Essence of sensibility
Works by Wendy Sharpe and Peter Kingston display equally distinctive, if very different, aesthetic personalities.
The language of criticism is necessarily inexact when compared to the language of science, but for that reason it is also more subtle and more flexible; that is why academic terminology, in its attempt to emulate the conceptual precision of science, so often ends up producing ungainly and obfuscating jargon instead of lucid prose.
The same is true of philosophy, in which all abstract terms were originally figurative extensions of literal meanings; thus the word matter itself comes from the Latin materia, which originally meant wood or timber, and was given its philosophical sense by Cicero, imitating the Greek hyle that had already undergone the same extension. Philosophical language too, especially in the academic setting, can become sclerotic and ineffectual in its illusory quest for quasi-scientific precision.
The problem is in looking for the wrong kind of precision, inappropriate to the subject under consideration. Discrimination and tact are however essential if we are to make proper use of critical terms such as sensibility in a way that is enlightening rather than vague or even misleading. But such discrimination remains a matter of constant attention and sensitivity to meaning, and cannot be reduced to a system or grid of labels to be mechanically applied.
Sensibility is one of the concepts with which we can characterise the work of an artist of any kind – painter, writer, composer. It describes what we might think of as their aesthetic personality, which can be quite different from their everyday personality, just as we know that the author is a literary role and is not the same as the real-world human behind that persona. A cheerful individual can be a severe author or an austere painter.
But sensibility is not the same as vision either. For example, we might consider Jeffrey Smart’s vision of the world as ultimately rather bleak, although his sensibility is serene and detached; the work itself, in which an impersonal world is resolved into harmonious geometric form, is an expression of his synthesis of vision and sensibility. Rick Amor’s paintings, too, present a dystopian vision of the world, but it is a different kind of dystopia, with themes of antiquity, monstrous scale and decay that do not appear in Smart’s world – and at the same time his sensibility is very different, tragic and elegiac rather than detached.
There are endless examples in other fields; we can think of the sensibility of Mozart or Schubert; of the melancholy Keats and the irrepressible Byron. In painting, again, there is the difference between Gericault and Delacroix. Gericault’s darker and more tragic sensibility was expressed among other things in his preference for tonal realism and was matched by the grim vision of the Raft of the Medusa. Delacroix’s energetic forms and embrace of the colourism of Titian and Rubens express an exuberant sensibility that is evident from his early Barque of Dante (1822) to the late Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1856-61).
In his Death of Sardanapalus (1827), in fact, the ostensibly tragic subject of the suicide of the Assyrian king accompanied by the butchering of all his favourite horses, concubines and eunuchs – inspired by Byron’s verse play published in 1821 – is transformed into an intoxicated romantic fantasy of sex and death. And it is no surprise that Wendy Sharpe painted a copy of this famous picture for her own living room, for her work too is characterised by a similarly exuberant sensibility.
Her exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, Spellbound, is not, as one might expect, a mid-career survey, because the gallery hasn’t mounted a substantial exhibition of contemporary or historical Australian art for several years (the last important ones were John Peter Russell in 2018 and Arthur Streeton in 2020-21). This appears to be the artist’s own work, and there is a display case full of her sketches planning for the show and its layout.
The exhibition includes a live space where Sharpe is painting a mural, surrounded by much of the paraphernalia of her studio, while the public can watch; the artist regularly stops to address the crowd and explain her process. The main space adjacent is almost entirely filled with paintings, densely packed together, the energy and dynamism of each single work combining into an overwhelming impression of movement and emotional drama.
One short wall on the left as you enter is covered with a collection of tiny paintings that Sharpe has made for the little antique frames that she picks up in flea markets in Paris. These are intriguing objects, not just because of their decorative form but also because of the mystery of the lost images they once contained.
Such frames are typically used to display and preserve images of parents, children or newlyweds; Sharpe responds to the poignant absence of the original image by inventing new ones – not necessarily a plausible version of the lost picture but often obliquely relevant images, poignant or erotic.
The longer walls are filled with large compositions occasionally punctuated by smaller ones; the individual titles are listed beside each sequence, but the hanging encourages the response the artist invites in an introductory wall-panel: essentially to interpret the individual scenes freely and connect them into loose imaginary narratives. This is possible, of course, because Sharpe is a figurative painter with great facility and fluency, who almost effortlessly seems to conjure up vivid images, poised between narrative and allegory.
They are often female nudes, and frequently self-portraits, which have been at the core of her art since the beginning. We see the artist at work, painting or hanging her pictures. Around her revolves a cast of lovers and models, some of whom are allegorically transformed into the figures of the three Fates. Dark themes are more common than in earlier years, intimations of death and mortality; the vision appears graver, but the sensibility is as exuberant as ever.
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Peter Kingston (1943-2022) was equally distinctive, but very different in his artistic sensibility, elegiac and nostalgic rather than exuberant. I discussed Kingston’s retrospective at the SH Ervin Gallery at the beginning of 2020, when it had to be postponed because of the onset of the Covid pandemic and when it seemed that Kingston, who was very ill with lung cancer, was unlikely to live much longer. In the event he recovered from that crisis and continued to work for another 2½ years.
Kingston was best known, especially in later years, for his paintings and prints of Sydney Harbour, Sydney Opera House, Luna Park and perhaps especially of ferries crossing the harbour, which he transformed into mysterious and poetic images evoking the fragility of life, the vastness of nature and the passing of all things. These were all subjects he observed by day and by night from his home in Lavender Bay, close to Brett Whiteley’s house.
A small but well-curated and attractively displayed exhibition at the State Library, in the same works on paper gallery recently occupied by the Charles Rodius show, is mainly devoted to Kingston’s artist books, many of which deal with similar themes. Thus Sydney Deckie (2018) is about life on the ferries, and The Ropethrower (2022) is an unusual concertina book composed on linocuts, devoted to the men who throw the cable on to the bollards as a ferry comes in to the wharf.
The artist’s book is a particular medium, best suited to those who, like Kingston, express themselves naturally in works on paper and prints. Unlike even the finest conventional art publications, they are not distinguished primarily by high production values and professional design but rather by their handmade qualities; working with Nicholas Pounder helped Kingston to achieve a balance between authenticity and fine craftsmanship.
Unlike conventional publications too, the print run of artist’s books is usually very small. In the case of The Ropethrower, it was only four copies, of which the State Library holds three. Mackerel Beach, a winter’s tale, produced with Pounder in 2014, was issued in 26 copies, lettered from A to Z. Each book consisted of 40 folded loose pages, including 20 original coloured linocuts as well as text and printed illustrations; the whole was presented in a handmade wooden box with a printed illustration pasted on top.
Each of these books, like Kingston’s printed works, drawings and paintings, as already suggested, is marked by recurrent themes and a distinctive melancholy sensibility; Kingston was especially a poet of Sydney and its harbour, and a lover of things too casually swept aside in the rush for progress; he campaigned for the preservation of sites such as May Gibbs’s home, Nutcote, in Neutral Bay and, with his friend Martin Sharp, of Luna Park; he celebrated the beauty of old and patinated things, and he was an acute observer of telling details and incidents in the everyday world.
Not far from the Kingston exhibition, as it happens, the library also has a display of the sketchbooks covering the years 1985-2016, given last year by artist Michael Kelly, under the title Drawn from life. They are a valuable record of an artist’s career and development, from life studies to sketches of figures in the street and little vignettes of colour studies for views.
Most striking are the larger watercolours of landscapes and cityscapes, including a colour sketch of the view from Observatory Hill (2004), another of the Supreme Court at Taylor Square at night (2012), and a monochrome nocturne of the City from Kings Cross (2009). It is particularly interesting when images are accompanied by annotations evoking the circumstances in which they were made; these are especially detailed in a sketchbook from 1999, when Kelly was living in a cottage at Dunmoochin, the property that originally belonged to painter Clifton Pugh and became, after his death in 1990, a foundation offering residencies to artists. The extensive annotations and reflections in this volume make it as much a diary as a sketchbook, a document of the artist’s career but also of the culture of its time.
Quite close again to the Kelly display is a recently acquired painting of modest aesthetic but considerable historical interest: it is a view from Hyde Park painted around 1872 by an unknown artist. Men, women and children are shown walking in the southwest corner of the park, towards the junction of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets, but the really remarkable thing is the way that the new buildings of the University of Sydney, that is the East Wing of the Quadrangle, built by Edmund Blacket between 1855 and 1862, dominates the view to the west, haloed by the setting sun; it is hard today, when the park is enclosed by so many much taller structures, to imagine that the city of Sydney was once overlooked by an institution of culture and learning.
Wendy Sharpe: Spellbound
Art Gallery of NSW to August 11
Peter Kingston
State Library of NSW to May 18 next year
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