“I’m chasing the light, always.”
With these words Julie Davidson turns around the large paintings that fill her Melbourne studio, to reveal her current exhibition Ways of Seeing. It’s a grey spring morning, and the sunlight that usually floods through her windows is obscured by cloud. However the artist has already harnessed its transformative power to elevate humble domestic objects to the sanctified space she creates within her still life paintings. It has taken a series of months to paint this body of work which expresses Davidson’s ongoing investigation into light, and as she eloquently states, the “Illusion of substance and the beauty of transience.” The illusion she refers to is the representation of reality through the slippery medium of oil paint on canvas, which is fundamental to the still life genre. To start each work Davidson artfully arranges various objects with a sense of almost cinematic mise-en-scène, illuminating them with direct or diffused light. In the light is strong and directional, crisply defining the soaring magnolia branches so they appear almost sculptural in both their clarity and solidity against the dark background. The illusionism of her images is completely convincing, as she expands the proportions of these everyday objects to occupy large-scale paintings in a hyper-real manner.
The transience Davidson seeks to evoke is reflected in the shifting nature of the light she chases, and her meticulously painted flowers. Though captured in full bloom they bring an awareness of the cycles of nature and the reality of impermanence, as eventually they too will decay. The concept of impermanence is enshrined in Eastern philosophies, and this body of work features another prevalent reference to Asian culture – the ancient landscape painting tradition of China.
This exhibition sees Davidson introduce misty mountainous landscape scenes that strongly reference the Chinese tradition, in particular that of the Song Dynasty. The mountains appear as layered planes in the composition, shrouded in vapour and evoking concepts of the sublime in nature. These works are deeply romantic and reflect a kind of idealised view of the natural world. This imaginative quality was historically an important aspect of the genre in China, which sought to provide a mental respite from the reality of everyday existence.
In an effective series of pairings, these hazy mindscapes are juxtaposed with Davidson’s crisp still life compositions, whereupon subtle points of connection unfold. In paintings such as Spring’s First Whisper and The Breath of Calm, light is diffused through veils of gauze like drapery to form abstracted backgrounds of pale tones, treated in a painterly, textured manner. Similarly Spring in the Mountains contains an ambiguous and ethereal backdrop against which her blooms stand out in crisp focus.
These abstracted elements of her still life works, which the artist tellingly refers to as “interior landscapes,” mirror the atmospheric effects that shroud her landscape paintings in mystery. The idea of an inner world of the mind and emotions, as represented in the landscapes, finds a kind of physical counterpoint in the interior, domestic realm that Davidson represents in her still life paintings. The result is an aesthetic and conceptual interplay between these two seemingly disparate sets of subject matter.
Unifying all is the artist’s skill in imbuing the small things (a vase, a flower) with the same sense of majesty as a towering mountain range – finding grace in both the epic, and the everyday. Marguerite Brown MA ArtCur, 2017
Julie Davidson was a finalist in the Eutick Still Life Award, runner up in the Warwick Regional Gallery Art Prize and finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art and the Mandoorla Art Prize, winning the People’s Choice award for the latter. She has produced a number of commissioned portraits and works are represented in private and corporate collections in Australia and overseas.
