The Ephemeral Moment
The paintings of Ray McChrystal explored by Gareth Stevens
After graduating from the Fine Art Course at Bristol Polytechnic in the 1970s, Ray McChrystal was offered a job painting sets for the Bristol Old Vic theatre where he further developed his painting skills.
A chance encounter then led many years later to him working with Spitting Image in London. This job, he fondly recalls, involved him modifying a car so that it became the ‘Crowmobile’ for the ‘Crow Twins’ – a thinly veiled parody of the Kray Twins. Although principally trained as an art teacher, his prop building work led to 26 years of teaching design and technology. Ray tells me that his “painting was constantly running in the background”.
Sanctuary by Ray McChrystal
After a move to St Leonards in the 90s, he found a large studio that enabled him to work in oils on large canvases. Circumstances led to him having to give this space up and so more recent works have tended to be on a smaller scale and executed using mainly watercolour, gesso and sometimes gouache.
The current exhibition at Hastings Art Forum, Ephemeral, is a lively mix of plein-air landscapes, painted on a recent trip to Kefalonia, and larger, more complex compositions that have been developed from direct sketches and/or photographs of special moments in particular places. Earth, Air, Fire and Water depicts three figures on a foreshore. A younger woman in the middle of the composition, with gorgonesque hair, looks directly into the eye of the viewer. To the left is a seated woman who exudes a kind of earth-motherish signal. To the right is a man standing. He towels his back in a way that connotes that he is caped or winged. This is a beguiling painting that despite its complexity has a reassuring stillness and charm.
Curiously, there are triangles drawn under the freer, more expressive paint. These geometric shapes echo the trio of figures and point to Ray’s preoccupation with the contrast between abstract universals and the more prosaic realities of human life. The most dominant triangle is inverted. Ray tells me that he has been very influenced by Robert Fludd’s diagrammatic interpretation of the universe. Active in the seventeenth century, Fludd was a very prolific polymath who, despite working as a Physician in the Royal Court, found time to produce encyclopaedic treatises across a range of disciplines. He was preoccupied with the common metaphor that the arts were a mirror of nature, a microcosmic manifestation of the natural order of the universe itself.
Earth, Air, Wind and Fire by Ray McChrystal
Whilst this, and many more of Ray’s paintings, is principally executed with watercolour, the artist has also developed a technique not unlike that of Max Ernst’s frottages. Ray explains that he began applying glazes of gesso and then pressing cling film or polythene into them before peeling them off to reveal unpredictable folds and textures in the picture plane itself. The sea kale in the bottom right of the painting is perhaps the place where the convoluted pleats of the universal ether converge with a more earthly and relative reality. The painting Sanctuary has a wistful air. It depicts a young mother holding her child whilst sitting in a rural setting, (a clear reference to Madonna and Child imagery in Christian iconography). Oblivious to the beauty surrounding her, she is glued to her smartphone with a zombie stare. She neither notices the male runner, nor the swallow flying above her head. She has forgotten her connection with nature and the divine. Despite the brimming lifeforce all around her … she is lost.
I am fascinated by the way Ray draws figures. His draughtsmanship is assured yet not ostentatious. His style is not illustrative: it is more inflected by more archaic forms of representation such as those found on greek vases or roman mosaics. During our conversations, Ray repeatedly refers to his sketchbooks. When doing so, his process is laid bare and the amount of thought and consideration that has gone into each of his works becomes clearly apparent. But Ray cannot be easily summed up. He is, for example, not only an intriguing painter but he is also the editor of the Vauxhall Victor owners club magazine! He is a multi-faceted man. His paintings explore the interplay between different media. They play with the interpenetration between the sublime and everyday human narratives and are deeply allegorical. They are vehicles for reflection and contemplation. And very powerful vehicles they are too.
• Ray McChrystal’s exhibition ‘Ephemeral’ runs until 30 October at Hastings Artsforum, 20 Marine Court, St Leonards. See www.hastingsartsforum.co.uk
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. You can also support local journalism by becoming a friend of HIP. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.
Leave a Reply