“[I] discovered this incredible dynamic as the peonies aged. They demonstrated a beautiful fragility as they faded.”
Informed by Western traditions of painting, the work of Dean Home spans the spectrum of the canon. Home’s earlier painting was concerned with the human form. No stranger to studying the Masters, Dean attended the Villa Borghese to visit Caravaggio’s Boy with a basket of fruit, c.1593. Instead of painting the figure, Home found himself painting the basket of fruit – and so began his foray into still life.
Dean Home, studio interior. Courtesy the artist
The Western canon, and particularly the Old Masters and Chinoiserie, is a key influence on your practice. Your considered compositions of Chinese ceramics, fruit, flowers and other objects collected from nature seem to speak to the vanitas tradition, or a memento mori.
Memento mori is a very Western thing. The Dutch Masters were interested in referring to the worth of objects or pictorial ownership. I’m interested in different sensations of time. At the moment, I’m painting a work with birds on the bowl. They’re in flight, animated and energised, but eternally stuck in porcelain, while the objects in the foreground age.
I want my painting to be evidently interested in things of the world. Years ago, I bought a beautiful, small paperback on the work of Tang period Chinese poet Po Chü-i, which made me place compositions more deliberately. The object, such as a bowl, becomes a kind of cultural site, the flowers a beauty device, and the foreground objects – such as a blue paintbrush, rocks, or handmade cups – are about the path of water, which is a manifestation of wisdom. If you’re lucky, your own brush will carry that wisdom to the picture. I only use objects that help to extend that metaphor.
That’s what I’m really interested in doing in Search for the Pearl – these compositions are a short, assembled poem; lyrics that join together, to do with where the path of wisdom might be.
Objects in the studio. Courtesy the artist
On the subject of the objects in your compositions – are you an avid collector?
As a painter of things, I do find things. I’m a regular attendee of auctions and a collector of Chinese objects. One of the first objects that I bought was a Chinese bowl of the Kangxi period, around 1700 or something like that. I like to think that along with it came a spirit that went into my ear and took over the steering of my aesthetic interests. Chinese scholars maintained a strong regard for nature and awareness of history, but also of what the artistic experience is, what it is to sit in the studio and think about doing something – or not.
Last time I was in Rome, a place that really animates me, I walked out of a market and discovered a stall with peonies. I dropped all my stuff on the pavement, got hold of all the peonies I could find, and took them back to the apartment (not without some funny looks on the subway, the commuters probably thought I was a hopeless romantic). Back at the apartment I took an awful lot of photographs over several days and discovered this incredible dynamic as the peonies aged. They demonstrated a beautiful fragility as they faded.
How does photography enter your studio practice?
I need the compositions to go through some filters, and that’s typically photography. It’s a sort of telescopic process. Photography helps me to capture the composition in the first place. Then I let the mind work on it, to pull bits of pieces out of it. It might need painting several times. It might need some distorting or recalibration. I have to begin to own it.
Dean Home is represented by Arthouse Gallery, Sydney, Metro Gallery, Melbourne, Gallery One, Southport, and Linton & Kay Galleries, Perth.
Search for the Pearl will be showing at Linton & Kay Galleries Subiaco, Perth, from 17 September to 10 October 2022
Sophia Halloway is a writer and critic based in Sydney.
