ROBERT MACPHERSON’S WELCOMING SIGN
Everyday I walk past one of Robert MacPherson’s Scale from the Tool paintings of 1976–1977 and I am constantly reminded of two fundamental aspects of the work: paint and its application. Substance, surface and the brush stroke: for a start there is the viscosity and character of particular brands of paint, added to which is the performative dimension—the gesture, the mark, an encapsulation of the artist at work. With these paintings there is no other distraction. The Scale from the Tool series represents exactly what is stated in the title, the panels of varying widths (each representing a particular brush size) bearing the trace of the hand, the sweep of the arm down the canvas and, of course, the conceptual framework behind the painting. The works humorously critique American critic and theorist Clement Greenberg’s oft-quoted maxim about modernist painting being ‘self-contained’. MacPherson’s take on this is that if a painting can be ‘self-contained’, an entity unto itself, then equally by this definition a can of paint itself must be a painting.1
The deceptive simplicity that characterises these works focuses attention on the painter’s craft, the process. ‘Scale’ and ‘Tool’—that is, ‘size’ (including the physical and intellectual connotations of scale) and ‘substance’ (not just the paint but its transubstantiation, the capacity of a plastic form to be elastic enough to stand for something else, to represent, depict and take on meaning)—are characteristic of MacPherson’s practice, an artistic enterprise that has been at the forefront of Australian art since the 1970s. Repetition, serialisation and the presentation of suites of works in ways that relate to particular architectural settings, further extend the artist’s preoccupation with the painting process and its reception. Themes... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline