The act of still life painting is a continual search for beauty in the most ordinary of life’s moments. The spaces within Julie Davidson’s artworks are highly orchestrated – shadows, reflections and the fall of light on meticulously curated objects – each contribute to a quiet solemnity. Her paintings reveal a kind of painterly magic that happens when fruit, flower and vessel, rendered on a two dimensional surface, feel more vivid than reality.
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Catalogue essay by Andrew Stephens 2024 When is the present moment? Now-ness is notoriously elusive: the world is in constant motion, and it is simply not possible for the mind to truly apprehend the here-and-now. Watch a peony’s ruffled petal fall, or the fading autumn sunlight, and there is only a series of ungraspable present happenings. Each light-fuelled image is infinitesimally delayed in travelling from object to eye to brain. In the work of Julie Davidson, there is an arresting stillness that, antithetically, is also vibrant with life. Each painting is an elegant invitation to meditate on the exquisite qualities of time and its relationship with light. Davidson’s series of paintings in Portrait of Light venture into seemingly uncomplicated yet highly curated worlds of oil on linen. Brittle poppy seed-heads lean out of a jade-green vase, loquats dangle from a pale enamel jug, and peonies in their prime nestle at the edge of a shallow blue bowl. These are not, however, mere arrangements of gorgeousness intended for relaxed visual pleasure. Nature (flora, atmosphere, light) and culture (vessels, fabric, tables) occupy the world in which this transpires. For all their absence of the human figure, they are deeply concerned with how people experience the passage of time. Philosopher Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was fascinated by time. He once remarked that it is the substance from which we are made, and that while time despoils castles, it enriches poetic verses. Had he – this man who went blind in later life – seen Portrait of Light, he might have added that painting is a form of poetry also embellished by time. Davidson has been exhibiting since the early 1990s, following her studies in the late 1970s, and she has spent significant periods travelling abroad to study the masters (Caravaggio, Claude Lorrain and Piero della Francesca to name a few). Because of this, and of her devoting countless hours of assiduous work in the contemplative zone that is her studio, Davidson’s work contains philosophical undertones about time’s passage. As she notes, her work is an engineered state of tranquillity intended to elicit that same response in the viewer: both painter and beholder embark on discovering a deeper truth. Davidson points to the mise-en-scène of these new works, the staged quality that coaxes the audience into an awareness that these tableaux are constructed to suggest silence, calm, balance. Each arrangement of plant cutting and container is initially captured in a reference photograph and then translated onto canvas with adjustments and augmentation along the way; it is not a slavish copying or a hyper-real duplication. Davidson chooses items for their reflective and sculptural attributes, and for the ways in which they absorb or reflect the natural light she favours, and each fresh painting builds on earlier works. Yet every foraged bloom or fruit, every ceramic or copper vessel (collected from friends, thrift stores or kerbside skips) has its own self-contained back-story. This layering is as subliminal as time’s passing. In the elusive present moment, before these absorbing paintings, everything connects. Still life, in the hands of Davidson, is anything but life stilled.
ARTIST BIO: Davidson has previously been a finalist in the Lester Portrait Prize, the Mandorla Painting Prize, the Eutick Still Life Award, the Warwick Regional Gallery Art Prize (runner up), the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Mandoorla Art Prize (People's Choice). She has undertaken numerous distinguished commissions and her work is represented in private and corporate collections both in Australia and overseas.
