There are moments when planets align and the crystal spheres of the universe really sing. Both have happened in to me the last two nights.
In my declining years finding “something interesting” on TV each night seems to have taken on an urgency worthy of Jason and his argonauts. Probably a just comparison. I was an ABC Argonaut in my childhood.
It’s easy enough to flick to a colourful commercial series with lots of canned laughter, celebrities, and no particular angst. The evening will pass effortlessly but you’ll never return to the show unless you stumble across it as a repeat.
I confess that I love those last-night-moments that do stay in the mind. A mental burr under your saddle that comes back the next morning while you’re munching your toast or sipping your coffee. A memory that pops into you head while you’re sitting on the train, off to yet a medical appointment, in a month or so. A moment that was, in reality, a door opening into a room you’ve not only never been in before but that you didn’t even know existed.
Both shows were on the ABC and both shows were about art. One neat, precise, contained and the other shambolic, puzzling and confused.
One was of an Australian icon who had to go to Tuscany to be discovered and the other, a shabby and dishevelled man known only for looking strange and forever walking along the Stirling Highway, until he too was discovered.
Both were artists. Both struggled with their talents and both have much to teach us about making our way through the labyrinth of life.
I met Jeffrey Smart the first night and the Ross Seaton the next. I knew Jeffrey Smart’s empty yet compelling paintings but of the man I knew nothing. I might have known he was gay but not how charmingly forbearing his partner was. That most of Jeffrey’s subject matter was Italian also escaped me. But as I sat there and watched as his marvellously meticulous paintings slid by, I was reminded of the superb style we had seen everywhere when we visited Italy a few years back.
The easy and bantering love Jeffrey had for his partner was obvious. What I hadn’t expected was his artistic angst. His art always looks so effortless. I had no idea that he struggled with some paintings, sometimes for years, working on them, putting them away, rediscovering them, getting them right……or burning them. His last work, painted before he died, I took to heart. A lone figure making his way forward in a vast and endless labyrinth that stretches to the horizon.
Ross Seaton is a quite different beast. He was known in Nedlands, an affluent suburb in Perth, only as that weird crippled over guy that seemed always to hurrying round the streets or striding along the Stirling Highway in apparent search of something.
And, as it turned out he was. He was searching, as Jeffrey Smart was, as we all are, for the meaning of life. But life, to Ross, was of more complex in a mathematically structured way than it probably is for you or I.
Ross Seaton had been odd all his life. We might think autistic, on the spectrum, something like that. But he’d always been an artist and over the years that art had taken over and dominated his life in a way Jeffrey Smart would understand and probably, forgive. Ross’s determined attack on art cost him his marriage and left him living in a Perth bungalow, wildly and chaotically packed full of art and the bric-a-brac and chattels of his trade, surrounded by an over grown and neglected yard.
He was discovered by a Perth Academic who recognised genius in the huge abstract paintings on black plastic stretched out in the drive way. Ross Seaton died before his works could be catalogued and exhibited.
Both Jeffrey and Ross had struggled and progressed in their own particular labyrinths. Fame may have eluded one if not the other, but fame, I suspect, is less important for an artist than recognition. To be seen by one’s fellows as having progressed deep into the labyrinth. A thumbs up rather than an acclamation.
At the End of the Day 