Rod McRae

Paintings

My painting story

5. Neo-Baroque to minimalism

1985-91

I gradually left the figures out and tried to get the same effects using forms that were ambiguous - perhaps rocks or bits of coral - but really they were only there to bring to life the space around them, rather like the marks of the grid paintings back at St Martins.

I was certainly happier painting ambiguous forms than human ones. There is so much at stake when you depict a human. It's very powerful but also quite dangerous. People read things in that you wouldn't have dreamt of.

The forms came out of, and went back into, an equally ambiguous space. This was initially a dark space and the forms were animated by light falling on them. But where they started and finished was never clear. Their state was itself left undecided - they were half made, half born, in process of becoming, or of returning to the darkness.

There was a somberness here, but also a sense of excitement and emotional richness. Its hard to say where that came from but I think I was still drawing on that Venetian colour and movement, even though the environment in which I was working was utterly removed from Renaissance Italy.

The forms were never strictly linked to objects in the outside world, but at this stage they became even more abstract and fanciful. Suggestions of space are everywhere but never unambiguously realised.

The wild dynamic of the earlier work gradually settled, perhaps as I settled into, and became part of, Melbourne. Some sort of order returned, and at times a kind of minimalism that continued to explore the edgy nature of things; how one is always trying to read what it IS that one is looking at, where it begins and ends. The world becomes a rather unpredictable place when its contents and boundaries are questioned and undefined.

A painting like this one seems to suggest a source in the real world, but no such source exists. It arose simply through the process of drawing. So, rather than coming out of a known world, it directs you into an unknown one. But it doesn't give you a lot of information about how this other world works... it remains mysterious and a little threatening.

One thing I've often found myself playing with is the ambiguity of figure and ground. This work could be a neck against a darker background, or it could be a space between two spheres.

Although I did not paint any figures over this period, bodies are never very far from the scene. The lack of detail allows scale to be ambiguous and you don't know if this is a huge landscape feature or a piece of anatomy.

Even this one, which is clearly based on the idea of a still life remains ambiguous. The space below the table, or chunk of rock or whatever the platform is, is huge and infinite. Some of the forms could just as well be bridges or strange dwellings as plates or fruit.