Person with Painting #5 – Self-Portrait, 2024-25
acrylic on canvas
152 x 152 cm - canvas; 160 x 160 cm - frame
signed ‘Cutler Footway’ (centre left); further signed ‘Cutler Footway’ (lower right) and further signed, dated and inscribed ‘Cutler Footway/”Person with Painting #5/- Self Portrait’/acrylic on canvas/153 x 153 cm,/2024-25’ and other inscriptions (on the reverse)
Provenance
The artist
This ambitious painting is part of a recent series combining the conventions of still life with those of portraiture. Each image in the series depicts a single figure beside a painted panel or canvas. In this case, the “painting" is displayed on a wooden easel against the tongue-and-groove walls of my Queenslander house. It therefore suggests a studio interior, as well as a still life. Wearing a paint-stained apron, I enter the composition from the left, appearing to touch - and perhaps to erase - a tabletop arrangement featuring flowers, fruit, a letter-rack, a chair, a nautilus shell and the plaster cast of a 5th century BC Greek antiquity. This last mentioned object is in my possession and comes from the collection of Dorothy Thornhill and Douglas Dundas, late stalwarts of the National Art School in Sydney’s Darlinghurst. It was a teaching aid at the school, a touchstone both to Classical ideals and to the many Australian artists who were demonstrably loyal, despite Modernist leanings, to art-historical prototypes. Such a list could be argued to include Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, major figures on whom I have written extensively and whose legacies I revere. Here, the vases of flowers and tilted perspectives are conceived in homage to them, as is the entire work.
Adding to this sense of artistic connection, the paintbrushes displayed in an earthenware vessel, forming a secondary still life, belonged to the great Surrealist, James Gleeson. He was an admired friend and mentor. I was gifted an extensive group of Gleeson’s working brushes, paint tubes, charcoal sticks and one of his easels after his death in 2008. They are magical presences in my studio and have been included as subject matter in many of my paintings over several years. Gleeson’s experience as a workaday art critic who finally found his way back to full time painting is a kind of "foundation myth" for my own life. In 2003, adopting the pseudonym Cutler Footway, I returned to full time painting after a career in print and broadcast media as Bruce James.
Elsewhere in the canvas, the cat records a marmalade moggie that visits my garden. Its pose, with upraised paw and lost profile, mimics and satirises my own gesture in the painting. Balthus, the painter called "King of the Cats", is surely just out of range. The tondo-shaped landscape nearby depicts the scrubby foliage and rocky formations characteristic of the Burdekin hinterland where I live and paint. The shells are local examples, the nautilus having been sourced for me at Alva Beach by a favourite nephew.
In truth, the image inventories my interests and environments. It is a personal emblem which might well serve as a painter’s shop sign.
All of the foregoing aside, it is my hope that Person With Painting #5 - Self Portrait can be understood at a very straightforward level. That is, simply as a display of painterly values. A decoration, in effect. However academically inflected a work may be, however steeped in social, political or historical considerations, it must function first and foremost as a pure visual artefact, a thing of the eye. It stands or falls as art on being seen.
Cutler Footway
