Tag Archives: Tim Winton

Longforms, THj Swell reports

How to have the Swinburne Complex by J Barr

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The Swinburne ComplexI made a reference to the Swinburne Complex awhile back. If you love to swim its a term that crops up in literary circles about those who love to swim.  You have to think about how deep the experience of swimming goes for you personally with this particular philosophical theory about swimming and the imagination.

Is swimming a driving force for your actions, does it create an addictive mindful calm, is it a outlet for built up steam, is it about just staying fit and healthy, is it for the social friendship and shared comraderie? is swimming a gateway to stimulate expression and a constant seeking of answers about humans and why we are here in nature?

So who has it? Well I sometimes think of the Swinburne COmplex as a kind of adrenalin chasing madness as exhibited by say big wave surfer Thomas victor Carroll or anyone who tight rope walks across large open canyons. But really it’s more like the painter Turner who lashed himself to the mast of a ship in order to experience and paint a storm. The Hollywood version is Bodhi in the original Point Break (not the remake!) where the character is inseparable from the element he craves.

Photo by Chris Burkard
Photo by Chris Burkard

And Surf photographers mainly come to mind. Chris Burkard chasing extreme coldness, Russell Ord sitting deeper in bigger and bigger waves. Writer Tim Winton and Painter Martine Emdur also channel the watery aesthetic in their work.

See Chris Burkard’s Ted talk on cold water surfing at www.ted.com/speakers/chris_burkard

The Reef by The Australian Chamber Orchestra and Richard Tognetti gives this idea a good go but most of my surfer mates do turn their noses up at the classical music and the creaky ants. And it’s set in the desert.

tHe Swinburne Complex is specifically about a way the imagination can work -in this case according Bachelard the imagination assigns a value to a substance ie water and there is  a creative act born of the experience in the water.

Swinburne was no  Romantic aesthete gazing upon a horizon. He was a cold wet poet writing words of beauty inspired by his own humanness and his physical and emotional interaction with the extremes of weather and water. Swinburne used swimming in cold water to calm down any hyperactive nervousness and sexual urges he had going on, and he had LOTS! Google away if you’re curious.

Bachelard and his ‘material imagination’ theory is one of my favourites about how creative humans and their thoughts are sensual interpretations of the natural world. I like it because Bachelard singled out  swimming in particular and he said of the Swinburne Complex  ‘Fatigue is the destiny of the swimmer’ and therefore the swimmer is always courting death.

Lots of people write on the subject of our human interaction with the ocean heaps better than myself. two favourites of mine are  Fiona Capp’s That Oceanic Feeling, a  personal account of ocean love and exploration of another theory called ‘that oceanic feeling’ and surf writer/historian Matt Warshaw’s Mavericks which discusses the shadow of fatigue/drowning and surfing  waves of consequence.

Never the less PLease Go forth and writhe in cold seas next winter and write great words poetically I say -safely. Thanks for reading these most unpoetic words – summer is coming….

Longforms

An Open Swimmer by Tim Winton and the art prize that got away…

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1999 Sydney

An open swimmer by JBarr.
An open swimmer by JBarr.

i don’t know how i painted this image. it was late at night at home, i was living in a Leichhardt ‘shack’ in Sydney that was earmarked for demolition by its Italian Owner. the front entrance room was my studio and i could do whatever i wanted because they were going to knock the house down anyway. there was great freedom in that thought and there were 8 layers of lino on the floor. i know i did drawing after drawing after drawing of the foreshortening of the swimmers’ body. i was in my second year of painting at The National Art School (NAS) in Sydney and i had Wendy Sharpe and Euan MacLeod as painting teachers. Both people whose art and art practice i still admire greatly. and at NAS you draw with a dedication thats almost religious. i hate charcoal now though, i have a physical eeeew reaction to its texture and sound on paper.

                                    it was Wendy Sharpe who introduced me to the swimming goddess, Annette Kellerman. she had won the massive task of painting miss kellermHead Like a hole by Euan McLeod an’s life in large perspect panels to hang above the new pool. Euan Macleod won the Archibald prize that year, one day 50,000$ richer with the painting ‘Head like a Hole’ (see image) and then he turns up to class as if nothing has happened because he’s so humble.

at this point i had very little money, i had lost my contract with the National Maritime Museum because the hours required for NAS were 9-5 everyday, id rejected an offer to do honours at University of Queensland in Archaeological Theory and put myself into debt and had generous friends who gave me canvas paint food etc. id followed the art.

Aida Tomescu
Aida Tomescu

I’m a big fan of the story ‘An open Swimmer’ by Tim Winton and it was his first big break.  So i stole the title for my painting which  i thought was okay and entered it into the Glebe Art Prize, which was a pretty serious prize for kudos back then. there turned out to be a few us from NAS who entered. And the main judge was Aida Tomescu, the heavy hitter abstract painter (who would later be my 3rd year painting teacher and always wore very tailored clothes and made us peer deeply into the painted surface).

My ‘An open Swimmer’ came highly commended or second place along with another NAS student, i think it was Craig Waddell. But i had almost won. Aida took me aside afterwards and said that when they realised i was a student (i was 28yrs old) they gave first place and the money to someone else, i can’t remember his name, i can still see his image but that is useless here. i was disgruntled i hadn’t won because the week prior my dog, my one constant friend in the big lonely Sydney world had lept off a small cliff and torn her cruciate ligament and needed surgery otherwise she would be lame. The bill was around $2000.00 roughly about the same as the prize money. i had to grovel to my parents instead and had massive garage sales with stuff donated to me by art school friends.

Nearer to the end of term i took the painting in to show Euan MacLeod, whose opinion i greatly coveted, and i did it quietly down the back of the big studio we all shared. I told him about not knowing how i painted it and that i was reluctant to show anyone else or didn’t really know what to do with it. He said  ‘ i would keep that one tucked away’ or something close… A little further along after the 3rd year had finished i was part of a group exhibition independent of NAS and one of the organisers of the Glebe Show came along. I could feel her disappointment in my work and upon leaving she said ‘You need to work real hard’. Ouch!

Sidney Nolan, in reference to his Ned Kelly Series, said there was one image that was the genesis for all the ones that followed. ‘An Open Swimmer’ is the painting that i look at and think okay maybe i can do this art thing, create painted images.It reflects back to me what is at the bottom of my art brain- SPACE and the humans in it. Now i know to look at an image and think ‘how’ did i do that and dissect it, thanks Aida. MacLeod is also a believer in a bit of serendipity in the creation of images, hard work and serendipity. Work HARD, Work ! and work and work…. and paintings will form.