Second Nature

J a m e s M c A r d l e

L o r e n a C a r r i n g t o n

S e c o n d N a t u r e

Stephen McLaughlan Gallery March 14-31 2012

Supported by

he had looked down, on the awkward step from platform to carriage, into the gap that dropped away from her into darkness. It looked so still and cool below the platform’s ! uorescently lit metal and concrete and tired babies in prams, ice cream wrappers and mysterious speckled stains. But soon that dark would shift. "e train’s underbelly, black and sticky with grease, would strain into movement, and the low slow sun would ! ick in through the thistles and gorse along the side of the track. She found a seat against the window, and leaned her head against the glass, letting the vibration of the engine rattle her a little. Maybe it would help to settle the shifting sands in her head. She was expected; would be welcomed with the usual hugs and we-missed-you drawings of herself, outspread stick # gure arms, triangle dress and always a big red smile under the scribbled line of light blue sky, but somehow she found herself surprised to have stepped onto that evening train home.

A tired body dropping into the seat beside her brought her back from her strange reverie, and she stared, chin in hand as the train slid past graffitied fences and neglected swing sets, lonely in patchy backyards. As the train picked up speed and the houses swirled away, she let her eyes venture between the houses, touching on split-second points of focus as they !ung past. Fences, bridges, the up and down sway of power lines, naked trees all span into each other, and in their dance coalesced into vortices, pin sharp at their centre and whirling out into blurs of green and blue.

By the time her station slid in, the day had unraveled and spun out into the darkening suburbs beyond. She jostled past glowing touch-screens avoiding prickly late afternoon commuters, and stepped back over the gap onto a platform, this time littered with leaves and an empty paper cup reeling across her path. She hopped furtively from the end of the platform and onto the dirt path that ran alongside the tracks. Now she twisted out of reach of spiny thistles. She was far enough down the track for the train to have gained speed into the red-lipped twilight as it wolf-whistled past her. In her move from passenger to bystander, her perspective had spun a half circle.  "rough one swirling window stood a single focused man, alone amongst the mass of commuters, a single point in all that spiralled around him. "en he was gone, and the train too, now just a broken strip of light receding through the trees and an eddying wind at her feet.

She walked on, away from the straight tracks as the path curved up the hill towards home, where the light from the windows would be warm, and all sat still in the dark blue night.

Lorena Carrington

he fragrant aura of a handful of verdure conjures the mystery of Flora. Her ephemeral bounty installed in a glass welcomes reveries of dark musky glades and sun-white blossoming bowers.

"e Dutch !ower pieces which evoke such ardour are illusions which at #rst we take to be virtuoso feats of realism. "ey reveal themselves to be "impossible", in that they gather !owers which could never have been in bloom together. "e profusion of fastidious detail is contradicted by the implausible crowding of masses of !owers into a glass or vase which could never have held them. Inspection and comparison of the paintings reveals that the reappearance of precisely the same shape of a !ower (or for that matter, an insect) has been used by the same painter elsewhere. "e montage of and repetition of identical motifs points to a process employed by the still-life painters to assemble many different compositions from on the same working models, each of which is a scienti#cally observed botanical specimen. " is method had advantages when creating images with this kind of painstaking detail, not the least of which was that it allowed the painter to represent !owers from various seasons in the same arrangement, from all sides and all states of budding to dropping. Each is an elaborate and arti#cial construction but also an assemblage of signi#cant symbols representing the passage of time.

In such ways these breathtaking works are a corruption of the ‘natural’; representing a perverse and rapacious collecting of specimens from distant Dutch colonies, arti#cial breeding and cultivation, and the hothouse forcing of extravagant blooms as much as the speculative in!ation of their value. "e Dutch Republic from 1583 generated a boom economy and dominance in trade power, achieving the highest standard of living in Europe by the middle of the 17th century. Affluence is re!ected in its culture. Within this wealthiest and most urbanized region in the world, art was produced and consumed within a settled domesticity, and the numbers and reputations of women artists !ourished as never before. "eir works are not evidence that bourgeoise households were #lled with vases of !owers and crammed with over!owing tables of produce; this was a society with an intense awareness of economy in both a religious and monetary sense. For the painters’ clients the !eeting of delicate life is a reminder worth purchasing and displaying. Gathered in Guilds rather than in Academies, these painters aspired to the status of ‘über-crafts-person’ rather than ‘#ne artist’.

Particularly striking is the work of Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750) whose father Jacob was an anatomist who developed wax injection as a means of preserving anatomical specimens, a task for which he recruited his daughter. "ere is both a scienti#c and aesthetic connection between these individuals whose careers combine an interest in the secrets of mortality. Also celebrated was Joanna Koerten (1630-1715), who was a skilled painter but also a

pioneer in the art of cut-paper silhouettes, which made her internationally famous. German writer, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, describes a visit to her Amsterdam studio in 1710 1 where he saw the silhouette portraits of Czar Peter the Great and statesman Jan De Witt, among others, as well as "seascapes, ships and a marvelous still-life of !owers." 2

"e silhouette form combines robust contrast and precise contour, requiring intense concentration in the making to avoid irremediable error. " eir effect is heightened by the way they provoke us to apprehend form and volumes within their contours, but it wavers alluringly with the ebb and !ow of our attention.

Notable among so many of these pronk still-lifes and vanitas studies is the use of a black background against which, by contrast, the lucid transparency and glossy highlights of petals and stems is made astonishingly vivid, in an effect not seen again until the appearance of the daguerrotype. "e photographic comparison is apt, given the number of studies which propose the use of the camera obscura and other optical instruments by these artists.

What domestic and artistic secrets drive this fastidious attention to apparently trivial subject-matter? James McArdle

1 Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, Merkuirdige Reisen... (Ulm, 1754), Vol. III, 554-55.

2 The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has a cut-out in paper of The Virgin and Child with St. John (1703). This intricate design with its lace-like delicacy measures only 2 3/4 inches in height and demonstrates the artist's amazing technical virtuosity.

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