Opening at the start of 2024, a new collection of works by John Lacey, exploring landscapes in both an abstracted and realist manner.
John’s work seems to live in that space between the familiar and the fascinating, a world that engages both the intellect and the heart. The paintings are both contemporary and timeless. Like Joni Mitchell, he seems to be able to see ‘Both sides now’.
‘Dam Blues - Yundi’
Oil and cold wax medium on canvas.
‘As Showers Ease - Mt Compass’
Oil and cold wax medium on canvas
Opening Speech:
by Emeritus Professor Doug Coster AO
John is well known with a strong following, not only in South Australia but across the nation, and beyond.
The title of the show, Both Sides Now, alludes to two sides of his oeuvre; the littoral landscapes for which he is so well known, and some more recent paintings that reflect his search for the essence of the landscape he is painting.
Details are reduced, shapes are simplified, and colours modified. The simplified image, freed from constraining detail, reveals the essence.
They are not exactly abstract paintings, but they are on that spectrum and work for the same reasons abstract painting has gained such widespread acceptance dominating the visual arts for the last 120 years.
The abstract image allows more space for the viewer to engage their own personal imagination, experience, and expectations.
This occurs because of the way we see – the way visual perception works. We see with our brains. The eye picks up course patterns of light from the environment and the brain organises them into meaningful images.
Memory, Imagination, and social context feed into the process of image creation in an interplay between subconscious and conscious mental processes.
We all regularly experience this autofill process when we see something in the distance, or in poor light, imagine it to be one thing but when we are closer, or the light is brighter, learn it is something else. Our experience, expectations and emotions feed into this creative process. The mind determines to a large part how we see the world.
Colour perception demonstrates how much the brain is involved in vision. Colour is entirely a construct of the mind. The world is not coloured. Light waves are colourless until they impact visual receptors in the eyes. Our brains create the colour we see, and the colour we experience is constructed and manipulated in our brains.
Physicists define colour by the wavelength of light that creates the perception. But the colour we see at a particular wavelength is not constant, it is influenced by the wider environment. For hundreds of years painters have recognised that the perception of a colour is influenced by the colours surrounding it. Ingres, the neoclassical French master, famously said” Give me mud and I will paint the skin of Venus – provided I am allowed to select the colours that surround her.”
Most of the colour adjustment goes on subconsciously, but we can influence the process to some extent by thinking about it and bringing previous experience to bare. For example we see the colour of a sweater we are familiar with as the same colour when it is outside in the sun or inside under a tungsten light bulb, even though the wavelengths reflected off the sweater into our eyes under these two conditions are very different. The mind adjusts the colour we perceive to accommodate experience.
The perception of colours also has complicated personal and cultural context.
Kandinsky, the father of abstraction, saw colours through his experience of music. He was an accomplished musician before he took up painting. To him cadmium yellow was middle C and his palette was a keyboard.
Although neuroscience can explain many of the devices used by artists to create their illusions not all aspects of visual art are amenable to scientific analysis.
The essence of art, the qualities that differentiate a masterpiece from a well-painted pretty picture are subjective and difficult to define. Art is about feelings and beyond verbal description, and diffuse, with many different facets. One element of artistry on show in this exhibition is the spirit of place.
Although difficult to describe in words, when it is captured in a painting it is obvious. Namatjira had it when he painted the west McDonald Ranges and Mt. Sonder, as did Cezanne in his paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, and Constable in his paintings of the waterways and mills of Suffolk. They painted their country in a way outsiders couldn’t.
John Lacey is a Fleurieu man. He has lived here and painted the region for many years. This is his place, and his paintings capture the spirit of the region in a way that an outsider never could, and better than anyone else has been able to do.
These paintings from John Lacey combine a rare level of technical prowess and artistry. Enjoy them, buy them, take them home and live with them. They will brighten up your life.
Thank you for listening.