GORDON SHEPHERDSON ESTATE

BIOGRAPHY

⁣⁣Gordon Shepherdson (1934 - 2019) attended classes with Caroline Barker of the Royal QLD Art Society (1951-52), Arthur Evan Read (1960), Andrew Sibley and Jon Molvig (1961) while working at a shipyard and later at an abattoir in Brisbane. He held solo exhibitions regularly from 1964 onwards at renowned Australian galleries including The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane; Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney and Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane. Shepherdson was a recipient of the Tattersalls Club Landscape Prize (1990), the Georges Art Prize, Melbourne (1980) and a finalist in the Archibald Prize (1962, 1974, 1976). Survey exhibitions of the artist’s work were held at the University of Queensland Art Museum (1977) and the Queensland Art Gallery (1997). Shepherdson’s work is in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria as well as tertiary and regional collections.⁣ His work has been included in major survey publications on Australian art including Horton, M. (ed) 'Present Day Art in Australia' Ure Smith, London, 1969 and Murray Cree, L. & Drury, N.  (ed). 'Australian Painting Now' Craftsman House, Sydney 2000. “Shepherdson records, primarily for his own satisfaction, the raw experience, the celebration and dark poetry of ‘one man’s stay on the planet.’ ” (Pamela Bell, Art & Australia, 1978).

ARTIST CV

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WORKS

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PAST EXHIBITIONS

BODIES ON PAPER: 2000 TO 2011

CURRENT 1 TO 18 FEBRUARY 2023

No way in, go in, measure.

Samuel Beckett

In applying paint to paper, Gordon created these bodies you see with touch. All marks are direct from the fingers, metamorphic colour-chords laid down in a semi-improvised way to form limbs, eyes, gestures, and their mysterious reasons for being. They keep their shadows like pets. They seem to curate the debris from memory. What is happening, or has happened to them, is happening, or will happen to us. That’s the connection. The fact that these bodies concurrently bathe in gravity and light gives them their fluid resonance. Large, irregular postage stamps that perhaps will never be delivered to their fate.

The bodies in this exhibition mostly date from the early 2000s. My mother Noela was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1999 and died in 2003. Gordon was Noela’s devoted carer within that expanse. There was no hint of selfishness. The treatment, the possibilities, the failure of the treatment, the iron knots in the tracks, the persistence, and the subsidence of the flesh. For Gordon, this meant a frequent compression of scale in his work. Inhaling ideas and their necessity from a 150 cm square that did not exist, to exhale them onto a 40 cm square that did. He’d set the domestic routine in the house, then race down the ‘the shed’ to unload and wrestle images out of his head. He’d then return to the house, see mum safely to bed, then quietly eat the meal he cooked earlier, capped off with a panatela cigar and a muscat on the front porch. Time was not a luxury at that point, but that point he adapted as an archer to creatively hit white paper targets with great consistency.

Having outlined the situation in which these paintings were made, it’s too simple a yardstick to say that they depict the stages of Noela’s illness. Some do, yes. And there is certainly a clock-ballast under it all, folding the lead that weighs them down. Yet thematically and philosophically, these bodies meld and weave tangents and motifs that recur throughout Gordon’s work. Snakes, shoes, blood, and landscape. They behave as portraits of their impact upon the body. The stress, the urgency, the beauty, the fear, the power, and the repose. Anatomy somehow falling onto the vertical surface, to rest, escape, or become entrapped in apportioned space. All notions fenced off by raw edges left by a knife. As stencil beings, they vacuum thoughts and emotions onto themselves. Through movement or stillness, they transition inside their jigsaw-silence to suspend themselves in matter.

And then the landscape, so often a word in the titles Gordon assigns? These bodies usually couched in their ‘darkening landscape’. What landscape? Why darkening? Is he painting, or capturing life and light as they self-extinguish, to form partial eclipses drifting across handmade figures that use silence as their primary language?

From boyhood to death, Gordon was very interested in capital N ‘Nature’. Through fishing, a totemic interest in birds, or observing the night sky, he could read landscape, he notated localised morse code on the wind, or from the backs of leaves. He would reckon within his own readymade maths, using the undisclosed numbers in the seasonal phonebook. And yet, in conversation, he’d sometimes gently challenge the terms, ‘landscape’ or ‘seascape’. He’d say, ‘are they?’, or ‘if that’s what you want to call them’.

Day to day we have practical handles, a language brimful with coded descriptors. So, while a door is a door, Gordon would have defined a door as what’s on either side of it. And I think that’s how he viewed landscape, elementally it is something you’re in, but he was more interested in positioning himself either side of it, at the same time. That’s the existential puzzle. The painter and the painting are either side of something else. As viewers, we are offered spiritual calling cards, rich in baritone colour, thinly sliced from the subconscious, and slid under our own theoretical door, be it from inside to out.

To Gordon, landscape was time. He was glad to discover a way to hitch a ride on the contradictory energies that concept entailed and allowed. The canvas chair in his studio still hovers six inches above its floor. And in slim moments, the thought-seeded weather systems that rolled across the continental plates in his head, can still be detected. Intrinsically these paintings are colour slides projected through his eyelids, images that floated, crawled, or stumbled out of the muscle memory in his right hand.

 

Nathan Shepherdson

Brisbane, 20.01.2023

PAINTINGS FOR AN AUDIENCE OF ONE: WORK FROM THE 1990s

CURRENT 9 TO 22 DECEMBER 2017 / 1 TO 11 FEBRUARY 2018

 

It could be regarded as odd to think of something we might call Australian romanticism, either as a genre or where a single artist or group of artists give expression to its historically accepted disposition. The Angry Penguins fit nicely as do paintings from the 1960s by Arthur Boyd. Other lyrical painting is an observed expressionism – John Perceval, for example - or a painterly symbolism like the late and seemingly endless repertoire of Nolan, where his familiar literalism offers a well-worn meaning, of sorts.

Charles Baudelaire summed up its temperament, ‘Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling’.

Subjective vision need not exist as an extreme and turbulent expression of an observed world, its circumstances or particular material fact. It can, of course, but in Gordon Shepherdson’s case it's where an impulsive and intuitive mind transcends any sense of literalism. We are familiar with figures running, nudes held within dark and menacing space. Bulls and open-winged birds and images drawn from literature and religion are each the well-spring for allegories developed within his rich imagination. They are painted without pictorial forethought - the act of painting and its physical process defines the declarative strength of his art.

I know this from personal experience. He painted my portrait and I sat for it. His studio – the shed - is a small space at the bottom of a scruffy-verdant back yard. He paces, settles, talks, offers a beer while stalking a large white sheet of paper clipped to a board on an easel. Silence, total silence, descends then a few staccato lines mark the surface, then brushes and fingers take over. In half an hour or so he needs a break and it takes a while for his mind to calm and he settles. Nothing is an affectation and his natural humility and self-doubt consume the space. I choose not to disrupt the pause in an incomplete momentum and don’t get up to look at the work.

Gordon Shepherdson sits within a familiar pattern of Australian art historical circumstance. He has always lived in Brisbane, a place where a localised expressionism became something of a tag for local modernism. Early in his career and in Sydney, Rudy Komon (Gallery) picked him up. Artists admired his work. He continued to exhibit commercially and in 1997 the Queensland Art Gallery presented an exhibition of painting from 1979 to 1996. He is represented in the NGA and many state, regional and university galleries. To my mind he is the natural consequence of the uncritical acceptance of the repeating blast of Australia’s art historical canon. He doesn’t appear to us as figuratively post-Antipodean let alone playing some Australian card. His interests are vast, and colloquial one-liners never appear.

Exhibitions like this help in reshaping our perceptions of the past, and with next-generation curiosity perhaps comes the prospect of seeing and placing his art differently.

While his work might be familiar, it’s never formulaic. The works in this exhibition hold an all-pervading certainty where black and white as massed and negative space compress the imagery and intensify its sensory experience. The use of half-tones is interrupted with blood-red flecks which amplifies drama. Figures are framed within compositions – open and closed space - and remind us of earlier art historical suggestions and discreet symbolic references to freedom and restraint.

The exuberant expression, those sightless eyes and masks - exaggerations and awkwardness – lead to a sense of intense vulnerability. They really are paintings for our time.

Doug Hall AM

 

PAST EXHIBITION: A SMALL SURVEY OF LATER WORK

14 MAY TO 13 JUNE 2015

NEWS

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GORDON SHEPHERDSON TRIBUTE BY BRUCE HEISER IN ART MONTHLY AUSTRALASIA NO 320

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GORDON SHEPHERDSON TRIBUTE ON ARTIST PROFILE ONLINE

⁣Artist Profile have published online Louise Martin-Chew’s 2018 feature on Gordon Shepherdson (1934 – 2019) as a tribute to the artist ⁣.⁣ VALE Gordon Shepherdson ⁣.⁣ ⁣‘His sensitivity and quiet introversion pervades each painting. Each one represented ‘hunks of me’, intended for an ‘audience of one’ he once said…’ extract from Louise Martin-Chew for Artist…

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GORDON SHEPHERDSON 1934 – 2019

⁣⁣Gordon Shepherdson ‘one of the major artists of Australia’s figurative tradition’* passed away on the 18th of July 2019⁣ ⁣⁣.⁣ ⁣⁣Gordon Shepherdson ‘A small survey of recent work’ was the first solo exhibition held at Nicholas Thompson Gallery in 2015. A painter’s painter, it is wonderful that Gordon’s images, from the powerful to the subdued,…

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GORDON SHEPHERDSON’S 1989 ‘ST STEPHEN’ PAINTINGS INSTALLED AT THE QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY/GALLERY OF MODERN ART

⁣‘The ‘St Stephen’ paintings of the late 1980s provided the artist with a motif which allowed a personal vision to merge with an event of historical and mythical significance. These works are some of the very few examples of narrative painting by Shepherdson’ extract from David Burnett’s catalogue essay for ‘Marks + Moments: Paintings by…

GORDON SHEPHERDSON IN ARTIST PROFILE, ARTICLE BY LOUISE MARTIN-CHEW

GORDON SHEPHERDSON IN ARTIST PROFILE, ARTICLE BY LOUISE MARTIN-CHEW