Michael Peck: This May Hurt

  

The current Michael Peck exhibition This May Hurt at the Metro 5 Gallery hails Peck as one of Australia’s leading contemporary painters. Metro 5, in fact, think so highly of him they have even put him on retainer – so now at the age of thirtysomething Peck doesn’t have to do anything more except paint. And that for the father of three can only be a joyous place to be in life.

According to his blog Michael Peck’s artistic practice is concerned with the “sensation of disorientation and dislocation that is often felt within the post modern world”, but after meeting him at his Blender Studios space, I am suspicious that this may have been written by a publicist, because Michael Peck and his work come across as anything but dislocated. (The Blender Studios by the way are known to be the intellectual heart of the early Melbourne street movement thanks to founder Adrian Doyle). And Peck in fact is immensely approachable, and prepared to talk about his work in an impressively inclusive way.

Some critics have aptly referred to Peck’s work as silent poetry. So says Art writer Ashley Crawford of this current exhibition:

In this world silence is a given. The birds hover, but they do not move. The world is in stasis; frozen in a moment of melancholy. The stillness palpable…the silence so intense that it becomes a sound in its own right, holding the grey mist at distance… but only just….

When asked about the press release presenting his painting of Mustafa Najib, a Tampa refugee who spent two years on Christmas Island awaiting Australian residency, and legal activist Julian Burnside, as a key component of his current work, he agrees that even though this may be a topical subject, hinging even on some level of political activism – it is probably not what sits at the core of Michael Peck’s current exhibition. This May Hurt is actually a series of hauntingly still landscapes and profiles of children looking on. And despite commentary around the work as isolationist and post apocalyptic, it is the strength in the stillness that is more comforting than distressing.

So is his work supposed to be representative of an anxious post 9-11 state?

Peck shrugs off any heavy political gesturing in what he paints. In the end (unsurprisingly) he explains, he is someone who just paints what he paints. There seems to be no agenda, nor positioning. For Peck, the work seems to be more about creating connection rather than dislocation, whether it be between the landscape and the figures or between the painting and its viewers.

“I don’t see the works as being political. They aren’t supposed to be representative of a war torn environment. And even though the mood is menacing, the scenes aren’t meant to be post apocalyptic – they are just a field with a child” he says. And how does all the hyperbole now being written about his work sit with him? Peck admits he is anxious that it might start to direct thinking in a completely different direction to what his work is about.

Even though the work is sometimes self referential, when he is painting, he says, he just thinks about places, and how we react to those places. And from childhood memories to adult experiences Peck’s work seems an almost anti-bucolic representation of artlessness.

“The idea lies more in the sense that the place and the person can have a dialogue with each other, so that they become symbols in themselves. The environment can say so much. – a big wide open space can be seen as freedom and as hostile by different people.” Peck explains.

The innocent child is a large part of many of Peck’s work in this current exhibition, and he believes the use of children in his work does offer an automatic connection for the viewer. Peck’s particularly ingenious decision to not paint the children’s faces, so the viewer can even imagine themselves in these paintings, he explains, also adds a sense of everyman to his work as it reaches past its internal narrative to draw the viewer into the story.

Peck also admits now that he has his own children, he steers away from painting them, and usually paints children of friends. Regardless, his ability to offer true anonymity by not painting their faces actually works strongly to emphasize a genuine sense of innocence and substance resonating through his work, making that vaguely ominous overlay even more powerful. The knowingness of the adult viewer sits alongside the strong pull of nostalgia that the children in Peck’s paintings create. “Perhaps a reminder of our own mortality” Peck has suggested.

When asked whether he ever sits back after a successful exhibition to consider the audience response, Peck admits he historically has not, although he recalls a recent incident when someone queried him on the inclusion of children in his painting and whether that was appropriate and didn’t tap into the current discussions on paedophilia. Michael Peck still looks shocked as he recounts this story. Possibly both at the idea that his work could be pointing even remotely to the current discussion on children in art, as well as the fact that someone could so easily deconstruct his work and place it there.

But these concerns about what can and cannot be painted when exhibiting in a public space are an issue for all artists it seems, even more so since the Bill Henson controversy. Peck is also about to start work on a new collaboration for the public art space Platform Gallery and again he has been alerted in discussion with the curators there that images of children in public spaces (as well as of men’s penises) were not allowed. Which although confronting, he says, has spurred off some new ideas for that project.

Regardless, the latest news from Metro 5 Gallery is that all of the This May Hurt exhibition has been sold. Michael Peck says he never imagined that he would get to this point in his life. About two years ago he was living his life as a teacher and imagining finding the time to fit in painting when he could in between now and retirement.

Now however Peck’s work is officially “hot”.

MICHAEL PECK ‘THIS MAY HURT’ @ METRO GALLERY
5-23 MAY 2010.