This was published 3 years ago
Elisabeth Kruger: 'The Sea Paintings 'at Nancy Sever Gallery is highly dramatic
The Sea Paintings by Elisabeth Kruger. Nancy Sever Gallery, 4/6 Kennedy Street, Kingston. Until August 6.
The Canberra-trained painter Elisabeth Kruger was thrust into the limelight in the Australian art world in 1989, when she was awarded the Moet and Chandon Fellowship. Apart from memorable openings, the fellowship did much to launch emerging artists nationally and internationally.
Spartacus, 2016, by Elisabeth Kruger, beautifully masters the forms of the waves and the drama of rock formations.Credit:Andrew Sikorski
By 1989, Kruger already had developed an exacting realist style that exploited immaculately worked surfaces and trompe l'oeil devices to explore a romanticised world of past mythologies. Fast forward almost 30 years, and Kruger is still employing painstakingly exacting mimetic techniques, now applied to the more accessible natural world, but still viewed through the prism of high romanticism and the artist's emotions.
Many years of painting flowers and occasionally, garden produce, has given way in this exhibition to dramatic seascapes. The catalogue note informs us that the collection stems from a period of personal loss, where the great ocean waves smash into the coastline to the background music of Aram Khachaturian's Spartacus.
The mood throughout the exhibition is of heroic resistance, and of the triumph of will and spirit over a material existence.
There is a literalness in Kruger's marine paintings that suggests the use of photographs as a source, so that despite the exactitude of observation, the swirling waves and the floating foam, there is also a certain flatness, stillness and hollowness in the dramatic gestures.
When I think of two of the great marine artists, J.M.W. Turner and Ivan Aivazovsky, their magnificence lay in their ability to become consumed by the spirit of nature and to evoke a personal romantic vision.
Kruger, in her finest paintings at this exhibition including Whispers, Secrets and Spartacus, all painted in 2016, beautifully masters the forms of the waves, the drama of rock formations, and that magical moment when the water seems to dissolve into air and float suspended for an instant before plunging and dissolving in the sea.
However, unlike the great marine painters, she fails to go beyond the form of her subject and embrace its spirit. She captures the sound and fury, but not the more subtle spiritual force of the ocean and the sense of awe at its terrifying power and majesty.
The painting I admired most was a small cloud study, Cloud Appreciation I, 2017, where there is something of humility before the moods of nature. The forms are ambiguous, and shapes appear to melt into one another.
Kruger's technique – so magnificently effective in her flower studies, where precision of photographically inspired observation is combined with still-life symbolism, and the idea of the transience of floral blooms finds a parallel in the transience of life – does not translate effectively into the seascapes, which refuse to stand still and be meticulously observed.
Elisabeth Kruger is a very fine and accomplished painter, although in this series she may not yet have completely mastered the appropriate visual language through which to convey her strong feelings on encountering the dramatic moods of the ocean.