Paintings | Richard Wastell
Paintings
People come to Tasmania seeking solace in its pristine wilderness. In shady valleys just off the highways or on walking tracks across mountains reserved especially for the purpose, they think they find it. Yet their joy in ‘untouched nature’ depends upon their ability to bracket it off from all those parts of the world that are not untouched, to pretend for a moment that this is all there is. Similarly, the understanding of the scientist depends on bracketing nature as a rational system, and the wealth of the industrialist on bracketing it as an impersonal store of raw materials for the taking. In order to see the world in one way, we must discount other ways.
What Richard Wastell wants to do is not necessarily to remove the brackets, nor even to recommend one approach over another, but to encourage us to step outside the brackets for a time so as to understand their meaning, and therefore our place in the broader scheme of things. Only by transcending our habitual ways of thinking can we break out of our isolation.
As a consequence, these paintings might be confusing (even confronting) to those expecting an easy environmental polemic. Burnt-out tree trunks (which may or may not be casualties of Tasmania’s rapacious woodchippers) appear as eerily beautiful as piles of mussel shells by a river (which, he has cautioned, are not necessarily Aboriginal middens). Withering sheoaks stand side-by-side with thriving ones; Abalone shells are artificially arranged into rhythmic conga-lines on a stylised seashore; spring butterflies assume a menacing monumentality; campfires burning in the distance might signal innocent family picnics or the start of a conflagration. Death and life, destruction and creation, succeeding one another in a never-ending cycle.
While such equivalences might thwart those who demand a firm moral stance, the artist does not assume to tell us how to think, but to suggest the right questions to ask ourselves.
So these paintings and are not just landscapes. They are about culture, imagination and memory, seamlessly blending the private and autobiographical into the public and social. While not promising salvation, they hold out hope for survival. Although no people intrude, the human footprint is everywhere suggested, marking the land with relics and traces, for, as the philosopher Erazim Kohák writes, ‘what is at issue is … whether we shall conceive of ourselves as integrally continuous with the world about us or as contingently thrown into it as strangers into an alien medium.’ *
Step up close, and the whole picture dissolves into a myriad of tiny elements, like teaming molecules, jostling and crowding, forming themselves into shell, treetrunk, water or bare earth, then just as quickly dispersing again. Richard’s surfaces are constantly alive. Step back, and everything coheres into a solid, monumental classicism, stylised and slightly unreal, as in a children’s storybook.
It is this lively interplay between the agitated and the static, between the miniature and the monolithic, that suggests wholeness, continuity and regeneration, putting these beautiful, meditative pictures into a state of nature.
Peter Timms, June 2009.
* Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: a philosophical enquiry into the moral sense of nature, University of Chicago Press, 1987.