LIFE IN THE MOMENT, AND THE COLLECTIVE THRUM

Submitted by Editor on Sun, 10/05/2015 - 10:05

REVIEW: JANET MELROSE'S 'MAKING TRACKS' AT THE UNION GALLERY 

Nothing remains the same. Life moves on. 

And yet, through the eyes of Janet Melrose RSW, time is temporarily slowed.

Her work begins in careful observation of the natural world. She traces its passage, delights in its colours and contours and in the rare moments of experience shared between human and other beings.

Some of her titles playfully attest to this. ‘Making Tracks’ is feral and painterly; ‘Caught in the Rain’ (below) simultaneously references the subject’s momentary reality, and the plein air process by which it was recorded.

But beyond these intense interactions, Melrose’s painting also bears witness to a sense of something greater and even stranger: the world’s shimmering otherness.

Melrose pauses time, takes time to look deeper. Quite what she discovers in these tranquil fractions is hard to say. It isn’t order, exactly, or an explanation. More, a sort of unknowable wholeness. The collective thrum of earth, wind, water, animal, and vegetable in consciousness; an underlying presence at which horses, stilled in the field, stand and stare.

I love Melrose’s economy. In a few strokes, she thrillingly conveys the presence of birds, their merging with and emerging from cover, their self-awareness, the sudden piercing concentration they may turn upon the viewer.

I love too the way she balances such accuracy with semi-abstract forms. Her landscapes are both real and cognitive, mundane and mythic. The Indian Khadi paper on which she often works resists crisp lines, adds fibrous three-dimensionality.

And it is a similar suggestive, unprescriptive generosity of spirit which appeals most to me about this exhibition.

Each of the 21 paintings in Making Tracks is wonderfully realised in its own right. (I can’t remember an exhibition of such consistently high quality.) But in combination, they form an act of mindful appreciation which I found immensely moving.

They make a virtue of our limitations, the fragility of existence. They take pleasure in how the world so beautifully exceeds our ability to understand it.—AM

Making Tracks continues at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 7 June.

Titles from top to bottom: 'Near the Pond' (detail); 'Caught in the Rain', 'Long-Tailed Tits'; ''Cherry Picking'; 'Dark and Light'; 'Seen Against Green'; 'Making Tracks'.