Paton - How to look at a painting

ALSO BY JUSTIN PATON

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Jeffrey Harris
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Life and Limb: Warren Viscoe
Jude Rae
Julia Morison: A Loop Around a Loop
De-Building

The art room

THE BEST THINGS always happened in the art room. Way up at the end of the hallway, with stencilled wallpaper and a plaster ceiling that set it apart from the rest of the house, it was one of those rooms that had been designed to be used only for company and had ended up being used hardly at all. The company always liked it better at the other end of the house, where the fire was going and the kitchen was handy.

By the time I was old enough to notice it, the room had turned into a kind of warehouse for all the objects no one could find a use for, but couldnt quite bring themselves to throw out. There were pottery gnomes, unused beach towels, a prickly sofa bed. There was a trunk that contained photos, internment camp diaries, and a World War I issue knuckleduster. There was a carpet square positioned to hide the chipboard patch that marked the spot where, thrillingly one summer, someone had stepped right through the borer-chewed floorboards. There was a china cabinet through whose windows you could see yellowing strata of the Auckland Weekly News , an ageing pottle of (remember this?) Slime with Worms, a bag of stringy Christmas tinsel, and a black tin box full of keys.

But what made the room were the paintings.

We called it the art room because paintings covered the walls from ceiling to floor. Somewhere in the midst of running a dairy farm, raising a family and coaxing a colossal flower garden into a yearly outburst of colour, my grandmother, Phyllis Paddy Nash, had taken up painting. A latecomer, starting in her sixties, she was untrained and, I guess, pretty close to being what those in the professional art world like to call an outsider or (awful phrase) innocent eye. Thats just a snooty way of saying she painted the things she liked, and did so for no grander reason than that she wanted to enjoy them all over again.

As a gardener, the things she liked most were flowers. The walls were a blooming barrage of hydrangeas, fuchsias, big floppy magnolia blossoms. The effect might have been oversweet, had she not had an equally strong taste for the gruesome, the lumpen and the all-out silly. Turnips and old sneakers received the same attention as jasmine and winter roses. One of her showpieces depicted a beaut big rat (her words) caught in a trap. And her rendition of a pair of holed-out underpants blowing on a clothes-line was reportedly the cause of frowning debate among the selectors at the local art society.

Between the dead rat, the underpants and the blazing hydrangeas, you could say that my grandmother had arts big themes covered. At the very least, those three paintings came close to encompassing her philosophy of life a mixture of southern-gothic humour, Irish fatalism and deep-dyed optimism. Things die, but theres laughter along the way, and regular blooms of beauty.

Did we tiptoe into the art room as kids, like miniature tourists crossing the threshold of a lofty museum? Far from it: most of the time we paid the paintings little attention. We had our own schemes and projects to be getting on with, and it would be a long time before painters started to outrank comic artists in my own childhood pantheon. But the room wouldnt have been the same without the paintings that we knew. Nailed with what-the-hell abandon into the good wallpaper, they charged the room with a tingle of possibility and permission that no other space in the house held.

It was as if, through some wonderful slip-up, the room had found itself without a purpose uninhabited, out of service, up for grabs. Here the rules that held sway elsewhere could be bent or ignored or monkeyed around with. You could build a blanket fort and leave it standing indefinitely. You could run a biro tattoo parlour without fear of interruption. You could up-end things, rearrange the furniture, dig down through the layers of family stuff. In sum, if you wanted invention, speed, foolishness, flights, falls, curiosity, wonder, arguments, misbehaviour and a general excess of joyous noise, the art room was the place to go.

It still is. Paddys paintings are now scattered among the relatives, and new owners occupy the house and the room. But if you ask me today what I do for a living, I might tell you that I work in an art room. Of course the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, where I clock in each morning, is not one room but dozens, and the paintings the gallery contains outstrip anything I encountered in the childhood art room. Yet what I love in the newer and larger art room feels like the same thing I loved in the earlier one: the sense of potential, the promise of change, and the prospect of looking through new eyes at the world you just left.

One of my favourite times to look at a painting is just before a shows about to open. When the hang has been refined (an inch to the left, to the right), the bubble wrap gathered in, the conservation tables rolled away, the labels pasted up, the floor swept, and the lighting tweaked, there is often an hour or so of downtime before the barriers are lifted away and the opening-night crowd begins to arrive. The lights have clicked off, as they do automatically when no one has entered the gallery for a while. You walk into the darkened space, the lights shiver back on, and the paintings seem to leap out from the walls. Even though Ive been staring at slides or photographs of these paintings for months, and paying them brief visits in studios and gloomy store rooms, this sighting often feels like the first true one. The kick of a colour, the audacity of a line, the jolting power of a detail, the simple fact of a paintings size all declare themselves with fresh intensity.

It never stops surprising me how much life there can be in these static, often centuries-old objects. With the richest paintings were never truly finished. Theyre always waiting for us, with new stories to tell and fresh perspectives to impart. Perhaps the best thing about time spent in the art room becomes apparent when you leave it, and find the world outside sharpened and heightened tilted a crucial degree off the axis of the ordinary.

In the big, rowdy house of images we all inhabit today, television, advertising and other mass media take up almost all the available space. Painting occupies a small quiet room at the far end. Despite being the oldest and noblest of the visual arts, its relevance to our broad banded, future-hungry, technology-obsessed century isnt exactly clear. Whats it for? Why is it still here? Hasnt it been rendered obsolete yet? Decommissioned? Downsized? Just as there was always a threat that the art room I knew as a kid might be commandeered for some dismally sensible purpose, there will always be someone around who wants to evict the painters and give their space to other, less troublesome tenants an IT company perhaps, or a human resources consultancy, or a franchise operation, or an office-full of brand managers. Call this book a tale in praise of the art room and its contents.

Do you have an art room? It might be the front room of a rural house, or a two-room dealer gallery up a flight of graffiti-webbed stairs, or a prefab garage in a suburban backyard, or a museum so large you measure your progress not in footsteps but in furlongs. In the end, it doesnt matter where the paintings hang. The art room that matters most exists in memory. This is where you hang the paintings that changed you. When ever new paintings come into view, they trigger romances and rearrangements. Many of the newcomers are sent into mental storage and never looked at again. A few go straight up on the walls and stay there, glowing with accumulated pleasure.

Looking at paintings, then, is not a matter of finding something to impress the guests, or match the curtains, or increase in value at 18 percent per annum; its a search for things worth hanging on the walls of your imagination.