LESLEY DUMBRELL - 'Atmosphere'

Charles Nodrum Gallery - 17^th Sept – 8^th October 2022

Click on images for enlargement

This is the artist’s second show with the gallery, following a debut in 2019 where the veteran Melbourne painter (b. 1941) introduced a surprising array of perspectival cues to her characteristically faltering grids, furthering a three-dimensional trend that has recently led to sculpture. The current show, 'Atmosphere', provides a condensed survey of developments leading up to the sculptural turn and allows us to see, just as impressively, the persistence and gradual refinements to a painting practice familiar as both austere and delicate, controlled yet quietly chaotic. ‘Atmosphere’ consists of eleven works in the ground floor gallery, ranging from intimate studies such as ‘Study for Cunmerian’ (2008) at just 38.5 X 73 cm to the grand ‘Akakia’ (1987) at 198 X 198 cm.

Installation view

Where the debut show, ‘Implied 3-D Dimension’ looked very much the product of digital 3-D modelling (quite serendipitously) and completely in step with the times, with the world of programming glitches, fuzzy sampling and ‘wire frames’; a look back over earlier work now heightens the sense of precision and mathematics that have been there from the start, when the artist slowly emerged in the seventies, as part of a wave of Melbourne artists including, Robert Jacks (1943-2014), Alun Leach-Jones (1937-2017), Paul Partos (1943-2002), Jonas Balsaitis (b.1948) and Robert Hunter (1947-2014), drawn to hard-edge, ‘post-painterly’ abstraction. At this point it is hard to say whether the artist has caught up with the world or vice versa.

Gridelin’ (2007) 168 X 130 cm oil on canvas

By her own admission, Dumbrell was a cautious developer, a ‘late bloomer’ who spent the sixties as student then teacher at the RMIT, eventually finding an entry into abstraction with Op Art, with its optical illusions of moirés and colour gradations engineered through tapering stripes, continuities established through juxtaposition or pattern. These provide a foundation for form pursued as a gestalt, an overall arrangement conferring content upon parts. The artist patiently worked through these, in time discarding obvious illusion and distilling the picture to layers of grids, degrees of colour saturation and its distribution across the picture as an overall or ‘field’ composition.

‘Spangle' (1977) 152 X 213 cm acrylic on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

The changes announce a commitment to a Minimalist aesthetic, and significantly the artist terms this shift in her work ‘Systems’. In the early seventies discussion of Minimalist painting often divided it between Systems – devoted to elaborate pattern, particularly symmetries, usually in layers and contrasted with Process which concentrated on novel pigment concoctions and applications, determining degree of system or field. One was post-painterly, the other post paint. For Dumbrell, the grid permits not just varying intervals between parallel lines but various lengths or sections to an axis, various axes and their range of intersections. Depending upon distribution of colour across lines and ground and order of layering, allowing overlaps or occlusions, a system becomes impossibly complex and yet is still somehow consistent as a field. The shifting accents to axes, section and interval now offer the artist a more diffuse optical spectacle and a potent metaphor for dealing with vicissitude, accident, stress, excitement and reassurance.

‘Tyger, Tyger’ (1978) 122 X 183 cm acrylic on canvas [NOT IN SHOW]

Importantly, the works do not simply declare a structural feature or celebrate a formal ingenuity, but through titles allude to an environment, weather, a place, occasionally literature or music. All can be absorbed and subtly reflected through their weaving within grids and increasingly for the accommodations grids can make under the circumstances. The artist next makes more drastic selections across her grids, retaining only a sparse assortment of line sections and intersections, giving the background a greater role in colour relations, giving lines at times a decidedly diagonal slant, in works such as ‘Zig Zag’ (1980). The series only lasts throughout the early eighties and is called Lines.

'Zig Zag' (1980) 92 X 120 cm approx, Gouache on paper [NOT IN SHOW]

A field is here at its barest, a system maintained largely by the precision to lines. The selection also highlights a resistance to curves. Curves, more difficult to marshal in a repertory were excluded from the artist’s vocabulary from the outset. The work remains ruled by the simple ruler. And the artist’s methods remain painstaking. Lines are developed as fields with colour through trial and error in pencil or gouache sketches then painted first, the background added after. The surface exudes precision even as the composition extols something more scattered, less certain, and with this series, implicitly concealed or lost.

'Akakia’ (1987) 198 X 198 cm acrylic on canvas

Yet while plain straight line acquires an impressive flexibility and expressive tenor here, background perhaps then assumes too much prominence in the composition and the artist next looks to outline or shape generated through her systems for something more ambiguous in the way of background. Throughout the rest of the eighties, a buoyant body of work titled Shapes, exchanges line for the shapes around and within them, and while works such as ‘Akakia’ (1987) hardly disclose layers of grids, in fact they are built upon more or less the same system, but again selectively choose which outlines to acknowledge, to constitute a shape, while maintaining a field distribution to colour. Ultimately, subtle omission again figures in an interpretation. The series quite coincidentally converges somewhat with the fashion for Memphis Design by Ettore Sottsass that sweeps the world of interiors and furnishings at the time, with a similar emphasis upon flat colour and tessellated, geometric shapes. Again, the artist finds herself curiously in step with the times, at least briefly, and completed a commission for a carpet for the new Federal Parliament as confirmation.

Yet Shapes also allow more vigorous brushwork to the paintings and a tentative painterly concession and possibly tempted the artist into too much of a freehand approach. Around 1990 the work returns to a strict array of grids, such as 'Veridian' (1999).

‘Veridian’ (1999) 198 X 198 cm oil on canvas

Grids are now notably less layered, full length rather than sectioned or intermittent, variation on axis a matter of adjacent areas to the picture. Colour to axes now serves to accent a background, recalling Op Art’s colour modulation or illusion, so that the series, called 'Back to Optical' (1999-2004) deliberately restates the artist’s project, coinciding with a career survey at the NGV Ian Potter Museum in 1999.

Yet even using a grid with standard axes as a kind of filter or screen to background colour, at some point suggests accents from a less consistent grid. In 2005, as the artist relocated to a rural retreat in the Strathbogie Ranges in north eastern Victoria, her work returned to layers of grids, still full length rather than intermittent, with various axes each assigned a colour accent to the background, as in ‘Study for Cunmerian’ (2008).

‘Study for Cunmerian’ (2008) 38.5 X 73 cm gouache on paper

A little predictably, layers soon suggested their discreet editing or omission, now as a further filter or accent to background colour. In time the artist applied various colour to sections of an axis, allows interval of axis to vary but maintains full length axes as in ‘Pandanius’ (2009).

‘Pandius’ (2009) 122 X 122 cm oil on canvas

Here the background is filtered not only by a greater array of colour, but by a selection of grids that offer no consistent window or shape to the background. The system maintains a field of shapes for background and grants the composition a subtle downward and diagonal slant. We have a colour that depends upon shape, lines that accent both, within a system of sustained parallel axes. Once again a field spreads or stretches its concerns, is at its fullest for weaving so finely.

‘Aurora’ (2011) 122 X 92 cm oil on canvas

Finally, colour differences between background and grids are markedly reduced in works such as ‘Aqua’ (2010) and ‘Aurora’ (2011) so that emphasis shifts to axis consistency or integrity. Here sections to an axis carry separate colours, while an opposing foreground axis deviates according to such sections, while maintaining a single colour. The result is a strangely rickety grid to the foreground, where its combined deviations take on a three-dimensional illusion of rippling. This too harks back to the artist’s Op Art roots but gives the grid a brittle attachment to the darker grid behind, a delicate fluctuation in correspondence. Here the show also brings us up to date with 'Implied 3D Dimension' and demonstrates the consistency of project, the steady persistence with permutation.

The work has never been at the fore of developments in Op Art or Minimalism, nor has the artist aimed for that. Rather she has tried to find herself at home amongst these styles, partly as a matter of her times, partly as a matter of personality, and with working through their further implications. An avant-garde is only as advanced as its consolidation or following and art history too easily ignores the role of acceptance, with subsequent teasing out of consequences for a style. The work there is less precarious or controversial but no less demanding and obviously takes time. Dumbrell’s achievements are subtle but secure and if they ultimately surpass those of her Melbourne contemporaries, it is less a matter of longevity than of modesty of ambition, greater self-awareness.

'Aqua' (2011) 122 X 92 cm gouache on paper

Much commentary on Dumbrell’s work concerns feminism and the recognition of women within the art world and its history. Some of that would surely benefit from a closer appreciation of the dynamics of art movements and their following.