Hunting Time
Peter Godwin's painted world
“Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” ~ Marcus Aurelius
The room is dark and still. The window… black as.
Hours pass. But it’s easy to lose track of things.
Time has a different measure here, a different form. It goes inwards, not along. It passes, but it does not move. It is an eye, not a clock.
This feeling of…
A lamp light turned on, drawing out shapes in the room… details, objects… like some short story that is over, a new and sudden stillness.
The studio of a painter.
Everywhere in this room there are scrolled canvases, papers and brushes in cans; three or four tables, sideboards, shelves, old uncomfortable chairs; over there, a skull beside a few books, a tribal shield leaning against a wall; a cuttlefish, the body of a squid and a lemon laid out religiously on one of the tables (sacrifice); blue curtains that look torn from a work by Matisse; a red curtain, Rothko colour, with splashed chalky patterns on it, loose-handed decoration, Eastern calligraphy.
A white owl emerges in the dim-lit scenery.
Somehow this bird has come in from the darkness outside, passed through the window pane and entered the room.
Ghost as much as a bird, it must be the painter’s spirit animal.
Like all owls its face is mysterious and predatory, shocked and inscrutable. All things at once.
Some see its disc-like face in the shape of a heart. Some think it beautiful; others ugly and cruel. There is a mute quality, a desire to speak. It’s most common sound is silence. But when threatened it lets go a harsh, rasping shriek; when mating a soft twittering. It feasts on rats and smaller animals, insects and even other birds.
The owl perches itself on a table, beside a Papua New Guinea mask so akin to its own face it could be a blackened mirror: otherworldly; its self absorbed into a physical thing, like a Shroud of Turin reversed, eyes peering from a fixed darkness.
The bird’s wing stretches out as if to protect or perhaps caress this mask.
You feel, faintly, the pornography, sorrows and failure inherent in the act of collecting things... around the bird are Third World objects, a fowl hanging from a hook, a sculpture of a dove, a few more masks, magic things made of wood, the curtains motioning by their colour without moving at all. Totems, messages to and from the painter who own this studio room.
“Think of yourself as dead….”
This is not really a room, of course… but a series of paintings inside that room. Motifs repeated. ‘Things’… objects that can feel more alive than perhaps they ever were in the first place.
The light is a kind of object too. A mood made permanent.
The paintings exist in a gallery – but you leave there and go to where they invite or call you. To this other room where the painter lives and works and dreams.
Flying through the space with your white owl.
Look at its body in one of the paintings: hazy, blurred. As if it might be shivering between this painted world and another to which it truly belongs, without ever leaving or fully arriving in either realm.
You are the bird too. You just know it.
See the title of the paintings to identify your breed: Eastern grass owl.
They say that they are crepuscular. Meaning they hunt in the dawn; or more often the dusk. Fierce, fast, hard to see. Wonderful eyes for the gloom of a day ending and a night beginning.
It’s confusing, because you see the owl on a canvas – but as you look you are pulled inside the bird, till you are looking outwards through its eyes.
Through the eyes of the bird, you have entered the painter’s studio for a moment and can see his room.
Then you fly outwards, leaving the room through a darkness. Hunting. Till you are above some other darkness, above a substance you can only sense.
You train your eyes and you spot a boy below in a heavy sea, skin diving, his form just below the water. You sense his thoughts, his love of marine life. He swims with legends of the water who inspire him… Valerie and Ron Taylor, Phillippe Cousteau. But the teenager will have to leave his sea world. He can’t live this dream.
The owl breaks through a black sheet as if it were made of glass and bursts into a whiteness, blinding for a moment. Another world: mountains made of red lines and blues lines. The boy who dreamed of fish and the sea is now a man, a painter. He is in another space. Landscape. River. China. Not just a place, a history of seeing that place. Ancient pictures in his mind. The owl is able to look through the painter’s eyes and stay with him till the painter returns home to his own country, Australia, and his dark studio, where he conjures the owl. Draws the bird out from his mind, through his eye, out into the world. Their minds linger together, betwixt one another, mutual thinking.
The artist paints the owl with tempera. An old technique before oils were invented. Medieval. Older still. Like myth and religion are mixed in the materials. On the boards and stretched linen he uses, the artist can wipe the tempera with a wet rag and layer fresh images. He can create ghosts of what he first depicted, depths, shades.
The owl is in a picture. It has its own double somewhere below it. It moves and shivers. It never quite stops, but it stays inside the picture. The painter stays with it. The image is like opera without music. Funereal love. Song to a mask.
Peter Godwin’s survey exhibition Space, Light and Time is at Sydney’s SH Ervin Gallery until Sunday 2 March. Thanks to Peter Godwin, Defiance Gallery and SH Ervin Gallery for permission to reproduce images.