Last week I spoke to one of my best buddies from my film school days, production designer Brett Chandler. I used to play tennis regularly with Brett until he moved back to Adelaide where he grew up. I've met all his family and I really miss having him, his wife and kids in Sydney.
It turns out that his father, and artist Ian Chandler passed away in November last year. While Brett is a very calm, level-headed man, it did come over the phone to me that he only found the energy to call me about it once he had somehow managed to process some of his enormous grief.
Mr. Ian Chandler was felled by cancer. According to Brett, he went in for a check up for something else and it was only then that it was discovered that he had advanced cancer of the pancreas. Given only months to live, Mr. Chandler brought forward the date of his final exhibition and managed to complete his final painting for the event. In a way, as Brett told it, he went out having completed his work.
I've met the late Mr. Chandler a couple of times and On the occasions I met Mr. Chandler he was a bon vivant, with a impish wit. He played tennis with us, and he was an elegant hitter of the ball, replete with the classic Australian technique; reminiscent of Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad and those kinds of hitters of the ball. No top-spin forehands or backhands; a seasoned grasscourt player with beautifully sliced backhands executed with bent knee, and right-angled wrist. We talked a fair bit about hitting techniques and how they changed with the advent of composite-material racquets. In my recollection, I think we talked about Jazz and fusion music as well when we went out to a Japanese restaurant in Crows Nest.
Brett used to tell me about his work methods which sounded like something that crossed Nick Nolte's wild-man act in 'New York Stories' with the minutiae-obsession of a dental surgeon. I was always interested in the large scale works he undertook, but never got around to seeing even one of them, much to my shame and embarrassment.
In fact I never really managed to discuss art or the creative process with him either. It always seemed to me that it would happen at some future date where by I would visit Adelaide and as I caught up with Brett and his family, that maybe the discussion would turn to such interesting waters. No such luck, and the lesson to be learnt is that you really shouldn't leave to tomorrow what you can do today.
Since the news I've been thinking about it quite a bit, trawling the internet for what I could find about his work and its place in Australian art and reflecting on the brief points of encounter and the (in retrospect) rather mundane conversation we had; and in wish I had a more profound interaction with the man.
NEITHER IAN CHANDLER nor his art school contemporaries in the early 1960s could have foreseen the way his art would unfold over the subsequent 40 years of studio work. For a brief time, it looked as though Chandler (along with other hard-edge, colour-shape artists working in Adelaide in the late-1960s) would always be gliding down the face of a glassy style-wave which never looked like breaking.
But about the early 1970s, everything bottomed out. In a politicised art world in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, painting as a privileged art form lost traction. This was particularly evident within small art communities such as Adelaide, where studio painters became marginalised by the relocation of alternative forms of art practice, such as performance, photography and video, into the hot zone of social relevance.
Chandler however, against the run of play, just kept stretching another canvas and
applying the paint. But the resonances of this volatile period saw changes emerge within his art; first the introduction of more natural elements, sourced from the Australian (Adelaide Hills) bush.When historians write about SA painting in, say, 30 years’ time, I imagine it will be Chandler’s canvases of the 1990s, and into the new millennium, which will be singled out. Here lies the heartland of Chandlers’ art, a passionate commitment to both social concerns and to painting. In this sense his art has always been at once surface and symbol.
This most recent body of works sustained these high energy levels but the thematic location, in Turkey, somehow anchored this body of work in deeper, silent waters. There was an elegiac note of introspection and repose in images dominated by trademark Chandler logos, in this instance calligraphic monograms and, in one work, a prayer rug.
One senses that at one level, Chandler’s art which began as a journey into minimalist meta space has begun to turn slowly back to this source, symbolised perhaps by the Long Slow Simmer, as a work title suggests of a traditional Tajine, issuing billowing clouds of rhythmical lines across a richly decorated field.
The introduction also of what appears to be an ancient, carved figurine as repeat motif had the effect of connecting, or perhaps re-connecting Chandler’s iconography with an almost forgotten genre of post-war British art (as exemplified by Henry Moore and others) which, in a previous era of global uncertainty and existential angst, called upon mysteries of ritual and form to somehow speak for a common humanity and future.
He is sorely, sorely missed; not just by his immediate family and friends.
- Art Neuro
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