Colin Pennock: Space to Find Peace

The driving force to move or make marks is to find distance and peace in my mind. – Colin Pennock

Colin’s cats live inside. It’s to protect the birds – and, of course, the other wildlife that share the Noosa Hinterland property where he works and lives.

The landscape slips away from the house and studio dramatically, dropping towards a ravine that’s only recently become accessible through a clearing of invasive weeds. It’s a kind of contested space – the experience of it has been shaped, but with a gentle touch.

No native plants have been taken out (although some have fallen – and no doubt countless suppressed – due to the impact of the introduced species), but still, the descent of the valley and the rise of the trees reveals shifting sections of impenetrability and openness. Earth slips away, while leaves and vines spill from above. Rocks jut out from any and all directions, both helping and hindering the passage through. Trunks punctuate horizontals in the landscape with irregular density and at disparate intervals. The landscape wraps and breathes and tumbles around you as you become part of it and it of you. The birds can be heard and seen wherever you walk.

The paintings that come out of the nearby studio don’t depict this space, exactly – but they don’t not depict it either. In fact, they’re probably not pictures of anywhere. Instead, they capture impressions of places and spaces, collected and collated in a field of activity, where a sense of time is infused with the other spatial dimensions.

Maybe these paintings are more about space than place – for what the subtle difference is worth. I mean, a place is a space – but space doesn’t have to depict a place. The spaces Pennock is concerned with revel in a kind of ambiguity – a mutability – shifting from solid to liquid to gas without ever fully committing to any of these states. They stir and rise and sink and thrust into different parts of the picture plane, rushing forward and draining away – much like the swell of the ocean displaced against the shore, following the fall of the sand and negotiating the topography of any outcrops it might encounter.

It’s not just the way the paintings are compositionally arranged though, where this movement and slippage plays out. The pigment itself is often on the edge of becoming something else. Areas of impasto transition to more atmospheric fields of colour and tone, often without revealing where the change occurs. Glaze rains down in places – rivulets of thinners tracing a haphazard path. Paint is dragged across surfaces – grabbing in some spots, resisting in others. It’s applied so thickly in some areas, it casts its own shadow over the semblance of a landscape suggested beneath. In these instances, the paint feels like it sits somewhere between the surface and the viewer – not quite part of either realm, but threatening to escape one and join the other. Globules hang in space – defying gravity – like iridescent bubbles or seeds or memories or ideas in lightened lilacs, blues and greens.

This is where I think of those birds again. These painterly forms that sit right in between the composed space and that of our own, gather and move like a mesmerizing flock. They rush like a current across the canvas, changing course in unison (a few outliers excepted). But perhaps this mental image of birds en masse speaks more to the flow and forms – behaviors and patterns – that course through so much of what we describe as ‘nature’ or ‘the wild’ (even though those much-loved cats indoors are just as much a part of this abstract thing).

At their heart, Pennock’s paintings speak to the beat and rhythm of time and change. While glimpses of distant horizons evoke melancholy and memory, these are fleeting, and the real spaces that Pennock is drawn to don’t have a replicable form – they exist in between the moments, in between the places and in between the days.

Michael Brennan – Gallery Director, Noosa Regional Gallery