#10: 04/03/2022

Long Afloat on Shipless Oceans- the Paintings of Spencer Shakespeare
by Benjamin Terrell

Spencer Shakespeare's paintings always feel like the edges of two great things meeting- like monumental cliffs, endless oceans and the wind that whistles between both. Imagine edges as places of origin where something ceases to be one thing and becomes something else and his work opens to other interpretations. Picture energetic fluxes flattening to in-betweens at their thinnest; think of grace first given gravity; visualize earth's final fissure unraveling us into irreversible instability. Shakespeare's subjects are the maritime of possibility and about everything that yearns beyond the limits of its own shore.

Amongst Friends
2021, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12"

     “Amongst Friends”- Clouds painted pink are like tall mountains of precipitation. Ochre edges round the entire ocean to a white vessel shape of mostly unpainted canvas. Likewise, to stand and stare at the ocean can be blinding, similar to a bright white page emptying to wordless potential. Spare cobalt lines suggest the harmony and balance of blue and white Chinese porcelain. A pencil line faintly trails between the painting’s bottom and top like an equator incapable of dividing a harmonious whole into halves.

Guardian
2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12"

     Shakespeare’s thick and thin paint sits on and soaks into the surface of bare canvas like the breath and pause of a poet. Each extreme confronts yet confirms the rhythm of the other for the benefit of a whole, like sea solidifies sand. Author Heiner Bastian compares poetry to the act of painting while paraphrasing the poet Stéphane Mallarmé: “Verse should not be comprised of words, but of intentions, and should destroy all words for the sake of sensation.” Bastian was comparing Mallarmé to the painter Cy Twombly and implies that both could “...detach (a subject) from its direct context...” and in empty white space more freely speak of unwritten possibility. Shakespeare, like Twombly, favors deconstruction over description. Both let language dissolve and break like a wave.

Storm Bird
2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12"

     “Storm Bird”- What could be ground can also be seen as the gold prongs of a crown, everything important existing above its kingdom where clouds of equal pink and white rise tall like ethereal ship and sail. The white pointed center shape seen in proximity to pink suggests the cloaked identity of a Philip Guston figure. Or perhaps a plank of a white washed picket fence from where Shakespeare's Tom Sawyer coaxes and convinces us there is something simple or easy about painting a seascape. At its most literal, clouds can be monumental dark birds forewarning of future storms.

     Cy Twombly’s “Poems to the sea,” is a series of 24 sheets of paper covered in markings of pencil, paint and crayon. The modest size paintings, completed at and inspired by the Italian coast, are waves of graphite scribbles, dribbles of white house paint and etched edits of gritty dark gray wax. Twombly’s “poems” are lines, letters and numbers both visible and indecipherable and are neither completely poems nor descriptions of the sea. Rather, they are the making and undoing of both things at once. Spencer Shakespeare is an author of similar verse and both artists can convince us that borders and boundaries are illusions of the ego and are made up mysteries of the sea and self.​

Warrior Falconer
2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12"

     In the paintings “Warrior Falconer” and “Guardian” the sea and shore are rendered confidently chaotic, as if to say balance is death but imbalance is evolution. Extremely textured half shapes and loosely stippled brushstrokes both squeeze and release imagery and energy with the momentum of a maelstrom. The artist wrings out any extra content, as if suggesting that to truly understand the sea one must move beyond mere observation.

​     When standing on a beach at low tide and full sun there are moments when senses fail and you can feel like you are moving when standing still, distances become hard to discern and even sound loses its context. The coast is a theater of illusion and is an ample stage for the ocean’s biggest secret- we are minor interruptions in vastness beyond our comprehension. Taken further, the spirit self is similar to the ocean and land is like the body vessel we over identify with. Spencer Shakespeare’s paintings are divisions dissolving, gateways, as author James Finley describes, “where we assume the stance of least resistance to being overtaken by oneness.” These places are where we momentarily hold the fleeting and things not easily reducible, places where we realize we are the mariners of both sides.

Above: Shakespeare in his studio (Cornwall, UK).
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​Below: Spring Comes Early
2022, acrylic on canvas

Spring Comes Early
2022, acrylic on canvas, 9" x 12"

You can see more of Spencer Shakespeare's work...
- on his website
​- At numerous galleries:   
Kers Gallery - Amsterdam - NLD
Livingstone St Ives - Bristol & St Ives - GBR
NBB Gallery - Berlin - DEU
One Wall Gallery - Eugene - USA (currently showing with Benjamin Terrell)
Jumbled Online - Orange, NSW - AUS
-On Instagram @spencershakespeare


"Long Afloat on Shipless Oceans" is from "Song to the Siren" by Tim Buckley.