JOHN OGDEN with his portrait of GRETEL PINNIGER aka MADAME LASH

Not every artist is an aesthete, and very few are synesthetes, although synesthesia is seven more times more common in creative people than in the general population. Vasily Kandinsky and Frank Litz were both synesthetes, as was Vladimir Nabokov and Nikola Tesla.

Synesthesia is a cross-wiring of the brain where vision, sound, and even smell are interwoven. It is an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense. In addition to being involuntary, this additional perception is regarded by the synesthete as real, often outside the body.

A synesthete is commonly born with the condition, but it can also be induced by psychotropic drugs, such as in Shamanistic practice, and usually for a short period only. My synesthesia was brought on by the enucleation of an eyeball damaged in an accident. After the optical nerve had been severed there began a permanent condition where sound can create colour.

This cross wiring made me more attune to extra dimensional notions and I began to paint as a way to unlock some of the visualisations that were created inside my mind. About the same time I became familiar with the '4D' work of Gretel Pinniger.

GRETEL PINNIGER aka MADAME LASH (Extra-dimensionalist) at 60.
Winner Peoples' Choice Prize Real Refuse 2006. Oil on canvas.

Gretel Pinniger aka Madame Lash is a Sydney icon, largely remembered for her dominatrix performances in the 70’s and 80’s, but this former life as a show girl is not the persona I wanted to represent. I am more interested in Gretel Pinniger the painter, who turned 60 last year. Once a recognised figurative painter, whose work was included in the 1994 and 1995 Archibald exhibitions, Gretel delivered her manifesto on Art at the Art Gallery of NSW on the occasion of the 1995 Archibalds. This was the beginning of her move to the '4D' painting concept that she has been developing for the last decade.

This portrait attempts to capture Gretel’s magnificent obsession with her '4D' work, a technique which usually involves painting over her earlier work in order to create a virtual reality of the underlying painting. Some of these canvases carry so much paint that they have become sculptural. And the paint is not just confined to the canvases for it spills onto the surrounding frames and walls as though the vortexes created cannot be contained by that space.

Sir Roland Penrose in his Biography of Picasso tells that with the shockingly new work Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon “the opinion given by Picasso’s friends were of bewildered but categorical disapproval. No one could see any reason for this departure. Among the surprised visitors trying to understand what had happened, he could hear Leo Stein and Matisse discussing it together. The only explanation they could find amid their guffaws was that he was trying to create a fourth dimension. In reality, Matisse was angry. His immediate reaction was that the picture was an outrage, an attempt to ridicule the modern movement.”

It has been said that 'a work of art is never finished, only abandoned' and it is difficult to know when Gretel will complete her series of "4D' paintings. Resolution to such an ambitious project is arduous because the energy that flies about us in a never ending, always changing flux, is a contradiction to inanimate art.