Rod McRae
Paintings
Paintings
1993-2002
After going through a minimalist phase, the pictures started to get more complex again. Here, the large pinkish area suggests both a solid form and a space at the same time, depending on which other forms it is seen in relation to.
Some of these became quite cartoonish in feel. This one always makes me think of Walt Disney, with some little figure dancing across the sky. The forms are simplified and not very realistic. There is more light coming back in again... less of those scary dark spaces around the edges.
There's surrealism here again, maybe because some of the forms are suggestive of things we almost know, like the scene in the background which could be a still life, and that thing in the foreground which could be an, albeit deformed, human figure.
More surrealism here too. The forms are strangely organic, even if they are distributed in space like elements of a sunset. The forms begin and end insidiously, emerging like visions and then disappearing again, just when you feel they should be revealing what they REALLY are.
It might seem that I should know what these things are, what they are about in the world, what they are trying to achieve. But the aimlessness that they exhibit is as much a mystery to me as to you. There is something human about them, if hopeless. They feel a bit like crippled figures who are nevertheless surviving and managing to exist, and who make us feel uncomfortable in our, mostly, comfortable existences.
This one always makes me think of Miro. This was about as light as it gets in my story. But the lightness is not exactly a triumphant light. It seems more like the intense light of the artic circle in summer, which is briefly all pervading, and in which life forms frantically try and reproduce, before the long night of winter takes over again.
In January 2000, I enrolled in a course in Electronic Design and Interactive Multimedia at RMIT. I really wanted some way of making money, painting not really doing that for me. I spent most of 2000 doing this, but finally decided it wasn't the career I wanted and that if I was to take it seriously, I wouldn't be able to continue painting as I wanted to. So I dropped out. There was a lot of intense computer work which changed my painting once I started back on it again. One project we had was to create an image in Photoshop representing the idea of 'dystopia'. This was my image — a picture of a semi-wrecked boat floating on a dark sea. Suddenly I was dealing once again with directly figurative imagery.
I continued to use the computer but started looking at the paintings from the history of art that have most affected me and I started experimenting with ways of creating new images out of them. This is based on a wonderful Pieter Breughal painting called the Tower of Babel. It seems appropriate that the image of Babel should itself become deconstructed and used in a new context. At this stage, I wasn't necessarily producing paintings from the computer imagery.… and I haven't painted this image yet.
At the same time I was doing work on the computer, I was continuing to work in my traditional way on canvas. What that consists of is starting out with an intuitive drawing, and then seeing where it leads me. Its what I would call a boot-strap approach, in that each stage of development depends specifically on what has gone on in the previous stage. I never have a concept of how it is going to end up. I might have a vague vision of this... but its pretty vague, and I like to be able to respond to something unexpected cropping up, which steers the painting in a totally new direction. This way, I stay interested, because the unfolding of the painting is a revelation for me, and it feels hopeful right up until the end.
This has developed into a two forked approach to my work which is still unresolved. On the one hand, I work intuitively, as I just described, and the development seems to have an organic feel to it. Changes gradually occur over time, whether I want them to or not. However, there's a resistance in that approach to new sources of imagery, new forms and ideas from outside sources. It is more about the process of production, of painting, and thats just what you get. On the other side, I can delve into whatever subject matter I like, and incorporate it into a complex image, using the computer. However the process of painting this image is much less organic than the first way. There is improvisation in the execution of it, but the image is partly predetermined by the computer image I have to start with.
Next chapter: Digital constructions