Matthew Tome (July 2023) - Beneath Trees Originally published in Studio la Primitive art zine, September 2023

Lockdown found me drawing trees. I would meet a friend within a five kilometre limit at a desirable tree. We determined that en plain air drawing was a picnic, as per the rules. At first we attended to the figs, small leaf figs, Port Jackson figs, those that populate Sydney and create immense canopies, full of twisting, sinuous fleshy limbs. The limbs that ascend and descend, falling threads of aerial roots that contact the ground and become props and eventually fully rounded limbs, striking down and up.

Each tree spirals. Twists. Turns in on itself, like all plants reaching for light. The drawings were a pleasant meditation, both a release from the tension of lockdown and a slow, dedicated focus on the form that is the tree, constructing a portion of it in drawing, line over line, tracing the growth, the tension of forms revealed in the surface, the fall of indirect, shadowy light.

It was also a confirmation of what we are meant to do in those troubled times. We are artists, we draw. As restriction relented, from five kilometres to ten, we entered Centennial Park. While my city studio was a haven throughout, despite the hollow quiet weirdness of the times, having the park as a studio was glorious. We sheltered beneath and beside the trees and drew.

It is common to turn to nature for making art. It defines us and reinforces the weird artificiality we have built in the cities. For me it is a fascination with the forms, how they are, what they look like, the ideas that they contain, the evidence of their evolution, growth, death.

The trees are difficult to convey as whole without having to move away from them and view at a distance at which point it turns it into landscape. Doing so I find I lose contact with the tree as a subject and prefer to remain under, or at least near, and accept that I am drawing fragments, like gazing at a torso. I remain sure of what I am near and unsure of the reach of the form, just guessing it, the range of it.

I found myself drawn to the pine forest. This is a weird place, considering it is like a European forest, a fragment of the Borghese gardens on Gadigal ground. It acts as a theatre, the needles flattening the ground and the trees are regularly spaced and tracks are made through them by joggers, dog walkers and wedding photographers. The trees are stone pines, much like those of Rome that I drew on my trips there and again I feel that strange tug of a European descendent. I immediately listen for the tone poems of Respighi, glorious haunting music. The tree forms themselves are tessellated, clusters of bark, geometric and modernistic. Cubists made these trees. They are exciting to draw and bring out something modern in form and Cretaceous in spirit.

I started to move from the trunk portraits to the clusters of trees, the ground plane and the rhythm of trees, their trunks, and occasionally their tops. Sheltered in the forest the strongest light comes from beyond, to the side or the distance. It seemed to demand colour which is when I scaled the drawings down and used pastels, chalk or oil, on coloured grounds. A step towards painting.

Doing these compositions I found that when I moved position they still looked the same, such was the regularity of the place. It became less about observation and more about construction. Reaching that point, I realised that I didn’t need to be there any more and could move the whole process back to the studio.

If I recount many hours of my teenage life I picture evenings spent listening to and playing music and drawing, or looking at books of pictures. It describes my preferred state, I found it then. My family travelled Europe for several months when I was 10. I was immersed in art, history, ancient ruins and a deep aesthetic culture. It was like a christening, being plunged into a deep pool of art and history and it never washed away. When I arrived at art school I realised I was in the right place. As a teacher, I have never left. I consider teaching art as being in the studio. While it is not primary production I am always thinking about making art, talking about art, showing how to make art, interrogating practice. Art school was the best thing that happened to me as a young adult and I can’t stop returning the favour.

Teaching has in many ways grounded my practice. I return to the studio to teach having to consider the essential things, what is it to draw, to paint, to make pictures and how to communicate that? I constantly look through art history and the language of art. It has also meant that I have tried many things in my practice to understand these ideas, used many materials and methods, learnt all I can about how art is made and why.

My recent paintings are in acrylics which is a change for me. Sharing the airspace in a studio in Sydney with two other artists who also painted with acrylics confirmed if for me. I like changing mediums. Each offers its own possibilities and I react to them with my own actions. The oils tend to be visceral, dense. My acrylic painting is much like my work on paper in ink, gouache, watercolour. I treat the canvas as a big sheet of paper. I use transparency and layering, linear marks, washing and scrubbing. I use a lot of matt medium, which is a weird form of nominative determinism.

In the studio my ideas evolve into abstractions. It is a way of getting to an essential kind of form, not away from those that I have observed but to get under them. It seems they are much more about the experience, what is felt and observed in memory than a reproduction of the refined optical vision. It allows me to work with colour, and develop layers, traces, and somehow capture aspects of time in the painting. I have learnt how important is for paintings to reveal themselves over time. You in fact reward a viewer who stays, they get more from the looking. Each work is a result of a series of actions, a response to a series of marks, a layer of colour, an erasure. It is also a matter of how you use your body, the movement of body and arm and hand but searching for something new. The most creative work is usually because of a mistake of some kind that you react to. I work ideas out on paper in the studio. These may be drawings, wet media on paper (ink, gouache) or collage. These are developed in multiples, repeated versions and variations largely to interrogate the idea but also to exhaust it. The repetition forces me to invent, to continue to find other ways to state ideas and then really create something new, something I hadn’t expected. These active works on paper become the language that is scaled up for the canvases. Along with this I will draw onto cut sheets of ply that I will later cut and use as plates for printing.

Mary Gabriel’s fabulous book Ninth Street Women clarified a lot for me. The origins of Lee Kranser’s powerful collages, Joan Mitchell’s glorious evocations of colour and space and memory woven into the complex history is just a couple of examples. The connection with music, particularly bebop. It reinforced the notion that abstraction was the language of freedom. At the time, sandwiched between colonialism, provincialism and fascism, abstraction in its various guises offered pure human freedom of expression. Essential freedom of expression from oppression and stultification, not the nastiness and bigotry that currently claims its name.

Our job as artists is to be as honest as we can. The more we work, the more we reveal ourselves, to ourselves and to each other. I would not be the first artist to say that I am often at a loss as to why I made a certain work in a particular way. I can explain it, after, probably. All the learning, the thinking and acting somehow melts away when you are working to ask questions, to find something and surprise yourself with the results. All the work, the thinking, the testing is to build your intuition so that you don’t think at all when it counts.

“Whisperer”, exhibition of paintings and works on paper will be at Straitjacket Artspace, Newcastle in November 2023