James Guppy
Artist's statement
'Explaining Mortality To Christopher Robin'
'How sad it is! I shall grow old and horrible and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June'
Oscar Wilde, 1891' I attempt to connect my work to its audience through the physical immediacy of high realism, drama and thick paint. This tangible physicality is a lie, for the world is a place of doubt and unknowing. I wish to indicate the chaos, mystery and silence at the heart of human relations.
Symbols are treacherous, open to manipulation and subversion. These flowers are not life enhancing and naturalistic, rather they are artificial, mental flowers referring to Victorian and medieval flower ornamentation, frequently they stand as a commentary or chorus brooding and whispering of death. Intended as a gentle implicit mocking of the metaphysical they become just fancy wallpaper really.
I enjoy playing with the layers of meaning, reference and quotation. A recurrent motif is a figure taken from the background of Piero Della Francesca's Baptism of Christ. In the original he is a young man preparing for his baptism. Now aged, he is preparing for his next baptism whether it be that of death, the shedding of his old persona or just an unfortunate episode in bed. This figure has become central to these paintings which are about the death of my father and the necessary passing of certain aspects of twentieth century manhood. These works are nostalgic, sad - and I hope, awkward and ironic. I have always enjoyed the cusp between pathos and bathos. The totally desperate moments have to elicit humour or we would never survive them. I would like my paintings to stand somewhere between the writings of Iris Murdoch and the cartoons of Michael Leunig.
Marine Etiquette.
A little over a year ago my family and I moved from the Pacific rim to the Atlantic edge. We settled on the eastern end of Long Island, New York, in a community of Baymen. Most days I walk the beaches. At the local university I am teaching Marine Biologists how to draw and illustrate their observations.
In my last Australian series the sea formed an essential emotive and metaphoric backdrop to my work. It was "the amniotic other place" where sexualized dreams of forbidden genders might be formed.
It seems the sea is claiming a greater and greater place in my life. I am caught, like America, between two oceans. I had thought of titling my new work Between the Atlantic and the Pacific for I am torn between two cultures; the physical 'here' of the USA and the 'there' of Northern NSW.The new work is a movement away from the last six years, with my obsessions over physical identity and the body. While I am still very much a drama queen I hope these recent paintings are gentler and more playful. I have allowed myself the luxury of revisiting old preoccupations - communication and the domestic - but looking at it from where I am now. It is a place of storms and sweeping beauty. In the latest paintings the sea has tossed up the flotsam and jetsam of our everyday passions, men struggle vainly to be more than ineffectual, flowers are always beautiful and tea can still calm troubled waters.
These works then are a gentle whimsy on all this.
The Coastline Of Desire
These paintings continue various narratives from my earlier works using a cast of familiars. Many commentators find my work surreal however I like to think they are missing the point somewhat. At my last New York exhibition it was said I took a ìSwiftianî notion of the world. Perhaps this comment was due to the Lilliputian stature of my people in a Brobdingnagian world, but I like to think it was referring to the essentially absurdist tradition we inhabit.
I have often wondered whether the coastline describes the shape of the sea or the sea describes the shape of the land. By this logic does the coastline of desire describe the shape of our desire or the limits of desire?
Iím afraid people, and I include myself here, spend most of their time like King Canute in the pursuit of the futile or the impossible. We must control the uncontrollable or find a way to say the unsayable. I believe true communication is rarely if ever possible, yet unlike Samuel Beckett I find the whole enterprise glorious, a thing not to be missed.I do hope you enjoy the paintings.
James Guppy
July 2002.