P is for painting, and P is for Penny. The two are almost synonymous in South Africa, in which Penny Siopis has remained a Grande Dame of painting over a protracted length of time. P is also for Pink, her favourite colour for some time now, and the central colour of her current show, titled “Lasso”.

You have to hand it to Penny Siopis, she works at her painting. Unlike a lot of artists who have allowed their methods and approaches to painting to stagnate over the years, Siopis subjects her work to constant overhauling and refreshing, giving her current work a relevance unusual in painters who have been around for a while.

Instead of her large Modernist-era works which were thick with impasto daubing, this show also ventures into a more contemporary anti-heroic style of small experiments with water colour and milky glaze in which marks are allowed to spread and coagulate without orchestration by the author's hand. This is a style which strays interestingly into the area of mark-making as a form of fragile and intimate open-ended thought or question, rather than the epic history-painting she has been known for in the past.

Having said all this though, I really battled to find anything of interest on the show. Her best work consisted of the few occasions where her experiments had been allowed to obscure altogether the mark-making of her own hand. Because Siopis's mark-making is trite. Considering the length and status of her career, one would expect more of her. She has not made serious inroads into learning how to draw. One would expect that by now she should be able to approach the skill of someone like Terry Kurgan. But her drawing is fluffy and weak, and does not even interestingly accommodate her own fluffiness and weakness.

It's an outrageous cheek for an unknown nobody like me to fantasise about how I would teach famous and successful people to make better art. But nonetheless I can't help myself sometimes. To Penny I would say, see what you can do with a cloth with dipped in thinners.

Labels: Michael Stevenson, painting, penny siopis