never too young

I am going to be in a group show called 'This is Brunswick Arts' which opens at Brunswick Street Gallery on Friday. It is a group show for all of us who are part of the Brunswick Arts Space crew, an opportunity to show our work in a different gallery.

Little did we know that another show, one which would get front page coverage in The Age, would be opening on the same night! Lucky us!

Follow this link to read all about it:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/my-kid-could-paint-that-toddlers-art-on-show/2009/01/07/1231004105005.html

I personally really love the idea. I'm intrigued to see the work she has produced, if my niece is anything to go by I can imagine some really wonderful art work being hung. There is definitely something lost with self consciousness/cricism and training of the fine motor skills. My niece who is now four, is suddenly very concerned with staying in the lines, and not that I would want her not to develop her coordination, but she has started down a path that will take her all of her life to learn and unlearn, and learn again. Such a double edged sword is (self)consciousness.


(the opening night is Friday the 16th of January, 6-9pm

Runs to 29^th Jan 2009 @ Brunswick Street gallery

322 Brunswick St, Fitzroy. Gallery Hours Wed-Sun 11-6pm)

B-Grade

I'm not sure if you would have noticed but horror movies are not in my usual repetoir of subject or inspiration. So it is kind of strange that I am now in the middle of curating a show based on them...

The idea came from chatting to a guy I know. He had been raving about the Peter Jackson group of very b-grade horror movies that he'd made before he shot to super director stardom with Lord of the Rings. Now I had been thinking for a while that movie night at Brunswick Arts would be a great way to get people into the gallery, and so as he talked about it I had visions of b-grade horror movie nights at the gallery. They could run their bar, I'd make popcorn. It'd be great! Then it seemed quite natural to have a group show with the same theme to go with the movie nights. A convaluted and back-to-front way to come across an idea for a show, but there you go.




Curating a group show is a very strange experience. In putting together a solo show I am used to being in control of the whole process, knowing exactly how the works are coming along, how big, small, good, bad, what colour, shape and size each of the works is and how they will all fit together. With this thing I am left with artists telling me they are doing well, the works are coming along and it'll be great, but I have no idea how they will all fit together, I don't even know what some of the artists are making... some of them don't even know yet!!! I won't know til the day they all show up at the gallery with works ready to be installed!

But I can't imagine it could be too bad, I mean the show is based around the b-grade... bad is good... remember??!?!

At the markets

Lately I have been so busy that I haven't had any time to actually paint... also I have not had any looming deadlines so my thoughts, time and energy get directed to more immediate tasks. I don't mind this, it is part of the ebb and flow of an artists life. I don't think I could paint all day everyday anyway, that takes an aweful lot of stamina! (I know people who do it though!)

At the Sunday Arts at the Convent there is another stallholder, Elise Hurst, who brings her paints along and does some beautiful work while there. She sets up and starts a fresh painting each time and will often finish it on the same day. I have tried sketching and writing and all sorts of other menial tasks at the markets, coz there is usually a fair bit of time between interaction with customers. I always thought I'd get self conscious and distracted and weird if I tried painting in front of people, and it is a lot of fuss and bother to set up and pack up again at the end of the day. But last month at Rose St and then at the Convent I gave it a go... and it was great~!

I think I had been a bit starved of painting time in the studio due to things like moving both my house and studio, having the red balloon show and getting a few more hours a week of gainful employment. So when I set up I was straight into it and loving it. It made the day at the market pass so much faster and feel so much more productive!





These are pics of me revisiting an image I painted a couple of years ago. I had been commissioned to paint an elephant for a special occasion and it was a real pleasure to play with this image. In fact it had been one of my first successful elephant paintings. The original painting has a story attached that I might try and share sometime soon. I've used the image of the original as a card and it is always a popular one. I was surprised at how easily I blocked everyone out and how much I was at ease with people viewing my shambolic process and half finished work.

I will be doing that quite regularly at the markets. People love to watch, though some get quite shy about talking to me... I hope that it doesn't scare people away from buying stuff!!!

If you come to the markets don't be bashful, I still love to talk to people!
:)

All sorts of stuff

I have been painting like a mad woman for this show. I'm really loving the red balloon theme!

Its funny coz the colour red and I have had a checkered history. I have tended to avoid it a bit as too much of it has the capacity to make me a little anxious. This show has proven to be a good way for me and red to become friends, such a whimsical and innocent application and surrounded by and large by friendly blue skies.

I think it would be worth doing a bit of highly rigorous and academic research (on wikipedia) into the psychological impact colours can have on people, particularly the colour red. (That will have to be the subject of another post!)

It will be a totally different opening to the elephant show earlier this year. For a start the venue is different. fortyfive downstairs is an awesome gallery with a reputation as a great inner city gallery that is accessable, dynamic and well respected as a hub for theatre, forums, performance as well as visual art. Brunswick Arts is a funky artist run space down a dodgy lane way in our favourite grungy suburb of Brunswick. Run by a group of young artists it is a lot more experimental and cutting edge. As opposed to the elephant show, which I had been working on for a couple of years and have long term plans in the future of, my plans for this show were to just have fun and break out a bit.

I am having all sorts of fun things going on... like a professional balloon man who makes animals out of balloons, lots of real balloons, a projected slideshow of images and probably access to the blogsite for Project Red Balloon. Oh yeah, also oil paintings and 99 little watercolours :)

I have decided to postpone the Thailand Elephant trip til March next year. I was being a bit unrealistic to think I could fit it in this year... with this balloon show in August, and another show I am curating in November and all of the rest of life and living as well. Yup, planning it for March is instantly less stressful and much more sane!

Exhibition Openings

I have my show coming up VERY SOON (scary!) So lately I have been paying as much attention to how people are presenting the show as I am to the artwork involved in the show.

Most openings are pretty standard, you have drinks, occasionally there is food as well, people stand around and drink and talk and if it is a really successful night you don't really look at the artwork at all because there are too many people blocking your view! There are price lists on a table somewhere, sometimes a blurb about the artist and the work as well... and if they can afford it a glossy brochure with coloured pics. People can organize speeches, but not everyone worries about this...

Occasionally people do things differently, incorporate elements of performance or audience participation. For example Marco Luccio recently had an opening at Steps Gallery on Lygon St and he had an opera singer perform! It was wonderful; an extra element of entertainment never goes astray. But it must be admitted that by and large they are just that – entertainment, creating atmosphere or ambience, but not significantly value adding to the work or my experience of the work.

A good friend of mine, Jenny Mitchell, recently had an exhibition. She did the whole lot food, drinks, performance… and somehow managed to create a whole other level of meaning for me.

I have been friends with her since doing the diploma together, so I have been privy to a certain extent to the thought process she went through in planning the show, getting the works ready and organizing the opening night. We have sat at Lentil As Anything at the Abbottsford Convent sipping tea as she ran ideas by me, though I can't say I contributed much except to say 'Wow, that sounds great Jenny!’

In the last few weeks before the show I was snowed under with concerns of my own so I wasn't able to help her in the final stages. When I went to the opening night I thought I knew what was coming and what to expect... and I did, as the plan hadn't changed much, it was the way it came together that blew me away. And, as so often happens, I think I actually found more/different meaning in it than Jenny had consciously chosen to communicate.

This is what I knew:
Jenny has been learning the cello in the last year or so and she wanted to play it on the opening night. She would play it while a digital slideshow was projected onto a wall next to her, a collage of quotes and images and an exploration of her thoughts about life, art and the journey she has taken over the last year in recovering from a severe breakdown. After that she would pull back a wall of fabric that had been hiding the room that actually held her paintings and people would be able to enter and see the works.

This is what I experienced:
The slide show gently drifted between images of her artwork, as yet unveiled, shown in abstract fragments, overlaid with snippets of poetry and her own words... elegant, restrained and yet so generous. She managed to talk about the darkest times she has had in the last year, she did not hide it, but neither did she fall into an indulgence of self-revelation. For me she hit a perfect balance. The music she had chosen was a most beautiful and haunting piece. These two alone (if the music had been played by someone else or on a CD player) would have been moving enough - but what really resonated and created for me a much more profound experience was all of this in combination with the physical reality of a person I hold dear to me, who I know has gone through hell in the last year, creating that music as we watched.

As she sat in front of us moving the bow and creating those resonances in sound, I became intimately aware of the other levels of movement and lived experience that it took to create the artwork, and write the words. I could see her in her studio moving the brush, mixing the paint. I could imagine what it must have been like to live the everyday (and every night) experience of a breakdown. The struggle to keep moving at all.

As the music progressed it moved into a more hopeful and gentle passage as Jenny neared the end of slideshow with words of hope and recovery. What the music and moving images did was not just move me to a deeper connection to the lived experience of creation, but it also tied in with a theme Jenny had been exploring in her words, which was the perception of and experience of time.

I have pondered the nature of music, art and time prior to this show. It has fascinated me how music is so linked to time. A painting or work of visual art is still; traditionally it is complete when presented to the public. You look at it and even if you spend time with it, and your thoughts move and shift in response to it, it in itself remains still, the same as when you first started looking at it. Music, on the other hand, is dependant on time. You cannot experience it without time, one moment follows another and one note follows another. The preceding notes set us up to experience the next. A gentle progression or a dramatic divergence from what went before helps create the mood. The way it takes some time to digest the stimulus of sound and our capacity to remember what went before allows the music to take us on a journey and tell a story. This experience is much closer to the reality of living life than the absolute stillness of a painting.

I think this is perhaps something to do with why I often enjoy creating paintings and going on that journey through time and colour to the finished product, more than I do looking at the finished work in a gallery. I suppose also that when my own works are finished they still resonate with that story that was told in the creation, something that the viewer does not have access to. I think, also, this is one reason how it can be that I love one painting so much and not another – yet people looking at them often have a very different connection.

So I think what happened for me was a wonderful fusion of all of those thoughts and feelings. It powerfully brought home the physical reality of her life. What we were reading was a lived experience for this person in front of us. The actions and movements of her mind, soul and body physically created the artwork we would soon be seeing. In exactly the same way as the cello was being played, in that moment and the next... and the next. And so too would her life go on, this show was just one in a long progression of lived moments. They would all slide into and onto each other like the notes of the music. It is a testament to her skill as an artist that she could take the experiences and memories of her life last year, I’m pretty sure many of which were not at all pretty or graceful, and shape them into something so poetic and beautiful.

The most poignant part, that which opened the door even wider to all of these thoughts and feelings, was that she did not play it perfectly. She played it astonishingly well, considering she had only been learning for a year. But every now and then a note was a little frail, or a little wobbly or a little short. That imperfection spoke volumes about the fragility of human ambitions. It spoke of the nature of learning (another journey; a thing that can only happen over time) and it described so perfectly the difference between what we aspire to and what, in our humanity, we achieve. I felt so much tenderness for humanity in that moment, for our attempts, our dreams, our limitations, our little and our big failings… and our courage in the attempts we make.

Paintings So Far...

These are some of the paintings I have done so far. Some of these will be in the show coming up in May... and some wont as they have already found good homes. There is still more work in progress that will emerge from the studio in time for the show as well!



They are all painted using oil paint, and many of them are on fine quality linen. I tend to stretch my own canvasses as I enjoy the process and find it helps me to connect with the surface so that when it comes time to paint we are not strangers.




It can take between one week to one year to complete a painting. Depending on how stuck I get with it. Some just need to sit half-finished for extended lengths of time before I feel confident to work on it again. Funny how a solid mental block of several weeks or months duration can lift silently in the night and be gone next time you are in the studio.