Noel McKenna by Damien Wilkins, 2005

There's a special sort of trouble on tap for most of the inhabitants of Noel McKenna's world. The cat up a tree in Flood Picture is only the most obvious model for the straitened circumstances that grip most of these figures and their settings. Usually it doesn't require anything as spectacular as a flood to promote the sense of deprivation. McKenna loves loss. He finds the trees bare, the fields empty, the sky washed out. Even the water drowning the red-roofed house is not much more than a milky grey cloud.
Such reduction is practised so rigorously that we look at those objects spared sometimes with a curious sort of fondness, always with renewed and quizzical attention. What's the value of what is left? Faced with the elementals--branch, limb, shadow--one is tempted to agree that less is more. And yet that kind of minimalism feels too comforting a vision for this work, where it seems the artist is letting us know that sometimes less is also less.

I used the term 'inhabitants' to speak of the people and animals and things in these paintings; frequently 'inmates' seems a better fit. There's nowhere to hide in these paintings, though escape may be their key concern. Which raises another question: escape from what, into what?
Here we might readily proceed to the single interior painting in the show, where we find someone already gone. Where is the boy in Boy’s Room, Brisbane 1967, that potent study in monastic adolescence? If the bedroom, with its tiny bed and bare walls, its boring wardrobe and crude hanging light, suggests a prison cell, the bike nevertheless has promise. Maybe the boy has used it to cycle off into the wonderful Bicycle with rider on path through forest, an uncanny picture with the ordinary menace of the best children's book illustrations. We work hard not to imagine the path on the point of closing up and swallowing the disappearing figure.
This same boy certainly seems capable of having conjured those riddle images, Small Sphynx and Grey Cat. These are the sort of things he might have looked at. Likewise his loneliness may have found an echo in Grey Horse in Field, where repose and boredom are forever fixed to each other--this too an insight from childhood.
We should note that McKenna's animals, at least from a distance, frequently appear stuffed. However, there's a kind of shock in store. The close-up paintings capture the comic, grave natures of these domestic creatures, their awkward awareness of being looked at, the shy uncertainty of being petted and kept. His cats stare out at us and we wish them gone. There is something compromised for them and compromising for us in this exchange. And while the horse in the field is scarcely a victim, he is as stilled as the boy's bedroom cat which looks as though it’s made of concrete--either that or the cat is another inscrutable intelligence, waiting, just as we wait, for the boy to come home.
What are the options anyhow for these sentient beings? Where can they go? Who can they be? The one animal that is in motion--Horse and Rider Jumping Fence in Field--is only doing so under urging, exercising a 'freedom' that will follow exactly the dimensions of the makeshift riding course.
And finally what should we make of the two cliff paintings? Is that the boy's chair at the top of the cliff, then his dream of falling? Hardly the end we might wish for, though the fall is accomplished while in the sitting position and minus any noticeable distress. There is also the ghost of a bounce in this figure, as if on landing he might come back up. Might he yet somehow escape? (The ambiguity of this bereft 'jolly' image is something like a signature, though McKenna's work feels a million miles from the smirky, didactic ironies of a good deal of contemporary art.)
Of course I'm reading these beguiling paintings as if they belong in a narrative sequence. Moreover the sequence I've described is marked by an adventure, a chase even, certainly a mystery about a boy. Fanciful maybe. And how can such a story be accurate when many of the paintings, experienced individually, seem defiantly undramatic, quiet?
Here I think we're closer to describing not only the way these pictures can work on us and on each other but also something of the tone of McKenna's art. It is precisely through insisting that every scenario convey constriction and every impulse towards motion is circumscribed--the cat-up-a-tree syndrome, we could call it--that McKenna brings his allegory of escape alive. In choosing vulnerability as the point of composition--jumping, balancing, falling, staring, disappearing--McKenna invests the 'not-muchness' of each painting with the quality of an involving struggle. It's as if McKenna looks at the world and is immediately, effortlessly existential. The effort comes in combating dread with care and feeling. The most placid of encounters, meeting a cat one knows, say, gains a rightful strangeness. There is something to be worked out in this moment, the image seems to be saying. That a painting can speak without moving its lips is further evidence of the artist's affecting reticence.

There's one more escape to acknowledge. I have no way of knowing whether the little red bed in Brisbane belonged to the artist as a boy, or whether the cat in the corner, posed like an ornament, had a name, or whether the artist as a boy cycled through the forest or fell from a great height or dreamed of falling--such details belong to Noel McKenna. These paintings are the places he’s hidden these and many other things for us rather beautifully and in plain view.

Damien Wilkins, January 2005

Artist statement, 2007

The last painting I did for this exhibition, "3708 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, New York" is a painting of an average looking home in the borough of Queens, New York. When you travel up Utopia Parkway you would not give a second glance at No 3708. For me, the home has a special significance as it was where Joseph Cornell lived from 1929 until his death on December 29th in 1972.

This painting fits in with the concept of images from my travels in the last couple of years, but the fact that Cornell never travelled outside of the USA - hardly ever out of New York - appealed to me as the idea for this show came to me in Nice this year. I had bumped into an acquaintance, who I hadn’t seen for years, and she said "well Noelie, how are you enjoying your first trip overseas?"

I was taken aback a bit, but I hadn’t seen them for years and what can you do about how people perceive you? After that I got to thinking about where I had been in the last 2 years. In no particular order, I have travelled to Wellington, Auckland, Russell, Dargaville in New Zealand, Hong Kong, Osaka, London, New York, Zurich, Nice, The Hague and Sicily. Travel for me includes Australia so I will throw in the Blue Mountains, Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Wollongong and Kioloa.

Most of my travel is linked with exhibitions; I have travelled to every exhibition I have ever had and see no reason why I won’t in the future.

I generally don’t work on the spot when I travel preferring to use photographs when I return home. On my most recent trip in Sicily though, I did quite a few ink and watercolour works on cardboard which I salvaged on my trips to the local supermarket.

A final thought regarding Joseph Cornell, an artist I have long admired, who, for me, is almost an outsider artist, residing in his own world of nympholepsy, but in some ways was an insider exhibiting with Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy, Andre Breton, Alexander Calder, Man Ray and many others at the Julien Levy Gallery New York.

The boxes he made in his basement in Utopia Parkway - often about exotic locations around the world - have done the travelling for him in that almost everywhere I have been on my travels away from my basement, I have encountered one of his works in a museum.

Noel McKenna
2007

Google Series, Men Smoking Pipes, Autumn, Men Fishing, Cats etc
27 May – 5 July 2009

Becoming an artist was not, it is not an intention. I don’t think anybody starts with the absolute idea of being an artist....sure you decide to become a museum artist, you can decide that, but in my eyes that’s just as bad as becoming a commercial artist, in the sense that you are not anymore a modern artist. You are subjected to the pope and the prince. The nature of the modern artist is to search, is to be in a precarious position and to be non-professional.
Saul Steinberg, 1986

On reaching 52 last year, I again began to take stock of my reasons for continuing to be an artist. I commenced art school in Brisbane in 1976 so I could say I’ve been in the ‘trade’ for 33 years, and being Catholic remember that was how long Jesus lived for. You have to keep it interesting for yourself.  I have never found it too hard to find things to paint, but you do find yourself getting a bit philosophical about whether you can keep it fresh.

I cast my mind back to when I was a first-year architecture student in Brisbane, when one of my lecturers took me aside and said – ‘it’s been my experience with what I have seen of you so far that I don’t hold much hope for you to get through the course, but I think your drawings have the potential to be art.’ I remember first-year architecture to have been a pretty casual affair and about the only difference with my work and a lot of the other students was that it was a bit messier; I could not get the hang of those rapidographs. I started second-year but dropped out after a while and applied to go to art school.  At the interview the Dean of the school said – ‘your drawings are a bit weak but we will take you.’

The world changes and the place of art in it changes. Even with the current global recession, money has been one of the big influences on the art world in the last 20 years.

I don’t think money has to be a bad influence; artists need it to have time to do art. Some trends which I think are not positive are: prices achieved at art fairs and auctions are seen as an indication of quality; artists and galleries (mainly young) often exhibit what they think will sell, instead of producing something as if money was not involved. In saying this, I know it is expensive to live nowadays; I am glad I was a student when I was. 

The market has its own levelling out process and I am not unduly pessimistic about it. Of course one can argue that just because you’ve been around for a while you shouldn’t be guaranteed a pension, as often being around too long makes your work repetitive, boring and dead. 
Now that takes me back to the beginning of these notes and Steinberg’s quote “...nature of the modern artist is to search to be in a precarious position and to be non-professional.”

How do you keep it fresh and interesting for yourself? I think it is different for everybody but you know when it’s not. Some of my more interesting discoveries have been a result of going into a second-hand store and seeing a painting done by an anonymous artist and thinking, I wish I could have done that. 

I have always shunned computers but I started to ‘google’ last year.  One of the first things I googled was “Men smoking Pipes”. Why?  I think I could not recall many images of people smoking pipes in art history except maybe Cezanne’s paintings. I quite like the smell of pipes and it is a rare sight today to see someone smoking one.

Once you google you get taken on many diverging paths and one such path took me to photos of men with hairy chests, moustaches and beards on a site where people sent in comments like “ I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for dropping ash”. These comments are the source of some of the painting titles in this exhibition.

Noel McKenna 24th of April 2009.