Essays, articles and special focus items, either written by me or about my work written by someone else.

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Stephen Hall – AGES – Survey Exhibition

Grace Crossington Smith Gallery Sydney – June to July 2022

I first encountered a work by Stephen Hall downstairs at Coventry Gallery in Paddington in the early 1980’s, 1983,  I think.

The apprehension of the work, a nude full body self-portrait, induced a nervous response in me as if bolts of electricity were racing through my nerves in a kind of mirror image of the portrait with its limbs twisted like the subject’s face in a contusion, extrusion of existential self-realisation in a hostile world.

I was shocked and delighted by the work in much the same way as I was when I first encountered a self-portrait by the German expressionist Egon Schiele in 1977 at the AGNSW. It seemed obvious to me that Hall’s self-portrait was influenced by Schiele.

The work had a heroic intensity and intention but, I was puzzled, hadn’t the artist as hero been proclaimed dead in the 1970s? Perhaps this was a statement of defiance, a kind of self-immolation under the critical gaze of feminism’s critique of male ambitions to conquer and reign supreme.

20 years later in the final third of the first decade of the 2000’s I once again encountered artwork by Hall. This time in one of the Depot galleries at Dank Street Waterloo.

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Essay by Merrick Fry 2020

You see the figures in the street. These are real people engaging with each other

In Newtown. There is a fusion of social groups with complex styles. I can almost see the brand of sneaker that man has on his feet. That young woman is pretending she has not noticed the guy having a quick look at her bare legs.

The artist also enjoys the urban spatial complexities. The tension of pedestrians jostling on street corners and cars waiting for the lights to change. The cars have a life of their own, like animals ready to jump. Holdaway gathers information at every chance, while walking his dog ‘Boyd’ in the park and at the intersections of streets in his car. He is interested in the change of space in these parks with the cyclists and joggers interacting.

Figures in Sydney Park 2019

It is rare to see figurative work with such engagement in the everyday. It is much easier to semi abstract the figures and places in a mannerist style and repeat it… get a quantity of work into the marketplace quickly for sale.

Rod Holdaway is a unique artist creating his vision of the world. You have to be prepared to study the work for more than a few seconds to get to the bottom of it. If you do you will find a rich visual experience.

How does he achieve these qualities in the work?

Over the twenty years I have known the artist I have watched him evaluate the history of the visual image. As a young man he was an intense expressionist. He had a difficult family life. Some of those images I still can bring into my memory because they are edgy but many don’t have sustained power. This is natural for young painters because you need time to gain more skills in techniques and more wisdom in life.

Clan Wars 2006

By looking back to the composition and palettes of the Italian Renaissance then combining this with the way the Chinese arranged their space in the calligraphic ink works he has broadened his knowledge, balancing the emotional power of his early works with interesting new-found formal structures. He also naturally from his generation understands the New York School approaches (what Hoffman calls ‘the integrity of the picture plain’).

Now I come to the final influence.

It always seemed to me a puzzle that the complex vision of Cezanne could not have opened up many possibilities of investigation. The Cubist works of Braque and Picasso are magical and radical but because of the upheavals at the time were left historically suspended. Later it looked like formal abstraction was the logical direction to take. Most painting then became a formalist playground where the work would refer to itself only and leave the wonderment of objects behind.

Holdaway takes the early cubists works adding like a bowerbird influences from his love of the past and comes up with a new reality. It’s not a realism from photography which kills many painters. It’s a refreshing vision which can startle the viewer.

The technique is multi layered. By using torn pieces of discarded prints from his iPad with painted areas on the canvas and by coming and going with paint and paper, he makes a composition. As he pinned these into positions before gluing them down he realised that the shadows were producing another dimension in space. He thought he could use some of these shadows but the only way to keep them was to paint an imitation shadow on the edge of the paper. One of his painter friends thought this was really cheating but there is no such thing in a work of art. The result is a world of its own. It’s exciting and you will realise it’s the world you live in.

Merrick Fry 

July, 2020

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The painting is multilayered in it’s language, concept and meaning.
It consists of 10 chalkboards, on which there are rectangles painted in white on black.
The rectangles can be understood as representing landscapes.
They can also be viewed as crucifixes, hopscotch grids, and windows.
Some of the rectangles contain numerals – some of the numerals have been
rubbed out.

The use of chalkboards situates the painting in a classroom.
It is a universal classroom; one in which we are all students.
Is there a teacher?
Does the artist situate himself as the teacher?
Or is this the work of a student reaching and fumbling toward understanding?

Human attempts at understanding the meaning of life, questions
about the purpose of human existence, the purpose of the universe, the
existence or otherwise of a God – have been represented numerically –
algorithms, columns, and patterns of numbers attempt to encode meaning
and refer to the language of pure mathematics and physics – Why are we
here? What is out there? Is there a God? Does it matter? Why does it
matter? We try to understand, we encode and deconstruct, we make mistakes,
mistaken attempts to understand are important – it is in the act of
trying to understand and trying to create meaning that we humans are at
our best. There is humility, love and anguish in this painting. There is
reason and there is abandonment. It is a deeply authentic work that does
not try to win any prizes – it’s value is in the rigor and flexibility of
it’s creator’s intelligence, in his flexibility of mind, in it’s multiple
frames of reference, in the synthesis of those frames and in the artist’s
love and intent. That it is terribly lonely is part of it’s comfort.