ELUSIVE IN NATURE
There’s no pressure for the viewer to understand John Lendis’s paintings of thylacines
Standing in Hobart’s Handmark Gallery as his latest body of work is being hung, British-born artist, John Lendis, muses on the elusive nature of his new images. Named Lacuna after the meaningful, purposeful silences in music, he says the collection of oil paintings asks to be met, rather than analysed or interpreted.
“It’s hard to talk about the paintings because of the idea behind them, and the working process involved,” Lendis explains. “The Italian artist Francesco Clemente says that if you want to understand painting, don’t look for meaning or narrative, but let your eyes play on the surface, make your mind as empty as possible, and then you will understand.
“In the studio, I play loud music, or have the cricket on, and I draw without too much thought. I’m not thinking about where it’s going or what I’m trying to achieve. I’m just letting it go, and letting it come from the drawings and the sketchbook.”
Across Lendis’s canvases, haunting female figures inspired by Pre-Raphaelite depictions of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine Ophelia take flight in taxis. Elongated thylacines drape themselves along the wild, stark landscapes of Tasmania. European-style cities, and the English Cotswold countryside where Lendis lives, emerge like echoes of dreams from the layers of paint.
“They’re not real, with reference to natural history or realism,” says Lendis, of his thylacines, which, like all contemporary renditions of the vanished creature, are poised somewhere between mythology and memory. “They exist purely within the imagination, which is, after all, how we keep the idea of them alive.
“It’s the same with Ophelia. She wasn’t ever real but she’s been written about and represented from generation to generation, and she’s always there, floating on the screen, in the liminal space. In the taxi paintings, she’s halfway through the world, on her way from one place to another, but will the landscape still be there when she arrives?”
At a time when Tasmania’s landscapes are facing huge transformations in the name of tourism, such a question resonates deeply. By retrieving and re-imagining that which has been lost, by attempting to glimpse something that no longer exists, Lendis, who originally studied textile design in England before training to be an artist in Hobart, brings a profound and poignant focus to humanity’s relationship with nature.
“In some ways the [Tasmanian] tiger is specific but it applies everywhere. All over the world is a huge mess, and I’m railing against it at the moment. I’ve been thinking about [philosopher Martin] Heidegger who discussed how we’ve changed from having a two-way relationship with nature to seeing nature as a ‘standing reserve’ of resources to be used at our whim.
“But I don’t want to walk through the forest seeing it all in terms of sophisticated Latin names. I just want to see it as trees. The trouble is, once you’ve lost that innocence, it’s very hard to go back.”
Lacuna is on at Handmark Gallery, Salamanca Place, Hobart, until May 22