Madonna Staunton: Out of a Clear Blue Sky is an exhibition showing currently at the Queensland Art Gallery. There are a number of different mediums in the exhibition. There are different types of works represented such as abstract paintings, collages, assemblages, prints, figurative paintings, self-portraiture, and there is a interactive panel which enables on to explore Madonna Staunton’s mothers Madge Staunton’s exercise book containing colour theory. The space where the exhibition is installed is a large cube, it has a very high ceiling, it is quite big but at the same time it gives one the perception of an intimate space. The works are installed in a sort of chronological order beginning with her earlier works, abstract paintings moving on to collage works and then onto more recent paintings. There are installations of assemblages and there are glass-covered cabinets containing prints in the middle of the space.
The curator, Peter MacKay, explained how he organised the exhibition. He said that Madonna Staunton has very little technology in use. She doesn’t use a computer or email for example. Therefore, he had to ring her and visit her to organise every detail, which he said did have its drawbacks as he was on a tight schedule, however, when he visited her he had to slow down and be in the moment, or many unhurried moments, on the plus side this resulted in him getting to know Madonna Staunton more personally and with each visit she would offer more and more insight into her art and life which I think has given the exhibition a more personal touch, a sensitiveness which may not have come through otherwise.
The title of this exhibition “Out of a clear, blue sky” makes me want to question what does Madonna Staunton mean by this? The title brings to mind that something unpleasant has suddenly happened ‘out of the blue’. Madonna Staunton’s works in the exhibition gives me the feeling that earlier in her career she was happier and more energetic and was able to produce larger more demanding works and as her health deteriorated her works change from painting to collage, and also I noticed that her works become a lot smaller on many levels. Her collages were quite large to begin with and as time went on they got smaller as well. Her paintings started off quite large in her early career: August 1996, Peripheral green, blue 1968, Easter 1967 and Untitled 1976. These paintings allude to happier times with brighter, happier colours whereas later in her life, in recent years, she has returned to painting and many of these paintings are smaller and have a darker, a more somber colour palette. These later paintings exude less happier times, emotional suffering, depression. Many of these paintings I feel are about depression and suffering and are about struggling with the illness and trying to live one day at a time. To me it seems Madonna is looking over issues in her life and situations and relationships. She is looking at her relationship with her father (They say 2010) and her relationship with her mother (No one said 2010). She is analyzing her romantic, personal relationships: Romantic doubt 2004, Numbers Game. Depression is a debilitating mental illness where mentally one is being pulled into a dark deep hole, is consumed with dark negative thoughts where many of them are about self reprisal, self-pity, self-loathing, analysing something (often a loss of some kind) that has happened over and over again, but is unable to find the solution to a wanted outcome. The mental illness turns into a physical illness. Titles such as Hide 1 2010, Hide 2 2010, Reprise c.2007 and Armature 1999 allude to her depression.
Madonna Staunton born 1938 is recognised for her significant contribution to Australian modernism over the last five decades, and has long been appreciated as one of Queensland’s favourite artists. Her confidently arranged collage and assemblage works exude a meditative lyricism long admired by audiences. In recent years, however, Staunton has committed more of her time to figurative painting – the discipline at the origin of her practice.
Beginning with Staunton’s earliest Colour Field abstracts of the 1960s, this exhibition seeks to recognise and contextualise these latest paintings – searching the artist’s career from Preludes and connections between diverse bodies of work. Indeed, stop Madonna Staunton out of a clear blue sky suggests that the artist has always taken on the concerns and interests of a painter, albeit one who has often experimented with unconventional materials.
From school-age, Staunton’s mother offered her comparatively advanced introduction to the qualities of colour and tone, and a capacity for drawing an emotional response. This attention, and aptitude, meant that by the time Staunton attended classes at Brisbane’s central technical College in 1964, her understanding of colour and tone arguably rivaled those of accomplished professionals. By the late 1960s, however, the artist directed her attention to the less strenuous practice of collage due to ill-health. She had suffered from measles as a child, which left her with weak lungs. And later she suffered with arthritis. Collage accommodated her particular skills perfectly and great success followed. But Staunton’s ‘Armature’ series from 1999 signaled a dedicated return to painting, and her works began to demonstrate the kind of philosophical, psychological and emotional concerns that would occupy her thereafter.
‘Madonna Staunton: Out of a Clear Blue Sky’ demonstrates Staunton’s capacity to change and adapt, reintroduce and renew. Expressed with talents amassed over a career spanning nearly 50 years, these recent representational works in particular are weighted with the kind of insights that come with age and deep reflection.
Staunton’s early abstract paintings reward the viewer who devotes time to recognising the subtle complexity of interactions between elements of colour, tone, shape and gesture. Madge Staunton, the artist’s mother, studied painting at East Sydney technical College from 1948 to 1951; she took great care to relay much of this learning to her daughter as a way of fostering independence through education. Notably, Madge studied with prominent artist and designer Phyllis Shillito, who provided her pupils with a sophisticated foundation in colour. Madge’s exercise books became the foundational knowledge for her daughter, providing Staunton with an advanced understanding of tint, shade, contrast, scales, complements and discords. These works are partly those of a young artist responding to that then recent American breakthroughs – Abstract Expressionism and, more specifically, Colour Field painting – but also one giving form to her own sensations.
Staunton is one of the few Australian artists working with collage to have achieved a national reputation based primarily on this medium. Untitled is an important transitional work which signposts her development from an abstract painter to collage artist. It is distinctive for its unusually scale, bright colours, and all over patterning – features that strongly relate to her earlier Colour Field paintings. In subsequent collages, Staunton would have the most part, work on a more intimate scale with a more subtle and muted palette. With practice, she would also devise ways to arrange the elements in her compositions to give each component sense of individual identity.
Though this exhibition focuses on Staunton’s painting practice, it is not intended to underplay the significance of her collage and assemblage works – the intent is to consider those works as, or at least in close relation to, painting. Assemblage with plank, cleverly iterates an idea of ‘painting without painting’. Here, Staunton took a canvas stretcher and created a ‘composition’ by fixing to it a pair of folding chairs and a reclaimed house painter’s scaffold board, complete with a cosmos of star-like splatters and cloudlike streaks of paint.
The chance patterns evoke a sense of the timelessness of the cosmos, and similarly the chairs speak of time spent contemplating, as a painter might in front of their work. The presence of two chairs is an ambiguous invitation: it could imply an exchange with a viewer or another artist. Tucked behind one chair is a record cover for the album Still Crazy After All These Years (1976) by Paul Simon – and so it may be that the two chairs are to accommodate multiple aspects of the one: the artist.
These sculptures recalled the tipi structure used by nomadic first Nations peoples of the United States, though Staunton’s are somewhat more defence-armoured. Here, two ladders (perhaps joined by the plank from Assemblage with plank) are covered with painted timber lengths to create a physical protection for the psyche. These sculptures seem to relate to Staunton’s mental illness, it seems like she is trying to cover up, hide away. Or it there something to do with trying to hide the easels away. Were these fabricated when Staunton was unable to paint?
Comprised of redundant railway markers, complete with coding and small ink bottles, Numbers game resembles a work by prominent New Zealand born Australian assemblage artist Rosalie Gascoigne, who was known for her gridded arrangements of reflective road signs. Tired of being discussed in reference to Gascoigne, Staunton composed this work as if it had been shaken in frustration, or even exploded.
For Staunton, numbers and letters are important symbols associated with the systematic denial of rights among certain citizens by authoritarian regimes throughout modern history. Even as a benign administrative process, the impersonal experience of being reduced to a number can sit at odds with a strong sense of self and self-worth.
In her armature series, Staunton attached while coat hangers to pre-painted boards in an even dispersion, and then painted around them. In one respect they were a kind of painting system with set parameters that offered a safe process by which to return to painting with paint – but they also coded a personal insight that would continue to underpin her practice thereafter.
Specifically, Staunton was thinking about the armour that we cloak ourselves in before we leave the home each day to face the world. Equally, she was also considering the restless aspects of ourselves – our sensitivities, vulnerabilities, secrets and compassion – that we might leave behind in the closet, like coathangers, or skeletons, left to rattle.
Sitting among the most accomplished paintings of the artists recent figurative period, here an elongated figure painted in murky tones stares out at the viewer with a brittle and nervous exhaustion. The subject’s face seems to hover in front of her head, detached as it rests in her hand in a way that suggests that she has been charting the formless, infinite void of depression. The wide eyes are marked with a sense of disbelief and acceptance.
The figure seems to be falling or losing balance right out of the painting. There is a shocked look in her eyes, they are wide and frantic. There appears to be a house in the background or she may be in a room of some kind. She certainly looks anxious. The hands seem stiff and non-functioning. I believe this is a self-portrait of Madonna Staunton herself and possibly she is losing balance or has lost her balance physically speaking with her health issues, arthritis maybe or it could be an emotional imbalance or mental imbalance.
Many of Staunton’s compositions are articulated in a condensed geometric arrangement – a post-cubist strategy linked to her tonal collage, but coded with emotional sensitivity provoked by the wrestling of humanist ideals and hostile circumstance.
Whereas every artist’s life experience has some impact on the shape and content of their creativity, in Staunton’s case this influence offers valuable insight into the structure and content of her work, which often harbours a biographical aspect. Her father was a bookshop owner and collector of period furniture, and her mother was a librarian and book conservator, poet and painter, who studied under the educator, advocate and utopian intellectual William Lane. Living in a household full of books and bibliophiles, Staunton became an avid reader, and soon started writing poetry with some seriousness. These works attest to the artist’s love of writing, and the fulfillment to be found in an inner world easily accessed through countless great books.
In an effort to exert some order over chaos in the world, Staunton attempted to frame her future, after death, as she optimistically aims to experience it in her ‘Postcard’ series, finding consolation in a kind of transcendental goal setting. Staunton announces her resolve to locate in the hereafter authors and musicians already passed. These novel projections are couched in a brutally honest personal reflection about the limits of life and the ideas that have made it worthwhile, charging the works with startling sensitivity and intelligence. Post cards to people beyond the veil give one the impression she is getting ready to depart this physical world and preparing to enter the spiritual world beyond. Possibly, she is already seeing loved ones on the other side.
Madonna Staunton is obviously a ‘cat’ person due to the number of cat paintings in her exhibition. Cat with storm clouds 2014 seems to reference a cat and storms, animals normally dislike storms. The ginger cat seems to be looking at Madonna and saying I am hiding nearby and I am scared, please look after me.
On first view, the glorious sense of sunlight and blue sky in this work could easily be mistaken for optimism. However, the idiom is not about the parting of the clouds to receive the gifts of chance, but instead an unexpected injury inflicted out of nowhere. Staunton’s wisdom here is that even in the finest moments hazard lurks. Something terrible has happened just when everything seemed fine. Life is what happens when you are planning the future: good and bad things happen. In this instance, something bad has happened.
Although Staunton was raised in a family with high participation in the arts, it seems her father was not always entirely sympathetic to his daughter’s aspirations to be an artist of one sort or another. From early childhood, Staunton was a talented pianist, yet she still remembers the impact of her father’s remarks after stress caused her to falter on stage during a recital. He declared on the journey home that she did not seem to have what it takes to be a performer. In her fragile state the young Staunton’s hopes were dashed. This scene may be the subject of the small semi-abstract painting Allegory, and in broad thematic terms this familial relationship dynamic would seem to be implicated in many works. The father figure seems to be abusing his daughter. He comes across as a stern father with a temper.
One would feel that Madonna Staunton has lived a hard life with regards to her family life especially her father and that she has suffered from her health all through her life and she has worked through her issues in her art in a personal way. It seems there have been many storm clouds and not a lot of clear, blue skies in her life.
References:
(1) Didactic panels by curator Peter McKay
(2) Madonna Staunton Catalogue
Art Life 