The making of the show
Short interview about show
There are places that act on us in unexpected ways: the mind slows down, the light whispers to us, the space hypnotises and draws us in. Such is the character of Carlo Sandblow, located near the township of Rainbow Beach. There is some wise ghost that caresses, humbles and rouses us from the frantic sense of expedient action - the grasping for security, comfort and status.
It might seem strange, but my path towards seeking to paint these intangible spirits in the landscape has emerged from many years of the traditional discipline of life drawing. I think of gesture as the sense of interiority, the subjective experience and vital force that has the model express intention - and that makes a drawing feel alive. Whether posed as reaching desperately or swooning, depressed or calmly meditating, the artist's job is not merely to illustrate the parts, nor to abstract as an intellectual exercise, but to find the invisible organising threads that generate life and movement.
I wonder if the same neural pathways used to channel the gesture of the human figure into a drawing are engaged in associating spirits with a landscape. And further, whether this is related to what is described by the term animism: a way of experiencing places and things as being alive that so deeply influenced our ancestors.
Carlo Sandblow seems to me to be startlingly alive. The great sweep of sand slowly wills itself over the ridge, exposing its gnarled bones of ancient mineral sedimentary rock. Its skin shivers into baroque sand-ripples that dissolve and reform, a vast pale slate for the hand of the wind, continuously reimagining itself. We shuffle our foot prints across these thoughts made of sand, and all will be forgotten into the wind by tomorrow.
The daily arc of the sun rakes with the shadows of stubborn, bending casuarinas and the broken skeletons of sand-suffocated trees, while clouds bloom across the sky, modulating moods. Ever changing but retaining a certain homeostasis, a continuity of character, the sandblow is one great living thing unfolding, becoming, decaying.
This place whispers, nudging us towards aliveness, to contemplation of both the inner landscape and the outer. “Forget the values insisted on by culture and economics” it says, “reach for a Romantic practicality - for the need of the self to evolve into the world”.
These are studio pictures built from the drawings and colour studies done in situ, attempts to bind these direct experiences of overwhelming space and constantly changing light into the condensed statement of a physical oil painting. They compress multiple perspectives and transitioning moods of the place rather than being directly observational. Through this, perhaps a little of the restless spirit haunting this place is also transmitted.
I often have a sense of sadness in very beautiful places, of something transformative slipping away. Insights powerful enough to cut through the unimportant, but fragile enough to be forgotten with Monday’s responsibilities. These paintings are an attempt to salvage those whisperings. I would like to think they can remind us that sacred places are out there. That they can slip under our logic and lift us to a way of being that we are not usually aware of, to a deepened sense of aliveness beyond the domesticated.
