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Any sweep or flick of an arm with the hand holding a paint-laden brush could be termed a ‘filled gesture’. Robert MacPherson has used this performative action in numerous series to describe the act of painting—the making as much as the outcome, the painted object.
Indeed, the object/objective of the painting process, as far as MacPherson is concerned, is best described as an ongoing relationship between the artist, the tools of production, the construction and context for each series of work. Early in his career, the artist decided that his own body—its reach and proportions—would be the determinants of his practice, just as his experiences in the world would temper his approach to the rich legacy of art history (for instance, Clement Greenberg’s view of modernist paintings being ‘self-contained’). In this sense, MacPherson’s work is autobiographic… always a self-portrait.
This is evident in the formative Scales from the Tool series of 1978; panels of varying width (the size of a brush laden with black paint) and the resulting sweep of the arm down the canvas. Likewise, Filled Gestures—a selection of 21 acrylic on paper works from a total installation of 200 components included in a recent survey of projects—are the catalyst for the exhibition, Painting Uncontained, Robert MacPherson 1978-2016. The exhibition brings together seven discrete series focused on the evolution of this idea across a range of media—from the works on paper, to stencilled words on two grey blankets (Wagga Wagga: two frog poems for N.Y. 1992-1995), to ink-stained white shirts and works on canvas—each with an accompanying framed laundry docket, characteristic of the ongoing Mayfair Peerless series from 2002.
The series has now been expanded