Ok, this one’s not obviously about Bali, yet in another way it is. This is a work by Paul Sedgwick (2006) that I saw at the recent exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection at the Callan Park Gallery. I photographed it then, but wasn’t initially moved. Yet this strange canvas has been working on me over the ensuing weeks (and even while in Bali) and I now love its language and its delicacy.
That got me wondering about how good Outsider art works – how it operates, as though on a different plane from much mainstream art, breathing from deeper levels of the psyche. And the painting fits well for me with my recent Bali experience – Bali and this work hold something related; another, fresh way of inhabiting the world.
Before I went to Bali I spoke to Peter Fay about this work, and he gave me some of the background. Paul works out of an arts workshop in Hamilton New Zealand. He compiles lists of street names, of mountains, of local landmarks. (This one has entries from the Auckland phone book.)
I like Peter’s take on the work: to him it’s “the dying of a breath of wind” (the way the letters fade). There’s much delicacy here, in the text and in the underlying abstraction of colour (which the photo doesn’t quite do justice to). An art piece that’s prepared to die away, to breathe in quite a different way. I like that.
