“Nothing is lost.”
Lisa McKimmie is back in Australia, and her painting has come home, developing from subdued and ambiguously dark European images made during the move and renovation, to luminous paintings that hold the eye and glow in the memory. These works have genuine abstraction; something the artist wants to record and share is shaped – by training, reading, observation of the work of other artists, understanding of the possibilities of materials, and by lived experience – to convey the essence of that observation. In parallel, her portraits envelop their subjects in understanding, her self-portraits think and record.
Lisa McKimmie, Untitled, 2020, oil on panel. Courtesy the artist and Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney
When she left school, not realising she should be an artist, McKimmie spent two years studying science, then psychology. To defray her student debt before studying art at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, she laid coaxial cable for a mining company in the Central Desert. Her descriptions of the physical demands of the job and the sexist men of the team emphasise the friendship she formed with the pilot who flew them to and from worksites. McKimmie finally returned to Perth and art school: she and Jonathon got together when she flew to Zimbabwe to be a bridesmaid and he came to the wedding; then she taught in Paris, London, and Amsterdam while he flew in Nigeria.
Nothing is lost. Science provided the rigour required to investigate and experiment, to understand the climate crisis, and to avoid materials from fossil fuels. It underpins the confidence with which she draws on gesso-prepared board with found metals, a strip of copper, or gold and silver rings, then delicately applies pigments: cadmium, cobalt. She waits to see them oxidise, attracting water from Sydney’s humid air; she watches the change, and then arrests that change. These are smaller works, the viewer more conscious of the surface and what its shallower areas reveal. The oil-on-linen paintings, some much larger, shimmer with layers of colour and texture. McKimmie’s confident control of line, form and tone demonstrates her commitment to training.
Lisa McKimmie, Residue, 2023, zinc, silver, gold and copper metalpoint with cadmium pigment on gessoed panel, 50 × 40cm. Courtesy the artist and Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney
Lisa McKimmie, Angophora, 2022, oil, oil stick and sgraffito on gessoed panel, 70 × 50cm. Courtesy the artist and Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney
From 1995, in Sydney, while Jonathon flew in Papua New Guinea, McKimmie worked at Brenda May and Chandler Coventry’s galleries, studied printmaking, undertook a Masters at the then named UNSW College of Fine Arts, and taught professional practice at the National Art School. Later, four years based in grey suburban London with toddlers were not easy, and eight years in Brunei and Singapore meant work was lost to mildew and heat. In Brunei she initiated a recycling system at the school. Then four years in The Hague, the children at high school, gave access to European galleries and networks of artists.
Jonathon has retired from flying, both children have left school, the house is filling with paintings and sculpture and furniture and books they’ve gathered or inherited. Her surroundings are familiar, settled and stimulating; she has a studio, she is making original work. She is unpretentious, with a sophisticated understanding of life, and, like all true artists, direct and very practical, laughing off hardship. Nothing is lost. McKimmie’s training, paid and volunteer work, moving among cultures, showing in group exhibitions; all contribute to the pictures. Rosalie Gascoigne comes to mind, who relocated to the Monaro region in south eastern New South Wales with young children, uncomplaining, inventive. Gascoigne first showed at fifty-seven. Lisa McKimmie is fifty-seven. Her work sings.
Dr Judith Pugh is a Sydney-based arts and cultural writer.
Flinders Street Gallery
13 May to 3 June 2023
Sydney
