The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont by Martin Edmond

Author:Martin Edmond [Edmond, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781869405090
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Chair during April is the first, and one of the best, of many chair paintings. It has verve, beauty, humour, horror in about equal measure. The chair is in motion, the upright wooden back falling one way, objects on the patterned plush of the seat tipping the other. Is that a teacup falling, or blood from a lopped neck? What is the large, baleful, black eye in the centre of the painting, like a dark whirlpool with a planet for a pupil, looking at? One chair leg is concertina-ed, the other resembles the stockinged calf of a travelling player. Across the activated space below, a series of heads pursue each other through versions and mirrors. The whole has the feeling of a tapestry woven from some happy intersection of the quotidian and the miraculous. It is impossible not to be reminded of the perceptual distortions characteristic of lysergic acid and its companion substances.

Whether or not Clairmont was taking acid during 1968, he certainly knew the drug by 1969: a friend bought some back from Australia and supplied him personally. Anyone who takes acid becomes aware of how much of a construct of our senses the world of ordinary reality is, how many other potential realities exist, how rich the possibilities are. Early Clairmont has a clearer debt to psychedelia than to any of the more traditional art-historical sources which might be cited. It is the fruit of the deliberate application of information derived from the visual field of one who is affected by LSD to the ends of painting and drawing. However, when Clairmont spoke about the drawings he did towards the major work for his honours year at Ilam, he acknowledged a debt principally to opium. He said he spent a lot of time at home, looking after the baby, in one room, stoned. That room was the sitting room of the flat at 26 Hereford Street where he and his family lived.

The drawings are views of particular areas of the room and what it contains. It was a ground-floor flat, at the front of a big old ornate two-storey wooden house, with a lot of elaborate open-fretted woodwork decoration on the outside. The sitting room has a half circle of bay windows, six in all; they are divided in two, with the top third of nine-panelled glass, and the bottom two thirds made up of one tall clear pane. In the photographs which accompany the thesis, this lower set of windows is curtained with diamond patterned cloth against the street outside.

Titled An Exercise in Perception, the thesis consists of a brief written introduction to a series of fifteen photographs, two of which show the interior of the sitting room as it was, while the other thirteen are black and white plates of large drawings of the room. In terms of subject matter, most of Clairmont’s major series are implied in this set of drawings: there are chairs, table tops, doorways, windows, a fireplace; with the exception of his nudes and self-portraits, these comprise his major preoccupations.

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