National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Home Sweet Home

PF: MacPherson’s work I have looked at for a long, long time. This particular work; I’ve never really looked upon it as being an image of a vase of flowers. To me this is very much a painting about painting. I mean, there’s the whole history of the Black Square. To me this is a painting about mark-making, and what it is that an artist does. So this is about what it is when a painter faces a board, or a canvas, and the way in which a mark is made, or the paint is moved over an area. And there’s no point in this painting that MacPherson lets you get away from the fact that you can see the board through it; you can see the rather clumsy; the rather direct movement of paint — there’s no attempt to follow edges; it’s a very wilful painting. There’s so much movement here, and ideas about what the painting either is becoming. Is it becoming a flower painting, or is it becoming a Black Square? This sort of very tenuous hold, and how an object; a painting, can, at the lick of a brush, change completely. This part