Silvery moon

‘...reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us. The other we make, to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive.’ (Jarod Anderson, 2024, Something in the woods loves you). I’ve previously written about the visual construction of the 3D perspective during the Renaissance period, its importance in still life compositions and particularly in portraiture. David Hockney has described the ‘invention’ of a three dimensional perspective to imitate how we see. Following the symbolism and flatness of medieval religious representation, artists sought to please their patrons with life-like portrayals of their images and lives. Apart from the distant vanishing point leading the eye to the background, Hockney reveals other techniques such simple cameras projecting inverted images onto canvases that allowed outlines of subjects to be traced to give a likeness, all in search of realism prior to photography.

The design of this quilt seems to elicit looking the through the window into the outside world. In a different way to the realness of Renaissance paintings, it plays around with perspectives by allowing the eye to move forward and back through background and foreground, as though zooming in and out. There are straight lines, both horizontal and vertical, but they do not direct the eye to the imagined non-existent vanishing pinpoint. The dominant silvery moon sits on top of the background rather than being part of it. And the vase seems to float in the same plane, testing the placement in reality of what we see. When viewing David Hockney’s large Grand Canyon paintings at the NGA the avoidance of the vanishing point is ironically ‘perceptible’. The effect is to draw viewers into the physical space, rather than leaving them standing outside looking in as a voyeur - or tourist perhaps. Called ‘reverse’ perspective, it has been an historically standard viewing practice in the creation of Japanese art. Australian indigenous art has moved from the representative, both in ancient rock art and the learned Western technique of Albert Namatjira’s beautiful works of his homeland have returned to a consciousness that connects to country.