Lyn Harrison - John Ellison - Blue Mountain Artists

Being an artist is like dreaming while awake with a paintbrush in my hand. It is like being on a carnival ride; like illuminating the way with a small torchlight beam. Like digging for treasure in foreign places. Like collecting and storing strange objects.

There is always an ongoing sense of discovery and surprise, not knowing where I am until I get there.

There is a need for connection, oneself to others. The meaning of the work however, needs no explanation. It is whatever the viewer gets from it.

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I have been a professional artist for twenty years and have written over thirty instructional articles for the Australian Artist magazine.

My workshop Art and the Transformation of Vision was featured on Caroline Jones' Search for Meaning programme.

During my time as Cultural Development Officer at the Blue Mountains City Council I wrote the Cultural Plan which resulted in the Blue Mountains being designated as the inaugural City of the Arts in NSW.

In 1994 I initiated the Katoomba Winter Magic Festival which has now become an event of national significance.

MY PAINTINGS or PARADISE NOW

In my early days as a painter I would tell people that: “I’m practising to be an artist”. Often I would get the puzzled response :”But you already are an artist. And I would say :”No, not yet. Not in my terms.”

What was that about? Well “in my terms” an artist was someone like Van Gogh, Matisse or Bonnard, who had learnt to project his own inner world with such force, conviction and beauty that the viewer is immediately joyfully stunned into an acceptance of that vision. No questions asked. Just joyful acceptance.

I drew and painted a great deal as a school kid. It was simply natural for me to do so. I took it for granted that I could draw, just as I took it for granted that I could wrestle most of my mates in the long grass outside our house. I noticed however that my school friends did not draw and paint so naturally, and that because of this I was singled out for praise. This seemed somewhat puzzling and I didn’t take it too seriously.

Later in high school I did Art by correspondence for the Leaving Certificate. Again my work was singled out for praise; but by this time I had become utterly confused. As a part of the correspondence course I received half a dozen small booklets, representing different art movements: Impressionism,
Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Abstract Art. Plenty of “isms”; they had the effect of producing a state of intellectual bewilderment on my
part. “What was an artist setting out to do when he took paint to canvas?” I asked myself. With this mishmash of art movements swirling in my head, I had no
idea. I t was important to me to be able to answer that question, and no answers were coming. And so for twenty years or so I gave up drawing and painting.

I began drawing again when I was in my mid-thirties, living at Patonga, a small fishing-village on the Hawkesbury River. The woman I was living with at the time had written a set of children’s readers, and I ended up illustrating them for her. At the same time I began doing simple ink and brush drawings of the rocks and bushland around our home. And to the question that had paralysed my artistic production for the last twenty years :”What is an artist setting out to do when he takes paint to canvas?” I answered somewhat defiantly :”I am simply trying to put down something of what happens when I and that thing out there – tree, fishing boat, bush-hut, whatever it happens to be – come together in this moment of time .”Simple. The spell was broken.

I had come across a book called Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, which turned out to be one of those landmark occasions when your brain gets turned upside down and your life is changed from that moment on. This book was on the subject of Gestalt Therapy, a psychotherapeutic discipline which has since become known world-wide. The author was Frederick S. Perls, a Rabelaisian old pirate, with a beard like Santa Claus and a mind to rival Freud’s. His injunction was: ”Lose your mind and come to your senses”. And the book contained a series of awareness exercises designed to allow you to do just that.

Living in Patonga, overlooking the Hawkesbury River, with fishing boats bobbing in the bay, and the ferry-boat chuffing merrily twice a day from the Patonga wharf across to Palm Beach, the rocks and the water sparkling, lyre-birds and goannas on our back step – it was the visual sense that I came back to with a rush as though someone had just thrown a bucket of cold water over my head. The world all of a sudden, was there with a glowing insistence that I had not experienced since childhood Everywhere I looked – the ferns along the verandah, the white trunks of the eucalyptus-gums, the craggy rock faces at the back of the house – everything was palpitant with an inner beauty of its own. This was what Thomas Traherne was talking about in his mystical writings. This was what prompted Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world. I too wanted to let out a barbaric yawp of gratitude, and I thought probably one of the best ways to do that was to paint it.

And so I began “practising to be an artist”. The companions and helpers that I seized upon in this quest were Van Gogh, Bonnard and Matisse, all of whom I felt shared a common ecstatic vision, as though the windows of perception had just been washed clean. Absolute joy in savouring the visual world – peaches aglow on a white table-cloth; the clear sharp colours of the fishing boats on the beach at St Marie, the enticing curves of a languid model surrounded by patterned textiles. Three different artists – but with a common theme: Paradise Now.

And of course when you start talking in this fashion some kind observer is liable to say: ”Listen Goofball. Haven’t you noticed that the world is going to rack and ruin? And here you are blithering about paradise. Get a grip on yourself.”

Quite right, quite right. I can see your point of view. But on the other hand, during the latter stages of World War 11, when Henry Matisse’s wife and daughter had been captured by the Nazis, Henri went on painting works of radiant joy. Even when he was old and ill and bedridden, the joyful production still continued .Henri was expressing with undiminished energy, his own paradisiacal domain which he had first discovered lying in a hospital bed at the age of twenty one, when his mother, thinking to help him pass the time, supplied him with a box of watercolours. By his own admission, as soon as he started to paint, he immediately entered “a kind of paradise”.

Could it be that Vincent’s paintings, Matisse’s paintings, Bonnard’s paintings are actually sermons without words? Could it be that Henri is saying: ”Listen here you blithering fools, with all your guns and self-importance and cruelty, don’t you know that it is possible to see the world like this – a field of delights? Put
down your bombs and your guns, your tortures and your cruelty and simply rejoice in this wonderland that surrounds us all. How can you be so blind?”Something like that. That’s what I take it he is saying.

The awareness exercises from Gestalt and the painting went hand in hand. One fed into the other. Become blissed out by looking and touching and tasting the world, and then make your best effort to put some of that down on paper or canvas. I looked at the various examples of Modernism: the Rothkos, the Warhols, the Bacons, the Sy Twomblys, even the old Minotaur himself, Picasso, and felt that something was missing – and the thing that was missing was the powerful mystical affirmation, that barbaric yawp of joy.

For my own purposes, and because I didn’t want to risk my querulous brain getting in the way of my art production for the next twenty years, I decided that it didn’t particularly matter what the art style was that one employed – whether it was the extraordinary light-filled clarity of a Vermeer, or the earthy abstractions of a Tapies – what was important was the consciousness behind the painting, and whether it was being effectively conveyed by the formal means thus chosen. In other words if a painting did not give me that blast of supernatural joy, a haymaker straight to the bread-basket, then I was not all that much interested.

When I was in Crete, I went to the Palace of Knossos and looked at the murals depicting the beautiful athletes, male and female, doing flying cartwheels over the backs of the bulls. And then in Iraklio, the capitol of Crete, in an archaeological museum, I saw a reproduction of a tiny stone seal, the type used by royalty to seal their letters, the reproduction blown up to maybe fifty times its original size, showing a young athlete, full of grace and beauty, standing in front of elaborate buildings – this whole thing carved onto a stone no bigger than an acorn, and looking as though it had been drawn and designed by Picasso, Matisse or David Hockney. I shook my head in disbelief. Somehow, something like three thousand years ago, some unknown artist had managed to carve this work of remarkable modernity onto a surface almost too small to see.

That evening, standing on the footpath overlooking the beach at Iraklio, the black waves thundering in, I raised my arms into the air thinking of the artists of that early mysterious Minoan civilization and of the great Cretan writer Kazantzakis creator of the Modern Odyssey, and I felt transmission of all the joy-filled artists coming down through the ages, down through Rabelais, Balzac, Vermeer, Rumi, Renoir, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, Allan Ginsberg and connecting up with myself standing there with my arms upraised in a gesture of preposterous delight.

And if anyone thinks it is vainglorious of me to feel connected to such superhuman company, I can only repeat Walt Whitman’s words “And what I assume you shall assume. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”.