Catalogue Essay by Laura Kirkham 2024 Speaking to her latest body of work, Slow Twisting in a Storm, Marise Maas describes her subject matter as “the same old things” and “the things that are in the little things.” This is the exquisite, yet simple heartbeat of the artist’s practice.
For Marise Maas, painting is a meditative process that calls upon her experiences of everyday life. Through her paintings, these personal meditations become fantastical mediations of human existence. The subject matter of her work seems woven into a magical ‘other world’ with her idiosyncratic substitution of humans for horses and use of an open, minimalist picture plane, upon which her equine characters float, unanchored by anything more than bold blocks of colour that gesture to a room or a perhaps a stage. They sit anachronistically alongside domestic objects and energetic gestural marks. In Maas’ other worlds, fairytales come to mind.
The fairytale evolved from an oral storytelling tradition often called the Zaubermärchen, or magic tale. As fairytales evolved as a genre from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, they, like Maas’ paintings, developed their own particular motifs, characters and conventions. Often, these tales drew from everyday experience to impart morals, or to communicate issues of action/consequence. Drawing upon the fantastical, they did so in ways that abstracted the specifics of people or places for universal relatability. Maas notes that she prefers to paint horses as substitutions for human figures as the latter “end up looking like somebody when that’s not the case.” Her paintings reflect on the every day, they do not attempt to describe it in real terms.
There is a cliched impulse to speak of the ‘extraordinary in the ordinary’ but like fairy tales, Maas’ work is not so clean cut, or necessarily glittering. There is neither a good nor a bad value judgement presented in her work, but rather a point of working through existence. As time passes, we encounter the “same old” no different to the person sitting next to us at a bus stop. Fleeting moments of conversation or the domestic everyday score a wider composition and are just as important as a building or unexpected crescendo. For the artist, a focus on these small moments is a compelling impulse in the current global climate and 24/7 access to the news and current events. At times her painting practice is an important counterbalance to it all, while at others it is, in her own words, like “twisting, dancing while a storm is raging around you” – Slow, Twisting in a Storm.
In the studio, Maas does not have a predetermined outcome in mind for her work. Evading this, she paints across multiple canvases at once, to allow her subjects, titles and meaning to emerge through process. What reveals itself in this process are the moments that stick – snippets of conversation, a latent memory or, as in the case of GreenTexta’s lyrics and Please Don’t Get Me Started, song title. Maas’ partner and best friend are always writing and playing songs in the background whilst she paints; their recording studio, Belmar Records, is next door to her painting studio. Maas lets some of it slip into her work. The slip of the oil stick is also a part of Maas’ practice, an unintentional process that permits her work freedom from intention. An errant or unintentional mark is left to sit on the canvas whilst the artist moves on to the next. Returning to the canvas after a time, these marks set the pace of the painting.
Another impulse arises in the context of Marise Maas’ subject matter – that some paintings gallop, some canter, some walk, and others stand still. But again, this is not so clean-cut, and the artist insists not to read too much into her work. Like a fairy tale, her works are simply life in motion. Their magic is not in the metaphor, it is in the ways they illuminate the little things.
Laura Kirkham, 2024
ARTIST BIO: Born in the Netherlands, Marise Maas immigrated to Australia with her family in 1982. Maas’ work is represented in numerous major collections nationally and internationally, including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, Swinburne University of Technology and National Australia Bank Collection. She lives and works in Melbourne.
