The celebrated 15th – 16th century Venetian painters: Giacomo Bellini and his two sons Gentile and Giovanni, give the art lover much opportunity to consider the mysteries of genetic inheritance. We can ponder this, among other mysteries, in a profoundly satisfying exhibition of works by William Delafield Cook and Jonathan Delafield Cook — father and son.
In a virtual world where every image makes an appearance on sufferance, Delafield Cook et fils’ paintings and drawings are persistently memorable. The looking is easy, but finding the words to fit the sensations they generate — the countless ways in which the eye beholds this very particular kind of realism, becomes a fugitive game.
Perhaps we could begin with the notion of realism. The idea that the painter could, with the help of ground pigments, oils and solvents, place on a portable square of linen tacked to a stretcher, some believable piece of their world, was perfected by the Dutch artists of the 17th century. But why is it that Vermeer’s realism looks so very different from say, Pieter de Hooch’s or Frans Hals? Neither subject matter, nor brushstrokes, nor light, nor palette, nor degree of detail is sufficient to pierce the mystery. What we are left with is the singular sensibility of the artist — the unreproducible fingerprint.
This much we can say of the Delafield Cooks, that their work is a testament to the pursuit of composing pictures about stillness — and distilling the absolutely unknowable essence of the perfectly familiar. Looking at a chesterfield couch, or a haystack, a slumping emu, or even a slag heap they have painted or drawn is akin to seeing them for the first time, with all their qualities intensified in a way that the mere application of paint with a fine sable brush or a graphite pencil can’t explain.
This quality the Delafield Cooks share with a 19th century painting hero, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Just as the latter’s brushstrokes and fine pencils have effaced themselves entirely in the service of flesh, satin and jewels, so the Delafield Cooks’ brushstrokes and pencil points vanish to give us the sharp edge of the broken rocks the animated shadows of trees, the undulations of eroded hills, and the slicked feathers of the Healesville emu.
This exhibition is the result of a trip which took them from Sydney to Yass, Gundagai, Euroa, up the Murray into the Mallee and thence to Phillip Island and Melbourne. Only a few of the subjects they documented have made the long journey to finished paintings and drawings. Much more material has been put aside for later scrutiny. If Johnathan Delafield Cook’s intentions have differed in some particular way from his fathers, it is perhaps because he is drawn to the microcosm. ‘Much of the time he looked down at his feet while I was looking hard at places’ suggested William. While the latter was ‘stalking landscape features’ John was gathering ‘curiosities’ to be rendered, when he was back in London.
And is there a comparison to be made with photography? Yes and no. The painter is more patient than the camera, and can venture where the camera cannot — layering fugitive sensation upon observation, over months, perhaps years, and in this sense painting leaves the camera in its wake. The metal box does not make poetry.
Indeed photographic comparisons must defer to poetry. A Greek poet, Simonides of Keos, suggested: ‘poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry’. Leonardo, as one would expect, was in a position to enlarge on this notion but he went even further – to suggest that painting was the more noble art: ‘the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world’ and cites the immediacy of painting (the result if not the process): ‘painting puts down the identical reflections that the eyes receive as if they were real’.
The feathers of Jonathan’s drawn ostrich leave tiny needle-like shadows in the unconfirmed space of the picture plane while the down on its head seems shifted by a tiny breath of a breeze. The faint pink light emanating from a farmhouse by William is repeated, like a musical sequence, in the folds of the surrounding hills. The skull-like pattern of the eroded banks of a dam is reflected in its still brown waters and skeletal trees rise up like sentinels from prehistoric rock formations. Here surely, is a painting which Rachmaninoff, who composed the tone poem ‘The Isle of the Dead’ inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s equally celebrated painting of the same name, would delight in. Fine poetry indeed
Patricia Anderson 2006 |
