Stab a Painting With a Sculpture: James Drinkwater + Braddon Snape
-
-
Ultimately this IS how Australian art histories are made – they are an accretion and a release of influence and energy refracted through a given time and place. And here, now, told from Newcastle, this is a new art history, both brash and tender.
-
Lisa Slade
Exhibition on display at Gosford Regional Gallery
BRASH AND TENDER
Aesthetic chess – an art game once favoured by the Surrealists in their relentless quest to free the subconscious – is best played by two people. Between them are arranged the material and conceptual pieces of their practice and all of these are rooks, capable of moving anywhere, anyhow. The game is won, not by one, but by both players and victory comes with the formal resolution of a winning composition.
Played every Thursday, artists James Drinkwater and Braddon Snape initiated an expanded field of aesthetic chess around 18 months ago. This exhibition is its end game. As with chess, this occurs when the most moves have been made with the maximum pieces exchanged. The endgame requires skill and nerve, not all players reach it. It is motivated by the desire for disruption – a yearning to see something you haven’t seen before, to paraphrase Drinkwater. This yearning, and the subsequent witnessing of the other work, has altered each of their solo practices.
The game started politely, with each artist encircling the other, asking for permission. Snape the sculptor and Drinkwater the painter met in the middlegame of drawing with both making marks across a shared surface before more confidently testing the material limits of the game. For Drinkwater the game brought welcome restraint from his signature horror vacui, with surfaces ventilated by Snape’s sculptural elements and fields of pure colour. For Snape, chance was invited into the studio with his sculptural practice disturbed by messy, spontaneous gestures and extended into uncanny incursions in drawing and painting.
With time, each artist began to direct the other – mining the studio for materials and demanding each other to make a mark here, or use a sculpture this way or that (the Surrealists would approve). In the monumental diptych, Clyde Street, the artists conjure a portrait of the very place where their collaboration occurs. Its pewter pallor is reminiscent of the concrete walls and steel sheeting of the studios that are home for many of the city’s artists. Sculpture punctures the metallic ground, creating a porthole-shaped memory of Snape’s maritime influence. Another memory, this time tethered to Drinkwater, is a paint-splattered drop-cloth that hangs like a carcass in a Velázquez painting. Brash and tender are the words used by Drinkwater to describe the marks and the moves made by the duo throughout their game, played mostly in silence.
Looking at this body of work through the lens of Australian art histories, it is impossible to distinguish broader art historical inheritances – say the influence of Sid Nolan’s Ripolin paintings or the assemblages of the Annandale Imitation Realists – from the push and pull of Steel City. The bright enamel colours of warning – yellow and red – vie with hand drawn and monoprinted shapes that resemble both eyes and shells, with the latter code for the prized Cowrie Hole surfing spot. Snape cites his love of a panoramic John Firth-Smith and a poetic Akio Makigawa from the Newcastle Gallery collection, while for Drinkwater it is Mandy Martin’s sublime oblivion that he holds close. Ultimately this IS how Australian art histories are made – they are an accretion and a release of influence and energy refracted through a given time and place. And here, now, told from Newcastle, this is a new art history, both brash and tender.
Lisa Slade is the Hugh Ramsay Chair in Australian Art History in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Between 2015 and 2024 she was Assistant Director, Artistic Programs at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and prior to this she was Curatorial Consultant at Newcastle Art Gallery and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Newcastle.
-
-
Works
-
-
-
Artist
