me and Velasquez

In the last few days I returned to working on a concept that has kept tantalising and eluding me for many months. It will be called "Aussie Infanta" and loosely relates to 2 other works I did last year called Aussie Icon 1 and 2.

Aussie icon 2

Aussie Icon 1

I've been trying to create an image that references the art of the very famous Spanish Baroque painter Rodrigo Velasquez (1599-1660). During his career he painted many pictures of children from noble families which I find enigmatic and intriguing. Particularly the girls, dressed in extraordinary costumes covered with embellishments and jewellery, these little girls were being prepared for the important roles they would perform in cementing family alliances. By mid teens these young women would be promised into marriages that maximised their families political aspirations and wealth.

 In an era hundreds of years before photography only the most wealthy and powerful elites in society could afford to have their pictures painted. Pictures of real girls/women (as differentiated from the religious and mythic representations) contained lots of significant information, beyond just a record of their physical self. They showed their status in society by illustrating how fashionably and luxuriously they were attired - the furs, velvets, silks, embroideries, laces, jewels, hairstyling - all indicated the wealth and social position of the person, and vis-a-vis the females family (in the mid 16th century several european economies were almost bankrupted by the amount of money the wealthy classes spent on buying luxury handmade lace. Some expert lacemakers were executed or imprisoned, and laws were passed to prevent them emigrating or sharing their expertise)

Pictures of unmarried girls were all about attracting suitable suitors from beyond their immediate vicinity. It was very common for kings and queens and members of the nobility to enter into marriages and not to have literally seen their spouse until the day of the ceremony except from a painting (often only a miniature, as it was challenging to transport a large canvas) So these representations were very important and there was potentially a lot depending on them showing the subject in the most attractive and appealing way.

In our contemporary world we still instinctively understand the importance of a picture showing us at our most attractive angle and well groomed and dressed. Rodney and I meet through RSVP, an internet dating site. So the first views we saw of each other were photos we selected to put up for public viewing. I think any women who have ever done this would understand the agony of choosing the "right" image!

Our photographs and representations from modernity are just as loaded with sociological information destined to intrigue our descendents in no less a way than I find the pictures of Velasquez fascinating...

I wanted to make a picture full of colour and pattern which somewhat overwhelms the female figure.

I stencilled these pieces of canvas then collaged them along with some embroidered fragments onto a large canvas

Stencilled canvas pieces

Aussie Infanta, unfinished

The magic of paint

I had a spazz out and changed "Beyond" from the graffiti look back to the original concept! The magic of paint....

head and shoulders detail of "Beyond"

It got too much out of my comfort zone and I really want to sell some work!

Beyond, the whole canvas 40 x 75cm

A new work was started yesterday but not enough interesting has happened yet to show any progress pictures. It will be created in this method I've been working in lately - a female figure embellished with textured cloth. Though I'm starting to hanker to get back to my more familiar techniques with lots of colour and highly embellished textiles and have started imagining along those lines....

A post with few (phew!!!) words today. I'm still drained from the brain spit I had last week!

Going beyond Beyond and quite possibly the longest post you'll ever get from me...

Yesterday I threw some paint at the work in progress, as I had suggested I was tempted to in the previous blog. I like where it’s at now, which is very different from my original limited palette, beige concept. Now I just have to get brave enough to put more paint on the flesh, particularly the face. Otherwise this is really 2 works inside the frame that aren’t integrated. There are some parallels with this work and the last one I did – “Wrapt; head full of bright ideas” That ended up changing radically from the original concept too. It ended up being a rather grey and monochromatic face surrounded by lots of bright abstract stuff. I decided not to alter the face much, being  just too worried about stuffing up what was a fairly competently rendered facial likeness. That I wanted to enter it into the Murrurundi Art Prize was a bit of a constraint too, with risking any adventurous alterations, because there was the date deadline.

Beyond, I'm happy with the background but will I be brave enough to alter the figure?

This a very long blog so some readers might get bored and drop out. Quite understandable as there is a fair bit of navel gazing about to unfold. Close examination of my belly lint probably has very limited interest to others! 

So be it. 

I have sort of split it into 2 parts so you can get a breather or refreshment approximately half way through if needed.

                                                                      PART ONE

A decade ago all my 2 dimensional work was abstract and I also made dolls. The dolls were sculptural and obviously figurative works, though I acknowledged that the dolls weren’t intended to be characters. I used them as a way to display my textile art collaged over the figurines. I was trying to be clever in making my essentially abstract surfaces into a figurative object that was more easily “understood”  (ie, in the SAP {Serious Art People} lingo “accessible”) by ordinary people who did not have highly evolved ideas about what art is. The point was that hopefully they would find the figures charming and would give me cash money to be able to own them!

Perhaps it could be a metaphor for me and my world that my last 2 artworks are grey, monochromatic figures surrounded by swirling, bright elements. In the last 3 years, due to the wonderful circumstances that my husband has bought into my life, I have had more time to work on my art than ever before.  Since January when I broke my ankle I have had 4 months off work. Except for a few weeks when I had to be horizontal I’ve been able to spend the bulk of this time just doing my art. I have never been so fully immersed in it and have never had a continuous period of time in my life when I woke up every day and had few other obligations other than the choice to do my art.

In just a few months the way I do art has moved forward rapidly, in a way that might have unfolded over a year or 2 when I only had a few hours a week. So now I find myself considering these last 2 works and acknowledge they are metaphoric. The monochromatic, competently rendered figures represent me, surrounded by clamorous viscous colour. Will I be brave and adventurous enough to be able to integrate myself with all the brilliance I feel surround by?...to dive in, make my edges permeable enough to absorb the gorgeousness of all that is available for us to experience in the visual world….?

I feel really threatened by venturing outside the safe realms of “competency”. As Roger Skinner put it in the quote I used in my last blog, to go beyond the ability to “accurately replicate” and “hand back to the tutor (viewer) what they want”

Doing art is about exploring what freedom is. At its most highly realised level it is a spiritual practice. All desire to do and create art expresses a yearning to explore subjective experience and what might be beyond it. The best art is often achieved when the boundaries are examined and transgressed. This requires risks to be taken and the humility of dealing with failure is a regular challenge to be overcome.

This blog is about words (ha!! pretty self evident!) It is a tool I’m finding useful in helping me focus on what I’m trying to achieve in my art. There is an essential contradiction here for me because my primary chosen means of communication is the visual, not the textual. I am often ambivalent about this textual means of communication. Sometimes it can be exhilarating as there are some words I find very textured, coloured and emotional. There is something very satisfying about finding the word that exactly, precisely sums up what you want to express. But that is also why language can be frustrating, as so often the word is not known or cannot be found...

Visual art feels like such a more competent, nuanced and authentic way of expressing an idea

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Language and text is an overlay of culture and civilisation which is very necessary but ultimately messes with the brain. Bugger semiotics and semantics. The subtleties of communication through the necessary vehicles of language and text. In modernity the vehicles are in constant revision and flux. Historians devote entire lifetimes to understanding, deciphering or interpreting in various ways what their subjects “really” intended or meant.  We would find the written text of our ancestors a hundred years ago hard to understand; the language would be cumbersome, dated and awkward. Their accents would seem absurd. The further back you go the more unintelligible the languages and text of the past. In reality if we spoke to someone of our culture from 200 years ago we would find it extremely difficult to understand them. Bill Gates wrote the language which has thrown our modernity into freefall only a few decades ago. It will define our global civilisation throughout the next millennia. Remarkably that language uses only TWO SYMBOLS – 0 and 1. Everything in our whole world has never changed at such a rapid rate and every day it is exponentially building on that.

So I sit here today using the using the aforementioned ubiquitous invention of Bill Gates – the “word processor” and are now into the 6^th month of blogging. I’m quite amazed I’ve been able to keep it up! Because it seems likely I’ll continue into the foreseeable future I decided to do some researching into how other bloggers do it. Like my art, if I’m going to invest so much time in it I want to do it well and get the most out of it. My writing of the last few months has made me realise how stilted, stylised and old fashioned my writing style is. This is partly because of what I learned at school in the 60s-70s which was defined as proper written English (haha, have to use the capital letter there!) and because the last time I wrote such vast tracts was at University 12 years ago and then it was necessary  to adopt the academic style and requirements.

What I have learned from reading numerous blogs in the last few weeks is rather similar to the learning curve in my artistic practice. Real world obligations usually mean I don’t have enough time to apply myself every day to writing and artmaking and the consequence is the way I do both these things is not very competently and frozen in time with outdated beliefs, learnings and conventions.  A number of wonderful young women writers have opened my eyes to the contemporary art of blogwriting in all its awesomeness.  These women are inspiring and electrifying writers who have bought me starkly to the realisation of my old fashioned, self adopted limits…and I thank them wholeheartedly!

They are listed down the sidebar of this blog if you want to investigate them yourself. I particularly recommend, in order of my favourites – edenland, magnetoboldtoo and bexstar - I’m just a girl & I’ve had it up to here. However, to quote the Popeye world view with a sense of humility - I am what I am. I can examine these other writing styles to extrapolate what I like and to help me loosen up and find my own heartfelt voice. A lot of what I admire about these writers is their absolute authenticity, their refusal to compromise, capitulate or pull their heads in to make other people feel more comfortable.  I have a lot of confidence I can do my own writing better with more time and practise….probably with a lot less swear words though. That is one convention I find hard to transgress!

                                                            PART TWO

Enough of that….at this point I want to return to the one paragraph sentence I made a while back to wholly explain what I meant.  To reiterate -

“Visual art feels like such a more competent, nuanced and authentic way of expressing an idea”

I spent a lot of time up above explaining why language and text seem such a secondary means of communication. There is something inarticulate, inchoate, from the time before language changed our brains that I want to capture and express in my visual art.

Visual art does communicate by giving the viewer a “feeling”. It is not like words which encapsulate information as a symbol (through intentionally grouped letters of the alphabet which represent a word).

As newborns and infants we had no language. We still had thought processes and through our visual acuity gradually make a sense of the world of objects ( I’m struggling a bit here because I’m no neurologist, paediatrician or psychologist….) to survive we have to quickly work out that the objects of greatest importance are the moving, tactile and soundmaking ones that bring comfort like food and warmth.

The human face is the first thing we come to recognise. We quickly find out that the faces respond to what we are doing in the world – cries of hunger or distress will summon a face that makes certain sounds, smiles and laughter create predictable responses and sounds from the face. So our first experience of selfhood and otherness comes from differentiating objects. Our first experiences of power in the world are that the objects do predictable things when we express in particular ways. When a baby expresses contentment by smiling the people around it smile and coo back. Infants learn to interpret visual clues on the faces of people around them before acquiring language. The visual is the first way we learn to understand the world.

My earliest memory is of the colour red. I have no way of knowing whether this is a genuine memory or one I have manufactured and embellished, but it really doesn’t matter. I believe I might been less than 2 years old at the time and lying in a crib when a lady came to visit who wore a bright red coat. The sight of this colour thrilled me so much I remember it still with a frisson 52 years later. In 1989 when I changed my name by deed poll I honoured this memory of my first experience of ecstatic feelings by taking on “Red” as my middle name.  Though my favourite colour is actually orange.

If you made it this far to read all of this I'm really touched. Thank you for your patience and I hope you got some interesting things to think about.

Comments are very welcome! 

the cracks

Today a trip to Muswellbrook and a delightful physiotherapist called Leonie examined my ankle. She pronounced all seemed to be well on the physical level. The fractured bone has knit, the scar from the operation is beautifully healed, the flexibility was very good and the muscles and tendons were a little weak but nothing that exercise won't strengthen.

I was surprised to hear that as I feel a lot of sensitivity and discomfort. There is numbness, pins and needles sensations and electrical shootings. It feels too weak for me to stand on it alone. Going up and down stairs has to be done very carefully. As she gently massaged my foot Leonie explained how a lot of stuff goes on in the brain. So much of what we interpret as pain is generated there, rather than literally in the tissues. My body might have substantially recovered but I have to complete the fixing with gaining confidence in my head.

After the physio session I dropped into the art gallery, as you do (Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre). Fantastic exhibition on at the moment - "Driven to Abstraction"  Showing the works of Carole Corrie and Garry Foye, on until 10 June. I was fascinated that these artists had participated in running a workshop for local artists and the results from that were also on display (eating my heart out) wow! how amazing to see the efforts of the students contrasted with the teachers.

I had a short chat with Brad Franks, the gallery director, just before I left, relating how blown away I felt by the brilliance of the art. I did suggest to Brad that my art is "anal retentive, I need to loosen up and get my head of my arse and I want to go home and chop up all my work, pastiche it back together and throw paint all over it" I think he may have been somewhat taken aback - haha, perhaps concerned that the work I've accumulated towards the August exhibition might end up vandalised!!! - however I meant that in absolute enthusiam. Not as a destruction of my art - but as a positive reconstruction!

I loved this quote from Muswellbrook photographer Roger Skinner, one of the curators of the exhibition and Arts Centre Education Officer, this is a portion of a statement he has on the gallery wall;


Somehow, there had to be a way to get the artists into the area and to teach some
of our local artists to free themselves up and explore the notions of beginning to abstract their
work. A means of encouraging them to move away from the literal, the mere replica
of what exists in front of the canvas, which is like learning by rote.
This process is not an easy one, because of previous learnings in schools where we
are encouraged to accurately replicate, which, is a most perfect nonsense. Teaching
is a subversive activity, and the difficulty we experience in getting free of the idea
of handing back to the tutor what they want instead of what we can do can sometimes fails most of us for most of our lives


Meantime (back on the farm) this where "Beyond" has gotten to yesterday....

So....now that I'm all fired up with wanting to DECONSTRUCT....where to from here!!!

passing of seasons

A few weeks ago I thought Winter was upon us. We even lit the woodstove a couple of times. Then this lovely balmy respite has given us a week of glorious autumn weather. I so love this time of year between the end of Autumn and true Winter setting in, heralded officially by the first frost. I heard at the garden club that they have had at least one frost already at Blandford - only 6km down the road so its probably just a matter of days before the icy tentacles of Winter tighten its grip around us. So I do my daily walk around the garden  anticipating the day will soon arrive when the last flowers and foliage of 2011 will crumple and return to the ground.

Outside my studio I have a little pond and took this picture of a pink calla lily opening up which grows beside a bust of Kuan Yin, the Buddhist represention of compassion.

Yesterday I started on this new work. It will be called "Beyond" I worked a lot more on it today and it has changed a lot since these photos! This work will be a bit similar to "Still Life"

Today I did some free motion stitching around the face to simulate strands of flowing hair. The figure will feature dimensional bas relief effects of folded cloth....

A close up of the face for "Beyond", oil over acrylic paint

Art Bazaar

Rodney and I will be stallholders at the annual Art Bazaar held at Maitland Regional Art Gallery on Sunday 10th June. The quality of the arts and crafts on offer is very high as the stallholders are limited to 70 and selected by a panel from the Gallery as the best of the applicants.It is limited to artisans based in the Hunter Valley and Newcastle regions.

Apart from the superb local art for sale it will be a delightful day out (weather permitting!) as the bazaar is set  outdoors in the lovely grounds of the Gallery. So if you haven't yet visited the Gallery this would be an opportunity to appreciate all it has on offer too. The Gallery cafe is offering an expanded menu of choices so altogether this would be a delightful Sunday outing to see the best of local artisan wares, peruse the Gallery and its current exhibition and then sit in the sunshine for a lunch time gourmet treat!

I will be offering for sale all the work I've produced in the last year plus my hand made beaded adornments.

more art from Murrurundi show

Yesterday another trip to Tamworth, another Xray on my ankle and yet another consult with the bone doctor. He said all is looking good and the bone has finally knit together. I was expecting he would then scoot me back to work but he was a little concerned about building up some strength and gave a me a referral to see a physiotherapist. So perhaps another 1-2 weeks before back to work according to how that assessment goes.

I have had a lazy week, not doing much art, though the ideas keep churning away just below conscious level. After winning a prize for my landscape effort I have had to give some serious thought to perhaps doing another! I do love the natural world, Rodney and I are both enthusiastic gardeners, and this is my favorite season of the year in the Upper Hunter Valley area. As I drove the hours journey to Tamworth in the mid morning yesterday I was enthralled with the vistas of yellow, gold and ochre coloured paddocks of dry grass and the pale grey winter skies, tinged with a little mauve or turquoise....

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River Water Hole, 34x72cm, winner of "Pages River Theme" at Murrurundi Art Show 2012

The winner of the Fibres/Textiles section was Charlotte Drake-Brockman, a well established local artist. She wove this delightful little melon basket which contained chook feathers and a tiny blue egg. To the right is another entry which is a larger nest made of leaves and twigs and containing duck eggs. A nest won last year too....so perhaps I see a trend here!

Charlotte Drake-Brockman, Melon Basket, winner in Fibres/Textiles section of Murrurundi  Art Show

In August the Arts Council will host the biennial Norvill Art Prize. It is an award given for best landscape painting. The first prize is a very credible $15,000, a very substantial prize for a rural based competition. I am certainly giving the landscape genre more consideration than usual! Anyone who is interested in checking it out should see - www.norvillartprize.com

Some entries in the Fibres/Textiles section, including the winner on the table to the left 

art of life in Murrurundi

The Murrurundi Art prize opened last night and we got a good crowd attending despite another event being on for the "King of the Ranges". There were 7 sections to enter with a cash prize of $200-400 for the winner and the acquisitive champion prize of $2000. Rodney entered 3 works and I put in 4. Rodney got a highly commended for his Ancient of Days horses in the "Stockmens Challenge Theme" and I got highly commended for Still Life in the Fibres and Textiles section and a First place in the "Pages River theme" The winner for the champion artwork $2000 Enid Norvill Memorial Prize was Nicci Pratten with her oil painting Minds of our Own.

Rodney entered this wonderful portrait of me in the Pastels/Drawing section.

On the right is a self portrait Rodney did about 2 years ago. He made the one of me the same size and in similar colours so we can hang them at home as a pair. Our lucky grandkids will no doubt fight to own them one day!

I was really amazed to win for my work River Water Hole. I only entered it because Rodney insisted and we needed lots of art to fill the walls! The picture was done 18 months ago for an exhibition sponsored by the Pages River committee. I don't have much affinity for rendering landscape and it is the only one I have ever done....sheeesh! I thought my figurative works were much better....

I went down to the show this morning to take a picture but the digital camera went flat so tomorrow I'll publish a picture.

The judge Brad Franks, the manager of the Muswellbrook Arts Centre did a wonderful job giving out the prizes and commendations. It is always great when the judges can make time to give some critique about their choices. I have been entering art shows for less than 2 years, totalling only 6 now, and have learned there is no such thing as a predictable winner!  Never have I been able to predict the winner in any section or overall. Sometimes I can narrow it to a shortlist of likelihoods, but more often than not I have been completely amazed, occasionally completely astounded at the judges choice.

So it was delightful to have an arts professional like Brad, someone whose job it is to work with contemporary and recent Australian art every day, give an eloquent description of why the pieces he chose for recognition were selected. I found it so fascinating that immediately after the awards I went back to look at many pictures I hadn't really appreciated before.

In my last blog I spoke about my own reticence with having ones art framed by ideologies, themes, messages, narratives, whatever...that I consciously eschew adopting symbols, iconography or images that feel contrived to suggest narratives.... (which is not to say other artists can't do this without great and authentic gravitas. It just doesn't work for me) So it was utterly fascinating when Brad described his response to Still Life something like this "suggestion of religious themes perhaps Mary Magdalene, containing great sadness, the cloth suggests a shroud perhaps implying suffering or grief of some sort" Golly! It was lovely to hear it could evoke such emotions but when working on it I never felt sad or wanted to say anything about grief or religious themes (I'm an atheist) It just felt very still and meditative.

River Water Hole he described as "an iconic image, something almost spiritual or metaphysical in the way the depths of water are suggested" Wow, more astounding and wonderful words! Though the truth is the focal piece of layered embroidery was created about 8 years ago and had no reference to water at all. 18 months ago I decided to use that fragment to embellish around to make a larger work for a Pages River art show. I did appliques and embroidery around the focal piece to suggest rocks and water running over them and used felt and shreds of light reflective fabrics to suggest reflections. But the central focal piece was only chosen because it had lots of green in it.

a head full of bright ideas

Things evolved with my last painting. It was so annoying that the black headscarf I had initially surrounded the face with immediately categorised the image as "muslim woman"....and that lead to whole lot of assumptions that completely hijacked any narrative the picture instigated. If the scarf had been painted on it could been changed but I had used draped and stiffened fabric so it became an unremovable feature (like being a muslim/woman)

I feel an instinctive resistance to contriving narratives for my images. That is why I found that one I did a month ago really irritating. It's called "Dreaming a place" and its the one with the gothic arch and doorway in the background (changed it from "Golden Pierrot") If I wanted to tell stories I should have been a writer.

Is this a bit of a conflict maybe...? that I want to show you something but not tell you anything? Isn't a picture supposed to be worth a 1000 words? People do art for a lot of reasons and that is undeniably a good thing because lots of people look at art for different reasons. So there is always going to be some artists and some viewers who find their reasons for doing it and looking at it are compatible.

It is very difficult to become accepted as a serious, credible and professional art practitioner if you don't have a theory about why you make art, what it means and (therefore) why you have something important to say. There are some artists who do this with absolute conviction and many of them make art I find deeply compelling. Truly awesome. And then there are some others I find utterly unconvincing!

So I think its a problem for me that I just like making pictures. So far I haven't been able to find or construct a theory that sounds credibly profound. Serious people in the artworld disparage art for arts sake. The best justification I can find for myself is that I find the surfaces fascinating to create and beautiful to look at. Professing a desire to make "beauty" in art is even more anathema to "serious art people" (I'll just annotate that to SAPs in future)

So before I get any further with shooting myself in the foot I'll just unveil my latest effort. This one will be called "Wrapt: head full of bright ideas" It will be my entry in the painting section of the Murrurundi Art Prize.
You can see it really doesn't look too much like a muslim woman anymore...I hope!

Wrapt: head full of bright ideas

Art and ANZAC

face detail of Still Life

I've been working all week but feeling frustrated and anxious because I'm not getting the results I want from the art. Still Life is finished and I've entered the work in the local Murrurundi Art Prize, which opens Friday 3rd of May. I have also entered 2 other works in the Currububula Art Prize, opening Thursday May 10th. I sold 2 of the 3 works I entered into the Currububula last year.

Still Life, the whole picture

Still Life measures 40cm x 95cm

During the week Rodney and I went away for a day to Nelson Bay and stayed overnight in Newcastle so I could visit my son, daughter in law and granddaughter. My one darling granddaughter Trinity Pearl turned 5 in January, so has just started school and had lots to tell Grandma and Grandpa. Rodney and I both needed to buy more art supplies so we did lots of shopping and returned home with a carload by Saturday night.

Above is a picture of the current work in progress which is what I'm really struggling with at the moment. I want to enter it in the Murrurundi Art Prize and because I don't have enough time to start and complete  another work (unless I do it in acrylic) this is the main reason I haven't set it aside and started something less challenging. The face is much larger than life size, on a canvas measuring 60x80cm.  I regret doing the head scarf. It's not intended to be a muslim woman but this is what viewers tend to assume.

I'm following my usual routine for ANZAC day, which means ignoring the whole thing. I think my grandad may have served very briefly in New Guinea for a few weeks before the war ended but never saw any action. I don't have any significant memories of my own relatives or any people I know who fought or were involved in any way with the second World War. War commemorations, whether they are purportedly to honour the "dead" and their "sacrifices" make me feel uneasy and ambivalent. I always wonder what the "losers" do and say on their days of remembrance... I would assume they probably do similar rituals and observances, i.e. god was on our side, we did the right thing, they died for their country and our freedom, etc. To me wars are the worst excesses of our species and at the basis of every single one of them is racism, greed, ignorance and/or nationalism. I would rather hear and celebrate the stories of the conscientious objectors and the people who "fought" for peace.