The streets around where I live on the Central Coast of New South Wales are full of examples of one of Australia’s greatest folk art traditions: hand-made signs. They are placed on fences and trees to attract the attention of passing motorists. One old favourite is LEARN ROCK AND ROLL – the words stacked up, one above the other, with a phone number at the bottom.
A new addition and an instant classic is PLS NO MACCAs, lent against a tree at a local lookout in the hope of deterring parkers from tossing McDonald’s wrappers into the bush. These signs instantly come to mind when looking at the career survey of Robert Macpherson’s work, The Painter’s Reach, at the Gallery of Modern Art (Goma) in Brisbane.
A self-taught artist who worked at various times as a ship’s painter, a cleaner and an antiques trader, MacPherson, now 78, has been exhibiting since the mid-70s. His earliest official works are stringently conceptual, exploring the possibilities of painting reduced down to its essential elements: the brush stroke, the canvas, the gesture.
Scale of The Tool is a series of thin vertical canvases the width of a wide brush on to which MacPherson applied paint in single strokes. The result looks calligraphic but it’s also conceptual: the painting looks this way because that’s what a brush and paint can do when used within strict limitations.
The first rooms of Goma’s large exhibition are dedicated to MacPherson’s more orthodox conceptual works: typed sheets of paper with didactic descriptions of what it is you’re looking at (or not looking at), thin ribbons of colour on thin canvases, large paintings that are all grey or all white. While the processes are fascinating to a certain degree, they do eventually become a bit boring. There has to be more.
Happily, MacPherson moved on to what feels like a more intuitive approach over the next couple of decades, mixing and matching concepts, approaches and even identities over the course of his career. His best known paintings are works that use the vernacular visual language and iconography of fruit shops, takeaways and garden supply businesses, creating a kind of painting that is partly landscape, but are also an Australian Dadaist poetry.
Mayfair: Xmas (Wildfire red) for Mrs Pretty looks like part of a placard for red cherries while Mayfair: Bethonga Gold for B.T.O?s is a three panel work that features abstracted pineapples and the declamatory statement THERES NO ROUGH ENDS TO OUR PINE APPLES NEW BETHONGA GOLD. The apotheosis of this kind of work is the gargantuan Chitters: A Wheelbarrow for Richard, 156 Paintings, 156 Signs, a series of black-on-white texts installed in Goma’s lofty atrium, a gigantic wall of words that stretches up to heaven.
For reasons that remain unclear, MacPherson decided it would be a good idea to have an alternate artistic identity – and so Robert Pene was born. Sharing a birthday with MacPherson, but eternally 10- or maybe 14-years-old, Pene has dated all his works 14 February 1947. A modest series of landscape drawings credited to Pene called White Drummer: 15 Frog Poems (Mamaragan) For D.P. appeared in 1990, to be followed by a much larger project: a mammoth series of 2,400 drawings of imaginary “boss drovers”, the heads of sometimes imaginary, sometimes real outback drovers.
With atypically ornate MacPherson style, 1000 Frog Poems: 1000 Boss Drovers (Yellow Leaf Falling) for H.S is installed in Goma’s centre gallery. The outlines of faces, bush hats and occasional collage elements morphs into something like a map or an abstract mosaic, an overwhelming project that is as baffling as it is huge.
There are many more examples of MacPherson’s various projects over the years in The Painter’s Reach – works using wool blankets and text, found sculptures, the camp bed installations and the latest pieces, a return to his 1970s conceptual roots. The connecting threads in all this are the artist’s recurring fascinations and interests, primarily an obsession with food, the appearance of things and the way we understand language and its connection to the visual.
What it all might mean is something else again. At the opening of the show, curator Ingrid Perez offered a detailed explanation of the works and their many of connections and references but after a while it all began to blur together into a mysterious cloud. The impression is that MacPherson is his own man, an artist interested in his own ideas and readings, and the rest is up to you to work out. And that’s not a bad place to be.
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Robert Macpherson’s The Painter’s Reach is at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane until 18 October
