Peter Davidson
The Sovereign Space: Defying “Voss in Paint”
Robert Hughes once dismissed certain Australian painters as producing “Voss in paint” — work shaped by inherited myth rather than lived experience. Davidsonian Temporalism rejects this framing. Authentic engagement does not arise from avoiding mythic landscapes; it arises from the delay you inhabit between perception and action. When you paint twilight over Trigg bushland, you are not reaching for a story. You are reaching for the interval where the light fades faster than your hand can follow.
At the centre of this thinking is the Sovereign Space: the irreducible territory between what you see and what you do. This is not an abstract philosophical gap. It is a bodily delay — the moment where the viscosity of paint, or the latency of an iPad, forces you into the present, a present already slipping into the past.
That delay unfolds in stages: perception, cognitive lag, artistic shaping, and finally action — the mark on the surface. Authenticity does not live in the motif but in the negotiation of this delay. The Sovereign Space is where that negotiation becomes visible.
The first ripple within this space is Kinetic Delay, where practice intersects with Barbara Bolt’s performativity and Caspar Fairhall’s emphasis on structure. On the iPad, your delay becomes entangled with the device’s own timing. The nanosecond lag between gesture and processor response produces a synthetic friction that must be navigated in real time.
Hughes’ critique collapses here. You cannot import a myth while you are busy keeping pace with a machine. The delay itself becomes the only story available.
Digital media introduce further layers of delay: the hand negotiating movement, the device asserting its own latency, and perceptual drift as delayed eye tracking continually reframes the image. Painting becomes a lived equation rather than a representation. In pencil, pastel, or coloured pencil — 15 × 20 cm — volume is stabilised through repeated adjustment rather than resolution. Fairhall’s “big volumes” operate as anchoring forms, keeping the work afloat amid overlapping temporal ripples.
The Physics of the Brush offers a response to Hughes. Authenticity is not achieved by avoiding myth but by surrendering to latency. Whether it is watercolour soaking into paper at 2 Dogs Art Space or the nanosecond delays of an iPad at Trigg, the work is shaped by the struggle between matter, memory, and action.
