Behind closed eyes

When Scott offered me a show early last year, I had just started a new series of works called ‘Raindance’. At the same time, my father had sent me photographs he had taken of young people dancing within a maze of fountains - a water sculpture at the Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland.

While the inspiration for my paintings had been growing concern about our water, conservation and the future, my father had captured in his photographs a very similar image to the one in my imagination, although with entirely different content -- namely the simple celebration of young life, beauty and abundance.

His photographs slowly made their way into my work - my father was delighted, and promised to send me his whole ‘water collection’ for me to work with.

Unfortunately, my father passed away shortly after we had made our little pact to work together. Devastated, I left my art behind and traveled to Switzerland for a couple of months. I spent a lot of time in the attic of my family home, reading diaries and looking at old photographs, while listening to my father's compilation tapes.

Our whole family life and his extensive traveling is documented in images. Slides or photographs, colour or black and white. I remembered evenings watching my dad developing and enlarging pictures in the makeshift darkroom in our bathroom, photos pegged to a rope hanging above our heads over the bathtub. I remember my dad mounting photos of the Bolshoi Ballet which subsequently graced the walls of our apartment. White swan dancers in a sea of darkness, gentle and graceful.

Looking at these images again - like I would have done thousands of times over when I was little - I could see why as a painter I compose my paintings the way I do. Where my sense of aesthetic comes from, why I have to crop pictures the way I do, why I love close ups. Why I often omit the background, blur it, or simply wash it in a colour in harmony or contrast to the image in the foreground.

I flew back to Australia with a boxful of photographs - and many more in my head - and started work.

Gerhard Richter has said in an interview, that an artist can get rid of many things through painting. And in that sense I knew that my next body of work would do just that for me - offer me a very intense way of working through the sadness and loss, but also allowing me to relive and re-imagine the most beautiful times of my childhood.

I started with the painting 'Janet and George'. It is a collage of my parents standing side by side, my mother a little older than my father, with flowers in her hands. My father, in a gentlemanlike fashion, wears both their schoolbags slung over his shoulders, smiling in a slightly naughty way, whereas my mother is a little more serious, possibly because she has to wear a dress she doesn't like.

They had not met as children, but I often wondered (as I do with other people), if they had, would they have been friends?

‘This world is mine’ followed, a portrait of my mother with me sitting on her knees, watching a concert. Many of my memories come from sitting on my mother's lap, her arms resting around me - traveling, reading, drawing, listening.

The painting journey took me walking through green fields, gazing at the mountain outside my childhood bedroom window, looking up from under trees, hunting butterflies and ladybirds, walking through busy blurry Spanish holiday markets.

I know there will be more to come, and I am forever grateful for having my art to express what we all feel and see when we close our eyes.

Christine White

Melbourne

October 2007 

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