Across Chilling Out, What Now? and Temptation, Alice barely moves. She sits, waits, watches and thinks. Yet anyone who knows Alice understands that stillness should never be mistaken for inactivity. Somewhere behind those eyes, calculations are being made.
The three paintings span several years of the Alice series. Chilling Out appeared in 2020, followed by What Now? in 2022 and Temptation in 2023. Together they reveal three sides of the same Labradoodle: the relaxed companion, the determined problem-solver and the hopeless tennis-ball addict.
Chilling Out is the most peaceful. Alice has found herself a wooden bench in the shade, beneath a billboard advertising ice cream. There is no tennis ball demanding attention, no predicament requiring assistance. For once, she appears completely content to simply watch the world go by. It is a rare ceasefire in a life usually governed by appetite, curiosity and play.
Two years later, What Now? presents a very different kind of stillness. Alice stands at the edge of a swimming pool, staring down at a tennis ball resting on the bottom. This is no unfortunate accident. Alice has punctured the ball, allowing it to fill with water and sink. Having created the problem, she now waits patiently for somebody else to solve it. She could jump in, but that would spoil the game. The humour lies in the reversal: instead of Alice fetching the ball for us, we are expected to fetch it for Alice.
In Temptation, the balance shifts again. Alice is high in a roughly constructed tree hut, looking down towards a tennis ball sitting innocently on the grass. The distance between dog and ball is not great, but to Alice it might as well be an ocean. How she reached the hut is almost beside the point. The real story is written in her gaze. Everything she wants is down there.
The tennis ball has become more than a recurring prop in these paintings. It is part of Alice’s character. She could strip away the felt, crack the shell and systematically dismantle a ball with remarkable determination. Her relationship with them was never simply about retrieving. The ball could be chased, carried, destroyed, sunk or, as in Temptation, worshipped from afar.
Colour also separates the three moods. The shaded calm of Chilling Out, the luminous turquoise water of What Now?, and the warm late-afternoon greens of Temptation place Alice in three distinct worlds. Yet she remains unmistakably herself at the centre of each.
When Alice arrived from Christchurch in 2013, I had worried that a dog might restrict our lives. Instead, she gradually worked her way into them, and then into my paintings. She became far more than an occasional subject. She brought her own stories.
These three works are really small adventures built around waiting. In one, Alice wants nothing. In another, she wants us to retrieve what she has deliberately sunk. In the third, she desperately wants something she cannot reach.
Relaxation, mischief and temptation.
Three paintings, three predicaments, and one very determined dog.
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