Vision splendid: Drifting into the eternal blue
Ralph Wilson’s seascapes are tantalisingly beautiful and offer respite and a chance to escape into the world of nature.
Have you ever wanted to escape into a painting? That’s a question that came to mind walking into Philip Bacon Galleries to view Brisbane artist Ralph Wilson’s latest exhibition.
Because there in front of me was the vision splendid – a painting titled The wave at Manta. It stopped me in my tracks. I breathed in deeply what seemed to be a salt-scented sea breeze. I could hear the wave crashing against the shore, spray blown back off the crest.
I thought of some lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and those mermaids that wouldn’t sing to him: I have seen them riding seaward on the waves / Combing the white hair of the waves blown back / When the wind blows the water white and black.
That same wind seems to be operating in this painting by Brisbane artist Ralph Wilson. When I was a teenager, I wrote a poem about disappearing into a beautiful woodland scene in a poster I had on my wall. And I thought, how I’d love to disappear into this painting by Ralph Wilson. Or into any of the works in this current show.
I could be that lonely little figure on a beach that I see in one. The figures are few and far between, but they are there at times … here a fisherman, there a small dog dwarfed against the sea and sky.
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Wilson’s paintings are of the littoral world, particularly Moreton Bay and its islands, largely North Stradbroke or Minjerribah. He has been working with this subject matter for decades and I have been covering these exhibitions of his at Philip Bacon. They used to occur every three years but rather than slowing down he has sped up and it is now two years between shows. Good. We can’t wait three years.
And in a sense each exhibition deals with the same subject matter and yet we never tire of this. People love having his depictions of this natural world in their homes or offices. My dermatologist used to have a Ralph Wilson on her wall and I looked forward to seeing it, although that was only twice a year.
To walk into the current show and see 32 works by Wilson hanging across the upstairs galleries is almost overwhelming. He didn’t mean to paint so many. He wasn’t even supposed to paint so many. And yet here they are in all their glory.
And while the artist lets the works speak for themselves, he does offer us a poetic glimpse of himself and wife Suzy – a little prose passage in the catalogue attached to Darkness, falling, Main Beach, a recent work that is poetic and atmospheric.
“It is dusk on the long beach,” Wilson writes. “We are two tiny figures under an immense and powerful sky. We are preoccupied with gather eugaries before the light fails. The cloud feels like a weight on our bent backs but we focus on water and sand. A flash of blue light is followed by the primal rumble that warns – ‘Pay attention to me. I am coming to you and soon you will know my power. Ignore my churning spin at your peril’.
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“We watch transfixed as the front advances. Waiting too long, then at last make for shelter as the first drops hiss into the sane. Of all Earth’s wonders, it is the weather that leaves me in awe more than any other aspects, even the ocean Of course, the weather performing in concert with the sea will command my attention for ever and ever. Amen.”
Interesting way to end that piece but appropriate as it is a kind of prose prayer or hymn even.
And it gives us a keen insight into the mind of the artist, a tantalising glimpse that makes us want more words. But for the most part he lets his paintings do the talking … Point Lookout from Main Beach, North east to the evening cloud, Dog beach, Flinders beach, late afternoon … and so it goes.
There are a few works from elsewhere, including Tassie, and there’s even an errant French rural scene included, but mostly it is magnificent Straddie.
As an experienced waterman, surfer, sailor and lover of the places where the sea sky and land meet, Wilson has an intricate knowledge of the elements, and this has been his subject matter since he started painting as a career after dropping out of studying architecture at university.
He has been exhibiting with Philip Bacon for more than two decades and I have made it my business to cover every one of those exhibitions. I have marvelled at his mastery of his subject. In recent years the spiritual elements of this quest seem clearer, and you get that from his tantalising prose description which I shared earlier. One thinks of the late ethereal works of Lloyd Rees or of Turner.
As I walk through the exhibition with Wilson, we discuss how one could just take photos of these scenes and hang them on your wall. But we agree that would never be the same. Because there is an alchemy involved when an artist applies paint to a canvas transmuting a scene to a painting with all the transcendental possibilities that can occur in the process.
Ralph Wilson continues at Philip Bacon Galleries, Fortitude Valley, until October 3.
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