Earth, wind and fire … the meaningful abstractions of Mostyn Bramley-Moore
Mostyn Bramley-Moore may be considered an abstract artist, yet there’s more to his work than meets the eye, as he demonstrates in his latest exhibition.
Brisbane artist Mostyn Bramley-Moore says he is typecast as an abstract painter, but he begs to differ. While his works may look abstract … they are about something. Sometimes the title is the giveaway, as in a couple of smaller suites in his current exhibition, Stimming, now showing at Woolloongabba Art Gallery.
After Fire III, IV and V, painted en plein air, were inspired by bushfires that ravaged the area around a property that he and his partner, the author Gillian Wills, share at Jennings, close to Tenterfield, just across the Queensland border. They divide their time between semi-rural Ransome on Brisbane’s outskirts and Jennings.
The rural nature of their lifestyle is a feature of his work, inspired as it sometimes is by the elements. As well as fire there are a number of other smaller works that are odes to the wind. Bramley-Moore says he was interested reading about the gods of wind in Greek mythology and how Zeus dispatched them when needed.
“It’s complicated because there are a few of them,” he says.
The wind paintings (he uses acrylic paint and graphite on canvas) each bear the title Anemoi. In Greek mythology, the four main wind gods, known as the Anemoi, are Boreas (North wind), Zephyrus (West wind), Notus (South wind) and Eurus (East wind).
“That east wind brings trouble,” Bramley-Moore notes.
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You can see that wind in the breezy, gestural marks on five compact works. Knowing the story behind the pieces is helpful and edifying but not necessary, according to the artist. He is aware that people will see things their own way.
“I’m often at shows and people say they know what a painting is about and it will be completely different to what I had in mind,” he says. “That’s OK. Paintings can have multiple meanings.”
Those meanings are not articulated in didactic panels or even in the catalogue, but if you want to hear more about them from the artist himself, he will be giving a talk in the gallery at noon on July 19.
The exhibition title is a word I was unfamiliar with.
“We decided to call the exhibition Stimming because the works do have a lot of repetitive marks in them, reminiscent of handwriting and the physical movements that autistic people make,” he explains. “My family does have a lot of people on the spectrum including, it is generally believed, me.”
Stimming, or self-stimulating behaviour, refers to repetitive physical movements, sounds or the use of objects that individuals engage in, commonly observed in autistic individuals and those with ADHD, serving various self-regulatory purposes such as reducing anxiety, calming, stimulating senses or coping with sensory overload.
In the catalogue he does offer a more general overview.
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“The general area that I’ve been addressing in the studio over the last couple of years has been the eternal vulnerability of documents and cultural information. We live in an age of false news, conspiracy theories, the reckless disposal of valuable material and a general awareness that previously trusted platforms can no longer be relied upon to present accurate facts, but I started thinking more deeply about historical aspects of this as I read Irene Vallejo’s book Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. These are paintings about erasure, palimpsests, cultural loss and the human impulse to reconfigure reality.”
Works are inspired by the elements, literature, ancient history and other matters that occupy the artist’s mind.
Cardenio (2024) is about Shakespeare and a work called The History of Cardenio that The Bard wrote with a collaborator, John Fletcher. No copies of it survive.
Sur (2023) refers to a scathing review the writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote about Orson Welles’s classic 1941 film Citizen Kane. The review was published in the journal Sur.
Phaistos (2024) refers to the Phaistos Disk, an archaeological find on Crete, while Sappho and Emetics (2024) refers to a couple of Greek poets … and so it goes.
The artist is an erudite bloke, as these works make clear. He did a master’s degree in New York as a young man studying at the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He has gone on to exhibit widely during a long academic career that included time as dean of arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and a stint as director of the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Before retiring from academia he was head of painting at QCA.
He has exhibited internationally including in New York and London and a show in Paris in 2018. His influences include American artists Cy Twombly (the gestural nature of the work is shared). Twombly was also interested in literature and the ancient world. The Dutch-American abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning was another influence and Bramley-Moore actually met him in Washington DC many years ago.
“He was very crusty and not every friendly,” he notes. He also cites the Canadian-American artist Philip Guston as a more recent influence.
Mind you, his style is distinctive and while it can be regarded as abstract it is not unfathomably so and, as he has pointed out, there is a narrative going on even if the viewer may not know what that narrative is. Which is why it would be invaluable to attend his artist’s talk. Hopefully this article helps too.
Mostyn-Bramley-Moore – Stimming continues at Woolloongabba Art Gallery until July 26.