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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Imagine the music of this painting: loud, energetic, with a murmuring tangle of notes that builds into a frenzied guitar solo. Philip Clairmont listened to music obsessively, playing the same song over and over while he painted. He once remarked that he admired the ‘painterly qualities’ of Jimi Hendrix’s music — the painting’s title even pays homage to his band The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
Indeed, The scarred couch, the Auckland experience captures in paint the electricity of psychedelic rock and its hallucinogenic associations. Here, a monstrous couch seems to have come to life, its armrests and upholstery slashes curled in a menacing snarl. Above the couch, a lightbulb casts off a weak purple glow, but Clairmont’s palette of blood red, acid green, electric blue and flaming yellow provides its own illumination. The painting becomes increasingly abstract from the left to right, as if reality is slipping away at the edges of the canvas.
Like the psychedelic musicians of the era, Clairmont wasn’t afraid of taking a few mind-altering drugs either. In the 1970s he was the hard-living enfant terrible of the New Zealand art scene, often fulfilling the archetype of the tortured artist by going days without sleep during painting and drug-taking binges. For Clairmont, painting was a way of life, and his supercharged paintings reveal an intensity and raw emotion that pulses below the surface.
This painting is one of the best-known works associated with the resurgence of expressionist painting in New Zealand in the 1970s and 1980s. Along with his friends Allen Maddox and Tony Fomison, Clairmont was a central figure in this movement, adapting the vivid colours and exaggerated brushstrokes of early twentieth-century German expressionism to embody his frustrations with the bourgeois establishment. The emblazoned words and distortions in this painting express his resentment about how poorly artists were treated in society. Clairmont’s lightbulb is reminiscent of the weird lights of The night café, 1888 (Yale University Art Gallery), by Vincent van Gogh — another artist unappreciated in his time.
The painting can, in some ways, be considered a symbolic self-portrait: wounded, manic and self-destructive, but buzzing with an electric musicality that reflects the emotional intensity of the artist and his era.
Chelsea Nichols
In this painting by Philip Clairmont, everyday domestic objects run amok. A couch becomes a wounded beast - its massive body convulsing, its fabric slashed open - while a naked light bulb casts a hallucinatory glow over the scene. Scarred Couch, the Auckland Experience is one of Clairmont's largest and most impressive paintings.
Domestic objects, interiors, self portraits
Clairmont often painted domestic objects and interiors. Eight of the thirteen works owned by Te Papa have titles such as Lampshade, Chair, and Window. He also painted several self-portraits. Scarred Couch has been described as a symbolic self-portrait, and the painting itself as a comment on Clairmont's experience of the Auckland art world.
Expressionism and protest
Clairmont's art was part of a resurgence of expressionist painting in the late 1970s and 1980s. Scarred Couch reflects the distortion, vivid colour, and exaggerated brushstrokes of German expressionism, which Clairmont studied while a student of Rudolf Gopas at the Canterbury College School of Art in the 1960s. A Lithuanian immigrant, Gopas worked in a style directly related to European expressionist traditions. While Scarred Couch is personal in its content, Clairmont put his expressionist style to work protesting against war, inequality, and hypocrisy. Other works address the Vietnam War and the 1981 Springbok rugby tour.