Peter Powditch Coast – A Retrospective 1 “I’m interested in the things I see around me, in popular things, like everyone else.” Peter Powditch 1969 Extract from Australian Art and Artists in the Making Craig McGregor, David Beal, David Moon, Harry Williamson, Thomas Nelson Ltd 1969. 3 Peter Powditch Coast – A Retrospective Painting and sculpture 1962 – 2015 Exhibition 31 March – 21 May 2017 S.H. Ervin Gallery Watson Road, Observatory Hill The Rocks, Sydney This exhibition is presented in association with Defiance Gallery, Sydney 4 5 Photo Vogue Australia 6 7 Peter Powditch Coast – A Retrospective John McDonald A few years ago I flew to Byron Bay for the Writers’ One thinks of Samuel Beckett’s “Ever tried. Ever Powditch gives the impression that he has lived Festival, where I was booked into a local B&B. On failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”4 the life of the artist, with all of its attendant cliches, arrival I found a photocopied article from The New Or perhaps Bob Dylan’s “She knows there’s no like an actor playing a role. It was easier to drink York Review of Books lying on the bed. It hadn’t success like failure, and that failure’s no success whisky in the back room at an opening, he told been left by the festival crew but by Peter Powditch. at all.”5 Susan Chenery, than to be standing in the gallery It was ‘The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote’ by Powditch was right. Ryckmans’s essay on Don having to “explain” your paintings.7 Simon Leys (AKA Pierre Ryckmans), now collected in Quixote illuminates the life, career and temperament He joined in with the drinking and bravado that his anthology, The Halls of Uselessness (2011).1 of an intensely original artist. In 1972, by his own one associates with characters such as John Olsen Ryckmans was an essayist in the classic style, and admission, Powditch was probably the best known and Ray Hughes, but maintained a sense of inner the piece on Don Quixote is a dazzling example of artist in Sydney. By 2000 he had moved to the NSW detachment. Like a character in a novel by Albert his lucidity and erudition. The premise is that north coast and virtually disappeared. In the ’70s Camus, he went through the motions of life without Cervantes wrote Don Quixote (1605-15) as a pot-boiler he painted big, bold figures and landscapes using attaching any deep meaning to these activities. to bring in much-needed income, and to express his radically simplified forms and bright colours. In Powditch is the very last person to get sentimental disdain for popular novels of chivalry. Yet somehow the 1990s he retreated into small, pastel paintings, about being one of the ‘Brothers of the Brush’. this hefty, repetitive, episodic story, inspired by an produced with the same exasperating reductiveness He has always been a loner, happy to work in utterly trivial literary quarrel, has gone on to be one that drove Giacometti to whittle away his war- solitude, solving the pictorial problems he sets of the most admired novels ever written. Cervantes’s time sculptures until they had become tiny stick himself with slow deliberation. tale has withstood the tests of time and translation. figures. Today Powditch is making complex, three- Even his compulsive smoking, which has ruined It has captivated readers from first publication to the dimensional collages from cigarette packets. his health, is something Powditch contemplates Self Portrait 1962 present day. Powditch is quietly spoken, with a precise memory with detachment. Whereas David Hockney is a acrylic on board 41 x 36.5cm Years later Powditch said to me: “I think that essay and a formidable intelligence, but over the years he militant smoker who champions the fags with the Collection of Campbell Robertson-Swann and Lauren Harvey just about sums me up.” It’s a startling admission has been prone to bouts of rage and depression. same fervour he applies to popularising his theories because most people would consider a comparison On more than one occasion he has smashed up a of art, for Powditch it’s merely something that with Don Quixote to be an admission of failure, of studio and destroyed a quantity of his own work. he does. hopeless eccentricity. One thinks of the elderly, self- He has a story about the years he spent as a high One can imagine him relishing a line from the styled knight errant tilting at windmills. school art teacher – that on the one day he finally Ryckmans essay, which mocks those who consume Ryckmans’s essay redeems Don Quixote from such managed to discipline his unruly students, he quit books from a sense of cultural obligation. “I confess charges. He argues that the exclusively pejorative use the job. “I realised I didn’t want to be that sort of I read only for pleasure,” Ryckmans writes.8 of the term “quixotic” demonstrates that “our culture teacher,” he says.6 There is an obvious connection with Powditch’s has drifted away from its spiritual roots”.2 For it is not There is a pattern in his career of striving after statement to Craig McGregor in 1969: “I’m Don Quixote’s failure that is important, it is his striving. a success that is rejected as soon as it has been interested in the things I see around me, in popular Indeed, the magnitude of the character’s dreams achieved – not wilfully, like the tortured artists in things like everyone else.”9 meant he was doomed to “perpetual failure”. The pulp novels – but through a sudden realisation of his Even in the ’60s, Powditch made a distinction lesson lies in understanding that worldly success should own indifference to such matters. Notwithstanding between the active, difficult, purposeful labour not be an end in itself or the ultimate standard of value. his clear memories of past events and paintings, that went into a work of art, and the banality of his Ryckmans concludes: “The successful man adapts Powditch says he’s not really interested in the things subject matter. The ‘meaning’ of a work could not be himself to the world. The loser persists in trying to he has done, only in what he’s doing at present. separated from its making. There were no messages, adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress Once again, it’s not a neurotic repudiation of the overt or hidden. There was no attempt to align 3 depends on the loser.” past but simply a habit of mind. himself with a fashionable style or movement. 8 9 Andy Warhol once said that Pop Art is about a shower recess, is a more overtly erotic proposition a curved shape on top signifies “tree” just as began as a comic character and ended as a powerful “liking things”.10 Powditch, who strove to paint the than any of the Sun Torsos, because we see her as a effectively as a Heysen watercolour of some symbol of Christian faith, Powditch’s sculptures, things he and “everyone else” liked, with neither recognisable person, not as a series of geometrical majestic gum. no less than his paintings of bikini girls, nudes and apologies nor excuses, had no desire to be viewed shapes and spray-painted forms that create an Powditch has always had a penchant for pastel landscapes, have a sacramental aspect. He is not as a Pop artist. For Powditch Pop Art was part of almost tactile sensation of summer heat, soft flesh colours, notably soft pinks and browns. Over the past paying homage to a silent, all-powerful God, but the landscape, along with hard-edge abstraction, and stiff fabric. two decades the last strong colours have seeped out to the mysteries of creativity, which can never be Matisse’s cut-outs, Picasso’s collages, and perhaps In an Art and Australia profile of 1974, Peter Brown of his work, perhaps as he has settled into a more unravelled by any number of analyses or expositions. Jean Arp’s wooden relief sculptures. In a painting noted how Powditch’s experiments with print-making introspective frame of mind. The most recent pieces There is a startling purity in the way Powditch has such as Fabulous (1966), which depicts a group of had influenced the Sun Torsos. He also claimed are small sculptures, full of fractured narratives and approached those “popular things” that proclaim people in a room, the reference seems to be to that Powditch “has been able to create classically references. Even a passing glance at 47/48 (2015) his membership of the everyday world, and his belief Michael Andrews’s All night long (1963-64), acquired weighty, grave and authoritative art which still conjures up Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe (1914). that the artist need feel no shame in playing a game by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1964. contains all the associative meanings which only the The current works are more playful than the small, that will always be lost. If he painted advertising signs and lounge rooms, nude can produce”.13 austere torsos and landscapes of the preceding it didn’t imply a critique of consumer society. If he It may sound strange to describe pictures of girls period, right down to the use of cigarette packets johnmcdonald.net.au painted nudes or girls in bikinis, it wasn’t with the in bikinis as “weighty, grave and authoritative art”, with their alarming health warnings that Powditch eroticism of Tom Wesselmann. but the more one looks at the Sun Torsos, the more ignores, as he puffs and coughs.