SMALL WORLDS
Small Worlds, 2020
17th Century Dutch floral still-life paintings often fulfilled a moral function. Whilst evidently painted as a celebration of beauty and of the richness of the natural world (and indeed the wealth of the painting’s owner), they generally had included in their compositions specific elements which served as memento mori (reminders of death). The very early floral studies were sometimes painted onto the back of portraits as an injunction against vanity, to remind the sitter that while their image may endure, their health and beauty was subject to the immutable laws of nature and would wither away. Flowers, beautiful yet only briefly blooming, were symbolic reminders of the fleetingness of perfection, the fragility of beauty, and the brevity of worldly existence. Alongside the fallen petals, these paintings often included other symbols of transformation, decay and the passage of time – skulls, butterflies, burnt-down candles, timepieces, and insects alighting on rotting fruit.
I first started using these Dutch floral still-lifes as subject matter for my paintings in the early 1990s. I enjoyed the detachment and freedom that came from working from found imagery. The meticulously painted, densely packed compositions offered a wealth of possible compositions for me to plunder. And when I stopped to reflect on the subject matter, the inbuilt metaphors chimed with my preoccupations with mortality. I was nearing the same age at which my father had suddenly died. And my young son was same age I was when I lost my father.
In those days the only imagery I could access was low-resolution. My reference materials were muddy reproductions in books, or the occasional blurry postcard collected in a museum. By the time I had “zoomed in” on the photo, and found a composition in it, the source image was in some cases reduced to a few square centimetres – which I then blew up a thousand-fold, on to canvases of up to 2 x 6 metres. This cropping and enlarging reduced the botanical details to simple shapes and colours, and I sometimes had no idea which part of which plant the areas of my paintings represented. This obscuring of the subject matter led to abstraction, which was enhanced by my use of large brushes, with gestural brushstrokes broken down further by solvent splashed and dragged across the still wet paint surface.
Eventually my work evolved away from those historical sources, but last year I was reminded of the old subject matter and I began looking again at it, literally in a new light. Now, with images of paintings made freely available online by museums and auction houses, the source imagery is far easier to come by, and the quality is greatly enhanced. And many of these old paintings have been recently cleaned, with the varnish removed and the original colours restored. Now all the details in those painstakingly paint ed originals are on display, down to the tiny water droplets on the leaves. And amongst them, in clear view, are the little creatures that inhabit these elaborately invented arrangements.
By the 17th Century, interest in scientific classification was growing. Many intellectuals’ homes had their wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities, including display cases of pinned insects. Religious concerns were giving way to science, typified by two notable still-life painters: Maria Van Oosterwijck, daughter of a Dutch Reformed minister, and a generation later, Rachel Ruysch, daughter of a botanist and anatomist. Both painted formal flower bouquets, botanically accurate and sometimes teeming with insect life. (Olivia Carlson has counted 19 moths, ants, bees and beetles in Ruysch’s Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1704). In a curious blend of naturalism and artifice, Ruysch sometimes placed her floral arrangements on a forest floor. As did other 18th Century artists, she painted woodland scenes, in which lizards and toads cavort with dragonflies and moths in dark fantasias of creepy-crawliness. In these paintings plants grow wildly, and the only reference to an ordering human influence is the occasional stone wall, tumbled down, and overgrown with vines. These images of unhindered nature seem to depict on the one hand a paradise before The Fall, (or a fearful depiction of civilisation succumbing to nature running riot.
I started the first of the paintings in this show in September 2019 – a large diptych based on a detail of a painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem, with small insects crawling over the stems and blooms of bursting roses and ranunculi. I felt a new resonance between the morality tales of the original painting and the current threats to our natural world – the loss of habitat to human activity, global temperatures rising, oceans under threat, and species declining and
By the end of the last year, vast bushfires were rampant throughout Australia. In the dark glow of these horrific fires, the moral function of those still-life paintings – reminders at once of the marvellous and fragile beauty of the natural world, and of the temporality of our place in it – seemed even more relevant. And while I didn’t share the original artists’ religious convictions, through the act of recreating some of their lovingly painted flowers, I could share in their sense of wonder at the precious diversity of life. It seemed now, as we saw around us the terrifying impact of human activity on the natural world, that reminders of the dangers of human hubris were even more necessary.
Then the year turned and the novel coronavirus came on the scene. A new vision appeared; of humans, not as rampaging giants crushing nature underfoot, but something more primal, humans as vulnerable organisms, subject to the vagaries of chance infection and the relentless computations of epidemiology. With everything under threat from COVID-19 – our lifestyles, our livelihoods, and even our lives – I felt a new affinity with those little creatures in the Old Master paintings who, having crept out from the fog of the past, are now clearly exposed.
Tim Maguire, 2020.
Small Worlds exhibition catalogue essay
Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney
2020
