GEOFF THORNLEY
GEOFF THORNLEY
ENQUIRE ABOUT THE ARTIST
As a rule, we assume that an artist’s vision will get darker as he or she gets older, their thoughts moving inexorably towards the end of the day. But Thornley with his morning paintings calmly dissolves that assumption. Wake up, the paintings seem to say. It’s light.
– Justin Paton
Thornley’s practice is rare in Australasia. It neither depends on local narrative nor does it leverage the landscape either literally or metaphorically as the all-too-common framework for describing, yet again, what we already know. Freed from this obligation to attend to local conditions, Thornley has been able to build a painting practice that sidesteps the kinds of geographical determinism that still hampers more provincial painting, thus allowing his work a latitude and fluidity, a grace and potency.
And yet these paintings are not without connection to place. There is a quality of light and quiet humidity about them that feels “southern” hemisphere, but my sense is that this is where that correspondence ends.
Thornley’s deeper association is to a gestural and poetic abstraction. One thinks of the early paintings of Cy Twombly, certainly to the Cold Mountain paintings of Brice Marden, but where both these painters assert a certain romantic authorship, there is a modesty to Thornley’s hushed elegance, one that doesn’t strive for the kinds of emotional tremor that Twombly and Marden seek.
FEATURED WORKS
The most seductive quality of this work for me is its existence as an ‘other’, an independent organism whose order pays no reference to the outside. The quiet unified interior provides an alternative accord.
– Mark Amery
There is often an arcing; almost calligraphic sense to his brushwork that at times is fluid and at times staccato – always faintly musical. Common to these paintings and Thornley’s other series is a preoccupation with space. The space is not illusionistic but made palpable through the careful layering of colour and gesture. Such spatial sensitivity crates a lyrical scaffold for seeing. It is a slowed vision that he wishes to invite and with it a more attuned sense of self.
Geoff Thornley’s painting practice is unquestionably one of the most considered and refined in New Zealand. Few painters have pursued abstraction so resolutely, resisting the fashion for appropriation and pastiche – the convenient cultural and stylistic diversions so often favoured by commentators. His clarity and conviction serve to guide discussions about his work back to painting itself and to its lineage
In looking back over almost fifty years there are deep aesthetic strata connecting his painting, from the mid-seventies when Thornley represented New Zealand at the São Paulo Biennale through to his later Anterior & History works. There is a composed lyricism and quiet material finesse across most all of his series, and certainly in the more recent paintings there is a more open expression of gesture and material re-emerging that harks back to his early paintings.
There is a softer organicism to the colour that opens the face of the paintings, allowing us to see into and through the structure he has built. It is always the case with Thornley that this interior framework emerges slowly. Shifts in light invite the anatomy of the painting to be partially exposed in a slow, demure dance that both reveals and obscures simultaneously. This courtship between viewer and object is measured by the customary restraint and discipline that characterise Thornley’s painting. He seems determined to remind us that making a painting is about an incremental building of form and presence – about giving body to colour and light, as only painting can do. However, this reciprocation takes time and commitment in the viewing as it does in the making.
EXHIBITIONS
As is always the case with Thornley there are a multitude of considerations that are critical to the paintings eventual form. His final re-positioning of the canvas on its completed stretcher, the relationship between margin and edge, the fineness of the stretcher face and the depth of the support. These adjustments feel critical to our apprehension and perception of the work and for Thornley they acknowledge another aspect about making that marries function and ceremony.
Geoff Thornley’s Devonport studio approaches a Shaker-like modesty but there is nothing self-conscious about it. The wooden stairs to the first-floor painting space are worn, the timber floor is cleaner than one might imagine, the two chairs are effective but not cosy. However, any sense of austerity subsides the second you see his painting. For though the studio is organised to allow for thinking and making, the paintings are where he locates his feelings and intuitions. Spend just a few minutes with them and time and vision slow allowing for, or more accurately facilitating, an overdue sensitivity in us.
– Andrew Jensen
Geoff Thornley (b.1942, Levin, NZ) graduated from Elam School of Fines Art at the University of Auckland in 1964. The following year Thornley completed a graduate diploma of Fine Art: Honours in painting. In 1975, Thornley represented New Zealand at the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. His works are well-collected in New Zealand and are featured in the collections of Wellington’s Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.
Like Ophelia, they might rise to the surface briefly, the weave of gesture visible, form and structure momentarily tangible and yet more often than not he is inclined to submerge these attributes in a shallow space that is slow and fluid. Only with patience can we move through this relative closure and constraint to the point where the paintings slowly open and breathe more easily.
– Andrew Jensen