Maryanne Wick

Posted: 24 Nov 2011  |  By: Prue Gibson

Wick spent many years living and working in South Korea, Hong Kong and Beijing. These experiences of a North Asian aesthetic, such as the structure, spare beauty and the exquisite form of functional objects, had a profound effect on her paintings. She has said she “explored a variety of media and surfaces and was introduced to many customs, traditions, beliefs and stories which influence her work today”.

It would be easy to liken Wick’s still life works to those of early twentieth-century Italian painter Giorgio Morandi but this might trivialise her work, demeaning the variety and diversity of her talents. After all, Wick paints landscape scenes and figures with as much assured confidence as her quiet resonant still life works.

In 2006, she visited Hong Kong’s oldest cemetery. On each headstone she discovered small images, photographs of the deceased. These anonymous faces ignited Wick’s imagination and her wonder over what kind of lives these people led. The ensuing paintings are formal, reserved (those of strangers), but they also embody the fragility of the deceased.

A 2008 Bundanon Trust residency was the impetus for the body of work Ancestral Ghosts, which explored the idea of spectral figures in the landscape. This was due to a discovery of old photographs, archival materials provided to her by the Bundanon staff. She suggested: “The black and white images depicting daily life on the property and the surrounding area, although quite worn over time, were nevertheless intriguing.” In charcoal on crumpled brown paper or on board, but leaving areas unpainted, these paintings are subtle remnants of old archival matter. Ancestry and the afterlife have been noted by the artist as threads of curiosity and these works hint at the lingering presence of past lives, of prescient energies linked to the divine.

Another shift in her work was predicated through a 2009 residency at Newington Armory in Sydney. During this period, Wick made use of an intellectual technique of automatic incidence. This concept, of the artist being open to apparently inconsequential or haphazard stimuli which have the potential to become significant, was mobilised. A seemingly harmless occurrence of frequent lizard visitors to her Newington Armory studio transformed her work into a new artistic proposition. She says: “Although usually timid they [the lizards] would chase and dart across my line of vision, around the easel and generally be very distracting.” Consequently, these little apparitions — scuttling lizard legs, a disappearing tail, a scaly still life object — played a new role in her work. Part of the composition and interlocutors to her work, they provided a dynamic charge to her recent still life paintings. As the artist professes: “Since Prehistoric Age the lizard has been depicted in art. In many indigenous and Asian cultures, the lizard is symbolic of ancestry, fertility, life and death.”

Wick lectures in drawing at the National Art School, after she graduated there in painting in 2001. In that year, she was also a finalist in the Sulman Prize. Since then her work has absorbed the cultural riches of her various travels.

Maryanne Wick shows at Robin Gibson Gallery.

Images from top:

Maryanne Wick, Cannon Ball, 2009, oil on canvas, 41 x 30cm.

Maryanne Wick, Still Life in Green, 2009, oil on wood, 50.5 x 63cm.

Click here for further information on Robin Gibson Gallery .