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Fenton Gallery: Megan Eustace
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Megan Eustace - 'Cleave' - June 3rd - June 26th 2004
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The title of the exhibition, ‘Cleave’, has two meanings, one being to cling closely to something while the other means to split or to penetrate. It encompasses both a sense of belonging and of separation or loss. This conflict is central to Megan Eustace’s figurative work. We feel the intimacy between artist and model but also a distance, as though removed, looking at something past, or lost. These dualities and subtleties could be interpreted as an expression of her experience of being an identical twin. The work is simultaneously powerful and delicate, spontaneous and particular.
A former graduate from the Crawford College of Art and Design, where she now teaches life drawing, Megan is also a director and member of the Backwater Artists Group in Cork. She has exhibited widely throughout Cork, including a solo show at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in 2003, and in Dublin at The Paul Kane Gallery. She has also exhibited at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and the RHA, Dublin. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, Dublin Castle and The Crawford Municipal Art Gallery, Cork.
Of Absence.
“Painting is, first, an affirmation of the visible which surrounds us and which continually appears and disappears. Without the disappearing, there would perhaps be no impulse to paint, for then the visible itself would possess the surety (the permanence) which painting strives to find. More directly than any other art, painting is the affirmation of the existent, of the physical world into which mankind has been thrown.”
John Berger.
“Who are you who stares out at me with your near empty face, when your companion looks away?”
“No one, nobody specific that is. Maybe I’m the stain of someone once present, the mark of a being put down in rose doré watercolour with blue bled to make eyes.”
“Your eyes hold my gaze and yet I cannot know you or who you belong to.”
“That doesn’t matter. My identity is not important. What matters is the encounter between the artist and my being, the artist and the model.”
Megan Eustace has always done life drawing. It is an important part of her practice. Over the last year and half she has focused almost exclusively on the human figure, producing a body of work that begins with the consolidated forms of her conté and charcoal drawings to the more ephemeral fleeting presences of the watercolours and the quick jerky line of the 30-second blind drawings of works by Old Masters.
The limits she imposes through use of just a few elements – a restricted palette of rose doré and cobalt blue watercolour pigment; conté and charcoal; tissue paper and carbon copy drawings suggests an interest in finding greater freedom, the kind of freedom that comes from knowing there are limits to work against. Time becomes central, an exercise in liberation. In the conté drawings there is time to work the piece, to focus on anatomy and to build the body mass. Tonality and well observed proportion make for figures that are firm in space. Definite. With their backs to us, a muscular stance of a dancer or a certain androgynous quality in the figure is well observed. And we might also recognise the familiar hip-sway of Michelangelo’s’ David (in no 1/name work) or a Degasesque ability to yield line, tone and colour simultaneously.
In the watercolour paintings and the blind drawings time is limited, controlled either by the artist’s self-imposed time limits or by the quick drying properties of watercolour. This forces Eustace to work intensively and at a swift pace.
The work begins when the model enters the room – the first encounter. How the model moves and how she settles into her pose is important to Eustace. Thus begins the collaboration between artist and model. Once started, there is little time for close observation, two dips of the brush into the rose doré produces the unbroken outline of the figure, the momentary posture of the body and the presence of another is made. Afterwards blue cobalt is added just here and there to define an arm, a hand, a face or a leg, Smudging, bleeding, blobbing are all part of the process, chance elements in the work. Eustace’s airy pink figures, hollowed, tumble across two sheets of paper or, sometimes in pairs, almost float on the white page. They seldom look at us, but down, away or with no face at all. They appear as shadows of beings, as if something substantial has been made from the outline after the body has disappeared. They speak of vulnerability and melancholia. The white page is not neutral but empty, filled maybe with the ghostly mysteries of what we cannot see. Non-matter. Peggy Phelan reminds us that the psyche has no material form and trauma is untouchable. The syntax of loss is hard-wired into the psyche and the psyche is designed to rehearse for loss. ‘Severed from the placenta and cast from the womb, we enter the world as an amputated body whose being will be determined by the very mortality of that body. Prior to recognising the specific content of an affected grief, perhaps the human subject is born ready to mourn’.
Might Megan Eustace’s introspective paintings of the human figure convey a reflective feeling of loss and separation and a search for personal identity? Born a twin, early life was lived as if two were one. Sealed off. Freaks. Life could be lived from the inside with languageless thought and grief postponed. Then bit by bit, friends, others, school would intervene making the split inevitable and push the two out into the world. If mental separation was impossible than physical distance could be guaranteed. The twins could live apart, with oceans and seas between them and Megan Eustace and her twin might then begin their separate search for ‘total personality’, for the inner unity reflective of their childhood. Like artist Marlene Dumas, who grew up as a white female in South Africa and became a stranger in her own land, Megan Eustace is aware of her split identity. Marlene Dumas says of her work, ‘even when I make a picture of a living being I always create only an image, a thing and not a living being. Eustace’s figures represent the mark left by someone once present. The stain of someone now absent. Only a shadowy outline of the model’s pose (the living being) remains. The placenta. It is in her quiet ability to give form to what has left and what has been left behind that arouses a possibility for an absent presence, the kind of absence, which without painting John Berger believes, ‘ we might be unaware.’
The rapid light line of the carbon copy drawings of works by Old Masters are drawn blind, in near to 30 seconds, on the back of blank postcards. These little intimate drawings of reclining nudes possess energy and verve, a delicate line, the nervousness of speed. - How quick, we ask? Shapes are thrown down and the drawings revealed only when the artists lifts the carbon copy paper. What surprise. These blind drawings are both dead simple and intense.
To draw breath Eustace returns to the obsessive patterning of earlier text works. Abstract symbols representing no language or sign are drawn one after the other into neat squares onto delicate tissue paper. The meditative process allows for slow laboured work. Order is returned and she is now back in ‘Art Mean Time’.
Clíodhna Shaffrey
April 2004.
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- Cleave II
2003
Watercolour on paper
80 x 121cm
€1,900
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- Solitude II
2003/04
Watercolour on paper
67 x 101cm
€1,900
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- Devotion I
2003
WAtercolour on paper
70 x 100cm
€1,700
SOLD
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- Cleave 1
2003
Watercolour on paper
80 x 121cm
€1,900
SOLD
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- Go Girl
2003
conte on oiled paper
100 x 140cm
€2,500
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- Faking It
2003
Mixed media on paper
70 x 100cm
€2,200
SOLD
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- Mentor
2003/04
Watercolour on paper
80 x 121cm
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