'RELIGION IS A HUGE STAGE FOR THE ARTIST'
Geoff Todd
Our cover this month is a painting by Ararat artist Geoff Todd. He speaks here of his involvement with religious images and communication in his art.
Christianity is the religion that I’ve grown up with and I’ve come to understand aspects of this in more than just a superficial way. I’ve also grown up with a very deep commitment to art. I enjoy immensely the fact that religion provides a huge stage and resource for the artist who is aware. To me there are times when art becomes religion and religion becomes art.
The exciting part for me is that when I am working on a painting that is stimulated by a religious story, I seem to be punctuating my artistic output by regularly returning to religious themes. My first major exhibition was in Australia in 1995 and was called ‘Biblical Stories’. When I was first studying art formally at the age of sixteen years I completed a large painting that was Christ on the Cross, I remember being inspired by Dali’s painting ‘The Christ of St John on the Cross’ where he used extreme perspective to show the form of Jesus on the cross in high drama yet without displaying any of the conventional imagery associated with the suffering one expects from a crucifixion.
As part of my classwork, I was obliged to demonstrate my understanding of perspective and to do this I did a fairly complex and painterly work of Christ on the cross viewed from below in an exaggerated perspective like Dali but less sophisticated than Dali, with the wounded and bleeding feet thrust at the viewer in a confronting way.
Over the years, because of my consideration between us and other living creatures and my realisation of the importance of religion and art in the community, I’ve come to change my ideas of what actually constitutes art.
As a younger person in a contemporary art world where amazing developments were happening at great speed, I might have said that anything can be art, if the ‘artist’ says so. Now I expect more from the artist.
Once again I refer to the idea that the meaning of life is ‘life’ and this relates to everything else living, as well as humans and now I have come to discover that there are animals which actually create decoration. They make marks, do arrangements and assemblages.
A great example is the bower bird that decorates its bower to attract its mate. My thinking has turned to the question, what is the difference between decoration and art? The ‘art’ side separates us from the decorating animals. So what is art? Art is the work that is done by humans that in even today’s abstract appreciation of art must still reveal human existence, with the inspiration for the work to stem from humankind even if recognisable figurative elements have been worked out of the picture altogether.
Some will say, ‘What about landscape?’ The successful landscape painter makes us feel we are there as the viewer, or at least the artist has been there and was involved and was part of it at a time even if his image is not there. What I’m saying is that any thing made by humans as a result of human existence, as a piece of art, succeeds as art.
I wonder if some modern art that is completely and deliberately non-figurative (as opposed to abstract) might be sliding across into the realms of decoration. Elephants and cats have applied paint to surfaces that people have exhibited as art. The problem I see here is that these works might be paintings, but this doesn’t mean that they are art.
My conviction is that this quality that makes art in society also makes religion.
