with aquatint, edition of 30, printed by Cicada Press 19.5 x 22.5cm
Fire and Water: Australian Jesus with Hollow Head and Eyes Popped Out charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 49.5 x 70cm
A Turn at Ruling Chris O’Doherty aka Reg Mombassa I am a white man I drive a white car I fly a white cloud and I build a white house. I eat white bread and sometimes eggs the whites of my eyes are as white as maggots. My wife is white and I have a white sheep my fridge is white and I eat white meat. White men rule the world right now they’re mostly called Americans. because we are their friends and help them with their work We too can bask in the glory of ruling. It feels good to rule but I sometimes worry that the yellow men (Chinese) might want a turn at ruling. Or perhaps the brown men (Indians) might also want a turn. The black Africans will naturally want a turn to themselves and the light brown men with moustaches (Arabs) are also very keen to have a go at ruling. They are so keen that they can’t wait their turn.
They are called queue jumpers and sometimes they explode with impatience I would like someone to knit me a queue jumper in the warm colours of an explosion. After all the different coloured peoples have had a turn at ruling other creatures might also like a turn. Pigs for instance. Pigs are very intelligent and they like drinking beer so they are quite a lot like us. Even their colour (pink) is quite similar to our colour. Calling ourselves white is not entirely accurate because we are actually a dirty pink. But if we called ourselves pink men people might think we were homosexuals and then they might want to kill us or not let us get married. Pigs would probably be quite good rulers because they are jolly and friendly. They don’t have opposable thumbs though, so they can’t make things for themselves.
But they could operate a computer with their trotters, and the computers could tell machines to make things for them: things like comfortable chairs that a pig might like to sit in or a car with modified controls that a pig could easily drive. After the pigs have had a good turn fish might like to try their hand at ruling the world. The problem is that fish have no hands, so they would need to murmur their instructions into a water proof computer. When our plump pink hands relinquish the reins of power and everyone else gets a turn at ruling I hope they don’t seek to punish us for all the arrogance and spite and pointless cruelty that might have poured out of our sausage brains while we were having our good long turn at ruling.
Foggy Highway II charcoal and coloured pencil on paper 19 x 23.5cm
Brown armchair oil on board 20 x 25cm
Watters Gallery
109 Riley Street, East Sydney NSW 2010 Ph: (02) 9331 2556 Fax: (02) 9361 6871 info@wattersgallery.com Hours: Tues and Sat: 10am - 5pm; Wed Thurs Fri 10am - 7pm View the full exhibition at: www.wattersgallery.com