From Maungataketake to Sgt. Pepper Michael Shepherd Reinvents History Painting
From The Attributes of a Marijuana Smoker (1975) to Commemoration (It was 70 Years Ago Today) (2017) featuring the drum from the famous cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Michael Shepherd’s engrossing exhibition Reinventing History Painting covers more than four decades of his distinctive and distinguished practice.
Ably curated by Elizabeth Rankin, who also wrote the text for the indispensable catalogue,1 the exhibition includes 112 works (if series such as five Fiscal Envelopes and eight Dead Letter Mails are counted separately). It is a show that takes time to absorb, given the invariably subtle and layered character of Shepherd’s method. A single visit left me with strong impressions but also the frustration of not having been able to give each work the attention it deserves.
Despite its size the exhibition is not a full retrospective; some parts of Shepherd’s work are left out, such as his 2014 paintings, works centred on Lilburn’s scores (2009) and the Janet Frame paintings about which I wrote for in 2011. From the outset Shepherd took a singular direction, out of key with his time. How many artists anywhere in recent history chose still-life as their primary mode? While his favoured models were Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) and and (both 1980). The former also includes miniature crossed flags, a military brooch and a pile of cloth or paper, while in the latter the adze balances on a cotton reel and is accompanied by other bits and pieces―an Anzac poppy, more flags, butterflies and meccano constructions. Distinctive long shadows are cast by the objects as if viewed in a raking horizontal light, possibly originating in Shepherd’s fascination with his father’s photographs of the Western Desert in World War II. The randomness of the objects and the oddity of their arrangements―awkward and enigmatic as if participants in an obscure private ritual―reveal an artist who, however wedded to tradition in terms of technique (grinding his own pigments, for example), possessed what Thomas Hardy called ‘an idiosyncratic mode of regard’ which is wholly contemporary in time and place.
