Journeymen

By Paul D Robertson

Mixed Media

485 x 155cm

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Presently on display and in the collection of The Australian Institute Of Management, Selby Street, Perth

This is a major work, one of the most important that I have done to date.

I tend to walk an invisible line where my work is concerned. I guess I have found a kind of border between classical and contemporary art, where my work can be placed, though it creaks and flakes bright paint as it leans either way.

So, this piece: The symbolism is layered, and not limited to images in a narrative. It also crosses over into deeply contemporary art. But I believe it isn’t convoluted, it is direct. Most of all, it is human.

 Firstly, the figures are all men and the title of the work is also "Journeymen." They are spread out across the desert as if they were going somewhere and yet none of them actually appear to be moving. This is a pretty direct metaphor for how I believe we really exist as men. We are all trying to go somewhere - we don't know where - and the most important motivation is to look like we are moving. Even though, of course, there is no movement. The stasis of our lives is extant. How can we journey so busily, so mightily, to an end that we do not and cannot know? So, we work. Desperately, frantically, we stay perfectly still.

That the setting is a desert is important also - the setting is our working lives, our contemporary existence.

The surface; the very paint itself, contains everything that I could think of (and had handy) that was definitively masculine. It is made from plaster and paint, sand, dirt, beer, motor oil, grass, bourbon, cigarette ash, some petrol in there somewhere… other things, I am sure, that I don't remember. These ingredients are mixed into the paint.

The landscape hence became thick and richly textured. I painted the figures themselves thinly and with limitations on my palette - they are far less real than the landscape that they are painted onto - as our own lives are transient while the earth endures.
They are in some kind of rough uniform to suggest the inescapability of our similarity as men. We are all fundamentally fated to masculinity, to manhood. We cannot escape from who we are.

And finally the one figure not looking up - in the third panel from the left. This is me. I am wearing a suit that is too big for me. The pants fall loosely over my shoes and the cuffs cover my hands. I have never been able to share fulfilling these roles; this contemporary journey in its glory and also in its doom.