Wes Placek's Suburban Dreaming (interview-essay, 1994)
by John Jenkins

This article dates from 1994. Insights from the artist's work of this time are still highly relevant, possibly more so than ever. Interested readers can seach the web under Wes's name to find examples of his work.

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Wes Placek lives in a world that is so visually rich that most of it has to be filtered out, or caught in a fleeting moment of perception, with its over-abundant images stripped down to the essentials, before it can be used in his art. At the same time, Placek's world is so utterly familiar to him, that he must look very carefully, and always with fresh eyes, to see it at all.

Placek was born in 1947 and arrived in Australia in 1950, and his art emerges from the heartland of Australia's second largest city, Melbourne, as he captures a sort of suburban dreaming behinds its ambiguous facades.

His paintings reveal surprising images beneath layers of familiarity, and epitomise the way suburban dwellers see – and perhaps are now able to see – the Australian landscape, with their expectations shaped by television, and memories framed like a continuous slideshow glimpsed through a car windscreen as it moves through the landscape at speed.

A photographer since he was 14, and painter since the early 1960s, Placek eschews all great and lofty themes of art, steeping himself instead in the streets, scenes and ways of life that are, literally, closest to home – uncovering, a secret life of the suburbs beneath what has sometimes been dismissed as its slumbering self-immersion: a world of pathos, whimsy and charm, individual self-expression and downright eccentricity, all bounded by the handful of streets around his Essendon home.

There is much that is mundane, unexceptional and just plain ugly here, rubbing shoulders – or paling fences – with elements of surprising beauty and formal integrity, expressed through the suburban garden, house or shopfront.

To learn more about his point of view, and the materials of his art, I walked with Placek one spring morning in 1994, peering over fences, and along the typical street vistas of Essendon, and talked about his recent work.

"The suburbs are a huge cliché, but clichés just sketch generalities, they don't reveal anything concrete or fundamental, so we can't see the suburbs any more," he says. "The naïve and unselfconscious art of the suburbs is expressed on a domestic scale. It can be bland or nondescript, it can be whimsical or slyly humorous, or individual to the point of solitary alienation. The suburban artistic impulse is often unconscious and deliberately understated, as if seeking comfort through the familiar."

Wes Placek was educated at MonashUniversity, and is sometime gallery manager of Artists Space, Melbourne, and has exhibited locally over the past few years at Lyall Burton Gallery, Australian Print Workshop and David Ellis Fine Art.

We cross a road, noting fanciful additions to certain front gardens, talking above the white noise of distant traffic, occasionally interrupted by token barking of would-be guard dogs earning their keep.

"If you simply wander around, put aside your prejudices, and really look carefully at what you see, you will find all manner of pathos and humor here. A cloth teddy bear on a soggy lawn, with grass growing through it. A bamboo birdcage, the exact replica of the house under which it hangs. Hilarious bits of sculpture in a painted rock garden. Or great formal abstraction, lovely rhythms and perfect colour matching in a line of gates, fences and facades."

Placek explains how he has become fascinated by a particular second hand shop, one in a strip of similar size in Rose Street, Essendon, which he has been photographing, on and off, for the past 17 years.

"I have about 500 photos of this place," he says. We stop before the shop, and he explains how photography can often be vital to his painting and prints, and vice versa.

Placek would like his photographs to be compelling in their own right – but they, clearly, also have a dimension as research tools, often suggesting ways a painting might be approached. Photographs can document and clarify, or act as 'filters' that reduce visual noise, thus allowing the essential aspects of subject matter to emerge.

The shop's left-hand window is white, its centrepiece an arrangement of objects and jewellery set up like a formal altar, with dummies in delicate bridal and night wear; the whole suggesting a wedding night, and fertility ritual.

"These windows are like a stage set," he says, ''and the display changes each week, like a performance. There's a certain drama in its arrangement of objects and second hand clothes. I know the owner, and she says the display is just meant to attract customers. But I am sure there is more to it than that."

Placek sees the shop owner a sort of naïve artist, with the shopfront as her canvass, upon which the chance materials and second hand wares can be expressively displayed. Like the many suburban gardeners and house handy-persons whose work catches his interest, he believe the shopkeeper is a sort of artist, and her artistry a sub-text he can read and celebrate.

So far, he has exhibited a number of paintings based on the shop and it’s apparel. Many are of hats that have been displayed in the shop.

"One gallery-goer said they found some of my hat paintings 'disturbing', and another said he had actually been frightened by them. Well, I suppose they can be intense!"

He describes the hat series as charged with emotion, where his method has been to underline any clues in the objects, amplifying any cues that spoke of the fetishes and fantasies, the personalities and problems, of their original wearers.

He had previously shown me a photo of one such hat, which he intended to paint. It was made of almost florescent-looking green fabric, and set against a background of tiny and very busy polka dots. It looked like a giant hive surrounded by buzzing insects, as if the wearer found her own thoughts overwhelming.

Working on a more minute scale, Placek has also completed a series based on crockery and small domestic items. He is intrigued by the way people leave their imprint on treasured objects of daily use, scoring and touching their surfaces, leaving small abrasions and indentations – an individual fingerprint of ownership, as objects are handled and used over time.

"These small items, which people use and value, gather a strange personality and patina of their own," he says. "The imprint of the owner is like a diary, and they carry the trace of an unconscious artistry, as people minutely shape objects to their use. I usually happen upon such objects by chance, and their presence surfaces in my work. These things often have appealing formal properties. Photographed in the right light, from the right angle, they can escape their actual scale, and appear very large, or even monumental, or be seen as the exquisite in miniature, depending on how you arrange or frame them."

Leaving the shopfront, we amble back to Placek's home, this time by a different route, as he points out things he has trained himself to notice: a little disused dog kennel atop an old barbecue, how pealing paint exposes some attractive streaked weatherboards, and their interesting cross-hatch pattern, how trees have been pruned in rows and vary in size, shape and gesture.

Placek routinely photographs the suburban streetscape – the gardens, driveways, and houses around him; and, particularly, their interesting formal elements, which might lend depth and colour to the suburban built environment, or reveal something of its individual or collective personality, submerged deep in its domestic fabric. As with Placek's hat and crockery series, photography, print-making and painting all play a part and contribute to the work.

Suddenly, Placek is intrigued by a row of letter boxes outside a block of units. "You could see these, for example," he says "as extensions of the tenants living here; a repetition of forms, a unity of colour; yet some of them are weathered or have bits missing; others have wrought-iron curlicues like turned-up moustaches; or decorated with more 'feminine', bow-shaped ornaments. Each has a sort of mouth, where the letters are placed; baby birds waiting for a worm, or faces all facing forward, waiting eagerly for news of the outside world. And so on... Well, you can read these things as stories, and also formerly, and the closer you look and more you think about them, the more possibilities you discover. Some are particularly attractive, if you chose to tell a particular kind of story, or follow the logic of their construction."

At the end of our walk, back at his corner of the national suburban introspection, Placek shows me some of his recent landscapes, which also arise from a very suburban and contemporary point of view.

Placek believes we have become accustomed to see things quickly, in a sort of pre-framed and instant way, due to habits of viewing modern media. We now see the landscapes pre-composed into rectangular frames, like frames that surround images on television or cinema. Furthermore, they are delivered with lots of cuts and dissolves, in a highly edited and structured way. Thus, we become used to looking at everything as if through a camera. Reinforcing this, we use cars to get around the modern environment – highly accustomed to seeing the world as if through a car windscreen.

He finds this new way of seeing – of refining and abstracting things – a very useful way of making the world less complex, and hence more available to him.

"I find the world around me too rich and complex to use as given," he says. "For me, it needs to be clarified, simplified and stripped back. For example, I might want to capture something as direct and simple as the sheer pleasure of looking and seeing itself; or the raw sensuality of manipulating pigment – the sort of freshness and emotion that's in the best naïve or child art. Abstracting and refining also allows great subtlety when you work with compositional elements that become much clearer as you filter things out. I mean, working the shallow depth of the picture plane, the way forms come forward or recede, or light reduce volumes or make them bolder; and, of course, use of line and colour."

Placek takes weekend drives to the country, looking for subject matter, but often feels overwhelmed by what is out there, returning with almost too many new ideas jostling for attention.

"I drive to the country and notice things pass very quickly on the road," he says. "A lot of what I see re-surfaces in memory, back in the studio. Memory helps you sort out things, and is itself a sort of filter. Only strong impressions last. And I think the suburban dweller is a little isolated from the bush. So driving around and seeing fleeting bits of it all flashing by – cloud, tree, boulder, hill – has become the contemporary way of seeing the natural or rural world, at least for those like me who do not work or live in the country, but have a sort of occasional, speedy relationship with it."

He continues: "It's like the way landscape arrives on television, in quick grabs and flashes, or as a series of instant 'summaries' or clichés, say of the 'great Outback', or whatever. It's the way we armchair traveler's visit the bush these days. And an aspect of my landscape paintings is to reveal this, and use it for formal purposes, to refine and re-imagine these very direct or pared down images, which I also hope are attractive and interesting in their own right, and as paintings.

He shows me a painting titled 'Rocks and Clouds', in which a car window or TV screen has been cut into a flat foreground of jaunty yellow and white floating patches. Through this 'window' we see rock formations like huge stone armchairs in the middle of the dessert, with clouds floating above them. The shapes and colours are very elegant, and there is a very subtle humour, and quirkily upbeat mood. It's a happy picture: very bright and breezy.

"I can't just go out into the bush and simply paint it," he says. "There's just too much detail – too much to see. I have to isolate things. The windscreen of my car becomes a viewing screen. It's a framing device, and a 'filter' thorough which bits of the landscape are lifted out. These elements are then refined through the painting process. In that sense, all my paintings are of remembered places."

Placek's viewpoint might be a modern one, but he is also part of the broader Australian tradition of landscape painting. For example, a work titled 'Suburb and Smoke' shows a map-like view, as from the air, of winter streets and smoking chimneys. There is a hint of Aboriginal dessert painting; and the pleasure of putting down a mark and seeing where it leads. One's eye, indeed, is lead deftly through the picture, with a sense of discovery, moving on and journeying. In another painting, 'Mansfield', trees like matchsticks are crowned in flames; some lay buckled and fallen; others are red-tipped like lollipops in a child's drawing. In the foreground, they are reflected in lakes – suggesting depth, memory and history.

"I see the Australian landscape as very fragile,'' says Placek ''Things die, fall and burn ... there's always change and movement – light and depth, then new growth, always life and death. And there's something maddening, too, about the Australian landscape, something I try to capture: a sort of mocking fertility... things growing, things breaking down, and always changing. And its ambiguity! A cloud emerging from behind a hill might be a small part of it, or another hill behind, a trick of the light, or cloud reflected in a lake. And when you return to the place, everything has changed. This ambiguity is part of the Australian landscape's continuous dreaming of itself into being - of its constant, shared re-making. Yes, I do see things with modern eyes, but also feel very much a part of this; and of the landscape itself."

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