Essays

Picnic

Gregory Ball
Curator, Nanaimo Art Gallery

“The examined life is no picnic.”
Robert Fulghum

When you think of the word “picnic” what image does this term bring to mind? Is it checkered blankets, a basket full of delicious food with an accompanying bottle of fine wine? Do you picture a sunny day in a park with a lover, or a day spent with friends and family?

Generally, we conjure up countless clichés when we imagine the ideal setting for a picnic and often make concerted efforts to keep the fantasy intact. Historically, Medieval hunting feasts and Renaissance country banquets can be credited with providing the foundations for the outdoor dining experiences we practice today. Picnics, or barbeques for that matter, actually evolved from the elaborate mealtime traditions enjoyed by the wealthy and influential during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning of the word “picnic” was defined as “a fashionable social entertainment in which each person present contributed a share of the provisions of the hunt”. It has been suggested that the word picnic is based on the French verb piquer, which means ‘pick’ or ‘peck’ with the rhyming suffix nique perhaps meaning a trifle. It is interesting in the modern day to consider that picnics and barbeques, with all their goodwill and romantic associations were based on ideas of the exhibition of power, prestige, hunting prowess, and material wealth.

There are countless examples in the last several hundred years of the history of art where human beings are set in demurely painted landscapes, depicted enjoying the fruits of their labours. While some artists portray a sweet and sentimental version of these outdoor affairs, others were bent on poking away at the manners and niceties of such occasions. Edward Manet’s painting, Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe (1863) which was originally titled The Bath, was so provocative that it caused a public scandal because of the placement of a nude figure in a contemporary outdoor setting. Manet’s artistic career was certainly no picnic at the time but all the attention he received as a result of this work succeeded in putting his work front and centre, actually helping establish his career as a well-known modern painter.

At first glance, the work of Salt Spring Island painter Patricia Murphy MacDonald could be mistaken as an intentional homage to those pastoral picnic painters of two centuries ago. MacDonald succeeds in creating a quiet, almost serene, space in her lush and skilful paintings and yet, with time for more studied viewing, there is an audible tension quivering beneath the lusciously painted surfaces. While her paintings appear to celebrate romanticized picnic conventions and fare, they also highlight the more quotidian consumer goods, including store-bought tablecloths and an array of domestic linens and dinnerware, all needed to complete at least a phenomenological illusion of the perfect life and family. MacDonald’s visual language is highly sophisticated and she investigates, through this series of paintings, the often overlooked ideologies surrounding domestic activities and assorted trappings within a broader context of popular culture. The rich visual incongruities and juxtapositions provoked by MacDonald in this series make for paintings that appear absolutely inviting, but at the same time are subtly unsettling.

In Picnic, MacDonald pieces together a visual narrative that speaks to a delightful sense of fragility. Fragmented and just barely held together in a semi-grid formation, MacDonald plays with scale, size, shape, and viewer expectations. Anticipating the grid, we are not so certain when the necessary pieces of the grid are absent – do we fill in the blank spaces, or simply move on to the next painting? The viewer is invited to interpret the work from different vantage points, from fleeting distances to microscopic, macro views that reveal the darker side of the picnic experience — bugs and prickles. We are teased by beautifully rendered and almost edible close-up views of fruit only to discover a snake that may be slithering its way towards us through the grass. In another painting, a mouse nibbles on a piece of forgotten food and not far away a bucket of Colonel Sanders chicken adds a pointedly clever piece of product placement. Although the style in this series is representational and at times bordering on illustrative, the artist’s use of multiple imagery results in ironic and whimsical twists that approach the surreal. At times, these gorgeous paintings appear to share some affinity with the oeuvre of the 20th century surrealist Rene Magritte. The meticulously painted blue skies, the pair of shoes and discreet cast shadows on the grass in MacDonald’s paintings follows Magritte’s trajectory. It may be possible to think it is only an image that stands for something else, or that the phenomenal reality of the painted image obscures or hides a more substantial truth lying beneath the surface.

The reading of MacDonald’s paintings becomes as slippery as the grass in one of the exquisite garden hose paintings, though we are offered a veritable feast of visual clues and information. The scope of this exhibition, for instance, has been expanded beyond the narrative of the picnic outing to include images of brightly colored cakes, which also offer allusions to our notions about celebratory gatherings of all sorts, including rites of passage, birthdays, and marriages. This broadens the reading of the work to include the mixed emotions one frequently feels during these significant and at times perfunctory occasions. MacDonald is clearly interested in drawing our attention to the small and the incidental, zooming in upon the minute details that are frequently overlooked. Buttons, beads, candy, subtle patterns in domestic fabrics are painted into our consciousness, larger than life. Natural elements become something we cannot take for granted, either – particularly evident in the two paintings of shadows in the grass where the work shifts even further toward abstraction, and in a painting titled Shaped Sky where pastoral clouds are painted upon seven oval canvases that are displayed in a group.
The work seems particularly interested in the aspects of popular domestic culture as seen in the proliferation of television programming focused on cooking, or the home, in all its aspects. Macdonald develops a complex visual critique of these cultural proliferations and in a David Lynchean sort of way, exposes the fragilities inherent in our dreams of home, domesticated life, and leisure. The series of paintings, aptly titled Cakes from the Alchemist Bakeshop are iconic symbols signifying opulence and easy living. Pink Passion, an exemplary piece in this series, has all the seductiveness and creamy surface texture of Wayne Thiebaud’s luscious pastry paintings from the 1960’s. MacDonald appears to have effortlessly applied the paint across the surface or around a form as if one were applying layer after layer of the most perfect frosting. The result is striking because of the entire body of work’s ability to create a sense of both desire and mystery in something so deliciously banal as picnic fare or baked goods. These are the cakes of our wildest dreams, each evoking the possibility of a fairytale existence in a make believe place hovering somewhere between celebration, magic, and saccharine over indulgence.

Macdonald’s work, while not overtly expressive is largely autobiographical, drawing on her personal experiences as a mother and artist adapting to a life that has shifted from an urban to rural environment. The subtle yet discreet tensions that resonate through her work offer the viewer an occasion to question and ponder consumer culture and its ability to manufacture the illusion, or rather, allusions of happiness.