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Figuratively Speaking
The Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald October 17-18 2009
Elissa Blake
Guy Maestri talks to Elissa Blake
Archibald Prize winner Guy Maestri hands me a cane toad. “Feel that,” he says. “Its skin is like the finest leather. It feels like a beautiful leather purse.” The toad is dead, by the way, stuffed with what feels like cotton wool. It’s also been furnished with plastic googly eyes like those found on a child's toy. But it is wonderfully soft.
Maestri's studio in Chippendale is full of curious things. A cow's vertebrae, a bird's nest, more cane toads (some real in a glass case, others cast by Maestri for a show), a female mannequin with elaborate tattoos drawn on her arms, and five sperm whale teeth with tiny cars etched into them.
“This one is my favourite, it has a stretch Hummer on it,” Maestri says picking up a tooth. “And that one there is my Mazda.” The teeth were exhibited in the Dobell Prize for Drawing in 2008. Critics suggested the etchings – Maestri’s version of the old whaler’s pastime of scrimshaw - were pushing the traditional definition of drawing too far. But Maestri is unperturbed by critics.
On the coffee table rests a human skull. It is covered in pencil-written prayers: a Christian verse, a prayer in Arabic script, a star of David. “That's a work in progress,” he says, smiling. “I’ve always liked skulls. They link us to the natural world and show us for what we really are.”
Winning the Archibald Prize in March has left the 35-year-old painter remarkably unaffected. His portrait of blind Aboriginal singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was a popular win; just pipping a portrait of Jimmy Barnes by his close friend Ben Quilty, who jokes that the laid-back Maestri will have to learn how to fight his way out of a pub, “when I see him in a dark alleyway, I'll get him.”
Quilty describes Maestri as a “very thoughtful human being” with a “lot going on inside his head”. “He's not the typical cliched mad artist or an ego maniac. Guy is such a grounded human. Winning a prize was never going to affect him,” he says.
Maestri says it was “pretty insane” winning the Archibald. “I swore amazing amounts, that's all I could do,” he said shortly after his win. “My heart was exploding, I thought I was going to die.”
Instead, the win gave him the confidence to kill off his usual painting practice and start again in a whole new style, something painters rarely do. “I'm actually terrified,” he admits. “Maybe people will think I'm completely nuts. But I just felt like I had to shut down and start again.”
Up until this year, Maestri's paintings have been big, colourful abstract works with “lots and lots of paint” swept onto the canvas. He drew on the environment for inspiration – his bookshelves are packed with titles on sharks, kingfishers and sea anemones and there is a stack of National Geographic magazines sitting by the coffee table – but they were not landscapes.
“I never go out to a landscape and paint because I don’t want to be a slave to a piece of scenery,” he explains. “So I gather images and go back to the studio to work on them and it ends up very abstracted. My work has always been concerned with the environment and what humans are doing to it but whether people could see that or not is another matter.”
Gallery owner Tim Olsen says his earlier paintings were “extremely delicious”. “They were like gorging out on lovely chocolate cakes but at the same time they had a brashness and a gestural confidence that people look for in abstraction. He really knows how to use a brush to draw. He has the dexterity to paint like a draftsman.”
In January, Maestri felt like he had run out of steam for the delicious paintings. “I started getting a little disheartened. I wanted people to see the work as more than just the decorative and engage with it on a deeper level. So I made a complete break and started heading down the road of more figurative works.”
Maestri works seven days a week in his studio, and keeps office hours. He listens to Led Zeppelin or Bob Dylan at high volume to give him a “kick up the arse.” Not that he needs it. He confesses to working at great speed on five or six paintings at once in “a bit of a panic”.
During work on the Gurrumul portrait, he didn't touch any other canvases. Instead, he spent two months trawling the Internet looking for images to paint in a new style.
“When I started, all I knew was I needed to remove my indulgent use of paint and remove my own mark and even strip back all the colour, so I could present images that reflect what I'm really on about. Then I got onto Google and the whole world opened up to me. I literally had thousands of images and I had to boil them down to something that made sense to me,” he says.
“This is the first time I've used human figures in my work and now it’s definitely more about humanity and its place in the world. But it's not really serious, I’m not really trying to ram anything down anyone's throat. It's literally a set of observations about the world and it's a little bit tongue in cheek.”
One image in the new show, which Maestri has titled Google Earth in a nod to his research material, is of Zippy the Chimp, a star of many 1950s comedy TV shows including the Howdy Doody Show. Maestri's painting The Ascent of Man shows Zippy rollerskating through a park. “There was a time when we'd look at that and think 'wow, aren't chimps intelligent' and now we look at it and think 'wow, weren't we stupid to make chimps wear roller skates or smoke cigarettes and play poker',” Maestri says. “It's a funny one because your initial response is coupled by other more disturbing thoughts about us and how we treat nature.”
Other images include a polar bear swimming through a melted ice cap, a comment on global warming. A giant skull and a portrait of Jesus Christ remind us of our mortality. A spaceman explores the bottom of the sea. Another spaceman explores the inside of a man's rib cage. A third spaceman floats above a huge wave.
“The space man has got to do with the idea that if this world is ever ruined, we can go somewhere else and colonise. For me, that would be a nightmare, I’d rather be dead. And so I consciously chose this guy in quite uncomfortable apparatus just showing how uncomfortable we are anywhere outside of our own little existence on the planet. I want people to see we are all still animals,” he says.
Maestri says he had to learn to paint all over again and it's been an anxious time.
“A lot of these images are things that I saw and thought that would be awesome to paint but I don't have the balls,” he says laughing. “But I painted them anyway because I think it's very important to be scared and anxious about your work, it means you're not just sitting back in your comfortable chair. I really now feel completely liberated to do whatever I want to do. I’m very interested to see and hear what people think about the work more so than ever before.”
Quilty says when Maestri first emailed some images of the new paintings to him, “it made my pulse race.” “Totally reinvigorating your painting practice is the most exciting thing an artist can do,” he says. “A lot of painters fall into the habit of just making the same thing over and over, especially if it sells. But Guy is leading his audience on a real trip.”
It's been a relatively quick trip for Guy Maestri, born Guido Maestri in Mudgee in 1974. Named after his Italian grandfather, a creative man who painted and played music, he showed early drawing promise sketching with his father, Anthony, a hairdresser by trade but also a talented artist and craftsman. Maestri took up a boat building apprenticeship after school. “I was good with my hands and I learned a lot of good skills and a work ethic that I still have today, but I had no energy for it,” he says, adding that he quit the trade at 25, against his family's wishes, to go to the National Art School in Darlinghurst. “I knew art was something I could devote my life to. I paint because I have to, it's my life. I spend 90% of my life in the studio and the rest I'm at home thinking about painting and looking for new ideas. I've always felt amazingly lucky to have this existence so I work really hard.”
His dedication has been tough on any relationships. He recently turned 35, and it was “traumatic”, he says. “I'm 35 and still single and I really want to have kids at some stage. I'm the only male I know who's looking for that sort of thing. But so far my relationships have suffered because of my obsessive need to paint.”
“I've always had enormous focus. I've put in 10 years of hard work to get to this stage including supporting myself with lots of odd jobs like gardening and cleaning out fish tanks. But I’ve been painting full time for five years now and after winning the Archibald Prize, maybe I'm a real artist. I feel the pressure to deliver. But I count myself incredibly lucky to have a passion to follow. It's a good life so far.”
Google Earth opens at the Tim Olsen Gallery on Tuesday (October 13).