BIOGRAPHY
‘The Light’ by David Hall, New Zealand Listener, May 9th 2009
After a string of artist residencies in New York and New Zealand, James Robinson is squatting in a disused grainstore in Whanganui, painting and wondering what to do next.
It is a vast space, rented out for a pittance when he began the Tylee Cottage residency in mid-2008. Light and wildlife pour in through its unpaned windows. Its corrugated iron roof ticks frantically when the sun comes out. The white planks of the ceiling are stained with tea-coloured rust, and rows of bird-shit line the floor beneath the beams that span overhead.
The ambience is not unlike the artworks that Robinson has been making there. He arrived in Whanganui to begin the Tylee Cottage residency, the results of which constitute The Light. The paintings are a distillation of their surroundings, almost camouflaged amidst the studio’s paint splatters, wood splinters, loose bricks and lost belongings.
“I’m a scavenger and an opportunist,” says Robinson. “I work with what I’ve got, where I am. Every time is different. Like the Whanganui logo, ‘Discovery is the journey’.”
On the white walls of Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery, however, the paintings are jarring, antagonistic, like overgrown cultures on a sterile laboratory bench. Torn and scorched, their massive canvases are stuck with thick worms of white paint, deflated sacs of resin, coarse sutures of woollen yarn, and mandalas of nails.
“I like big work,” he says, “because when a sensation overwhelms us, you are in that world, rather than looking at a world. Sometimes with my work I don’t know when to stop, because—y’know—when is a cloud finished?”
Robinson is a painter of effects, captivated by the possibilities of his materials. Blades of grass, black sand, and river pebbles are swamped by acrylic paint, as is a slew of domestic detritus: matches, washers, buttons, beads, plastic toys, loose change, old 45s, circuit boards, a spanner, a handsaw, a broken table leg, a shattered pane of glass, and a post-it note from a friend which invites the artist around for quiche that afternoon.
There is a revelatory spirit at work, a willingness to expose the process, to show the tools of the trade trapped in the painting. It extends to his mind too: Robinson wants to show you how he thinks. He scribbles messages and declarations, auto-criticisms and self-help notes; and gives license to more subliminal impulses, indulging a Gestaltian urge to find faces and figures in the static: ghouls, goblins, mountains and thunderheads.
The canvases are like the tanned hides of endangered civilisations, like tikis or totems, made by a white man unsettled by the memories of the land (Robinson describes Whanganui as “a cultural war zone, a racial genocide point”).
Yet where Robinson’s earlier work was mostly monochromatic, its atmosphere spanning from wintery desolation to frenzied brutality, there is now a profusion of colour, an expansion of his emotional palette. The Light retains Robinson’s usual onslaught, his sensory excess; but emerging through the smog and grey scud is a flush of rusty reds and muted magenta, aquamarine and azure.
“I want to give the most intense experience I know how to do,” he says. “In the past, that was more turbulent and negative, and these days it’s more salubrious, joyous and uplifting. The work has become more alive.”
Robinson had messy beginnings. Born in Christchurch in 1972, he had a schizophrenic and largely absent father, a precocious descent into drugs and booze, and suffered the suicide of his only sibling, Martin, aged 24. What followed was an equally messy recovery, a rocky road of psych wards, AA programmes (he’s been teetotalled since 1993), binge eating, and alternative remedies (“I went to a new age hippy and did rebirthing, and tripped out like Jesus.”)
Of course, art-making was his primary therapy, and he practised it with due fervour. (Output has never been a problem for Robinson—knowing when to stop is the lesson he’s always learning.) Based in Dunedin from 1998 until late 2007, he has exhibited abundantly through dealers and regional galleries around the country.
Given his intensely personal approach to art, it is unsurprising that, to some extent, his artwork mirrors his nature. He is grandiose, expressive and well worried, much of this fuelled by a ferocious commitment to honesty. It makes him incapable of white lies or tactful silences, makes him capable of shooting himself in the foot when it’s already in his mouth, and makes him unsparingly self-critical. And in true yin-yang fashion, his quirks have their counterweights: he is boisterous yet reclusive, self-absorbed yet considerate, frugal yet generous, insecure yet philosophically assured.
He’s also far calmer, far steadier than he used to be. He eats better, tramps regularly, and practises qigong daily. His recent successes haven’t appeased him, but they have tempered the jagged edge of his ambition.
“I’m the kind of artist that’s a journey of the wounded healer,” he says. “I carry a large bundle of post-colonial guilt towards my place here, and I’m turning that guilt, which is unnecessary and unproductive, into a positive force of growth. It’s important to be critical of the culture that birthed us, and ourselves as the perpetuators of that culture, rather than being just a big happy hippy.”
These concerns were sharpened by his residency in New York in early 2008.
“There’s a real confusion about identity that I’ve always walked with,” he says. “But I felt more like a South Pacific artist after being [in New York], and felt more permission to be that.
“Art is a communal record of a collective impulse,” he continues. “Every artist is an MP for their particular community.”
As for now, he is contemplating his next move—Berlin? Waitakere? Whanganui?—and, as always, creating new work.
“I’ve always been aware of my own mortality,” he says. “The good side of this is that I question who I am, why I am, where I am, and what I’m doing with my life. I’m willing to make a lot of embarrassing mistakes, to be a student out loud in service of the spirit of art. My life is a symptom of the universe.”
About the author: David Hall is a freelance writer and political theorist. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and is moving shortly to Oxford University, England, to read for the DPhil in Politics.
David Hall
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