Good evening and welcome everyone. In some circles opening speeches are deemed uncool, but for an artist each exhibition marks the end of a period of toiling alone and deserves to be marked with a sense of occasion. Jock has requested me, his friend and fellow artist, to do the honours tonight.
Good art can always speak for itself. All I want to do now is focus your attention for a few minutes on the work we are here to look at tonight.

Some years ago two people stepped into a lift and I was unable to avoid overhearing their conversation. The salient part went something like this, “Oh wow, so you’re an artist! What sort of work do you do?” The reply was delivered in a tone of utter contempt, almost spat out. “Anything but paint!” Naturally I kept my mouth firmly shut. That artist is now the darling of contemporary art in Australia.

Had Jock been asked that same question he would have happily and proudly declared, “I’m a painter!” For Jock is an artist who still has faith in the long tradition of painting, not only in being an heir to his heroes, but in seeking out new products, colours and mediums and testing them. Perhaps it’s the scientist in him because Jock is an artist who researches his materials. Thankfully, I am sometimes the happy recipient of that search. Who among my artist friends had ever heard of Roberson’s number 22 medium, let alone discovered it’s magical properties and then generously shared their findings? And just when Jock had me hooked and ordering it online from America the company sold up. Jock, I’m trusting you to find me something equivalent before our meagre stash runs out.

Jock doesn’t just seek out a working knowledge of materials, he also attends master classes with living artists he admires and then he plays with the insights he gleans there. The paintings that result from that investigative play rarely make the journey from the studio to the gallery but they have been steadily and quietly infusing his work in pleasing ways that remain true his inner artistic compass.
True North for Jock lies in the direction of his openly declared heroes. Jock will have to correct me later if I misread why he admires them and what he draws from them but rather simplistically I will try to outline some of the touchstones.

Pierre Bonnard, for his joyful use of colour and the luminosity of his canvasses. The light seems to glow from within the objects, rather than falling on them. The canvas underneath still imparts a latent glow of its original whiteness
And then there’s Edward Hopper whose broad blocking in of areas and reckless regard for detail to get to other truths. I see all of these qualities solidly echoed in Jock’s paintings.

Both of these artists also have a strong humanitarian sensibility, which I also see in Jock’s work. Jock often bravely includes the human figure in his landscapes. He usually places them centre stage or at least stage front. His Parisian gouaches for example would not be the same without them. Where Hopper seems to add figures to express isolation, Bonnard uses them to say, “How good is life?” I think Jock is on Bonnard’s team there.

Of course, Jock has many other artists he would cite as inspirational and I don’t want to imply that Jock’s work is merely derivative. All art is built on the foundation of other art but what does Jock himself contribute?
Having worked outdoors on many occasions with him I have seen his skill at synthesising the landscape to suit his pictorial and compositional needs. He can and does often move mountains!
Jock has an innate sense of optimism.  That optimism informs his whole approach, not just the act of painting but also it somehow ends out informing the composition and infusing the resultant picture. There are no bleak days in his paintings even though we’ve certainly painted together on some. Jock’s palette is definitely upbeat too. It is more of a signature than his handwriting. Clean blues and purples, crisp whites and lush ochres almost always offset somewhere by orange, which is also the colour he unfailingly uses as his imprimatura.  

The act of Plein Air painting is the oxygen for Jock’s art as it is for mine. Working in nature, apart from offering many physical challenges that one could well do without, allows the artist watch nature at work. The ever-changing scene means that you never just paint a moment. A calm, sky blue sea can suddenly turn black. A drifting cloud might offer up a eureka moment for an otherwise struggling composition. No matter how good your imagination nature is better. She can throw colours, shapes and texture together in such a variety of ways. On some of our outings I have seen Jock’s work border on pure abstraction as he responds to nature’s wild unpredictability.  I’m happy to see Jock has exhibited a few of these freer expressions here tonight.

Rarely does the plein air painter bring home a fully-fledged painting and before nature your work often looks woefully inadequate but in a spirit of optimism they are dragged back to the shed. After a little, or a lot of tinkering they either end up as trash or treasure. Jock’s larger works all have their genesis in a smaller plein air study, which is quite apparent in this exhibition.

To finish, I’d like to quote this passage that I read the other day by Gabriella Coslovich in The Age. “With it’s taint of superficiality and triteness, beauty has been unfashionable in the art world – unless tempered by a heavy dose of irony and self-knowing. The “concept” has been king and brave are the artists who have favoured beauty and aesthetics over a more theoretical approach.”  Jock is one of them. However, I think the word brave is a little over the top because artists who paint beauty, do so not to be contrary or perverse but because they are answering a deeper urge – painting from the heart as well as the head. Jock paints the things he loves in the world around him, boats, buildings, people and the thing that his life seems bound to the most, the sea.  So, I invite you all to share the love in the room and declare this exhibition open even as I look forward to Jock’s next.

Peter Gouldthorpe 2011-11-29