Carmody, Brian » Jack Lasenby Speech (Points of View)
Brian Carmody Exhibition 24/4/09 South Coast Gallery, 169 Cuba Street. Jack Lasenby For many years I lived just above the high water mark at Paremata and watched the curtains of rain, mist, or drizzle come down Ken Gray’s valley up the north end of the inlet, advance across the harbour and sandbanks at high and low tide, withdraw up the gully, lifting between the spurs, revealing those beautiful hills. I’d busy myself with my writing, look up, and they’d be there again, those greens, greys, blues, whites advancing, retreating, the harbour a floor to their grave dance.I’d look at the shapely hills behind their gauze of rain and cloud and think of Yeats’s “Wild Old Wicked Man” poem: “Because I am mad about women/ I am mad about the hills.” I was beginning to understand something of his fascination with the twinned folly and wisdom of old age.Then Brian Carmody lent me a painting, a generous arrangement that has lasted over thirty years, and I hope – through forgetfulness or kindness on his part – for another thirty. It’s a harbour scene: reflections of water, cloud, sky, hints of headlands, islands, hills; and seeing my harbour through Brian’s, the shift and change of light and reflection informed my own vision.I was at Paremata again this Easter, and though the air rang like a silver coin with hard bright light, I remembered Brian’s painting, and the pictures in my mind of those curtains of mist and rain on harbour and hill.I’ve been looking continually at other paintings of Brian’s for many years, two in particular: one of Picton, the other a still-life of sulphur-yellow daisies, and the looking has added another depth, a patina of thought to them. Patina mightn’t be the right word for paintings, put it this way: they exist now in a larger context than when I first saw them. And that’s one of the advantages of growing old. Immersed in time, we experience the arts in a greater body of meaning. Most of all, the arts are inclusive, pour their benevolence over us. They include us. It’s unsurprising that Brian’s artistic life has intertwined with his life in education. He grew up in the period informed by Dr Beeby’s enlightened philosophy in which the arts were a crucial part of education. Hence the encouraging of music, the establishing of the School Publications Branch, hence the appointment of Gordon Tovey as supervisor of art and craft for the Department of Education. Tovey then made his own series of enlightened appointments – art advisers to the schools including amongst many others: Brian Carmody, John Drawbridge, Ralph Hotere, Marilyn Webb, Cliff Whiting – the list goes on, a glittering array.And here I think of a story about two of them: Brian Carmody and John Drawbridge, going to Europe for the first time. It’s about 1957. In London, they go to the Tate Gallery, to an exhibition. They look long and step out of the Tate as if into the very paintings they’ve just been looking at: the river, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, the Embankment, the shifting curtains of light and shade.“Everything about us looked like Monet,” Brian has said. “We were seeing through his eyes, our vision heightened by his.” For it was a Monet exhibition. They made their way home in a prolonged and profound silence, like a necessary developmental step. Both already active painters, their thoughts, their minds, their eyes were now fed in a different way. A rich torrent of work flowed down the years that followed, John died, alas, but Brian continues not just to paint, but to maintain his interest in education through the arts, and his teaching of painting classes, a generous record. There’s some disagreement about the medical symbol, whether it should be the rod of Asclepius with its single snake, or the caduceus, the staff of Hermes with its two snakes entwined in a double helix. In his novel, The Cunning Man, Robertson Davies says of the caduceus that one snake is wisdom, the other knowledge, and neither can succeed without the other. I like that, partly because it reminds me of Yeats’s preoccupation with the twinned folly and wisdom of age.In their accessibility, in their sheer enjoyment, Brian’s paintings are inclusive of us, like the mutual dependencies of knowledge and wisdom, of education and the arts. The Beeby period is long gone –educational theory and practice change as fast as any other fashions – but the effects of that great inclusive philosophy of education through the arts are still present in our generation. I look at Brian’s paintings and see those two: wisdom and knowledge acting upon each other. Together, as we see about us here, they produce art. back to artist page
Carmody, Brian
Jack Lasenby Speech (Points of View)
Brian Carmody Exhibition 24/4/09 South Coast Gallery, 169 Cuba Street. Jack Lasenby For many years I lived just above the high water mark at Paremata and watched the curtains of rain, mist, or drizzle come down Ken Gray’s valley up the north end of the inlet, advance across the harbour and sandbanks at high and low tide, withdraw up the gully, lifting between the spurs, revealing those beautiful hills. I’d busy myself with my writing, look up, and they’d be there again, those greens, greys, blues, whites advancing, retreating, the harbour a floor to their grave dance.I’d look at the shapely hills behind their gauze of rain and cloud and think of Yeats’s “Wild Old Wicked Man” poem: “Because I am mad about women/ I am mad about the hills.” I was beginning to understand something of his fascination with the twinned folly and wisdom of old age.Then Brian Carmody lent me a painting, a generous arrangement that has lasted over thirty years, and I hope – through forgetfulness or kindness on his part – for another thirty. It’s a harbour scene: reflections of water, cloud, sky, hints of headlands, islands, hills; and seeing my harbour through Brian’s, the shift and change of light and reflection informed my own vision.I was at Paremata again this Easter, and though the air rang like a silver coin with hard bright light, I remembered Brian’s painting, and the pictures in my mind of those curtains of mist and rain on harbour and hill.I’ve been looking continually at other paintings of Brian’s for many years, two in particular: one of Picton, the other a still-life of sulphur-yellow daisies, and the looking has added another depth, a patina of thought to them. Patina mightn’t be the right word for paintings, put it this way: they exist now in a larger context than when I first saw them. And that’s one of the advantages of growing old. Immersed in time, we experience the arts in a greater body of meaning. Most of all, the arts are inclusive, pour their benevolence over us. They include us. It’s unsurprising that Brian’s artistic life has intertwined with his life in education. He grew up in the period informed by Dr Beeby’s enlightened philosophy in which the arts were a crucial part of education. Hence the encouraging of music, the establishing of the School Publications Branch, hence the appointment of Gordon Tovey as supervisor of art and craft for the Department of Education. Tovey then made his own series of enlightened appointments – art advisers to the schools including amongst many others: Brian Carmody, John Drawbridge, Ralph Hotere, Marilyn Webb, Cliff Whiting – the list goes on, a glittering array.And here I think of a story about two of them: Brian Carmody and John Drawbridge, going to Europe for the first time. It’s about 1957. In London, they go to the Tate Gallery, to an exhibition. They look long and step out of the Tate as if into the very paintings they’ve just been looking at: the river, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, the Embankment, the shifting curtains of light and shade.“Everything about us looked like Monet,” Brian has said. “We were seeing through his eyes, our vision heightened by his.” For it was a Monet exhibition. They made their way home in a prolonged and profound silence, like a necessary developmental step. Both already active painters, their thoughts, their minds, their eyes were now fed in a different way. A rich torrent of work flowed down the years that followed, John died, alas, but Brian continues not just to paint, but to maintain his interest in education through the arts, and his teaching of painting classes, a generous record. There’s some disagreement about the medical symbol, whether it should be the rod of Asclepius with its single snake, or the caduceus, the staff of Hermes with its two snakes entwined in a double helix. In his novel, The Cunning Man, Robertson Davies says of the caduceus that one snake is wisdom, the other knowledge, and neither can succeed without the other. I like that, partly because it reminds me of Yeats’s preoccupation with the twinned folly and wisdom of age.In their accessibility, in their sheer enjoyment, Brian’s paintings are inclusive of us, like the mutual dependencies of knowledge and wisdom, of education and the arts. The Beeby period is long gone –educational theory and practice change as fast as any other fashions – but the effects of that great inclusive philosophy of education through the arts are still present in our generation. I look at Brian’s paintings and see those two: wisdom and knowledge acting upon each other. Together, as we see about us here, they produce art. back to artist page
