Richard Straley - Evaluation
Posted Jun 30, 2005
Last Updated Jun 21, 2012
Painting and Richard Straley…
Colour coding is used in visual narratives to describe, factually or poetically, the appearance and order of things in the world. Indeed, every child, every scientist and the average reader of photographs know that spring grass is green and the summer sky is blue. But Richard Straley knows something more. He knows that objective observation of nature and a purely responsive use of descriptive colour, rather like the song of the sirens, can lure and lose us into the sensuous experiencing of the tangible world. Whilst this gentle entrapment is devoutly wished for the many who are unable to resist the rampant artificiality and virtual experiencing of our electronically controlled contemporary existence, Straley also knows that colour, like music, is a language that the human consciousness uses to explore expressively the recesses inaccessible still to discursive and analytical introversion. And nature offers the timeless palimpsest upon which he inscribes this discourse in colour. Straley uses colour in the way a poet uses words and a musician uses sound.
The sensuous and analytical enjoyment of the world we referred to above entraps us into the illusion that time stands still, that things are. The arrested consciousness freezes the time frame so that the gaze can harvest the things of the world. Analytical control is, at best, Man's saddest illusion, and at worst, the legitimised expression of his tyrannical impulse. For in fact, the world never sits still. Things are always becoming. Every land, city, sand and seascape contains memories and traces deposited by the ebb and flow of time. And for those hungering for hope as well, the sites that comfort the weary gaze also hold promises of a better tomorrow. This is the awe, the wisdom and the poetry that Nature breathes and secretes. We have evolved a magical term for it, “forever”, a term that is both poetic and empowering. Just take a second to whisper it to yourself… feel the yearning for transcendence that it conjures up from the depth of the psyche. It is the feeling that resonates in the music and poetry that nourishes Straley, and that motivates and inspires his painting.
The paintings of Straley are acts of faith; in their making unfold a ritual of self-affirmation. They take Straley and the viewers who care to follow him beyond the reach of history. For the history of contemporary Man has become sad and deeply wounding, rather like the tangled mass of a thorny rose bush whose cultural blooms the cold wind of pragmatism scatters awry. Straley, like many men and women who care militantly for Culture, bears the scars. But he also knows the Healing too. In fact, every painting becomes a site for Healing.
As he drained the gourd of a kindly Berber, after a crash landing and a long spell of wandering in the Sahara, Antoine de St. Exupery proclaimed water to be Life itself, rather than merely essential to Life. Indeed, no testimony to Love equals the devotion of Water to Life. Likewise, it would be derisory to call “technique” the conjugation of water and nature’s powdery pigments that underlines Straley’s practice. The craft may well have evolved through years of assiduous experimentation, but the art results from an initiation into the loving possibilities that water, in its graduated mélange with paint, makes available to artists. Like the traditional Chinese artists that Straley counts among his spiritual ancestors, the admixture of water and pigment represents the Tao, the very cosmic essence that Nature makes manifest in its multitudinous and wondrous forms, and that the alchemy of painting mirrors and, in inspired circumstances, extends.
It is this extension of the possibilities of Nature that fascinates me in Straley’s paintings. For his engagement with Nature has a wholesomeness that awakens the senses and heals the imagination.
And this is not the only gift that Straley’s paintings offer the viewer…
Jacques Rangasamy, PhD, FRSA
Hereford, May 2003
Colour coding is used in visual narratives to describe, factually or poetically, the appearance and order of things in the world. Indeed, every child, every scientist and the average reader of photographs know that spring grass is green and the summer sky is blue. But Richard Straley knows something more. He knows that objective observation of nature and a purely responsive use of descriptive colour, rather like the song of the sirens, can lure and lose us into the sensuous experiencing of the tangible world. Whilst this gentle entrapment is devoutly wished for the many who are unable to resist the rampant artificiality and virtual experiencing of our electronically controlled contemporary existence, Straley also knows that colour, like music, is a language that the human consciousness uses to explore expressively the recesses inaccessible still to discursive and analytical introversion. And nature offers the timeless palimpsest upon which he inscribes this discourse in colour. Straley uses colour in the way a poet uses words and a musician uses sound.
The sensuous and analytical enjoyment of the world we referred to above entraps us into the illusion that time stands still, that things are. The arrested consciousness freezes the time frame so that the gaze can harvest the things of the world. Analytical control is, at best, Man's saddest illusion, and at worst, the legitimised expression of his tyrannical impulse. For in fact, the world never sits still. Things are always becoming. Every land, city, sand and seascape contains memories and traces deposited by the ebb and flow of time. And for those hungering for hope as well, the sites that comfort the weary gaze also hold promises of a better tomorrow. This is the awe, the wisdom and the poetry that Nature breathes and secretes. We have evolved a magical term for it, “forever”, a term that is both poetic and empowering. Just take a second to whisper it to yourself… feel the yearning for transcendence that it conjures up from the depth of the psyche. It is the feeling that resonates in the music and poetry that nourishes Straley, and that motivates and inspires his painting.
The paintings of Straley are acts of faith; in their making unfold a ritual of self-affirmation. They take Straley and the viewers who care to follow him beyond the reach of history. For the history of contemporary Man has become sad and deeply wounding, rather like the tangled mass of a thorny rose bush whose cultural blooms the cold wind of pragmatism scatters awry. Straley, like many men and women who care militantly for Culture, bears the scars. But he also knows the Healing too. In fact, every painting becomes a site for Healing.
As he drained the gourd of a kindly Berber, after a crash landing and a long spell of wandering in the Sahara, Antoine de St. Exupery proclaimed water to be Life itself, rather than merely essential to Life. Indeed, no testimony to Love equals the devotion of Water to Life. Likewise, it would be derisory to call “technique” the conjugation of water and nature’s powdery pigments that underlines Straley’s practice. The craft may well have evolved through years of assiduous experimentation, but the art results from an initiation into the loving possibilities that water, in its graduated mélange with paint, makes available to artists. Like the traditional Chinese artists that Straley counts among his spiritual ancestors, the admixture of water and pigment represents the Tao, the very cosmic essence that Nature makes manifest in its multitudinous and wondrous forms, and that the alchemy of painting mirrors and, in inspired circumstances, extends.
It is this extension of the possibilities of Nature that fascinates me in Straley’s paintings. For his engagement with Nature has a wholesomeness that awakens the senses and heals the imagination.
And this is not the only gift that Straley’s paintings offer the viewer…
Jacques Rangasamy, PhD, FRSA
Hereford, May 2003
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