Rod Moss

A SHARED HUMANITY

The work of Rod Moss, based on his life in Alice Springs, spans a period from the mid 1980s through to today and is a remarkable record of the artist’s experience of life and family in that community and its surrounds. He would include in that family not only his own kin but also the broader community of aboriginal friends who have been so important to him during those years. Enlivened and challenged by the traditional lifestyle and the urbanisation of the Arrernte families, Moss has devised a method of combining painting and drawing which depicts the realities of a life lived, coupled with a symbolic and heroic narrative. Through this he intensifies the drama of a cultural synthesis unique to the Alice, which as a settlement can be compared to a raft in a limitless sea. The Aboriginal elder Arranye Pengarte Johnson’s intimate friendship with Rod opened the spirit of his country to the artist. Arranye officially opened Moss’s first retrospective at the Araluen Cultural Centre in Alice Springs in 1994. The following retrospective was in 1998. Kemarre Turner after consultation with Arranye made the opening speech. The conversation between the two elders was overheard and translated. “Rod’s paintings aren’t anything special. Only ordinary life. People going about business. Rod sees us as people, not just black people, but as people like he is, a white person. Just our skin is different. We are still living in sheds and he helps us, thinks properly about us. People will think about you people at Irrkerlantye, still dancing and doing anthepe ceremonies. Town mob learn this from looking at the paintings. That’s why you take Rod to watch. They might believe that these things are are not continuing. But they are at Whitegate. Not just like bush communities. Community mob take photos at anthepe, the dances women do at initiation ceremonies. But we’ve got Rod with the picture in his head. Young people will see that their culture is still alive in the paintings, showing other people how people live at Whitegate, not houses like at Charles Creek. We are the forgiveness people. White Australians will see from the paintings that the Aboriginal people still live in humpies and from soakages, and hunting on foot. So whitefellas will understand from seeing the paintings.” But in order for Moss’ paintings to carry the complexity of such information and compress its vigour there needs to be a physicality of execution and an aesthetic order, which is anything but ordinary. We must appreciate the compositional and technical devices within the work. The fact that the flesh of the aboriginal figures is rendered in graphite whilst the rest of the composition is fully painted creates a tension and threatens to disrupt the cohesion of the whole. Yet the graphite portraits of his aboriginal subjects within these paintings are executed with a great tenderness and familiarity. These figures are empowered, they witness, direct and execute so much of the action being depicted that they hold it all together. The silky grey tones of the graphite which are at odds with the fully painted white people is a device that speaks of the gap which exists between the two cultures, a separation which is enforced in every aspect by the rights removed from them. As an artist schooled in the traditions of the West, Moss is well aware of the push and pull of the picture plane: the disruption of space by the Cubists, the emotional stirring of paint by the Expressionists, the arguments of the purely abstract over the narrative are art school debates that tend to wither under the sheer force of the reality of life itself in the centre of Australia. Moss meets this challenge, evoking the brilliant light of day through the broken brush stroke moving from sinuous gesture to the Pointillist dot, carrying the dappled colour of ground and sky, the complimentary warm and cool of sun and shadow. The careful organizing of groups within this plane opens the space up so the eye can enter and read the narrative or ask the question. The narrative is stilled, even though the action is often taking place. Figures gesture, dogs roam, yet it is all set and imbued with gravitas. To this end Moss looks to the great painters of realism, Caravaggio, Courbet, Manet, Bruegel, Velasquez, and Goya, using compositional devices such as the placing of groups with pivotal figures as the balancing point between clearly distinguished genre types. In some cases spiritual religious emblems drift into humble scenes of grieving or elation, evoking the spiritual world made material. The influences of the Masters are absorbed and modified rather than slavishly copied, the ironies and follies of this depicted coming together give rise to a humour and a certain Surrealistic quality, where in one such work, Discovering the Gridded City, aboriginal ‘archeologists’ unearth a miniaturised green artefact which is actually the Alice Springs township, buried and preserved under the sand. The political and social issues of disenfranchisement that bear down on the aboriginal community put the traditions of Western Art and its march towards Modernism into the back seat. How does such a brief flowing of western culture deal with meeting an ancient culture whose sense of time and timelessness is not driven by immediate material success and wealth? As Moss has opened himself up to the ‘otherness’ of aboriginal life he has witnessed the passing of many young aboriginal men, too soon to the grave. He has joined in the hunt, nursed the elderly, ferried the sick to hospital and helped in the efforts to find small means of income. He has recorded this in meticulous diaries kept over a lifetime. These experiences have given rise to two wonderful books. The Hard Light of Day (2010 University of Queensland Press, winner of The Prime Minister’s Award for non-fiction and the Northern Territory Book of the Year 2013. Followed by One Thousand Cuts (University of Queensland Press, also the Northern Territory Book of the Year 2014) These volumes give voice to the integrity which underpins his art, and the deep affection that he holds for the friends he has made on his journey. I would also recommend that you visit his website where he gives a detailed explanation of many of the stories and the thinking behind his paintings and drawings. John Anderson, Melbourne-based painter & sculptor.