Kerry McInnis and Mike MacGregor, Of Ravens and Rivers installation. Photo: Andrew Sikorski/Art Atelier Photography.
If you live long enough in nature, nature will teach you how to view it from the inside – as a native and not as a tourist.
Kerry McInnis and Mike MacGregor are two artists who have shared not only their lives for more than 40 years but also their passion for art and for the natural environment. Both of them are tree-huggers and essentially possess a romantic sensibility.
In other words, they find inspiration in nature and are excited by their own response to nature – it is never the same, it is full of mysteries and unexpected discoveries and yet there are certain ancient patterns that seem to predate recorded time.
Also, unlike many well-intentioned amateurs, McInnis and MacGregor are professionally trained artists with an extensive toolbox of skills nurtured over decades of practice.
I suspect that they frequently work intuitively and, as Michelangelo once famously wrote in verse: “Then stroke on stroke from out the living rock, / Its promised work the practised chisel brings”. In other words, the image may lie in the materials, but it is the artist’s “practised chisel” that will release it.
Kerry McInnis, The River finds its own way, oil paint, oil stick on linen, 150 cm x 170 cm. Photo: Andrew Sikorski/Art Atelier Photography.
The sense of release of imagery is strongly felt in the work of both artists.
In her major painting, The River finds its own way (which is almost 2 m across), McInnis suggests enough detail for the viewer to use their imagination to complete this wondrous landscape setting and become actively involved in the painting.
While it is a fairly traditional oil on linen painting, the artist also employs oil stick to give a certain tactile feel to the surface of the work.
This translates into a sense of freshness and unexpected discovery. If you get close enough to the surface of the work, it will appear largely abstract or non-figurative, and only at a distance will the masses of colour blend together to create this majestic vision of a river flowing freely.
Kerry McInnis, The All Mighty, oil paint, oil stick on linen, 122 cm x 244 cm. Photo: Andrew Sikorski/Art Atelier Photography.
This sensation of forms of nature emerging from the surface of the painting is even more pronounced in the vast The All Mighty painting by McInnis, which is almost 2.5 m across.
It reminds me of a verse by Henry David Thoreau, who championed a spiritual harmony with nature, combined with keen observation of the natural world.
McInnis, like Thoreau, grew up in America and received her initial art training there before migrating to Australia. Like Thoreau, she believes in living close to nature.
Throughout her paintings at this exhibition, including Into the heart of it and Shadowbirds 2, there is the celebration of the spiritual being present in nature, particularly in the watercourses that feed and transform the landscape. As she recently noted, the river is “a conduit of life, a metaphor for survival”.
Kerry McInnis, Shadowbirds 2, oil paint, oil stick on linen, 150 cm x 170 cm. Photo: Andrew Sikorski/Art Atelier Photography.
Mike MacGregor, Noah’s Scout, forged corten steel, mild steel, 67 cm x 110 cm x 113 cm. Photo: Andrew Sikorski/Art Atelier Photography.
In this exhibition, MacGregor emerges primarily as a sculptor who is preoccupied with man’s interaction with the raven.
So many artists, from so many civilisations, have been drawn to the raven as a bird of exceptional intelligence and complex song, for its role as a symbol of creation and destruction and for the liminal place it occupies between the spiritual and physical worlds.
In MacGregor’s sculptures, including Noah’s Scout and The Watch, both employing forged steel, the raven is a hovering presence that neither belongs entirely to the terrestrial nor to the celestial realm. It may be a harbinger or a messenger from another place, carrying its unique message to those attuned to hear it.
Mike MacGregor, The Watch, forged steel, ball bearing, 41 cm x 40 cm x 70 cm. Photo: Andrew Sikorski/Art Atelier Photography
Of Ravens and Rivers is a seductive exhibition by two unusual creative artists who have devoted a lifetime to observing nature and are now sharing it with a broader audience.
Kerry McInnis and Mike MacGregor, Of Ravens and Rivers, is at Belco Arts, Pivot Gallery, 118 Emu Bank, Belconnen. It’s open Tuesday to Sunday, between 10 am and 4 pm, until 5 July.
