Rod McRae

Paintings

My painting story

4. Dynamic spaces

1982-84

Though Titian was a master of mood, colour and human emotion, another painter who was not nearly as good as Titian also had a big effect on me. This was Tintoretto, who turned out a lot of hack paintings but nevertheless had a particular way of dealing with space that thrilled me. His paintings are like dances, with the figures using their bodies to animate the space around them. These figures turn their bodies in every direction to create a sense of space and movement. Its quite balletic.

This Tintoretto, Susanna and the Elders, contains some extraordinary spaces that take a little while to apprehend. It reminds me a little of the life drawing I did at St. Martins.

This is Tintoretto's St George and the Dragon, where the action darts backwards and forwards in strong opposing diagonals from top to bottom so that your eye is directed to and fro, bouncing off the sides like a pinball table as you scan it.

This one, also by Tintoretto, is an extraordinary vortex where bodies and clouds merge together in one huge upward surge of movement.

In September of 1982, I moved to Australia with my wife and two small daughters. We went to Sydney, and then to Nimbin, where I got a job as a doctor in an alternative health centre. But after a year of that, I finally gave up medicine altogether, left the health centre and started painting in the shed at the bottom of the garden in the beautiful valley in which we lived. This is my shed, painted from the house.

Venice came back to me, violently. It wasn't really a conscious decision but I just wanted to reproduce, somehow, the experience I had had in churches like the Frari, where swirling figures towered up towards the sky producing a dazzling vertigo of light, colour and dynamic form. I painted this painting in my shed. It would barely fit in - it was 10 ft tall. Each evening I would take it out and lean it against the garage doors. Then I would run up the hill opposite, just as the evening sun caught it and lit it up like some apostolic vision. It was great.

A year later, now in Melbourne, I put together my first show in Australia, made up of these huge, rather weird, neo-baroque paintings. The response was mixed - people were interested but not entirely sure what this was about. It wasn't quite the ratification I was looking for, but I ploughed on nevertheless.

I never felt totally confident painting figures. Gary Catalano described the figures in my first show as like 'plasticine ETs' and I could see what he meant. The verisimilitude of these figures was never really the point for me. The mannerist paintings of Tintoretto weren't always all that good either, but the way they articulate the space around them was brilliant. I don't think I managed that quite so well either, but I was trying.

This one seems, in retrospect and looked at with a Freudian eye, like a self portrait of me and my family in some kind of haven which looks remarkably like a map of Australia, in the midst of an apocalyptic vision of the outside world, protected somehow on our little island. It wasn't what I was thinking at the time at all.

I went through a short phase of painting quieter, more poetic, figurative pieces. This one, called Echo, was quite successful, but I couldn't stop.… I had the urge to move on and that's just what I did.