Australia's place in a widening landscape
by Paola Totaro
The Sydney Morning Herald
17 May 2006
Her influences - later to become colleagues when she joined the Slade's teaching staff - included some of Britain's greatest modern figurative painters, William Coldstream, Lucien Freud and Euan Uglow, a tutor who became a great friend.
Paola Totaro meets a painter who has found freedom and fresh air in her new home.
LAURA MATTHEWS is in her inner-city studio, paint slapped and splattered over every available surface: even her fingernails are ingrained with the array of blues and grey that infuse her skies.
The radio is on, always, and a maelstrom of sound accompanies every brushstroke. Canvas is propped against canvas, two works on paper are taped to a wall opposite, and amid the chaos whirls Matthews, adding a tiny daub of violet to one picture, a big, broad, gestural stroke of cloudy grey to another.
For Matthews, painting in silence is as unimaginable as painting sitting down or working on just one picture. "I paint them all together. It's a process that doesn't stop," she says, pacing between frames.
"I feed one into the other and back again. You can't be precious about things … you have to be prepared to deconstruct, make big changes. It is a little like looking at a piece of text and then saying 'I don't like that line' and rewriting and making it something else. The remnants of the original idea are there but it is different."
Matthews's frenzy is fuelled by a pending exhibition deadline - her third Australian show at the Barrack Gallery - and she doesn't yet feel satisfied. "The big test is to take it out of its own context and put it into an empty space … I suddenly thought that it was not cohesive enough, some things have to change," she says, her thumb boldly streaking a cap of white onto a windswept wave.
"I brought them back in and re-painted … you want the images to work individually as separate pieces but you are also making a show and changes have to be made to make them all work together, too."
Welsh-born and trained at London University's prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, Matthews found herself in Sydney after a "tall, round-faced Australian bounded up like a marsupial and introduced himself enthusiastically to me". A series of slapstick mix-ups the following day - "he thought I was married, I thought he was going back to Australia with his partner"- were sorted out pretty quickly - neither was true - and seven weeks later, Matthews says, she found herself married to "a very clever chappie", Associate Professor Dale Bailey is principal physicist at Royal North Shore Hospital.
A baby boy, Luke, and girl, Lani, arrived within 11 months of each other and in 2002 the family - with Matthews's eldest son, Ed - packed up and moved to Sydney for good.
Four years later, Matthews's love of Australia is evident and visceral although her artistic expression of the world remains a palpably English one. Her influences - later to become colleagues when she joined the Slade's teaching staff - included some of Britain's greatest modern figurative painters, William Coldstream, Lucien Freud and Euan Uglow, a tutor who became a great friend.
The latest body of works, collectively titled Breathe, are undeniably Australian seascapes, energetic expressions of our vast, open skies, windswept dunes and turbulent, lonely seas. Matthews says she chose the exhibition's title not only to mark her sense of freedom from London's leaden air and skies - "I never felt I could breathe there" - but also as a symbolic step away from the great artistic traditions that shaped and nurtured her but which in time also threatened to burden and oppress.
Breathe opens at the Barrack Gallery, Level 6, 16-20 Barrack Street, Sydney, tomorrow and continues until June 1.