Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Although Incarnation was unfashionable among one section of the art world because of its figuration, it was not as out of court as Looby liked to imagine. Room for him was available at the inn. However, space for his paintings was not so easy to find. At 4 to 5 metres by 2.65 metres, canvases such as Crucifixion - Resurrection and Incarnation were murals in search of a public wall. Constituents To dissect the images and structures inside Incarnation is to ponder how such elements might connect to the ideas and experiences that inspired its creation. The clustering of figures was both a personal and a social impulse. During the painting of Incarnation Looby lived and worked in a flat occupied by a former girlfriend and her current lover. He expressed his displeasure by replaying a record of 'None shall sleep' from Puccini's Turandot. The canvas remains unframed, originally because Looby could not afford the timber. The painting, however, contains its own frame, a dark trim around most of its perimeter. Only four of the twenty-two figures extend to the edge of the canvas: the leg of the man holding the white paper in the lower right continues beyond the depicted space; the skirt of the woman brushes against the far right; the hood of the central figure in black reaches to the top; the sleeve of the top right figure extrudes past the canvas edge. For the most part the figures and their clothing are kept away from the perimeter. For example, the man in the lower right comer does not rest his back against the edge but leans forward into the picture. Closeness is intensified by the arrangement of limbs. Some of the hands keep the people apart; others bind them together. It can be difficult to determine to whom a hand belongs, as in the lower centre where the hand that holds the number 2 billiard ball looks as if it is where the right foot of the bearded man above should be. Or is it the right hand of the boy? In a further complication, that hand appears to be back-to-front so that the ball does not rest in its palm but along the back of the fingers. Or is it that we think the hand is reversed since only the thumb shows a nail? Similarly, the left foot of the person holding the ball seems to be wrong side up, as if he had no bones at the ankle. These awkwardnesses indicate that Looby was blocking in spaces with little regard for Gray's Anatomy. No source of light is identifiable but it is possible to suppose the presence of a single strip of light along the top edge which distributes light equally on all areas and at a constant intensity. This treatment of illumination could be a weakness in Looby's design. Alternatively, the absence of a light source could have been deliberate, to ensure sameness over all the canvas as one more way to connect the figures. Some hands push forward against the picture plane to mark out its surface. Thumbs extend towards the viewer to give an illusion of depth in the foreground. By contrast, a cavemousness behind the figures is perceptible through the area around the crosses. Any flatness which Looby achieved looks different from that attributed to abstract expressionists by the NewYork critic Clement Greenberg because the surface in Incarnation is not energised for its own sake. The faces also convey a sameness in mien. Twenty of the mouths are closed, some being no more than slits sealed tight. The faces also look like masks. Their pairing is repeated in the coupling of figures. Both mask and double-goer ( doppelgdnger ) belong to the repertoire of the grotesque in the sense of crossing from one form to another — from the animate face to the inanimate mask, from flesh to timber or metal. Looby's faces appear to be chiselled out of wood. Many hover between the simian and the human. (The treatment of the face as expressionless had become frequent among a cluster of Australian painters such as Blackman, Brack, Dickerson, Nolan and Tucker, with their variants on the Antipodean head or vacant eyes.) Significantly it is only the infant — innocent of the world beyond — who looks past the edges of the painting. Several other pairs of eyes are focused towards the viewer, but some stare blankly forward, while the rest have their eyes cast down or up. In the lower left comer the three faces closest to cards and dice are eyeless, thereby underlining the blindness of chance. None of the equipment for gaming is what it seems. Billiard cues are shaped into spears while the numbered balls could be eyes. The tray of medals in the left centre points up the luck of survival on the battlefield and to the randomness in the awarding of honours in situations where soldiers swing between courage and cowardice. The tray of medals commemorates the death of Looby's paternal uncle during the Second World War. The clock marks the flow of the tides during which 'time and chance happeneth' to us all, as the preacher says in the book of Ecclesiastes. Games and randomness express an Australian view of how life might be lived. The Sydney Push treated gambling as a philosophy. After five years of travel and study, the 26-year-old Looby assembled the sources of his inspiration, regardless of chronology, anatomy or theology. The physical scale and intellectual scope of Incarnation marks it as a work by a painter anxious to grasp beyond the reach of his technique in order to impose some discipline on all that he has learned. While Incarnation looked back in homage to the art that Looby had seen, its completion opened a path to his rebirth as a painter of suburban life. The canvas might also be taken as one marker in the birth of a community of artists who did not need to reside overseas, however much they remained open to in-flight fashions. Humphrey McQueen is a freelance historian based in Canberra. In 1988 he published Suburbs of the Sacre d, a survey of the Australian art scene since the 1950s built around the career of Keith Looby. McQueen's other books on art are The Black Swan of Trespass (1979) and Tom Roberts (1996). MYSTERY PAINTING 293