About

MICHAEL BERRY

The universal questions that Michael Berry asks and the pictures he paints are the same exploration. His life and his art are linked at the deepest possible level - they are an inseparable whole.

He denies psychological security through images of oneself and others, and in his paintings he avoids the recognisable, including his own fronto signature, that add to and promote the feeling of safety through recognition in the viewer. He maintains that the 'self' is subject-bound.

Berry speaks often about the limitations of thought - that it can only measure and compare - and he maintains that if thought in human beings functions technically, there is no psychological pain.

When it comes to art, the integrity of the technical visual language, which is an ongoing, moment-to-moment inquiry for him, is of ultimate importance.

"Great drawing skill is essential to fine painting," he says. "How else to bring together the relationship between line, symbols and colour on a two-dimensional sheet of paper or canvas, and create a corridor of light and space in which it all exists."

"There is no insight without questioning, and one cannot be free without seeing one's limitations. The art itself is not what is important - it is the challenges one sets and the questions asked while doing it that truly matter. Insight arising from those questions will bring about insight in the work."

"What is actually happening without overlaying my opinions and all my 'knowledge' - which make up the 'self'? Perhaps therein lies pure perception."
In "Symphonic Space 1" the lyricism is exemplified because the light violet is also the base of some of the other colours. A painting in harmony with itself - yet harmony with opposition - is what he set out to achieve."

The key to Berry's intriguingly complex and multi-faceted work is that the negative and the positive space are of equal importance. He has been criticised for using too much colour, but contends that the shortcoming is in the mind's eye of the critic.

"I reduced the palette to black and white for many years - the aim is to paint and to draw with equally spontaneous flair."

Berry is a perceptive artist whose only concern is for the next great breakthrough in painting, and to that end he insists that each piece speak for itself.

He has exhibited widely throughout Australia, and his paintings, drawings, and sculptures are in many public, private and corporate collections.

(From Selected Contemporary Artists of Australia - article written by Anne-Patricia Hemingway) back to top

The art of visual thinking

Every now and then one happens upon an artist brash enough to ignore the power of mainstream cultural conditioning and daring to stand alone to work in his/her own metier.

When you ask abstract/surrealist painter Michael Berry to describe his work, he will go into a long insightful discussion about the "universal visual language of art" and the part it plays in imagining who and what we are, and how we relate to each other with images of ourselves.

"It is not a matter of explaining or eulogising about a said work," he says. "It is a matter of the observer being able to read the universal visual language used - the fact of it and not his/her opinion about it. And to do that one must end being who one is."

This may sound like "art-speak" but if one is to believe anything the artist says, the answer must be in the paintings and not in the apparent rhetoric.
The paintings are bold, gestural, delicate, complex and simple; in short his work is paradoxical. It is multi-dimensional, freely shifting the vanishing point and the negative and positive space, depending upon the demands placed on it by the viewer's eye.

"When I first saw a Michael Berry painting, I witnessed the controlled linear geometry of Kandinsky and the passion of Van Gogh," says his friend, painter Peter Ellis.

"Most of all, in his paintings I see and feel a freshness of painterly surfaces that have not been done to death - they are a collection of compositions obvious to the eyes, but a challenge to the mind - thank God!"
Ellis thinks that it is also this artist's propensity to move away from conventional thought and embrace the new at the risk of non-acceptance that is exciting, making him a "painters' painter".

It is unusual to find an artist like Berry who steadfastly asserts that his "ego" is the enemy of painterly awareness and transcending personal style.

"Music is generally accepted as a universal language. If you can sing in tune and I cannot then you are musical and negotiate the notes and I do not, and no redefinition of the spoken word will alter that," Berry says.
"However, if an untrained person scribbles a black line on paper and a master artist does the same, somehow the lack of acknowledgment of the universal art language deems both of them artists when clearly they are not equal artistically."
"While tremendous breakthroughs occurred in the visual language in the last century, unfortunately these have not been fully understood and integrated, thus opening the floodgates for every personal 'chicken-scratching' to be deemed important.
"But the pure art language that has developed - and indeed continues to evolve technically- is essential to pictorial understanding and makes a work truly profound, beautiful, logical and polydimensional."

He pauses for a moment.

"The understanding of all this is in the looking, not in the words said about it. It is sad that there is so much talk, and masterly works are not approached in a manner that allows the painting to speak fully," he explains.
"That is - without pre-conceived verbal opinion."

However, Berry concedes that there needs to be a verbal terminology to describe the space in which he explores and works. He has coined the term "symphonic space" to describe the next step beyond plastic space, where a total spatial flexibility exists, forcing the viewer's eyes to move across the pictorial surface, perceiving with peripheral vision and not normal binocular vision.
In a recent acrylic work entitled 'Song for Sad Eyes', Berry defies the advantage that tonal painting affords to hold form together and give volume and substance to painted objects. Instead he uses the lessons of the optical quality of colour to have its own dimension which creates a real sense of depth as one mentally enters the painting.

And here is the difference! Berry is inside the painting and not an autonomous self outside the picture plane when the painting process is occurring. His colours are extraordinarily vibrant, harmonious and defiant of normal colour theory. This is not an opinion; believe it or not he is colour blind.
He denies it, preferring to call himself 'word blind', meaning he simply can't name subtle colour nuances - he can see them, decipher their pictorial depth but he usually correctly guesses the colour by what he calls 'intensity of spatial depth'.

Berry also makes assemblages from biscuit tins and found objects, including toys in his 'Food for Thought' series. These pieces show another side of Berry; here the humour is biting and relentless, and perverse psychology lurks in these otherwise ordinary commercial objects.

He lampoons the falseness of fantasy heroes - of all heroes for that matter - in "the best laid plans of mickey mice and men". He has the successful Mickey Mouse caught in a rat-trap paradoxically made by Ron Disney.

"One Disney makes an imaginary mouse famous, and another Disney is responsible for killing his image; it's that silly ... and that's really funny," Berry says.

by Phillip Hill
Phillip Hill is a freelance journalist and art writer
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