Porter’s Power Strokes
From The Sunday Herald May 20, 2000 - Painter continues to challenge viewer, self
ELISSA BARNARD - At the Galleries
BRIAN PORTER'S new images at Zwicker's Art Gallery grab and startle and mystify. The Yarmouth painter's dream-based imagery has always been enigmatic. This time, his new work is startling in both imagery and style as he shifts into the terrain of powerful religious symbols of skull, crucifix and snake.
Porter, whose paintings used to be more dense and precise, has loosened up his style for large, breezy canvases of paint that look hurriedly applied with little mixing of colours. There are thin scrubbings of paint: 7 with drips. His use of animated, gestural line is powerful.
Porter explains these new images in a concise statement. "This series of eight began without a preconceived concept," he said. "Two crudely made sculptures, the running man and the dog, were the starting point.
The act of painting is a joy and has feelings of magic ritual. It depends on chance, impulse and a commitment to the moment. At its best, the brain retreats and one simply watches the hand paint.
The series seems to illustrate the dilemma of a person compelled to choose a path. There is a celebration of man's animal powers and basic instincts. Mortality colours the choice."
Porter's images, though never specifically explained, have always suggested a story. The drama in these new acrylic paintings is one of the soul as the body rushes heedlessly toward its natural end.
A running man, galloping alongside a lean dog, turns his head back to look at an unknown object. He and the dog keep on running in a large blue acrylic called Running.
The dog, in the more densely painted red, blue and black painting, Crucifixion, is stopped in front of a giant cross. He stares at the nailed figure of Jesus, painted in ghostly white and blue. Entering the space between the dog and the cross, but placed in the foreground, is the running man, his head turned to look at the cross as he continues running. (This painting has a fantastic composition of stately symmetry and rippling energy.)
In several paintings, the craned head looking back or arrested by the crucifix halts the viewer amid the basic motion. The man, taut and angular, is in a position of urgency. The dog, a simplified form with a long, lean body, pointed face and sharp ears like horns, seems to be a creature of myth, a guide to the underworld, an animal sent to warn the man to pay attention.
Porter pulls you in as he pushes you back. Religion and death are disturbing subjects. The painting style is aggressive, rapid, not peaceful. The colours are dramatic red, blue and black, orange and gold. But you keep on looking. What exactly is going on here? The work recalls, varying from painting to painting, the bizarre imagery of Nancy Edell, the classical imagery of Tom Hopkins, and pop art in paintings like Skull, with its grinning giant blue and black skull drawn on white space...
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