Jude Rae

Jude Rae’s paintings traverse a great many interests, genres, and subjects—still life, interiors, portraits, and most recently, trees. A visit to the artist’s studio makes clear that their common centre is Rae’s unyielding commitment to observation, form, materiality, and the search—as Cézanne once put it—for “truth in painting.”

In October 2024, Jude Rae will present her fourth solo exhibition with Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane. New works will include eight, large, still life paintings; plant paintings of fiddle leaf figs from the artist’s studio; as well as smaller still life paintings and drawings. The exhibition will also give Brisbane viewers an opportunity to see Rae’s first painting to be selected as a finalist in the Wynne Prize, The white fig (Ficus virens), Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, 2022.

The white fig is more of a “tree portrait” to Rae than a landscape in the strictest sense. During Sydney’s pandemic lockdowns, she began to draw the trunks of fig trees across inner Sydney—among them, an enormous white fig encountered in the Botanic Gardens (Bed 22, for curious Sydneysiders). Seen from beneath the canopy, the viewer is enveloped by this magnificent tree, each branch suggesting a vector with radial depth and breadth.

The magnitude of Sydney’s fig trees led Rae to realise that her way of understanding these complex and beautiful forms was to regard them as objects. From there, a scaling back occurred as she began to paint potted fiddle leaf figs. The plant paintings are hybrid: part still life, part tree painting. Control and order—at least over light and scale—return to these natural forms in the studio. Vital for their restraint, they play in the ambiguous space between description and, as the artist puts it, “paint doing its own thing.”

Rae’s study of painting and philosophy are deeply integrated into her thinking. Her turns of phrase in print and speech are sensitive and memorable. Paint is “coloured mud.” Canvas, “a membrane that I work with.” Human beings, for their insatiable visual instincts, are “sight dogs.” A recent drawing trip to Morocco was “an antidote to the iPhone.”

This economy in language complements the attention that Rae pays to details beyond a painting’s surface. Edges are left deliberately bare, revealing the support. More than this, they are “something to hold onto.” (“I would never paint a tondo,” says Rae—something which even Morandi did in works on paper.) Even the titles of her still life paintings, numbered sequentially since 1998, are intended in part to avoid associative distractions, focusing the viewer upon formal and material considerations alone.

Seeing Rae’s library of handheld objects is instructive, not least because it reveals the ways in which control, imagination, and elision figure in her work. Boxes which appear in paintings as plain packaged monoliths are, in life, covered with text and embellishment. An orange Penguin Classics book is painted without a title on its spine. In several 2021 paintings of a black thermos (SL443, SL450, SL453), Rae goes one step further, substituting a label for an elliptical void of exposed underpainting.

In the studio, two paintings are in progress, set on easels before arrangements of vessels on tabletops. Lighting conditions are tightly controlled. One grouping is painted in natural light, filtered through venetian blinds. Another sits beneath a rigging of bulbs and wiring in artificial light (“a night painting”). The “flex” of the wiring was something which Rae used to censor from her field of vision—until she saw its potential to arc or sag through an otherwise orderly composition of vertical objects on a horizontal surface.

Rae invites me to look at the larger of the two works in progress and the objects on the tabletop behind (a wide bowl, a jar with a dracaena cutting, a plastic bucket, a bottle). In life, by chance, there are three, soft-edged streaks of yellow light upon the wall, a different temperature to the white light of the early afternoon. In the painting, for now, two streaks appear. Rae may yet add or remove one as it suits her. Maybe the streaks will be removed altogether. Whatever her conclusion, it is a lesson in how Rae goes about her practice of observation. It is not just about representing what is before your eyes, it is about the translation of light and form from three dimensions into two. What is that if not abstraction?

That process of translation through the medium of paint from the artist’s eye to the brain of the viewer is nothing short of miraculous. It is also something that Rae does not take for granted. “Reception completes the work,” she reflects. Look upon any of Rae’s still lifes and you will see the sincerity of this belief. Rae’s tabletops reveal not only lighting conditions through the intensity and direction of the objects’ shadows. They also reveal reflections—the shared positions of the artist and the viewer as joint observers to the painting on the wall. Like the unheard sound of a falling tree in the forest, reflections require observation to exist. If there is truth to be found in painting, surely it must lie somewhere in that improbable, beautiful, shared experience of seeing.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 68 

EXHIBITION
Jude Rae
22 October – 16 November 2024
Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane