'Michael McCosker: Paintings' at The Box
Last Saturday afternoon I had the pleasure of visiting The Box, a venue that opened in West End last year.
From their website:
The Box is an artist-run initiative providing the West End and greater Brisbane community with dynamic events of all varieties. The space is versatile and adaptable and plays host to live music, workshops, exhibitions, launches, music rehearsals, cultural events and a plethora of other projects.
The Box has an indoor gallery space, featuring a Steinway D grand piano, and a backyard equipped with a stage for many varieties of performance.
The nine creatives behind the initiative have complementary skills, and together work to showcase the best Brisbane has to offer. Feel free to contact any of us if you wish to propose a concept for an event, or chat about a project. We’re very open to collaborating with you, to help materialise your creative vision.
I have been to The Box for a few different exhibitions and events and I am struck by the diversity of the exhibitions held there, as well as the diversity of the crowd it attracts. I do feel a genuine sense of community and openness exists within the place.
Saturday's exhibition viewing was of 'Michael McCosker: Paintings'. Michael is an acquaintance of mine and my house features in one the paintings in the exhibition. We both remembered running into each other at the top of my street months ago as he was taking photos of the sunset street scape to paint from.
Michael was at the gallery for each day of his ten day exhibition, which fostered an authentic feeling to the exhibition, and on Saturday he was working on a painting in the gallery, which was quite interesting to watch.
Paintings by Michael McCosker had its genesis in his almost daily walks up to the lookout on Highgate Hill. Over the past four years living on Dorchester Street, his attention was consistently drawn to Emily Street off Gladstone Road. He imagined that if he ever painted again, he’d paint this street. It haunted him. He imagined Highgate hill back in the 60s and 70s long before it was considered prime real estate. As so often happens with his process the concept only became apparent once started.
theboxwestend.com (Retrieved May 13 2013)
I like the above blurb and the ghosts it alludes to. I took my mother and my sister to the exhibition as I presumed (correctly) that the paintings were ‘art Mum would like’.
‘Sunset Over Emily Street’ displays an incredible three dimensional quality. The very accurate sense of perspective makes you feel like you are walking down the footpath, about to tread on the fallen flowers that are leaping out of the painting; and stepping straight into the sun. The way the paint has been worked really creates a glow.
I appreciate the technical proficiency - especially as I have recently developed an understanding and appreciation of oil paint and how to work it – of paintings like Michael’s; but I do have a tendency to often stereotype this kind of work as ‘technically proficient lifelike representations of everyday subjects’. And it results in ennui!
That is why I enjoyed reading the well worn artist’s statement Michael presented to us at the gallery, and even the short blurb from The Box website.
I think the aforementioned interpretation of art is holier-than-thou. Sometimes it comes from a self-consciousness about my own art and my awareness of its lack of, disregard for, or plain absence, often, of realism and the way most of us have been socialised to notice the fact and not the feeling. And sometimes this interpretation comes from the feeling, or lack of feeling I might get from looking at some art. Realism alone does not leave an imprint on me. Delving into the concept helps me connect with the work more deeply and remember that there are things in the work I do not know and cannot see or being to imagine. And that makes it much richer to me than a lifelike postcard interpretation.
The Box website describes Michael’s paintings as whimsical – which helped me look at them in a different light as well, and look at them as about light. And maybe light as a metaphor for creation after darkness (in a personal sense, not a biblical one) which I read in to Michael pondering ‘if he will ever paint again.’
I also recognise, through writing this report, that representing local scenes in art is very important. I got a thrill from seeing my house in one of Michael’s paintings, and one must acknowledge that the quotidian aspect of life is a large part of it. This is real life – it is not set in Andy Warhol's Factory, and I don't care much for most of that art anyway. Michael sold each and every painting which only goes to show that people love and appreciate to see their own surroundings represented in art. And that in itself is fulfilling.
by Felicity Scarce
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