Angus McDonald Selected Paintings 2001 - 2006

Angus McDonald: Still Life

excerpt from the catalogue essay by
Jacqueline Millner, University of Western Sydney

Angus McDonald’s paintings are marked by that very enhanced realism that renders the ordinary extraordinary. Through his adept handling of light, line, colour and composition, McDonald transforms his humble subjects of white cloth, fruit and receptacle into mesmerising scenes that refresh our vision. The artificial light allows the artist to control the tableau as a director controls a stage: he can create drama and suspense just through lighting. The minimal composition, strong line and restricted palette add to the drama, heightening ‘reality’ rather than seeking only to reproduce it. These are far from modernist abstractions, yet they bring modernist insight on the nature of the picture plane together with a loving fidelity to the real life object.

McDonald shuns ostentatious virtuosity, aiming instead for an economy of expression, a fine balance between the exertions of the visual language and the content. His treatment creates a compact, integrated image that strikes us in its wholeness, but also invites us to notice and follow the interrelations between the different elements, to wonder at the sensibility that orchestrated their infinitely variable harmony. That is, the images at first appears simple — their direct cogency indeed attracts us — but prolonged reflection gradually suggests the complex conceptualisations on which such simplicity is grounded.

McDonald’s choice to rigorously limit the objects he paints is key to his work’s ability to trigger our heightened looking. As Crispin Sartwell observes, common objects become dull to us unless we can refresh our experience of them; the dullness of the world emerges from our own dullness, from the bluntness of our desires and the surfeit of sensation in the course of our lives. McDonald’s work is exemplary of the possibility to find endless wonder in the same things — a pear, an apple, an enamel jug. His continuous study of these everyday objects amounts to a way of expressing his love for the actual; it proposes that what is at hand is the most important thing, something to which one could devote a whole life to exploring. To gaze upon his paintings is to begin to discover that experience for ourselves.

McDonald’s still lives, with their rigorously negotiated economy of means, their simple and familiar subjects, and their heightened yet faithful realism, allow for that critical experience of beauty in art.