Michael Peck

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‘Silent Poetry’

In this world silence is a given. The birds hover, but they do not move. The world is in stasis; frozen in a moment of melancholy. The stillness palpable… the silence so intense that it becomes a sound in its own right, holding the grey mist at distance… but only just….

Michael Peck’s paintings act as stills in some portentous drama. The narrative remains a mystery, but we know this is not the world as we know it. The fog has bleached the colour from the fields and the trees. One might hope that the book holds the key. It is clutched tightly, like a sacred talisman, a way out, an escape from this monochromatic miasma. But when it is opened there is nothing more than total erasure, the pages so intense that the reader becomes irradiated, her features vanishing in a blast of forbidden knowledge.

Peck’s strangely luminescent landscapes recall old sepia-tone photographs. The focus is caught on strange moments, the blur of the trees at times hinting at fog or smoke as the little girl looks warily over her shoulder. A different kind of narrative is unveiled in Peck’s world, one that shares a strange aesthetic with moments from Alfred Hitchcock’s films merged with hints of the surrealism of David Lynch. The monochromatic palette, the strong whiff of a cinematic still, a sense of pause.

It is difficult to articulate how a painting, a thing of oil on canvas, can so strongly suggest the eradication of sound. Some paintings are noisy. Others, such as Peck’s, suck the sound from the room like an aural black hole. At times Peck has announced this intention by literally branding the paintings with such titles as Sound or The Long Silence, but regardless of title, his works exude a cacophony of stillness and contemplation, an avoidance of movement.

His figures look out onto landscapes devoid of life. The hint of apocalypse, so prevalent in today’s culture, is captured in the sheer stillness, the lack of breeze, the chilled permafrost of the ground. The figures, either a young boy or a hooded figure, are distinctly solitary. The hood becomes emblematic of what borders on a cult of alienation seen on the streets of every metropolis; the protective garb of skateboarders, street artists and the generally disenfranchised. The hoodie itself has become symbolic of refusal, a way of shutting out the ‘real’ world of nagging parents and authoritarian structures. The hood, no longer the solitary garb of monks shunning the temporal world in preference to prayer, has become a silent weapon of refusal, a ‘fuck-you’ gesture to the suits and bureaucrats who have created this cold and grey world.

The boy looks over a frozen lake, the clouds glowering with laden weight, and he is so very alone. Every childhood has moments of hidden (and often sullen) reverie, but in Peck’s world those moments are shared by the landscape itself. And when he paints the landscape devoid of humanity it is a blasted flatland, sublime in its simple bleakness. This could be the world of Cormac McCarthy’s blisteringly bleak 2006 novel The Road which records the travails facing a man trying to ensure his son’s safety in a post-apocalyptic world. It is set in a landscape similarly bleached of colour: “In the afternoon it started to snow again. They stood watching the pale grey flakes sift down out of the sullen murk. They trudged on. A frail slush forming over the dark surface of the road.”

In 1757 the philosopher Edmund Burke published his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in which he stated that; “terror is… the ruling principle of the sublime.”

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature… is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” Burke wrote. “In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.”

With his fascination with the watcher, the viewer, Peck shares certain tropes with the grand Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. But where Friedrich seemed to capture the Germanic sense of grandeur, the operatic, Peck is muted. His landscapes are not heroic and grandiose, they are distinctly muted and ashen.

Peck recently painted a much-discussed painting of a young girl wearing a gas mask (Dorothy, 2009). Many asked what had triggered such adornment? Was this a pre-apocalyptic scenario, the beginning of some horrendous end-game? But upon consideration what Peck had captured was a perfect portrayal of emotional isolation, the alienation of young adulthood, the moment of transition between child and grown-up, facing a world both threatening and confusing and facing it very much alone. The gas mask took on the same role as the book and the hood; a thing to hide in, a symbolic cessation of the bludgeoning of emotional uncertainty.

Like a number of his contemporaries, Melbourne artists like Sam Leach, Tony Lloyd, Juan Ford and Jackson Slattery, Peck clearly relishes the ability to fine-tune his surfaces. While many artists have decided that painting is moribund, turning instead to the computer screen or video camera, Peck has re-embraced the age-old art of painting. While this may seem old fashioned to some, the twist is in how contemporary these painters feel. Street art, comics, cinema, science fiction and television inform Peck’s oeuvre as almost unconscious muses. While we may be tempted to recall 1950s film stills and old and faded photographs, they are filtered through electronic angels and futuristic scenarios to produce a body of work that is simultaneously cool and emotionally charged, a contradiction achieved via a blend of street-smart awareness and emotional catharsis.

Peck came to age as an artist at the turn of the millennium, a time fraught with doubt and confusion. Peck responds to this strange new world with lyricism and silent poetry and epics of delicate grandeur, leaving viewers to dwell both on their past and their future.