Stewart MacFarlane

COMPULSION advances Brisbane City Gallery's ongoing commitment to show artists living and practising in Queensland. It marks the first major museum exhibition of works by Stewart MacFarlane, a painter and musician for almost 30 years.

MacFarlane constructs images utilising live models to create implied narratives, as revealing in their filmic-like drama as they can be closeted and disturbing. Particular images represent the artist's assertion of a scenario as a complete or sufficient narrative, yet it is precisely the lack of closure, or the multitude of possibilities suggested, combined with representations of canonical ideals, that compel sentiment.

Charged by his use of the human form, paintings in this exhibition infer sub-texts of forbidden fantasyrole-play, erotic crisis, anxiety, voyeurism, sexual identity, violence and subjectivity. For some, the
images derived from these concerns also flirt with the question of whether a set of inherently masculine qualities, or logics, may be attributed to particular art forms like film or painting.

Works may also incorporate seemingly dislocated 'still lives' that guide or distract our attention or solve a formal pictorial problem in composition. Yet these may recall the presence and influence of further layers of reality behind the picture. The lure of fetish objects such as the stiletto shoe, for instance, exemplify ways in which a bodily part can be sexualised as a site of allure and desire.

The fascination with the figure, or body, appears in of metaphorical associations, and suggests the role of a centering principle to his practice. He affirms the centrality of the individual, both among tokens of urban modernity and in modernism's legacy for painting. The vision may not be so much on the individual, however, as it is with the 'typical'.

This catalogue would not have been possible without major support from Philip Bacon Galleries and Alex & Kitty Mackay. Generous support has also been received from Charles Nodrum Gallery, Brian Kino and Noosa Shire Council. Thanks must go also to Vincent Katz for his essay. The Brisbane City Gallery joins with Stewart and Jane MacFarlane in offering gratitude for each contribution.

S P Wright
Acting Director
Brisbane City Gallery

Stewart MacFarlane in conversation with Simon Wright
Brisbane City Gallery September 2001

Can you recall your earliest memories of art, and the
influences leading to your decision to become a
paInter around the age of thirteen?

It was my art teacher David Dridan during the mid
1960's, and the fact that art was the first thing I
really enjoyed at school. My first paintings caused
him some excitement. He was very encouraging
and I thought "I haven't received that from anything
else" - that was it. I was a very solitary kid and
didn't mix with groups. I wasn't really into sport or
maths, science or languages - I felt out of place
except for art - which was painting. Here was
something I could really immerse myself in, and get
good marks. I didn't really get a lot of
encouragement at home. I guess Mum would've
been happy for me to be an artist... it was passive
support, whereas Dad actively discouraged it in
preference for a 'profession' like law or something.
My mother was more fascinated with the lives of
artists than their work. She'd read accounts of Van
Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugin... all artists that
are still favourites of mine. Yet my father was quite
quirky in his relationship to art. He would engrave
nudes on the side of beer glasses with a dentist's
drill and sometimes sign it 'Dobell'... he had some
weird awareness about art but we never went as a
family to see any galleries and there was no bought
art in our house, just a few prints. Vincent's Sun
Flowers and The Green Lady. A bit later on when I

was 15 or 16 I used to go to Bonython Gallery in Adelaide and see Boyd, Dickerson, Nolan, Tucker. It was really the only gallery there and it had these fantastic shows - I thought these guys were brave they weren't worried what the public liked or what was selling - they were brave painters.

Like many young Australians interested in art left and travelled overseas in the 1970's. I'm interested in your reaction to the art you saw in the USA back then, the experiences you had from working in the studio of an artist like Alex Katz and any lessons you could pass on to young painters now.

Katz was a big influence on me, even before I went to America, through reviews and articles in Art America. New York seemed to be more serious think he was actually serious than the 'Pop' scene in London, less tongue-in- cheek, and closer to what I thought I wanted to do. I was tired of the banality of Pop chewing itself over and over and by going to the School of Visual Arts in NY I thought I could gain from that time and place. John Button was a very supportive teacher and a respected painter. He directed me toward a
summer school scholarship and offered me work in his studio as an assistant. He was in the same building as Katz and following an introduction from Button, I was able to work in his studio as well.

The energy in NY at the time was intense... they used to say there were a million painters in NY, but I soon realised that 90% of them were crap and that it was the 10% - people like Button and Katz - that I had to - focus on. I saw the way Katz operated. He was like an executive in a corporation. He wasn't sitting around dreaming up inspiration, he got up and was in the studio at nine every morning, worked until lunchtime, had a short break, then in there again until six and that was it five or six days a week. It was this serious attitude that I liked - a real professionalism. In a way I think I went to New York , to 'make it' and sort of try and circumvent having to 'make it' in Australia - that was my thinking at the time. Now I would say to anyone interested -
actually David Dridan told me this jokingly a long time ago - don't be a painter. Of course, when he In said it I read into it "I dare you to be a painter". I because it can drive you nuts. I mean it's wonderfully fulfilling in many ways, if you don't mind a struggle through your 20's and 30's... but if you get to 40 and realise you've got next to nothing, and might never have anything in your 60's and 70's and be in the flophouse - it's terrifying. I would say don't be a painter.

The figure and landscape painted from life has a long pedigree in Western histories of art. You have said in the past that you felt your task as a painter
is not to find new forms or styles of art. ..Is it out of a sense of this tradition that you seek to contend with these subjects in your painting?

No. I never worry about that. I always work from instinct and gut feeling. To me, no particular way of painting - analytical or instinctive investigations of
the subject - is necessarily better. I'm too busy trying, in that instant of painting, to build up paint as strongly as possible so that the work speaks of
today, of contemporary life. I'm trying to look at and understand 'today' - in films and books and in my work - rather than a nostalgic journey into the past.
It's a very simple impetus that makes me want to paint from life. It's not tradition or anything else, but the unending, continual supply of imagery – strong and fresh - that I see everyday without having to move. The city and inner city life are big influences on me and were, even before seeing the NY realists. I'm interested in the intensity and claustrophobia of suburban life. But it's not just 'Australianess' or local suburban life specifically, it's anywhere I might be. I don't get it from the soft landscape, or rolling hills... it has to be full-on, and I find it in the urban environment. Plus I can't draw from memory. I'm hopeless at it - just like anyone oft the street trying to draw on a piece of paper something from memory. I've got a very short visual memory. I have to be there to look and check and I have to constantly refer back to it.

In a typical MacFarlane image we learn something but are prevented from getting too close. By withholding the story are you implying equal importance to the formal elements of the work?

Life for me is very rarely without some sort of pressure or drama just about to approach. For most people I think this is the case. Ultimately I paint for myself and maybe, through painting, others can relate to how I feel, or what I've seen. I'm not interested in politics or social climates and I don't know anything about the so-called 'human condition' because I don't know what other humans are thinking. I want to paint as truthfully as possible, and I hope this carries through. I don't often paint what is labelled as beauty. It's often the shabbiness. These are the things we see everyday. I very rarely think about the viewer. I've got to be excited and entertained in the studio. I set pictorial problems for myself by pushing space, or using cropping devices, or looking at reflections or light. I don't think people focus much on the formal problems associated in the making of my work. They don't see the paintwork so much as the composition. It's easier for them to talk about the characters within, the untold drama, whether it's politically correct as an image etcetera. For me there is never any answer to the pictures, as far as I know. They're mostly a sort of side-glance you could see from the corner of your eye...we don't quite understand what it is we've seen and that's when I get inspired by the potential of painting. I just want to capture that moment as it strikes, that side-glance, where YOL really are not aware of what is going on, and can possibly know.