Art Collective WA Jeremy Kirwan-Ward monograph

jeremy Kirwan-Ward You Can See it From Here

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Jeremy Kirwan-Ward. Portrait by Simon Cowling 2017

First published in 2017 by Art Collective WA Perth, Western Australia artcollectivewa.com.au ISBN 978-0-9942842-1-1 Keywords Jeremy Kirwan-Ward, Non-objective Art, Western Australian Art Authors John Barrett-Lennard, Margaret Moore, Lucy Kirwan-Ward Book Design Isabel Krßger izzi.com.au Principal Photography and Image Management Simon Cowling Image Scanning Fitzgerald Photo Labs Production Scott Print Copy Editors Carola Akindele-Obe (The Write Business) and Loretta Martella Copyright Š Art Collective WA, Jeremy Kirwan-Ward and the Authors Cover Jeremy Kirwan-Ward, Forecast 5: Flora Terrace 2013, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 101 x 122cm. Collection of Peter and Debbie Schwann.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All artwork remains the copyright of the artists or appropriate authorities.

The publisher wishes to advise that every attempt has been made to contact the owners of copyright. Any further information relating to the images appearing in this publication would be welcome.

Jeremy Kirwan-ward You Can See It From Here

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Taking Time to Look Margaret Moore

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On Edge: Jeremy Kirwan-Ward’s Painting and the West John Barrett-Lennard

44 52 62 80 118

Selected Works 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s

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A History Lucy Kirwan-Ward

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Curriculum Vitae

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List of Works

172 Acknowledgements

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There are plenty of painters who paint things.

I like to paint things you can’t see.

Jeremy Kirwan-Ward

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Taking Time to Look

Margaret Moore

I am struck by the affirmative aggregation in Jeremy Kirwan-Ward’s five decades of practice. It is a career not seamless, of course, but there are no real fissures.

Stylistic or material variations surface along the way, though rarely are there deviations from a fundamental commitment to non-objective painting. His is an evolution commensurate with practice, in the true sense of that word, along with an insatiable curiosity in pictorial construction. To plumb that aggregation, I mesh, rather than chronicle, conversations, observations and commentary traversing his work.

Kirwan-Ward is generous with circumstantial information around his works, yet economic with explanations of the works. It is a communicative style that has held him in good stead, in not over-narrating his art and in asserting its non-objectiveness. Circumstantial information does, however, unlock certain imperatives and insights into the value and acuity of external stimuli and ideas that inform his work. Sitting in his studio is a rewarding departure point.

Studio

Jeremy Kirwan-Ward and Helen Smith’s Fremantle Studio

In 1987, upon receiving a coveted State Government Creative Development Fund Fellowship of $25,000, Kirwan-Ward was in the press lamenting the loss of a studio space and describing the tedium of locating a new one. It was a pre social media call out. Although the uncertainty of space in which to work is a common concern for artists, to visit the studio that Kirwan-Ward purchased in 2000, some 13 years later, is to comprehend how key a space can be to a settled practice.

In a limestone complex of units in the light industrial fringe of South Fremantle, Kirwan-Ward has created an organised haven and much can be gleaned within its walls. Taking up ownership at age 50 appears to coincide with the dawning or the consolidation of flourishing periods of confident and exploratory painting. In 2000, Kirwan-Ward also left teaching to dedicate himself as a full-time artist.

In the studio, a library of music and books is housed for regular use, upper level shelving holds paraphernalia including a rolled-up tent devised for paint atomisation, the inventive tilting table used for multi-directional pouring is tucked in a corner niche, and another corner given over to a slatted structure for safe storage and accessibility to former work. A desk and a light table abut and the utilitarian comforts of kitchen, bathroom and space for a sofa, domesticate it. Year-round occupation is ensured with a wood stack and fire heater for warmth, and the lush vine that grows on the façade serves as an

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1

Stringer, J PAINT!, catalogue essay, PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts), 2000.

2

Interview with the artist, 3 January 2017.

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Stringer, J Constructions and Prints, catalogue essay, Commission No. 3, Mark Howlett Foundation, 1996.

environmental cooling system, as well as an aesthetic enhancement. Most significant though is the dominant, clean area of floor space and white walls allowed for focussed work; providing sufficient viewing depth for systematic checking and assessment by the artist, stepping well back or more particularly sitting back to reflect throughout the painting process. Taking time to look is the fulcrum of Kirwan-Ward’s vision.

It is apparent the studio is the hearth of creativity and its dedicated spatial organisation echoes the ordered structural armature he adopts for picture making. It is also noteworthy that in spite of a predilection for sources in the natural world, in phenomena and the urban fabric, Kirwan-Ward is a studio painter. His characteristic alchemy of colour and surface that ferments on canvas and that so often result in allusions to unfathomable expansiveness, all come to fruition in a moderately scaled, though purposely-defined, interior.

Large works are managed in the space, painted panel by panel. This is also a strategy to intentionally section and stutter works, rather than a consequence of space limitations. Kirwan-Ward has articulated his interest in avoidance of one focal point in picture planes and working in segments is one means to this.

Employing segmentation has also likened him to the practice of minimalists: He exploits a structural system similar to those pioneered by minimal artists who found it easier to perfect their designs by composing works of separate canvases that could be tackled individually and subsequently bolted together.1

Colour

Kirwan-Ward’s fearless and, arguably, peerless use of colour in a local context is a discernible legacy of formative training with British-born artist, teacher and acknowledged mentor, George Haynes. Kirwan-Ward remains effusive about the impact of Haynes upon his career, especially with regard to an associative, inclusive style between teacher and students during the James Street Technical College days and later at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT, now known as Curtin University). They have since remained friends and colleague artists.

Kirwan-Ward’s work charts startling chromatic breadth, almost as though there is no colour relationship he would be unwilling to test or exploit. By his own admission, he has become cheeky with mixing colours.2 High key colour hues, mixed and unmixed pigment, diluted or opaque surfaces run through his career. Fields of colliding colour are countered with monochromes. Where colour serves a depictive purpose for Haynes, colour for Kirwan-Ward becomes matter and sensation.

In 1996, curator John Stringer saw the artist’s application of colour as the feature distinguishing him from a number of other geometric abstractionists working in Perth. He makes a conceptual connection to artists such as Karl Wiebke, Trevor Richards, Alex Spremberg, Andrew Leslie, Jurek Wybraniec and Howard Taylor, and states: Distinguishing him from these artists though is the artist’s profound love of decorative qualities and this above all is expressed in his attitude towards enriched colour.3 Other art school compatriots under Haynes’ tutelage, such as Giles Hohnen, Eveline Kotai and Carol Rudyard, also demonstrate a fine colour sense.

Active abstractionist painters today, beyond those cited by John Stringer, such as Brian Blanchflower, Lisa Wolfgramm, Cathy Blanchflower, Penny Coss and Michele Theunissen, also convey a flare and sensitivity for colour, although noone seems to extend the palette as expansively as Kirwan-Ward.

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Kirwan-Ward’s use of colour seems to vacillate between a form of geometric lyricism and a more effulgent form of romanticism …

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Stringer, J 2000, H2O A Miscellany of Works from The Kerry Stokes Collection, Australian Capital Equity Perth, p.87.

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Mason, M 1988, exhibition review, The West Australian, 11 August, p.50.

Paintings produced when the artist was just 21 and 29 respectively set the tone for colour as instrument. Throughout his career, Kirwan-Ward’s use of colour seems to vacillate between a form of geometric lyricism and a more effulgent romanticism, and this is typified in Run Red Run 1970, and in Surface to Air 1976. Each work relies on division of the picture plane, such as square within square or in striated bands, but it is the application of colour that enlivens the surfaces, lending dynamism and drama.

In 2000, some 30 years after the completion of Run Red Run, John Stringer also captured the essence and the importance of colour application in the realisation of that work: At first glance the painting seems to be bi-chromatic, but closer inspection reveals that it is infinitely more complex – achieving its particular intensity not just from the polarised clash of cobalt and orange but also by the alternation of transparent and opaque pigment. Additional touches in aquatic blue-green, yellow lavender and khaki bring a vibrant intensity that borders on the psychedelic.4 From a similar time, Repeat Performance 1971, is graphically bolder and more reductive in its curlicue lines of pink, watermelon and blue. In the context of subsequent preoccupations, it is hard not to perceive this work as foaming edges of the sea, yet it is sufficiently dynamic as an abstract study of colour and form to hold its own without reference or illusion.

Surface to Air has all the hallmarks that would find future force in its foreboding use of strong red, blues and gold storming up and across the surface, anchored or split by the horizontal bands. This work is imbued with a romanticist flurry of swirling energy and seeming painterly reduction of natural atmospherics – perhaps fire, water, light.

Beyond the heady colour contrasts of the 1970s and 1980s, hues might have tempered, yet over and over it is the particularity and peculiarity of gradations and tones achieved by Kirwan-Ward that continue to surprise and entice.

Language

Reviews of the artist’s work invariably engender some poetics; such is the desire to either parallel or decode his painterly orchestrations. An early example in 1988 is an effusive response by critic Murray Mason: It is all a memorable experience with interplays between form and distance, colour and shape, movement and continuity and the omnipresent constancy of radiance. The pictures and their memories glow, and glow and glow.5

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above Run Red Run 1970, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 174 Ă— 187cm.

Kerry Stokes Collection

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Kirwan-Ward’s ability to conjure and emulate atmospherics in paint and colour has induced metaphorical climatic associations.

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Zampatti, L 2004, ‘Coup for KirwanWard’, Post Newspapers, 5 June, p.44.

See also Moore, M ‘Jeremy KirwanWard’ in Jeremy Kirwan-Ward Paintings, exhibition catalogue, Perth Galleries, 2001.

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Banks, R 1993, ‘Artist means his work to question’, The West Australian, 16 June, p.4 ‘Today’.

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DiCiero, L 2011, ‘Kirwan-Ward shows how – 40 years on’, The West Australian, 15 June, p.7 ‘Today’.

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Banks, R 1993, ibid.

Bromfield, D 2001, ‘Sights to Make You Soar’, The West Australian, 10 February, p.6 ‘The Big Weekend’.

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Blond, S 2004, exhibition review, The West Australian, 5 June, p.10 ‘Weekend Extra’.

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Palmer, S 2002, exhibition review, The West Australian, 24 August, p.94.

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Snell, T 1985, exhibition review, The Western Mail, 17 August, p.48.

opposite Surface to Air 1976, synthetic polymer paint on canvas,151.5 × 126.6cm. Bankwest Art Collection, Perth

Others also grapple with the coexistence of abstraction and representation, acknowledging the primacy and virtuosity of matter, yet seeking source or appearance.

It is unsurprising that certain paintings teeter on the edges of recognition, such is the associative nature of Kirwan-Ward’s vision. The artist himself has always been forthcoming about his fascinations with light, the fleeting meniscus of water and phenomena.6 Yet he has been equally clear on his intentions in making art not reproduction. In a 1993 interview, at age 44, he stated: All paintings are descriptions of space – and I like to make that space as ambiguous as possible.7 Two decades later, he elaborated: My work has always been about the phenomena of the natural world but I don’t have any desire to try to reproduce literally. In my opinion, paintings should be mysterious and be questions, not answers. They should be something you look at continuously and have some sort of dialogue with. I’m not a ‘thing’ painter. There are plenty of people who paint things.

I like to paint things you can’t see.8 This has prompted assessments that conform to this. Ron Banks summated: Motivation for his cool, cerebral works comes from the inner eye, not the physical landscape.9 In a 2001 review David Bromfield clarified: Even so this is not photorealism, the painter works with pigment and space to evoke an expansion of vision that parallels but does not imitate the ocean.10 It has perplexed other commentators who might subscribe to abstraction and representation as polarised, and lead to less sympathetic analysis.

Critic Simon Blond dismissively locates an allusion as too literal: With this series, however, the flat variations in tone have sprung into a three-dimensional representation of undulating silk. This cross over from abstraction to representation seems to me to be a mistake. It destroys the ambiguity that is central to the power of most of Kirwan-Ward’s work.11 Kirwan-Ward’s ability to conjure and emulate atmospherics in paint and colour has induced metaphorical climatic associations. Of the Padanginspired works in 2002 Sandra Palmer describes heaviness in the air and water of contentment.12 As early as 1985, Ted Snell ascribed to paintings an immediate sensation of damp and cold.13 His work has been compared to that of mid-twentieth century abstract expressionism and colour field artists of the New York School, especially in evocations of the transcendental and meditative. This corresponds with

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Kirwan-Ward’s desire for creating sites of ‘continuous meditation’. Curator Anna Gray in an essay for Swingtime: East Coast West Coast, an exhibition exploring works dating from 1960s and 1970s in the University of Western Australia’s Collection, situated Kirwan-Ward in the realm of the transcendental.

The poured and stained saturations and flows of works produced decades later, such as Sweetwater Bay: Zephryr 2001, Large Green Swell 2004 and Torrent 2014, are redolent of the fluid gestures of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, to whom the artist referred. Apparent also is something of the momentum and enveloping capacity of Morris Louis, and in others the interiority of Helen Frankenthaler. Yet, most certainly, they are exercises of the artist himself continuously experimenting and intensifying his own trajectory.

Wanderlust

Although not necessarily perceptible, travel has impacted Kirwan-Ward’s work.

Time spent out in the world; looking and returning to the studio, has been, and continues to be, a life-blood. Even more so in the past decade, with his partner and fellow artist Helen Smith, he has been able to reach far and wide to the museums of the world and follow major contemporary art biennales and projects. The couple have made it a purpose to spend considerable time away, being open to and enriched by the shared experience. Most of the time is spent looking, as art travellers, but a residency in Brooklyn, USA, and connections in Basel, Switzerland, for example, have enabled working time too.

Anecdotes of periodic geographical and cultural immersions dot the artist’s life journey. Interestingly, Kirwan-Ward first applied successfully for a residency, aged 30, in 1989, to the Kanoria Centre for the Arts, in Ahmedabad, India, where he spent six months with his artist wife, Megan Kirwan-Ward, and their three young children.

A circumstantial opportunity to join the French documentary filmmaker, Claude Massot – on a reconnaissance trip to inland Australia – was indelible and took in places such as Kalgoorlie, Broken Hill, Coober Pedy and Alice Springs.

Likewise, a sailing trip from Western Australia to Indonesia, time staying in Padang, Sumatra in 1999, and closer to home experiencing the 360-degree horizon from the Abrolhos Islands.

Aside from structured trips, Kirwan-Ward finds impetus in the incidental. He describes, for example, how in the late 1980s, when driving home to Fremantle from teaching at Edith Cowan University in Joondalup, he would observe the treeless rhythm of rooftops in the newly developed suburbs; or be mesmerised by the effect of a red neon light across the waters while sitting by Circular Quay in Sydney. These became approximated triggers for On the Edge 1990, and the Surface Writing: CQ works, painted first in 2003 and later in 2015.

Perhaps most consequentially, Kirwan-Ward attributes the experience of seeing the pyramids in Egypt as a turning point that returned him to the course of art in the early 1970s, having spent three years roaming in doubt after an unprecedented period of success in his early 20s.

Wisdom

Reviewers and observers have periodically posited the maturing of process, the benefits of endeavour and the acknowledgement of persistence as ‘paying off’ in terms of their sense of satisfaction with the artist’s work, or the promise of greater outcomes. Curiously, such remarks begin quite early and continue, with regular claims of surety.

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above from top Courtyard I 1991, pastel on paper, 48 Ă— 75cm.

Private Collection

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Light in the Costine 1985, pastel on paper, 55 Ă— 76cm. Collection of Simon and Georgie Cowling

above The Age of Heroes 1988, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 162 Ă— 232.5cm. Collection of Megan Kirwan-Ward

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14

Cook, R 1998, exhibition review, The West Australian, 2 April, p.6 ‘Today’.

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Jackson, J 1987, Fremantle Arts Review.

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Spencer, R 2007, ‘Masters and Apprentices’, The West Australian, 26 May, p.13 ‘Weekend Extra’.

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Bromfield, D ibid.

In 1998 curator Robert Cook was unequivocal about the worth of time and industry on the artist’s output and his ‘mastery of acrylic paint’: Kirwan-Ward’s practised virtuosity shows just what can be achieved when one has the dedication to focus for an extended period on the particular medium and set of aesthetic concerns.14 In an interview at age 38, Kirwan-Ward remarked: I’ve been happy with my work since the end of last year. It has taken a slightly different direction, a bit more formalised, a bit more shape oriented and more figuration. And I feel it is going to run … I’m never aware of having an aim for the future of my work. It just keeps building on itself. I’m prepared to go along with that now. I trust that feeling. I’m not nervous of the fact anymore that it might not happen.15 Abstractionist parameters were set almost from the outset, and ensuing major developments can be traced to periods when ambition correlates with available resources, with increased scale being the prevailing beneficiary and dominant variance. Aside from the faltering start, after success proved oddly discomforting, his aspiration was unwavering. There is an enduring, palpable energy arcing through his catalogue of works, and also evidence of adaptation; to make art in some form whenever circumstances were challenging. The ebb and flow of life lived seeps and surges as surely as applied industry and perspicacity.

It is true that excavating the properties of acrylic paint seems to be more joy than burden. Ric Spencer captured the attraction in a 2007 review: ‘Into Four’ reminded me why paint can be so intoxicating to artists.16 Paradoxically, after almost 50 years, this lineage, the accretion of skill and a healthy exhibitions index, might suggest an ease, yet this is a deception that denies the authenticity of rigour underpinning his pursuit.

Kirwan-Ward offers a collective body of painting that is assured, seductive and ambient, stemming from an instinctive, sensory method that subverts a more calculable, conceptual strategy. David Bromfield perceptively compared his modus and mastery to musicianship equivalents: Work like this was sometimes described as process art but this implies a dry logical attitude that is belied by the joy and delight on display at PICA. I prefer to think of his kind of painting as improvisation, in a jazz sense. Only a consummate musician, or artist, can do it well enough to thrill.17 Predominant across Kirwan-Ward’s work, from pastel to acrylic and into the brief excursion to three-dimensional constructions, is a purifying process

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