Opening of CHRIS DELPRATT - ‘Roadside Impressions’ exhibition survey (2003 -2015)
Chris Delpratt
Along Holden Road, 2007
107.5 x 115.5 cm
Oil on Cotton Canvas
Officially opened by David Harley, Contemporary Visual Artist on Saturday 5 October 2-5pm.
Speech Notes
Thanks Kareen it’s lovely to be here and wonderful to reunite as Chris and you and I did undergraduate together sometime late last century at the RMIT art school, and I can see others from that cohort are her today -. As I was wet under the ears and had come direct from TAFE into the course, whereas Chris had come in as a fully-fledged artist, an accomplished pianist and mother to Louise and Peter, having just migrated down from Queensland, Thus Chris was a mentor for me as I was entering on my own path to becoming an abstract artist, it was like having a nurturing and supportive lecturer as a fellow student a welcome difference from some of the more hubristic lecturers.
Chris had decided to be an artist from age 16 and went on to do a Commercial Illustrator and Design course at the Central Technical College in Brisbane, with a view to having a vocation that would support her practice. This was thirteen years before starting the Degree at RMIT. In the between time, she had moved to the sun states Maryborough started a family, worked as a designer while pursuing her painting attended many short-courses such as those of the colourist Mervyn Moriarty’s Flying arts school as well as travelling to Toowoomba summer schools and similarly to Armadale. It was a great time as many significant artists would instruct or participate in these courses including Suzane Archer who became a friend, Fred Cress, Clifton Pugh, John Peart, and the eminent and formidable Andrew Sibley to name a few. Curiously Sibley comes into her life 3 time once delivering a workshop at her school when Chris was 12 then at one of the summer schools in Armadale and then again when we were at art school together at RMIT.
Chris’s experience of being a musician gives a clue to her work. I remember her final presentation at RMIT when she choreographed the rhythms of the slides of her paintings accompanied by recordings of her own playing of music by the late romantic Russian composer and synaesthete Alexander Scriabin. This combination of picture and music reinforced each other and gave another way into the work. The potency found in the parallels of the mood and spatial relations of the music and pictures chosen gave each other more resonance.
By the way it was at one of the fabulous RMIT art balls with a medieval theme that she met her now husband Andrew Westmore, brother to fellow art student, John.
Chris seems to do things in sustained series, on a spectrum from extreme abstraction to figuration. Each end of the practice informing each other and often providing amalgams of each. It is not an either-or situation. Whether it be subtly veiled coloured abstractions, like those shown in Roar studios in 1989 one of her first solo exhibitions, or a series of gouaches made on an extended road trip in West Australia or her paintings of the figure they are all recognisably hers. And her various periods of abstract painting contribute to the way she uses colour in her landscapes.
This series here titled Roadside impressions are expertly chosen and hung by Kareen and Geoff from a larger body of work. The landscape becomes a vehicle for a complex amalgam of sensations to be expressed and conveyed. This is the second series of such landscapes, painted on the city fringes. These ones are painted next to and adjoining Holden Road Wondin North further towards the foothills of the Dandenong's 16ks from where she lives in Croydon. positioning herself at 2 main spots within this landscape one nearer the road and the other in the midst on the undulating landscape. Sometimes they will be from one point or view or from one 90 degree in another direction or alternative viewpoints from the one spot. As you will notice that the preponderance of more horizontal rectangular canvases has taken over from the squarer more portrait orientated works magically combining elements from a wider field of view into the one canvas. Over the two years previous, she made sketch paintings of this landscape familiarising and internalising its proprieties topography and set of relations returning to it again and again building an intrusive map of place within Chris’s consciousness, before being able to make a coherent series of art pieces spanning the next12 years until 2015. It makes one think of the devotion that Cezanne had for his beloved Mont Saint Victoire, or Morandi for his still life objects. Fittingly Cezanne once said "The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness."
Chris said to me that she would start some paintings by endeavouring to capture a particular quality of light corresponding to a part of the landscape in a section of the canvas and then the rest of the painting would emerge from there working across the canvas as though working on auto pilot. It’s as though the initial marks and colour selection set up the key signature for the rest of the painting’s development. There is a mutual meeting of an interior world pervaded through the landscape as vehicle, bringing out a particular colour harmony and play of relationships of the myriads of varieties of gestures with the boarder shapes within in the canvas. The relationship of arias of ebbs and flows of the micro gestures within the paintings and anchor points and fluxes give the canvases a perpetual life.
As a painter it’s often finding and chancing on the right parameters to be able to make things flow and bring the right combination of elements into play. One of these fortuitous elements due to health reasons resulted in the use of thick viskus and transparent medium of linseed oil as the main medium providing a finite time before it dries. This gives the paint a fluid transparent, pliable membrane to work the paint gestures and colour into. This envelope of time in which the painting needs to come together is like action painting. Painting wet in wet or to use its fancy name alla prima while working en plein air which means working directly in front of the landscape. It gives this dual experience to the viewer as you experience the act of painting through the perception of it. The immediacy is made evident in some paintings as the bodies of little swarms of insects are actually still embedded in some of the paintings. In a way keeping some of the biological evidence from the place within the picture, giving another dimension to the apprehension of time within it. This working method sustained a series for the next 13 years. The worldly success of these is evidenced by the many art competitions for which she has been selected as a finalist.
Like the best of paintings, these works are interactive and reward immersion, and I commend these generous and inviting paintings to you, and it is a great pleasure to open to this exhibition.
David Harley
Contemporary Visual Artist
David makes work concerned with what he calls ‘free form abstract painting’ using both traditional, and since the mid 1990s digital tools, folding in the use of technologies into the practice to see where it can take this form of abstraction. This is often manifested as the moving image as well as installation and easel painting and in artwork commissions for buildings. He did his undergrad at RMIT and also went onto do a Master of Fine Art at RMIT in 1995 and later a Practice-led PhD at the VCA graduating in 2015. Between 2004 and 2013, he periodically worked and exhibited in Germany. Since 1995 he has also worked as a casual lecturer including at RMIT, VCA, Monash and Victoria University. He is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery in Melbourne.