Wamboin Postcard 23.8.2021

The sculptures don’t change much. Some new ones arrive. Others move around the block, jostling for their comfort zone. They seem well placed until another site calls them and they get moved. Other sculptures, like ‘The Book’, are repaired or abbreviated. Seasons change everything. The vegetation changes colour, height and density. Oblique angles not seen before, are noted.

It seems to snow three or for days a year.

The Book republished

The bottom third was damaged and has been mounted separately.

This fisherman was made for a neighbour. He has a half size replica of Stonehenge on the hill next to The Federal Highway. The fisherman will be placed next to the dam below that hill. It’s a Chinese fisherman. Its future site will be recorded here.

It’s not a sculpture, but then again, it deserves a site still. Its shape could only have been derived from an accident, well beyond my technical capacity.

Made in 1982, this work is low standing but has found its height at the top of the hill.

The Train is about 5 metres long. Kangaroos provide scale without crowding a picture as a human might.

From The Folded Forest , this photo was taken under the full moon.

A Crowded House sits among other works whose status is unquestioned. A question mark hangs over this work too.

Stuart Purves

Stuart Purves 2014 - 2021 oil on canvas 120 x 180 cm

Further thoughts on my portrait of Stuart.

This painting approximates my thesis on what a portrait can be, in light of everything that has come to pass in life and in art over the last one hundred years.

As a non portrait painter, this painting is more research than execution.

It is the task of every portrait to integrate all the innovations that have taken place in art over time.

It is imperative, for example, to have integrated cubism. Much portraiture presupposes those experiments were unproductive and shed no light.

As a post 20c artist, I have no choice but to integrate that material, those experiments.

It is in our blood.

What then, from what, is a portrait made?

We cannot rely on information gleaned from direct information from a ‘sitting’. Information there is too governed by familiar blinding processes, compositional habits, head focus. The sitter provides an obstacle to observation.

Relationship in a ‘sitting’ dulls observation and is almost as mechanical as photography.

I need to know a subject over time. Over time I observe, and build, quite unconsciously, a well of knowledge. That well can then be accessed mostly unconsciously. From that we find out what we have thought, noticed, absorbed.

The painting of the portrait involves a process of knowledge extraction.

This is what cubism sought to do. How does an artist approach a subject from different angles of every kind to get to the core of a subject?

Therein lies what is unique about The Archibald Prize and why we are so privileged to be so obsessed by it annually, here in Sydney. .

The Archibald is important because it provides a taut rope between the past and the future. The brief requires us to be grounded and not befuddled by an esoteric brief.

From that groundedness we can navigate more accurately through the hazardous channel that separates the past from the future.

The accurate identification of the individual as they ‘appear’, is our guide.

On this occasion, Stuart is the navigator, our GPS.

Group Portraits

My Painting Mitch Painting Agatha Making Art 120 x 180 cm Oil on Canvas

A + B Watching TV 2015 oil on canvas 50 x 32 cm

A + B Dining 2015 Oil on Canvas 60 x 35 cm

Laura's Sigh

Laura’s Sigh was made immediately before Annemarie’s Gate. See two posts earlier. Closeness of time does not guarantee similarity!

The brief here was to employ similar processes to my last year’s exhibition at Australian Galleries, The Folded Forest. The finished work would be required to reduce morning glare from the sun, improve privacy from neighbours, and make a work which was engaging and poetic.

All the works from The Folded Forest employed cut and folded steel plate. A steel plate, any plate closes off air and space. These works sought to relax the plate’s authority. An opened plate has ears and eyes. We need to go through rather than be held by a wall. This garden provided the context for this opening and folding to be drawn out and extended.

Laura’s Sigh

Open sculpture, sculpture that is not bound by its objecthood is well suited to an outdoor space. Statues work well outside buildings by being well differentiated from them. Contrast frames.

(Open sculptures in front of buildings don’t generally work because of a lack of contrast.)

This opened work partly closes off the garden but lets enough garden through. Approached obliquely the work is relatively transparent.

Laura’s Sigh during installation.

Any work commissioned, is a statement. This work serves its functional purpose. It sits there though, does not declare itself as an artwork. It declares itself as a question mark. What is it? By asking ‘why’, ‘what’, everything around it is made more vivid, more wondrous. This is the function of art.

Laura’s Sigh set in the garden opposite the home.

The sculpture sits in the garden and speaks to the building. It speaks a different formal language but the languages understand and reinforce each other. The screen, the sculpture, is raw and unrefined. The building is sleek and leans, is suave.

It’s an even steady conversation.

The work is long but because you mostly walk past it, the leaves open and close. It cannot be apprehended at one moment like a painting can, but changes.

The work might be an inhalation or an exhalation. Whether it is a sigh of surrender or wonder depends upon the mood of the user or the time of day.

Laura’s Sigh without direct sun

Sawmiller's Sculpture Prize

Dear fellow sculptors,

The Sawmiller’s Sculpture Prize 2021, is up and running again this year.

Entry details are below, should you be interested.

Sculpture at Sawmillers | A McMahons Point Community Initiative

Annemarie's Gate

For the newly installed Annemarie’s Gate at Annandale, I was invited by the client to model my thinking on a 1990 sculpture, The Interior.

It was a challenge to move back into a forty something mindset, but the motivation to go back to the mindset of the worm and the wind, the wet and the dry, was still strong. That thinking was reinforced by the last year of living in the landscape at Wamboin. Recent experience would provide new lived imagery to mix with the younger one’s.

The Interior 1990 Wamboin

Doing commissioned work can take us away from our obsessions, liberate us from our immediate focus, often for the better.

It has been a joy to make this work. Discussions with the client through the process proved to enliven the work. Finding the balance between drawing shapes and letting shapes emerge through these processes was critical.

Finding structure and unity out of this activity created a lively tension. How far to go, how far is too far, how transparent should the material be allowed to become? The open-endedness of the process gave the work air and space.

Annemarie’s Gate in process

To add to these esoteric aspects, the wall needed a gate inserted which hinged and opened and closed and locked. Handles, hinges, locks that needed to be soundly made, that embodied the same unruly rules the cutting had employed.

Finally, the client requested an additional sound aspect to alert residents of visitors arriving.

The handle of Annemarie’s Gate

Annemarie’s Gate showing door knocker.

You don’t get better at driving mayhem with practice. It’s boring to know where you’re going.

This work will acquire more colour in the short term which will fade. The work’s ultimate decline however will be brought about by human will and other unforeseeable factors.

This work is a celebration of fifty years marriage of the clients.

Congratulations!

On China

This blog provides the right forum to discuss China’s relationship with the world.

Where better to find a lack of bias, prejudice, and lack of fear of loss of favour? With nothing to gain there is nothing to lose.

China used to be the sensible partner in the communist corner of Asia.

Now North Korea and China are competing as to who is the sillier.

China does have the advantage of leverage. They can do as they choose more or less, before anyone complains. Complaining makes no difference anyway.

We always hoped for a benevolent world leader to replace a mostly benevolent US.

With the extraordinary history from which China has to draw, we should be optimistic. Even when there are signs this optimism is naive we can still count on the power of that history to be ultimately more generative than preoccupations with loss of face by which China is sometimes consumed.

However long Xi’s influence lasts, however long the principles of Communism sustain the nation’s momentum, China’s and Chinese good nature, born of experience and philosophy will triumph beyond this age of rebirth trauma.

We have learnt from recent US experience that silliness and power are bedfellows. They seem to come as a pair as if power is poison.

The antidote to poison is culture. Culture is like water which, as it travels along its course is purified. So will culture overwhelm short term matters of state.

Like a child learns how to play with a new toy with practice so will China learn how to flex its new muscle without breaking too much stuff. In doing so it will ultimately realise that loss of face is not the end of the world and provides no justification for aggression.

Ironically China holds the copyright both on wisdom and on humility.

China more than anything does not take kindly to advice or instruction. A lack of China readers here is fortunate!

cezanne

Mountains in Provence Paul Cezanne

There’s no village here. There’s a house in the background and a shed. That streetscape in the foreground is a cutting, a bunch of broken rocks at the side of the road. Just a couple of vertical lines and some roof type angles lead us astray.
It is though, a community of rocks, assembled to keep each other and Cezanne and us the viewer company.
I could easily walk along that road, knock on a rock, see who’s home.
When we you go to look at the subject in a Cezanne, it blurs away, refuses to be apprehended. You have to submit to the wider picture to glimpse the detail, just don’t look at it!
I went up close to scrutinise the sky with my insistent eye and it dissolved into some very idle brush strokes. Only when I gave up and stepped back, or forgot to look again, that the pale sky, so distant and pale, made the hill high and clear-edged.
For all the realist paintings in this landscapes room of the NGA show, the Cezanne came to be the most conclusive in the addition of its parts. It made the other pictures arithmetic to Cezanne’s maths.
Every detail in it is evasive. Every detail is conspiring with every other detail to concoct a secret whole. Each contestant is sworn to secrecy until the final reveal.
It was just a small picture.
I always walk away from a Cezanne with shame at my own crude devicery.

El Grecos' Motive

Contemporary scholars may argue the colours have faded and they may be right. The dead centre of the picture as it appears now is a mauve hole. Being as centred as it is makes it like an abstact element and the figure subject is made peripheral to this central spectral nothingness.

We might speculate whether the shapes here have a universal reference or a vaginal reference. Is this centre a big nothing around which all this other activity is decoration and distraction? The richness of the subject in the rest of the painting provides a stark contrast .

The disciples depicted in the picture to the right of Jesus seem to be as perplexed as I am, wondering at the meaning of this shape with their hand gestures. Jesus discourages this curiosity with his down pressed hand, which makes us to look harder.

Certainly the empty middle cannot be overlooked. One is left with no recourse other than to wonder.

Its central placement is reinforced by a blue sky shape immediately above and below a virtual plinth, being the shattered table.

Certainly Christ’s head is rendered secondary by this other emphasis and we are left with no option but to gaze here..

Perhaps the folds and the oval shape of this centre amplify the scope for this projection.

Greg's Mono-print

Gregory Snape Mono-print c.1975 70cm x 90cm

This is my brother Gregory’s work, a mono-print from the late seventies. 

He had been influenced by my work from earlier, but in this and other works improved upon my efforts. 

These works, his and mine, had riffed off the stuttering arcs provided by the then emerging, Sydney Opera House which we ferried past on our way to school and subsequently to work and to university. 

Such arcs had not appeared before at such a scale. I have in mind the thought I would go back there, to where it began with my work, before I went to art school. 

I trust that in going back so far it is not a premonition of an imminent end, but a reawakening, a rebirth, a new begging. Beginning.

Watch this space!

The work here grows off the bottom left right angle. It builds and bends and shapes are produced as it goes. The shapes comprise the dance.

There is no need for added colour or texture or graduation of tone. The language available is adequate to perform the task.

Dinner and the new bottom line

Sample No.1

Eating a meal brings the pleasure of the food, the tastes, textures, the nourishment provided, the focus for conversation, meeting, all the usual suspects.

It had not occurred before to this writer that all of the above is just process, the journey along the path to the main game, which is the meal reduced to nothing, or as near as nothing that a knife and fork can provide with food.

Sample No.2

It doesn’t matter whose is whose, but the eater is definitely in the making, bringing their take, their interpretation of the meal. Not everything is an artwork, but the extent the meal provides such a scope for variety in its execution is definitely there to be remarked upon as strong.

Sample No.3

We are perhaps accustomed to looking aside at the empty plate as if it presents a venue for shame as if some toilet has taken place. Our eyes are averted to the privacy of the empty plate. Manners argue that they are bad if found looking.

Sample No.4

We eat and as we eat, we arrange and organise. We order and measure. We eke out the meal as if it is the last. Our appetite when we eat lasts forever. or at least until we are full.

It’s exhausting finding opportunities for art practice everywhere. It’s an indulgence. Too many liberties taken does not serve the ultimate goal which is to make the most of opportunities presented.

That being said. the circular plates weave their magic, making the contents, remnants unified again.

A big picture

Wamboin workshop

This is an image of the outside of my Wamboin workshop at night.

The image is a picture, a big picture. A big frame can make a big picture. Once framed, the items within the picture become more compelling, richer, more magical. The bits get conscripted to the whole.

The photo is taken front on, not obliquely. This makes the frame more active, to make that which is contained, stronger, vivid.

A picture is closer to art than an image. An image is what you get mostly, when you shoot stuff on your iPhone. You might get a good photo but that’s not a picture.

Why is art better? It’s more enriching to the soul. It steadies you like an image can’t. It’s affirming, reassuring, deeply satisfying. Those are the experiences we need, to get by.

 It helps here having a big black night frame around the picture. What is contained by that just has to give in.

Ten-shun!

Inside the front door at Wamboin

Next to the front door objects gather to be picked up on the way out or hung when entering. Ease and speed of placement is the key. We are in a transit mode incapable of non transit actions, like, taking your time.

Hung is the action most applied in this place, for its speed and spatial economy. Coats jostle in a crowd of hooks, competing for pole position. Umbrellas don’t need a hook. Their handle inverted makes a hook and they cling like fingers above a precipice do, when only adequate purchase is available.

Sunscreen used to be called blockout, changed its name without notice or permission and sits here with insect repellant, a garden fork and machine oil for the squeaky gate.

Pegs hang in a hook-like crowd, conformists, only because it’s the thing to do round here. They lack rank, hanging out for a wet day.

The minute hand hangs permanently, posing for the subject. The I-pad pencil who normally reserves its attraction to its master, the I-pad, is moonlighting, calling to attention all the objects gathered here.

The pencil registers as an exclamation mark undotted. It’s a spare minute hand for a hurried space.

Like leaves gather round a drain, all these objects are seeking a determination between in and out.

Rupert Murdoch's Life Work

Rupert Murdoch’s life work represents the revenge to the world for setting Australians apart and separated from where they came.

 The message was, set us apart at your peril.

 We will come and overcome you.

 We will shape you as we see fit as we ourselves were shaped by where we went, were sent.

 There is no sense to this, no message profound, only, we will come over and over come you.

 Whatever you think you are, whoever you think you are, from where you think you came, all of this is nothing.

You will be made by the madness from which we were made. You will submit to the will of will, the core of will, the empty middle of will.

Rupert is a machete. We had to clear the bush. We have to clear the scrub of the world. Scrape the top. Scrape the middle. Scrape the core.

Scrape away the vanity of belief.

Scrape away the vestiges of belief.

Scrape and in scraping shape.

Shape to perfection.

We mean you no harm. Rupert is our message to you. Our letter back.

It’s lovely here.

For manifesting media material Murdoch is by this writer made an honorary member of the SSS. He is the only Melbournian in the group.

This blog seeks to determine the edges of SSS’s brief. It is important to stretch those parameters beyond their capacity. It makes a bigger space so you can stretch and relax.

SURRENDER

There is a condition in art, a condition when artists are in such a state of surrender, that they are able to get to places not available through the normal transport systems.

What are the normal transport systems?

Thought is one, planning, a program, time set aside, an idea that really needs to be expressed, discussed, making something for a show.

They’re all very well and get us by when we’re not guided by the state of surrender.

What are some examples of an artist in a state of surrender?

Locally.

Late Tony Tuckson, he was deputy director of the AGNSW. He had integrated twentieth century European innovation. He had immersed himself in Aboriginal culture. When he did his late work, there was nothing to lose.

A bit, not much, of paint on a sheet of 6 x 4 Masonite, smeared as much as painted.

All of Tuckson’s followers are accolites, designers in comparison. Yes, that’s you, sorry.

We none of us can be as loose as that again. The market can’t  take too many adventurers for one. Also, it is not often that artists have so little to lose, to take so little care, to such great effect.

Sidney Nolan had nothing to lose. In love with Sunday Reid, a virtual conscientious objector, with all the guilt that brought with it in 1940. When soldiers were heroes what was he to become? To be worthy in his own mind, but to be bigger in life than his contemporaries? He made war more than he made art. He made war against the prevailing mediocrity. He shaped post nuclear reality.

He and Tony Tuckson synthesised Picasso better that anybody. In fact if you could draw a line through the old ‘evolution’ of art from classicism through impressionism and Cezanne to Cubism, you would get to early Nolan as the pointy end of the arrow. Cubism had collapsed into mannerism through its other practitioners.

There’s Adam Cullen, street wily, had his bait out for ten years before he caught the death he craved. In the process, again, when nothing is at stake, when nothing can be lost, when standards can be flaunted even if they were not entirely understood, it kind of doesn’t matter. Cullen took the utmost care to take so little.

What do we have when nothing really matters? We have what we want.

Hany Armanius thirty years ago was full of hate and fun in equal measure. He was the embodiment of rebellion against art. Everything he did eschewed the values of art and the systems that processed it. Quite quickly though, the world caught on and assimilated his thinking and you really can’t be both in and out at the same time.

There’s a limit for an appetite for end game art, even if that’s what we crave.

It’s hard to live out and maintain a state of surrender. You have to be self destructive, helps. To be at the end of one’s innings with nothing to lose is useful.

Plodders can be winners if they cover their tracks.

And there’s Emily.  She more or less started painting at 80 with a golden flush every hand. She left a universe.

Even if we can’t maintain that state of terminal surrender, we still know the space. We wait for it to emerge and see it straightaway, as if it was the most obvious thing.

You just have to keep the prospect of that space alive, in your mind, and not be too tamed by the demands survival makes on us to be lame.

This state of surrender is a condition to which members of the SSS adhere as a condition of their membership.

Wamboin Postcard, Summer

Works here at Wamboin are jostling with each other and the space to find their rightful place. Some works here have been seen in other Wamboin Postcards, but each work changes with time, in a different space or season, or with new insights not had before. This writer swims with all the changes in an attempt to get closer to the……, closer to making improvements.

Folded Forest in the morning mist

Folded Forest among other works, in the afternoon.

First Coming obliquely

Folded Forest detail

Me 1983 and Dana’s Jeans 1987

A painting surrenders

A painting by this writer painted in 1975 has been hung high in the shed at Wamboin. It can’t be viewed at eye level as we are accustomed or might prefer to view paintings. Being high it is also distant and small. It claims no rank as an eye level displayed work would expect.
The painting is left to establish therefore, relationships with other parts of the building. The work is partly covered with a line just as within the painting other lines cover the ground of the painting. Above the painting, a skylight makes the blue square within the painting another window.
The painting is abstracted by the context. The context is appropriated by the painting.
The slope of lines within the painting reflects the slope of the ceiling.
The dawn light outside carries the same lack of brightness. The opacity of each conceals that which lies hidden behind, outside.
The blue mistiness of each is moody, ominous.

The painting was this writer’s favorite from their show at Watters Gallery in 1976.
At the same time they were in a group show with Michael Buzacott and Harry Georgeson at Gallery A, which Frank Watters, in his expectation for artist loyalty, never forgave them. *

Painting meets site

• The use of ‘them’ is employed in its current context. What denoted plural is now singular and is accompanied by they, to make them gender neutral.

Mostly,

the last gesture, the last brushstroke, the last element of the sculpture added, provides the keystone without which the arch of the composition falls. 

A piece of music which does not end, may as well have not been played. 

A beginning can be be strong, to get you started, or in,  but you’ll get by if the climax works. 

The working end allows you to step out of the transcendent moment, to appraise the experience. The end allows you you look back at something from which you have now become separated. 

The last part is not necessarily a conclusion but does function in a similar way. 

Likewise a joke without a punchline is just a story. 

Ideally, or often, the last mark, the key mark, is concealed and only the most hardened viewer will spot it. 

The last mark, the last gesture, the final element is the move without which the match is declared a stalemate. 

Hair Of the fire

The flames are the hair of the fire.
Both flames and hair play second fiddle to wood and bone. They are accessories to the main game.

Both draw the eye because they move independently from their source, because they move.

What moves is a dance. Movement invites time more than stillness does. To watch movement is to be caught in a flow of time. We love to dance in space but more, we love to dance in time, not just plod slowly to our demise.

Both hair and time do great solos but depend on their source to set the rhythm and the base to keep them grounded.

Both hair and flame grandstand. They both need a wheelbarrow to carry their ego.

Hair has hairspray to dampen its inclination to move. Flames have no flamespray to curb their nature. Flames only ever flicker, agitated, restless, wild.
In our imagination there is world where flames can be permed and parted, combed, tied in a bun.
They are at their best in the fire.
We all come to terms with our limits, because we’re such great negotiators!

Flames are like hair.

Self portrait, held under mobile portal

Self Portrait, Held Under Mobile Portal 2020

We’re all on the phone. We are held by the light, more transfixed here than ever we were by the television or the computer.
We are pinned down by it. Reason has no power to reduce the spell cast. Something here is always more compelling than anything away from here.
This is not home detention or restriction from freedom. The phone is a cuff, leaving one hand to achieve all other activities.
This is an emergency.
We are under siege.
This painting is a warning and a reminder of our predicament. The portal is fake.

This painting is a record of the artist held under that shadow.