Rosemary has asked me to say some words about her exhibition and of course I said “yes”, but I made a mental note that I would say upfront that I am not an artist and the little I know about art I have gotten from Rosemary herself. But I do know something about philosophy, and if you bear with me, I will take a philosophical approach to this exhibition. I would like to begin with an anecdote told to us by one of my teachers, the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. He describes how he was teaching poetry at Queen’s University Belfast during the Troubles. A bomb went off nearby, and one of the students asked, “What are we doing reading poetry when the bombs are going off?”
We too now live in troubled times. The horrific events in Gaza and Ukraine mean that we are actually very close to WW3. Clowns and fools oversee the world, and they do not mean us well. This sorry state of affairs poses again the question that Seamus Heaney grappled with. That question is “What is the role of art, when at any moment we could be close to being obliterated?” This question is also a variation of the theme that the philosopher Teodor Adorno touched upon when, in 1949, he wrote that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric in that it ignored the terrible suffering of the death camps.
My first attempt at an answer to Heaney’s student and to Adorno is to turn to my late friend and mentor the philosopher Roy Bhaskar. He envisaged art as part of living well. If humanity is to thrive it must leave a place for the aesthetic be that enjoying poetry or doing a painting or taking a walk in the rain forest or the Stoney Desert of Central Australia, or the Botanic gardens, or the Brisbane wetlands. So, for Bhaskar the aesthetic is not turning us away from the world but teaching us how to live well in the world.
The second philosopher I turn to is the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is a very complex thinker, whose erudition is simply staggering not to mention intimidating. As I understand his work. in his approach to the transcendentals, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, Balthasar argued that the key to uniting them was to understand that the Glory and beauty of God’s creation underpinned the forces of goodness and truth.
So, Rosemary in her studies of the austere beauty of the Central Desert, her wonderful paintings of Brisbane’s wetlands, the rock formations of Gen Innes, and her engagement with the wonders & mysteries revealed by the Webb telescope is insisting that we see the beauty and the dearest freshness that lives deep down things.
The last philosopher I will cite is the theologian Dun Scotus. He had a concept called “haecceitas” or “thisness”. This is difficult to understand but for Dun Scotus God was in the detail. We need to come to terms with the sheer physicality of reality and not simply use language to dampen down or to tame our engagement with the world. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used the term “inscape” to convey the importance of looking closely at the world and to see the wonder in the detail. And I think he we have an explanation for Rosemary’s insistence on the importance of drawing for painting. I will conclude this talk by quoting a poem by Hopkins. I know it is a favourite of Rosemary’s and it provides I think a good way to understand her work:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I commend to you Rosemary’s painting as a way of understanding the wonder and mystery of our world. We have never needed such sentiments more than now.
Gary MacLennan, 17 June, 2024
Rosemary’s art is on display at the Burrow in Russell Street West End in Brisbane Magan-djin.