Drawings Steph Goodger - Watery Dramas

Other Watery Dramas involving Theatre, Literature and Painting.

History painting and theatre have shared a close relationship since at least the time of Medieval Mystery Plays.  The iconography and spatial qualities in such performances influenced early Renaissance masters like Giorgione, to shallow foreground scenes set against backdrops that added a sense of distance behind.  Characters, action and choreography, artificial spaces and meaning, are central to my (mostly) Watery Dramas.  Beds, altars, monuments, tanks, actual stages and actual rafts, all serve as platforms for action and meaning, creating inner spaces in every sense within the painting.

Fish Hell is a painting where the tragedy of the Raft of the Medusa has gone to be immortalized and the agony eternally replayed, under the threat of the predator fish. The leviathan as main protagonist, an avenger, a warrior angel, reappears in the later painting, Flight and Charge. A messenger of doom, it is impartial yet terrible. Moby Dick is a fine example of this breed (Moby Dick, Melville, 1851).  Such a character reveals the ridiculousness of human pride, rather than emphasizing the immediacy and innocence of tragedy.  The scenes of the final chase of the whale, like the Fish Hell image, create a sense of the fettered air of hell, permanent and hopeless.  ‘Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice, were in his whole aspect, and despite of all that mortal men could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.’ (P. 506)

The Underneath of the Raft series is in the preparatory stages.  The events surrounding the actual shipwreck of the French Frigate Medusa, off the West African Coast in 1816, were officially documented with the accounts of two survivors J.B.Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard. Savigny was a doctor, Correard an engineer geographer.  The later drew out a plan of the raft to accompany his official account of the events. Gericault, for the making of his famous painting Le Radeau de la Meduse, 1819, constructed a wooden replica of Correard’s plan.  His friends were employed as actors, playing their static roles on his wooden stage whilst he painted. 

For The Underneath of the Raft paintings I have constructed a wooden model from Correard’s plan, of one meter in length.  Painting directly from underneath it, whilst it is suspended and lit from below, one is actually in the space beneath the raft and can begin to imagine what that space, and the raft, can signify. 

The raft is a heavy, free-floating mass, suspended in a sublime void, an uninhabitable region. As a container of hell on earth, it is the platform for continual and immeasurable suffering. Awkward and fragile it sits right on the seam between life and death.  With chaos of one sort above and another below, it is in fact a last semblance of order and control.
Within the limitations of the painting itself, new suggestions emerge through composition. The raft becomes a vaulted ceiling, like a medieval vault of heaven. The space beneath is transformed into a separate world with its own light source and atmosphere.  With the raft as a vaulted ceiling the space beneath takes on more of a positive identity, an atmospheric quality of its own.

Human frenzy and mass chaos as an act of will, a decadent luxury, is described in the stories of Marquis de Sade in the late Eighteenth Century, or later in romantic novels such as J.K.Huysman’s La-Bas, 1891, about Satanism in Paris. Delacroix’s visual equivalent is the hugely violent and erotic painting, The Death of Sardanapalus, 1828. 
In such cases, the pleasure taken from dominance and cruelty, and in the giving and receiving of pain, blurs the edges between the erotic and the horrific. The orgiastic scene in Flight and Charge, with the sumptuous, greatly oversized red bed set against a backdrop of proscenium arches, is a world created especially for decadence. The bed replaces the raft as the platform for a different kind of action.

The leviathan crashes in as Moby Dick rams The Pequod, or as the angel flies though the window in Tintoretto’s Annunciation.  In their insatiable state, the group appears unaware that their world has been penetrated. Or perhaps they just don’t care?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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