PAULNACHE
PRESENTS
EVAN WOODRUFFE
CHARTING
8–31 JANUARY 2021

CHARTING

Lost is just a place to collect your wits.

My paintings create a space that you can float into, where your mind can stumble and catch, find viewpoints and follow trails without me telling you what you should be seeing. I build a location for active contemplation, where your own ideas are cajoled to the surface by the work. In this, my painting is not “about” anything; it does not mean anything except what you bring to it.

I could say that my works are the opposite of literal, that they avoid distinct narrative prompts, but this is incorrect. It is almost impossible to prevent associations with colour and shape, as the human eye will search for familiarity and make forms from the formless. This searching is what engages the mind – we wander across the painting, poking into corners, examining contours, dreaming ourselves into spaces. My large paintings such as 29th June 2020 are self‐sustaining environments that we can return to again and again, never completely uncovering all the possible incidents, never really understanding the nature of the place, because the meaning is not in the painting but in you.

We make maps to negotiate the unknown. We chart a journey, whether over treacherous waters or up the path of “success”. We can mark where we are and posit where we’re heading, what might lie ahead, the best way forward. Dealing with guesswork, these maps are fallible, hopeful, superseded, idealistic: the scribblings of someone’s idea of how to go in a certain direction. A chart is a particular kind of map, a graphic representation of data which also plots a course, begs conclusions, and is only as correct as the data itself.

Colour is the sum of my work: small areas and vast expanses, defined shapes and diffused edges; my paintings work on the interactions of these colour placements. But colour is a nebulous sensation, it changes with the light, with thickness, quantity, and most obviously with its proximity to other colours. It’s a tricky territory to traverse. There is no fore-knowledge of what will happen when making my paintings – there is too much variance. Even looking at a familiar blue on the tip of my brush, until it is wiped onto the canvas, how

it will function there is pure conjecture. What all‐important colour should I put next to it, and what particular form should it take? For while there is great potential inherent in trying different combinations of the same colours and shapes, repeating a known outcome quickly makes for stale work.

Here’s the thing: for me, making a painting is like summoning up an entity. You can’t practice the summoning – you either say the incantation or you don’t, and once you’ve said it, you’d better be sure it was right or there’ll be hell to pay! Likewise, I can’t practice making a large painting – I either make one or I don’t. As it takes a lot of time, energy, and money, the effort must have every chance that it will grow into some fascinating “thing”. What I can do though, is exercise, so that when I come to summon up a new image, I’m as fluent and prepared as I can be.

In the most practical terms, my new watercolour works are colour charts. Nine colours are mixed with each other in the direction of the arrows to form twenty‐four additional colours. Some charts are built around variations of the primary colours to make secondary colours, some around the secondary colours to make tertiary hues. These exercise my colour fluency in a way that avoids committing to the complexities of a painting, while carefully considering the nuances of colour relationships.

Except a colour chart is never just a colour chart: it is a map through the emotional responses we have to colour. The eye leads us along from one round island of colour to the next, following compass lines – arrows saying “go this way”. These charts could be esoteric maps for finding our way through unknown territories in our heads. They could function as a colourful new astrology, a star chart vaguely guiding us with more entertainment than accuracy.

So go for a drift into my paintings. If you need help navigating them, perhaps consult the more logical structure of these charts. They helped me prepare for the construction of my large canvas works.

But then again, maps warp the world. They stretch it and fatten it, shrink it and flatten it; they sell half‐truths in order to tell their story. These charts may only show the way around themselves, and it may be that being lost with your thoughts besides my painting 29th June

2020 is the best place to be after all. – Written by the artist Evan Woodruffe, Tamaki Makaurau, December 2020.

Installation photographs taken by Thomas Teutenberg, courtesy of the © artist & PAULNACHE, Gisborne 2021