Kevin Lincoln’s amazing still lifes in Ballarat retrospective

The introspective, meditative spirit of Kevin Lincoln’s painting is evident as soon as you enter his retrospective.

Mask and skull (2010) by Kevin Lincoln. Licensed by Viscopy

Still life is an introspective art, more solitary and turned in on its own world than any other kind of painting. The landscape painter is out in nature, exposed to its vagaries as well as its beauties; the portraitist is of necessity sociable and must achieve a kind of intimacy with the sitter; history painters and others who work on a large scale deal with models, studio assistants and patrons; but the still life painter spends days at a time alone in the studio with a few inanimate objects.

It is for this reason that still life is a mirror of human subjectivity, both in a personal and an impersonal or general sense. In the first case, still life can reflect the aesthetic sensibility of the artist, as for example in the case of Giorgio Morandi. The still-life paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, the greatest master of the genre, unite an intensely personal sensibility with an almost miraculous apprehension of the materiality of each of his subjects.

In the more general sense, still life mirrors human engagement with the world of objects. Landscape deals with our relationship with a reality that is non-objective and transcendent. The natural world takes us beyond ourselves, but objects bring us back to our sensory, appetitive and associative responses to things.

That is why so many classic Dutch still lifes of the 17th century represent food, often eliciting sensory memories in specific combinations — asking us to recall, for example, the tastes of salted fish, olives and white wine.

Sound, touch, smell and other sensations are also evoked in still life, and one of the two most popular subjects for complex still life compositions in the 17th century was the allegory of the five senses. The other was the memento mori, for everything to do with objects and appetites belongs ultimately to the world of illusion that is doomed to perish. The interest of still life as a genre lies in the way it can simultaneously express pleasure in the world of objects and our appetitive response to them, and reflect on the transience of such pleasure, thus creating a space for meditative detachment from desire.

The introspective, quiet and meditative spirit of Kevin Lincoln’s painting is immediately apparent when you enter his retrospective at Ballarat, and all the more so because you are obliged to pass through another exhibition, antithetical in sensibility, to get there. In Lincoln’s work, colours are low in tone and chroma, canvases are often large, but mainly to create a sense of space around quite small objects, and compositions are sparse and laconic.

The inspiration of Japanese art — of decorative screens and Zen-inspired ink painting — is immediately apparent, and yet all the elements of classic still life are present. There are vases and books, kitchen utensils, fruit and vegetables and even fish; and there are masks and skulls, too, recalling the memento mori tradition.

Lincoln cites his predecessors not only implicitly — one painting has three vases huddled together in a clear homage to Morandi — but explicitly as well, through drawings or prints included among the elements of the still life itself. Thus Braque makes an appearance in a 1994 triptych, Lucian Freud in a work from 1994, Morandi in a 2011 charcoal drawing and Giacometti in another drawing from the same year.

The posture of the Pierre Bonnard self-portrait at the Art Gallery of NSW is echoed in one of Lincoln’s self-portraits, while Japanese prints, an African tribal mask and various Chinese and Japanese bottles and tea-ceremony cups appear throughout the exhibition. The repetition of these motifs, often in different combinations, shows that, like Morandi’s bottles, they are familiar elements of the artist’s environment, not only regular painting props but talismanic aids in his painted meditations.

Their spatial treatment is significant too: more often than not Lincoln’s objects float, as we also find in some Zen paintings, in broad empty spaces, with no clear sense of resting on a horizontal surface. At other times they are lined up on a tabletop or shelf, but the horizontal surface is precisely at the implied eye-level of the painting, as for example in the triptych Mask and skull (2011) or the two little paintings of Japanese tea-ceremony cups.

The reason these two entirely different approaches to space are equally unsettling and in fact complementary in meaning is that they both ignore or negate the way we normally encounter things in space. We are made all the more conscious of this by discovering objects sketched from life with great care and an accurate sense of naturalistic space in the sketchbooks included in the exhibition. Thus a 4th-century Greek kylix is drawn as one would see it from above, in a museum display case. More subtly, two Japanese sake bottles are drawn as we would see them set on a tabletop in the studio. Here too we are looking down slightly, because our eye level is above the height of the tabletop: the bottles are thus seen in perspective, their open mouths forming an ellipse and their base curved.

In the paintings, objects may be seen from above or from the side, but in either case the sense of naturalistic space is disrupted. And the reason for this — although of course it is intuition, not reasoning, that leads to the aesthetic choice — is that naturalistic space, in establishing an intelligible relation of distance, position and angle of vision between the eye and the thing, also implicitly insists on the separation between subject and object. In Lincoln’s painted world, however, objects float in an indeterminate space of the subjective imagination.

That is not to say that they are necessarily vaguely painted: some forms are merely suggested, but others are articulated very clearly. Knives, for example, are painted with a vivid clarity that leaves no doubt as to their function, and yet somehow remain archetypal rather than succumbing to the temptation of superficial specificity.

Thanks to an unfailing sense of tact in this respect — for mass-produced objects seldom work in still-life paintings — Lincoln is able to paint everyday things, such as an espresso coffee pot, and turn them into painted forms with a wholly new pictorial interest. He is also able to create compelling quasi-narrative associations of objects, the simplest yet perhaps most striking of which is a picture of a fish and a knife.

The knife is indeed the most prominent motif with narrative connotations, although the corkscrew that appears only by itself in a small painting, with both its screw and its blade open, is quietly threatening. Readers of Lewis Carroll may recall Humpty Dumpty’s song from Through the Looking-Glass (1871), relating how he sent someone to wake the little fishes, and finally decided to do the job in person: “I took a corkscrew from the shelf: / I went to wake them up myself.”

The knife appears again in a still life with a pair of beetroot. Here, though, the painting is on three canvases — Knife triptych (2008) — and the quasi-narrative association of knife and vegetable is considerably complicated by the fact the blade crosses the division of two panels. Thus the motif of the knife serves to join two parts of the composition, while simultaneously reminding us of the cut between them, and even suffering the same kind of cut.

This strangely self-reflexive motif had appeared the year before in a larger composition, Artist’s Kitchen (2007). Clearly, an analogy with the artistic process is implied: the knife is the artist’s instrument in his kitchen, just as the brush is in his studio. But while the relation to things implied by the knife is one of use and consumption, that of the brush is disinterested and meditative; perhaps this is why the knife is symbolically broken when the painter puts it down to take up his brush instead.

The exhibition includes a series of very quiet and minimal abstractions and another series of fine but elusive self-portraits, in which the artist seems to be trying to capture a sideways glance or shadow of his features, rather than studying them in a methodical way. It is as though he is trying to seize some intuition of himself as subject without allowing that fleeting impression to be submerged in the materiality of his objective form.

But the most impressive among the other categories of pictures is precisely the one that is almost the antithesis of still life: a landscape. One may be surprised to find the painter of such remarkable still lifes also attracted to this very different genre, but in fact he brings a similar sensibility to this vision of a world beyond the introspective domain of the studio.

As with the still life motifs, there are some very fine drawings from observation, such as the study of a sunken boat in The Otago at high tide (2007). Even here, though, and even more conspicuously in the beautiful Small jetty, Recherche Bay (2012), we can see the artist simplifying the data of perception to focus on the essential: here the fragile structure of the pier reaching out into the water.

The process can be observed in two stages in the juxtaposition of study and finished composition: Distant view of Bruny (2014) is a combination of watercolour and charcoal, already simplifying the view, yet still ensuring that geometry, proportions and the characteristic shapes of the trees are all carefully ascertained. In The Channel (2015), Lincoln turns this study into a finished painting: and here, armed with the knowledge gained in the study, he is able to reduce form and to concentrate on the sense of life and movement.

This kind of reduction calls, once again, for great tact, for it cannot be gratuitous; it must be based, rather, on the condensation of deep experience, like the haiku poems printed beside these landscapes in the beautifully produced catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. And this is what lends authority and a poignant sense of longing for the infinite to a picture such as Mystery Bay (2013), in which the painter gazes out into a beyond that is the antithesis, but perhaps also the complement, of the mirrored world of still life.

Kevin Lincoln: The Eye’s Mind

Art Gallery of Ballarat, to June 19