BARNABY SMITH
Woodcuts
WINDOWSPACE - April 2019
WINDOWSPACE - April 2019
Spiritual Softdrive, Grey Blue Sky (1998), on Wenzhou mulberry paper, (detail)
In the wider West the spiritual polarities of dark and light pulsate in the luminosities and chasms of Mark Rothko’s “spiritual almost
tragic timeless emptiness”[i]. Closer to home the later work of Lloyd Rees initially appears evanescent
but hints at a dark underside, a yearning for release from the yoke of
conscious proficiencies and knowledge.
The bloom on the surface of Tim Maguire’s luscious fruits and flowers is
a moment away from decay. In the world of the shiny fast gleaming expendable, and the infinitely
duplicable digital, the quiet thunder of handmade polarities at work recalls an underside,
the cost of neglecting the 'heart of silence' (T S Eliot).
Barnaby Smith's sense of art practice as a “spiritual discipline” perhaps influenced
his intuitive decision to make print images.
In 1996 Smith went to Kyoto and was introduced to the Japanese woodblock
technique by Akira Kurosaki. In Japan he
had the opportunity to appreciate the wooden temples of Nara and Kyoto and
exhibited with the Second Annual Kyoto International Woodprint Association.
Grey Blue Grain, (1998), woodblock print on Wenzhou mulberry paper, (detail)
In his woodblock prints Smith brings together significant
knowledge and experience of the cultural poles of East and West. Through his study and appreciation of
Germanic culture and its graphic traditions locating image and text in printed
form, (Smith has a BA in History and German from University of Melbourne), he was influenced by the idea of printmaking as a vehicle for radical
millenarian notions, a counter to alienating materialism.
By the very nature of its practice, printmaking offers an exemplar of the inextricable link between the positive and
the negative, the light and the dark. Over time this 'play' may be described as a ‘genetic’
resonance. Smith sees
the woodblock as the archaic precursor of modern technologies for reproduction
and dissemination of images and expresses a fascination with how images ‘leave
traces through successive stages’.
Red Johanna VII, (2015), woodblock print on Gozen paper, 44.5 cm x 67.5 cm, Unique state
In
the Artist’s Statement for his Leichardt Street Gallery exhibition (1999) Smith
observed that in Chinese writing the characters are perceived as emanating from
the same essence as the ideas or things they represent. “All the forces and elements of nature and
consciousness (are) seen to issue forth from the same prime ground of being, to
which all would return in a continuum of emergence and dissolution, order and
chaos, growth and decay.”[ii] Woodblocks bearing these characters are
revered as repositories of spiritual knowledge.
This continuum informs Smith’s woodblock prints which he describes as
appearing like ancient documents “speaking a distant language on the verge of
recognition”.[iii]
The popular notion of the woodblock is of line and shape, clear
forces of image and colour. Barnaby
Smith’s work turns this notion on its head – his delicate mulberry kozo paper ‘banners’ are fusions rather
than forces. Unique rather than
editioned images arriving from what he describes as ‘ a dialogue with the
process’. His approach is one of an
“emptying out of the ego-bound self and attuning to the spiritual energies inherent
in the materials and processes.”
The living energy brought to life in the act of making and
viewing has its precursor in what Japanese woodblock master Munakata Shiko
defined as hirogari, the ‘cosmic
energy produced when the soul of the artist meets the soul of the block’.[iv] The undertaking of the printmaker is to work
from the finitude of a fixed surface to transfer that vision to another
surface, to create from definition an illusion.
The artist calls on an empathy - einfuehlung
– to effect this transition, to convey a sensation, which is in the end a
private, lone, ineffable awareness, a trembling in the face of life’s
fragility.
The spirit of wabi-sabi is here in the delicate
stained traces, of hand, of block, of the faint fusing of the two meeting at
the border of nothingness. From these
sensuous banners visions evolve and devolve, suggest mortality, loneliness,
hints of the human hand and the force of nature.
Smith's 'banners' are deliberately near life-size, enabling an envelopment of artist, and viewer, an absorption into
sensuous and perplexing existence, the restless natural process and the alchemy
of the light and the dark.
Despite the names one might reach for to contextualize
Smith’s work, to posit it as part of a linear development or graphic
‘continuum’, the subtlety of the work defies categorisation. His series, from which this WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC show is derived, are at once truly contemporary
in their visual acknowledgements and resonant
with thousands of years of graphic history, timeless.
From Bridgewater I (2018), woodblock print on Kurotani kozo paper, 27 cm x 39 cm, Unique state
Barnaby Smith lives and works in Hobart and shows at the Colville Gallery, Hobart.
AS
[i]
From the artist’s notes
[ii]
From the artist’s notes
[iii]
From the artist’s notes
[iv]
From the artist’s notes – Ref also Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 1994
