TWO UP
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
Lyndell Brown (44) and Charles Green (52) are Melbourne based photo artists and painters. Partners in life, they also work as a collaborative artist team, having held 21 solo exhibitions since 1989. Their haunting and dreamlike photographic montages draw on western painting styles from the renaissance to contemporary realism, as well as popular culture, skilfully layering images from different time frames and contexts into a poetic visual archive of memories. An academic as well as an artist, Charles Green is also Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Melbourne, whilst Brown recently completed her Ph.D. at the College of Fine Arts, at the University of NSW. In May 2006, the pair will hold their first Sydney painting show in more than ten years at Grantpirrie Gallery in Redfern.
Victoria Hynes, Australian Art Review
How and when did you first meet?
Lyndell Brown
A classic romance novel. We had noticed each other months before we first talked. We both knew this would be special.
Charles Green
We met at an art school. I’d just returned from twelve months trekking; Lyndell had just recently decided she wanted to be an artist and was in the process of changing careers.
Victoria Hynes, Australian Art Review
First impressions?
Lyndell Brown
I thought he was very serious, very smart and very distant.
Charles Green
I knew she was marvellous.
Victoria Hynes, Australian Art Review
How did your creative relationship evolve?
Lyndell Brown
We had been living together for three years or so, separate studios in the one house. I was a photographer of constructed still-life tableaux, very literary, very Kristeva, very 1980s. He was making large, sombre paintings of imaginary landscapes, very metaphysical and romantic. We always talked to each other about the other’s work, we shared the same likes and dislikes in art, films, books. One day in 1989, we were talking about the photographs I was making for my forthcoming first solo show at Michael Wardell’s Verity Street Gallery, in Melbourne. Charles was working on his next show at Pinacotheca, a very, very different gallery. Out of nowhere, we suddenly both realized, at exactly the same moment, that we could do everything we were doing separately much more powerfully together, and that there was nothing to stop us from working together on art.
Charles Green
Yes, and we also immediately realized that making art together would work only with complete commitment, and that meant working together for the rest of our lives. We started slowly. After all, I already had a small career and a following with my paintings; Lyndell had shown with very different artists to me, including at Store 5 in a show with Sandra Bridie and Gail Hastings. We didn’t quite know what to do first. In fact, it took us about two years to work out what type of artistic collaboration this would be. For a start, we understood fairly quickly that we would have to completely abandon individual art altogether.
Next, Michael Wardell, who had a superb young gallery of emerging artists like Patrick Pound and Brent Harris, was delighted to take the risk of showing the collaboration. My own gallery, Bruce Pollard’s Pinacotheca, was horrified and more or less terminated the relationship (though Bruce later became one of our most valued studio visitors and made, typically, the most astute comments and suggestions). Fortunately, at this point we spent about six months in Europe, mostly staying with my family in Paris, and that time out of previous routine meant we moved into the first paintings with a different set of shared expectations that were to do with figurative painting and history painting at that.
Victoria Hynes, Australian Art Review
Can you describe your artistic methods and process of collaboration?
Lyndell Brown
People always want to know who does what. When we gave our first joint artist talks, a well known female Canberra painter asked me if Charles was the intellect feeding me lines, sitting at my shoulder like a monkey-critic. Other people asked if I painted the feminised drapery and he painted the masculine buildings. Very silly, very patronising. Basically, we work as complete equals. We both sit at the canvases, painting side by side, each with small sable brushes and oil paint and amber medium, working painstakingly away on the most complicated tasks we can imagine to render. We share every aspect of the work, from the administration (which nowadays, as one well known US handbook for artists notes, takes about half of any artist’s time) to brushing in the Venetian red grounds with which we start.
Charles Green
We spend a lot of time workshopping ideas and images. We don’t use computers at all, never prepare Photoshop images. We work very traditionally, following pretty much exactly the exact technical processes as an 18th-century French painter would (one of our favourite periods), methods that involve multiple layers of glazing and scumbling and careful drawing from sources. But we aren’t particularly attached to any romantic ideas about painting, and in fact, the artists we’ve most admired over the years have little to do with any cult of painterliness or any talked-up return to painting. We also work very intuitively, but we find that our imaginations work in fairly precise systems and that we both tend to come up with exactly the same decisions at the same time. Artist collaborations have to involve complete trust and the freedom to change the other’s work totally. I wanted to properly understand the nature of artist collaboration in conceptual art, the movement from which our work perversely emerges, so I wrote a book about it (The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, 2001) that explains the different methods of collaboration, and traced the processes and how they affected the art.
Victoria Hynes, Australian Art Review
How do you juggle a personal, professional and creative relationship?
Lyndell Brown
There are a lot of artist couples, and usually one of the pair attracts more attention, is more successful than the other. Working together solves that problem. Basically, we are a partnership, a traditional family business. We are dedicated towards the same end, and we think a lot about how to get there and what that means
Charles Green
Juggling a personal, professional and creative relationship is the least difficult, most easy of my balancing acts, for I’m also an art historian at the University of Melbourne. Academics are fractious and don’t like cooperating or working together. We do.
Victoria Hynes, Australian Art Review
What are the joys and challenges of working together?
Lyndell Brown
Basically, working together is about getting the best result, not getting one’s own way. Expressing yourself is a very relative activity, not that ambitious. Making art that thinks, like Canadian photographer Jeff Wall’s light-boxes—making art that involves a particular type of easily misunderstood or underestimated complexity—is hard, and working together is about combining our strengths to make a third hand better and more profound than either of us singly could ever manage.
Charles Green
Making art is a fairly methodical, lonely, unromantic activity. There’s no choice. We couldn’t work separately now. There’d be no point and we don’t want to. For us, after 16 years, this is natural.
Victoria Hynes, Australian Art Review
What does the future hold creatively and professionally?
Lyndell Brown
The exhibition at GRANTPIRRIE in May is our first show of paintings in Sydney for well over ten years. It’s a very important show for us, for it also marks the point where we want each picture to hold even more information, to reflect even deeper on the bleak times we live in.
Charles Green
We’ve both recently read the famous Turkish novelist and dissident Orhan Pamuk’s book, My Name is Red. It is a murder mystery set amongst miniature painters in Ottoman Istanbul, at the point at which Venetian painting and its Albertian perspectives begin to impact on the Sultan’s ambitious miniaturists. It’s one of the greatest books we’ve read about painting. But the debate about Venetian painting’s heretical innovations occurs at a point where history made the issue of winning or losing the debate about representation irrelevant, for miniature painting was about to be swept aside altogether. That’s the situation artists are in now.