UFFs

Unidentified Flying Friends

 

We can discuss UFOs or UAPs now without being conspiratorial.

The SSS (Sydney School of Sculpture) brief has a wide brief and is able to entertain notions outside sculpture .

We sculptors are equipped to grapple with the uncertainty of UFOs, more than other disciplines.

A condition of excellence for sculpture is that it hasn’t been seen before and that it presents itself in space cohesively. At its best sculpture is a UAP.

My thinking about sculpture qualifies me to speculate on these other alien activities as being not that different from our own.

We can understand on observing the behaviour of these aircraft or spacecraft, that they are far in advance of our technical and probably social capacity.

“It’s official. Science and the military confirm the presence of alien activity throughout the world!”

Such is the scope of these craft and their pilots, that they far exceed the most advanced human science.

They ‘re so beyond a threat as to make the idea of military power, an absurd notion.

Being that these craft are more advanced we should also understand by extension that the pilots or passengers will be more advanced in every way.

They will understand, for example that we are messing up our environment, that we are developing technologies over which we have no control or understanding.

These aliens have shown they are benign and have no notion of conquering us or defeating us even if we might go there by default as a response to their presence here.

These aliens have already shown themselves to be on our side, by keeping us in the relative dark, of their existence.

These aliens, we might call them ‘friends’, have shown themselves to be so far advanced as to be loving and caring for us, and even protecting us from ourselves.

These ‘friends’ are so advanced that they will interfere in our determination to destroy ourselves. So technically advanced are they, that they will redirect carelessly flung missiles away from nuclear reactors.

They will apply their technical superiority to cooling the ice in Antarctica that has been allowed to warm for too long.

We are finally ready, collectively, to acknowledge the presence of UAP’s as we have never been before.

Finally!

We are ready because we are not immediately compelled to fight them as if they are determined to defeat us, and ‘take’ what we have, (taken already).

We are ready to confirm the reality of these life forms because we need to be. In the absence of the old guiding lights, we are ready for new illuminations.

Not only do ‘UFF’s have extraordinary technical and scientific knowledge they also speak English and read blogs.

Hello, and welcome!

Swearing Notes

Plein Air Sculpture 2020 Painted timber c. 90cm x 90cm x 160cm

There’s no grounds for speculation on swearing. Ironically, the interrogation of swearing is taboo. Any interrogation of swearing will be perceived as uncool.

Swearing is king. It is part of the woke upgrade. There is a universal endorsement of swearing, which is trans-cultural, trans-racial, trans-continental. Watch any film made anywhere in the world in the last ten years and swearing is an important tool employed in communication, even in the gentler cultures of South-East Asia. There’s just five or six words, available in all languages. Each word relates to body functions that occur as far from the brain as you can get. The words refer to reproduction and the tools employed for reproduction. They refer to human waste in both solid and liquid form. Strangely both birth and death offer no prospects for strong language, even though both conditions might offer scope for an equivalent strength. I guess they’re not body parts enough.

Everyone is on the swearing bus. We were collectively, universally, in the need for release, given the collapse of old world certainty, apparently.

It’s not that I don’t swear. I swear as a bodily response to shock, mainly, and it works really well, like a shock absorber works. I immediately feel better after swearing, good medicine wisely used.

For me though, day to day employment of strong language is lazy. Minute to minute swearing is like watching a crowd of high vis workers clocking on or off, assembled together. At a certain point high viz is no viz. It’s better to find scope for high viz in the the usual rainbow spectrum.

Please see attached image.

We all breathe and swear and swear and breathe, to get by though.

I came back to Sydney as a fourteen year old, from five years in Europe and England. On my first day at school, I had the usual first day at a new school anxiety, but all the boys were swearing as they had not done in England. It hurt my Englished ears and caused a pain I was required to use to make myself strong. ‘Toughen up’ was what was implied.

Thanks, but no. I will make my own way, find a strength somewhere else.

I will never forget. The boy next to me in English asked me whether I was a deadshit. I see him sometimes still, in Balmain, a retired barrister, doesn’t recognise me. He asked me dead pan. I had no idea what a deadshit was, at the time. It’s gone out of use a bit now, but it’s quite a good word. A deadshit is someone who tries and fails. I believe I said no I wasn’t, but it was only a hunch.

Australians were the first to toughen up in this way. The coming here from England made it necessary to come to terms with the different weather and trees and the other criminals and their enforcers.

It turns out we were scouts on an emerging global condition that required everyone everywhere to toughen up in the same way. We led the swearing way and we are now a world of Australians.

When I was learning about art, I even learnt it at school, you don’t use black to divide colours to make them bright. You need to establish relations between the colours on their own terms. Using black to make colours strong was cheating. Naturally, rules are made to be broken, but as a general rule, I try to make language flow without using black. Even telling the deadshit story crossed the line a bit, the word jumping out on the page like a pimple on an adolescent.

This account of swearing will inevitably find little sympathy, such is the depth to which we have collectively swum.

It was important for me to make an account of the idea. Any idea, good or bad, gives rise to form, which is the task of this blog, to explore.

Plein Air Sculpture 2020 Painted timber c. 90cm x 90cm x 160cm at The Sawmiller’s Sculpture Prize 2021

Background sculpture by Ron Robertson-Swann

Sydney Secondary College Art Show Opening

2nd August, 2022

I’ve known Marissa Zaknich for a very long time. She has been teaching here at the college for longer than I’ve known her. I did not hesitate to say yes when she asked me to open your show. I have written some notes on these two pieces of paper.

At 2pm on Sunday I am writing a piece to read at the exhibition of year 12 art students at what I understand incorrectly to be Leichhardt High School.

I say this in ignorance being that I have failed to keep up with many changes in the world. For example, if I drive through the White Bay intersection, the space cannot be understood, because, while it is made from concrete and steel, it is in a state of flux and defies understanding. An imminent stage of conclusion may appear to offer more substance however, that will be illusory too, because it will be already hinting at a future perceived failure and need for improvement.

I opened this show before, possibly when today’s students were not yet born, when Marissa still had black hair, when I was unimproved, and less able to make the sense I am able to make today.

Between my last opening this show and now, my daughter Agatha opened another show here and would have made much more sense than I do today or did before.

Time moves deliciously around in beautiful circles and we artists are lucky to be able to inscribe those circles in the sand or whatever material comes to hand, or mind.

I think maybe, when I spoke before I would have spoken about the show and what a privilege it is, to begin to be a part of the Art World. The two words, art world, have been disfigured by the actual art world, which is a slippery and dangerous place.

My Art World comes with caps and is in fact a glorious world of opportunities, discoveries, illuminations and rewards. It is a place where ‘life’ provides the best possible medium in which those activities occur. Life was invented to provide a studio to make art.

‘Life’ is a studio.

I think when I spoke before I was not yet fully disillusioned. I still had foolish hopes for myself and for art. I think, if I was eighteen again and heard myself talking today, I would be deaf to my wisdom, and say, this guy is bad, not in a good way.

I remember when I was eighteen, I was probably full of whatever it was that was about to make me a fully entitled prepossessed white male entity and I apologise for that as much as I can , which is sadly not much, as a consequence of the power of that programming.

If I was eighteen though again, despite that disadvantage, I would not hear a word of what I’m saying, or maybe one or two I would hear, which I would apply to suit my fantasy.

I think before, when I opened this show, I would have spoken of glorious light and hope and adventure. I would have wanted to open your hearts, to hear you speak, and I do feel for that optimism still. The reality is though, that darkness brings us more alive. Oppression makes us initially weak but ultimately strong. Culture, new culture, a real voice breaks through cracks laid in concrete laid by master builders, who were well meaning!

The more horrible life is, the more beautiful art becomes. These are, ironically, beautiful times.

At my last opening speech I recited a poem, ‘The Balmain Traffic Poem’, which has been taken down from being installed at White Bay for twenty years.

Agatha and I recently installed ‘Become The Part’ at Camperdown, outside the RPA. It’s another poem, a shorter one, quick to recite, but covers themes explored here today.

Go well dear graduates into the night, to sleep, or stay awake, as you decide.

BECOME THE PART LAUNCH

This speech was delivered for the launch of a new sculpture, Become The Part, which is a collaboration between my Daughter Agatha and myself. The sculpture is outside St. Andrews College, Sydney University, on the corner of Missenden Road and Carillon Avenue, Camperdown.

18 June 2022

Firstly, Agatha and I would like to say what a pleasure it has been to engage with the St Andrews community from our first meeting to today. I would especially like to thank Eleanor Cheetham for her very early enthusiasm for a collaborative work with Agatha and myself. Thanks too to Barbara Flynn, whose early contributions made the machinery turn. The broader college community, led by Wayne Erickson has proceeded to place no obstacles in the path to the realisation of that proposal.

Thank you, St Andrews.

The following statement is a quote from our initial proposal.

“This project will be our first formal collaboration. Our mutual influence and shared lineage will create a fertile ground for the process of making Become the Part. Bound by a common interest in the relationship between the opacity and transparency of poetic language; the formal manifestation of letterforms and an ongoing enquiry into the body’s relationship to the sculptural, Become the Part reflects a moment of cross-generational dialogue and play. Further, engaging with the college community as a father-daughter collaboration has enabled us to create a sense of familial intimacy with the college, and ask challenging and incisive questions of both each other and our commissioner.”

We can look back now from that early overview.

Despite the usual hiccups in executing commissioned works, there has been a smooth transition between first response and final execution. Lee Tunks, as The Man of Steel, has overseen the task of cutting, welding and bringing the parts together onto the site and not leave anything but Agatha’s and my mark. Martyn Rathbone and Marsupial, in the wet, have kept their humour to frame the work to Natalie McEvoy’s, Maria Martinez’ and more recently Phil Black’ FJMT’s landscape vision. Matthew Molder initially and Sam Wolff-Gillings from Spectrum have more broadly overseen all of the above. Douglas Knox from KPH has assured us that no part will tilt or drop or bend. Katrina Dunn-Jones from our team has steered Agatha and I through all the traffic and been there with us to enjoy the progress as it was made. Amanda Rowell from The Commercial Gallery who represents Agatha and Stuart Purves from Australian Galleries who represents me are here today to support their artists as they reliably do. Thank you everybody who has contributed.

***

Agatha can’t be here today. I can’t speak for her. Well, perhaps I can. We are all, at best, only a part of something bigger.

We can’t be anything unless we are buoyed and carried along by a current. A singular voice cannot be sustained.

The fact of the matter is that Agatha and I come from a long line of letter mongerers. We cannot help ourselves. My mother was a world renowned calligrapher and typographer. What we witness over our parent’s shoulders is what we become, for better and worse. We might like to justify what we do with immediate considerations however, mostly, what you get is what you are, we find.

My life personally, as a sculptor is the result of having given myself to the great history of Sydney sculpture over the last century. Collectively identified as The Sydney School of Sculpture, my voice is a small contribution to that history, that voice.

We are at a time when a singular pursuit has been found to be mostly problematic, destructive even in the wider world. From the singular pursuit of profit and gain we have seen the world come to a perilous place. Safe from danger is elsewhere in our thinking. We have to work together.

We are beginning to register the Indigenous voice that shows us how listening can be more productive than speaking. Listening occupies a shared space.

Sydney University is ready to open its arms to the world, not to hide behind its hallowed walls, but be more transparent. The new opening is the lungs through which the university can breathe new air.

The sculpture is more or less free-standing and placed on a corner, at a powerful intersection. The sculpture is framed by the landscaping and the voice of each gives to the other to make both voices audible. The sculpture itself is the product of a conversation between Sydney City Council and St. Andrews College.

The culture of St Andrews specifically, places emphasis on being part of a community. To not be a part is not to be strong and not belong.

From whichever perspective the words can be read, the already large words expand. They are wrought here from molten earth and through the letters you can walk, or rest, or take shelter. The walls of steel blend with the shapes of stone walls of the college, bringing the background forward into the shared space.

That ART as part of PART should find itself to have a final singular dedicated plate in this space is coincidental.

When things come together however, you don’t argue.

Wayne Erickson described the work as a ‘provocative’ sculpture by Agatha and me. The fact of the matter is that we are all in this together, so that whatever mischief or glory ensues, Agatha and I are happy to share.

Thank you.

Become The Part 2022

St. Andrews College, Sydney University

Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 20m x 10m x 3m

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Become The Part Agatha Gothe-Snape and Michael Snape 2022

Nigel Lendon Memorial

These notes are an extended version of the video presentation with my partner Jacqueline Gothe, at Nigel Lendon’s memorial service at the Kambri Cinema, Australian National University on 7th May, 2022

Jacqueline’s and my presence today has been informed by our contracting Covid. While we present ourselves as ghosts, we have not suffered the same fate as Nigel just yet.

We only knew Nigel once we arrived at Wamboin.

The parallel tracks laid by Picasso and Duchamp before the first world war meant that our paths had never crossed, nor would ever, such was the quality of cultural engineering from the early twentieth century.

In the rarefied atmosphere of Wamboin however, those parallel lines were suddenly one line. That separation had been caused by a cultural stigmatism and there was just the one track, the art track, down which we all rambled.

That’s what I thought anyway, but Nigel would not budge. Measured differences would not so quickly be dismantled for social ease.

Nigel was belligerent, but in the most civilised and friendly way. His Adelaidian gentility was well instilled and so many years in education and in his writing, this nature had been well applied.

I first encountered Nigel’s work in 1971, at Watters Gallery. He had erected scaffolding throughout the gallery not as a preparatory activity for further construction for which scaffolding in normally employed. The beginning of it was the end of it. We were left to imagine what might arise from this structural introduction.

I was still a student then. I remember being annoyed by the work and it was only twenty years later, that I appreciated the scaffolding mounted in the gallery made the gallery itself the artwork. The gallery was under imaginary repair as if it was in need of reinvention.

Even if we have asked the question, ‘what is art?’ a multitude of times, the question still needs to be asked every morning. It is the artist’s morning  prayer. It was this determination that was shared, without question.

Nigel had been preparing for his show with Alex Danko at Milani which he sadly missed. He had in his time at Wamboin reinvented himself as a full-time artist. He was doing work which was still dry and as fresh as it had been, still annoyingly devoid of any applied sensuousness.

He mocked the notion of ‘sculptural values’, as if their presence might induce substance automatically.

The jury is out still. The jury is famously in a state of permanent deliberation nowadays. Our task is to keep it there, to keep us alive to possibilities as they emerge, or don’t!

In that spirit and, speaking of parallel lines, I’ve just now had another look at that scaffolding work on the internet. It’s called ‘Structure for a specific site’. It’s not a conceptual work at all. It is a beautifully realised spatial improvisation that doesn’t interrogate the function of the gallery at all. You don’t need to think. You only need to look and be apprehended by it. The gallery is divided and subdivided into a sequence of harmonising shapes and kind of reeks, sorry Nigel, of ‘sculptural values’.

The task for the sculptor traditionally, is to transform the block so that one can’t see the shape from which that block was carved. In this instance Nigel has completely transformed the space of the gallery.

I commend you all who don’t know the work to have a look on his excellent website, built by Axel, nigel.lendon.art.

Yes. That’s actually the website address. It’s like a second coming in that it brings Nigel back to life.

Structure for a Specific Site 1971

Structure for a Specific Site 1971

Structure for a Specific Site 1971

The Background of Friends of The National Art School

I have written these notes in response to Deborah Beck’s invitation to make an account of the early history of FONAS. Deborah Beck is Collections Manager at The National Art School.

The Fight for the Independence of the National Art School (NAS) and the formation of FONAS (Friends of the National Art School) 1992-1996.

Michael Snape April 2022.

It is over twenty-five years since the art school achieved independence from TAFE. These events took place in 1995 and directly led to the independent art school that now stands in 2022 as The National Art School (NAS). It doesn’t seem that long ago because nothing much changes in 26 years, no matter how compelling technological and political changes may be. We can only hope that the changes made then, were so deeply rooted that mischief cannot come again to undermine the strength and independence of the school.   

1995 saw the beginning of the implementation of Competency Based Training (CBT) in the Department of Technical and Further Education (TAFE). As part of TAFE the art school was subjected to this curriculum reform.

CBT broke down the teaching of art into discrete units which the teachers ‘knew’ and which the students ‘learnt’. With the accruing of these units of knowledge, the students would then have the necessary tools to make art. That may be the case in a technical school, but this was East Sydney Tech, aka ‘The National Art School’. It was different here.

The approach of the TAFE reformers showed their ignorance of a different culture which had been in place at the art school for generations and had been effective and did not need to be reformed. The culture involved the student being ‘immersed’ in the school culture to find their place and voice within that tradition. Being scant of traditions here in Australia, the artists and art students decided what had accrued needed to be protected at all costs.

What was intrinsic to the culture at the school was the voice of the part-timer, the practising artist, who came directly from their studio into the art school to share their knowledge and experience. This was the strength of the culture, the sharing of lived experience between artist and art student in a studio context.

Making art could not be made out of a set of ‘learning units’, instead it is a way of seeing and being. The role of the full time staff was to facilitate and create the environment in which that process was fostered.

The National Art School had always imagined itself as a separate entity from TAFE, with its own history and philosophy. With these proposed initiatives from TAFE Head Office seeking to undermine that history, immediate action was required to enforce that identity formally and forcefully.

Strangely the voice of resistance to these reforms was so low, nobody heard what was happening at the school. It was critical that the wider arts community understood that this tradition was under threat.

To that end, I took news of these changes at the art school to the broader art world. Most of these people had been to the school or had long-standing associations with it. They included the most respected artists, gallery directors and critics at the time. They signed a petition, ‘Public Notice, the extent of the threat to this valued part of our culture’*. Their response was immediate and strong.

This backing ultimately provided the support to a group of part-time teachers, students and one full-time teacher and we formed Friends of The National Art School. We had found our voice.

Initially the group constituted Geoff Ireland and me, with sculpture students Hopi Steiner, Megan Hewitt and painting student Emma Walker. When Ron Robertson–Swann joined with Jacques DelaRuelle and John Peart we officially formed FONAS, with John Peart being the first president. Kevin Norton, Peter Godwin, Liz Cummings, Richard Goodwin, also joined the group.

(From left) Megan Hewitt, Hopi Steiner, Michael Snape, Emma Walker, Bernadette Boscacci and Gria Shead 1995

FONAS was formally instituted and would become what it remains today.

Our aims were consolidated in the attached statement.**

Being employees of TAFE, the full time teaching staff were not able to speak out against these reforms, with one exception, who was Head of Sculpture, Geoff Ireland. It was the Sculpture Department in fact, who were initially, the strong voice.

The Sculpture Department had enjoyed a proud continuous history of sculptural thinking over the twentieth century. From Bertrand McKennel, Raynor Hoff, Jean Broom-Norton, Lyndon Dadswell, through to Ian McKay, Ron Robertson-Swann, Jan King and Clara Harli, the school had a firm foundation of sculptural thinking that refused to be undone by short term thinking from outside.

FONAS strength grew from this history within the sculpture department to hold the arguments, to bring about change. It was the voice of this history that made the voices loud.

A demonstration by students and staff took place at Parliament House in February, 1995. It was here that the FONAS committee met with the then leader of the state opposition, Bob Carr. At that meeting he made a commitment to make the art school independent from TAFE, should he win the election, which he duly did, on both counts.

Following these events, the struggle was not won, but the weight of argument had shifted. The intervening years have passed to produce the current school, which in 1996 would have been perceived as a most fanciful outcome.  

Michael Snape Personal Reflections and Reservations:

With the new independent art school, the structures of the old school were abandoned and the full-timer took the power the part-timer previously had. Where the strength of the part-timer had been initially argued by FONAS, their role in the new school was weakened. They became known as ‘sessional’ staff, which is a way of silencing those artists and facilitating a precarious relationship between the institution, the artist and the student. They were no longer part of the continuum, part of the culture of the school in the way they had been that was so successful previously. Sessional staff would appear briefly within a set period of time and then leave until another ‘session’ became available.

I was perceived by some of my FONAS colleagues to be an ‘incurable revolutionary’. I continued to be outspoken about FONAS members accepting tenured employment in the new school when I assumed our commitment to the school had been more altruistic. I was also not convinced about the choice of the first director of the school, who ultimately had a short tenure.

The school’s vision was to accrue status and respectability through University equivalence, which I still believe is anathema to art. From my perspective making art has never been an academic activity conferred through undergraduate, post-graduate and research degrees. These are bourgeois aspirations designed to protect the parents of children who might otherwise be devoured by a life in thankless art without a life jacket.

The traditions we had sought to protect ultimately have been eroded by the employment of graduates from university art education and aligning with University practices. The urge to be ‘contemporary’ is not long sighted.

Success is fabulous but usually comes before a fall. I do not wish this but one should be wary.

Philip Cox’ show

Philip Cox Paintings at Simon Chan

Architects imagine themselves custodians of ‘the mother of all arts’. Very few architects dare to apply their thinking outside their chosen discipline. 

A degree of confidence, a calling, will drive results to a degree however, without sufficient experience in handling material, no cohesive visual language will emerge with that intent.

In viewing Philip Cox’s paintings, the viewer is immediately struck by the landscapes themselves but also the way in which those landscapes are viewed, experienced and felt by the artist. 

A painting represents the way in which the experience of looking at a landscape is ‘synthesised’. 

The paintings employ observation which is wrought gesturally. Subject is not spelt out or illustrated. 

The use of gesture allows the artist to be immersed, to be at one, to have surrendered to the landscape as an insider. They are not trying to own it by naming it as their colonising aunts and uncles may have done. 

Philip Cox is not owning this land by painting it. He is listening to it and feeling it.  It is cold or hot, still and breezy. If it is not filled with birdsong one can at least hear the leaves rustling, the distant waves thumping the sand.  

All art stands for what it has achieved. It also acts as a promise for what will follow while the artist remains alive.

‘’Menindi’

This work is courageously unsightly with its crude blue and red sky and land demarcations. The scratchy vegetation shows the determination of plants to leave an unfavourable impression on the viewer. We are grateful for shade provided. We only wish the ground on which we lay brought some pleasure from shelter provided..

The paintings in this exhibition are modestly scaled and are painted on paper. Modest ambition mostly proves to be the most productive however, these paintings provide the scope for a hand and wrist gesture. Scaled up they would give scope to what the arm and the body might bring to the discussion in terms of ‘embodying’ the landscape and I look forward to seeing the way in which those actions are employed, perhaps.

The works in this exhibition are an account of the experience of being in the landscape. Also they are an account of the influences of other artists that guided these results. 

There is a history here of trying to understand what it is for us to be here, in this place, pictorially. Any contribution to this discussion is much appreciated. 

‘Thubbul Garden

This painting is more than the description of a place. It shows what it feels like to be in it, to walk through it, to be at one, with it. One senses the artist’s smile.

Painting

Dam 2022 oil on canvas 90 x 60cm

What we see is where we are now and where we have ever been. We bring to this moment all of the other moments that came before.

All of this prior experience gets stuck to what is in front of us. It’s bodily and in no way intellectual. Try and steer. Try to navigate. They are all dead ends compared to this driver.

We are at best, part of the medium with which we work. We are part of material’s plasticity. If paint is wet or dry, thick or thin, red or green, it is the task of the artist to spread paint’s word.

it is not so much that we think with our gut or heart. It’s that we digest with our brain. The brain is a filter that extracts simultaneously the goodness and badness of life and synthesises it.

If our brain is required at all, it is to persuade this governing process not to be interrupted.

Don’t stuff things up, we tell ourselves.

The graffiti gallery

There’s an industrial site in Balmain that has been repurposed as a park and within that park there is a natural gallery space. It has been put aside for graffiti artists and the collection of works here probably represents a survey of local graffiti art quite well. 

They have laid down their hand. ‘This is what we do. This is the sum of our capacity. We live by it and the messaging built within the works stands for what we believe. 

Because there are no distractions here, the work speaks for itself. The work has been tightly curated. There is a secret heirarchy and messaging I cannot decipher, but the works are laid out side by side with an almost military precision with everything in its place. This is a compliant orderly showcase for anarchy. There are signs warning unapproved additions are illegal.

Because there is no significant anarchic population in Balmain, the ‘gallery’ reading is amplified. The application of a painted ground unites all the works. Each piece reads as a visualised breakdance. It’s as much a show as an exhibition. It’s worth writing up here. A big effort deserves acknowledgement especially when it brings pleasure. This writing about it will increase audience. That is writing’s purpose.

Life is Beautiful

What is it, or more importantly, where is it, if this painting is a ‘landscape’? It has to describe somewhere, or everywhere, or account for a condition of landscape. If it is not made of land and trees and rock and sky in particular order to make sense, then how is it a ‘landscape’? Can one accurately, pictorially account for a smell or a sound of landscape? Can a ‘landscape’ be what it feels like, to be in it? ‘Painting’ the landscape may be, getting the landscape off and out of you. To return inside from having been outside, to be hot and sweaty and dirty, to have been bitten and swarmed, scratched, exhausted, painting may be the shower you take to cleanse yourself from it, to eradicate it. You take the shower to make the paint flow.

This landscape here is a curse. The painting of it breaks the curse. To catch it is to capture it, to reduce, to tame its power. It’s a strong landscape. You need a new potion every time to tackle it. Every potion has a use by date of yesterday. Every painting is a potion. No number of boosters will protect you.

To those accustomed to being here, to live here, to be at one with it, the landscape is mother. By giving the landscape respect, to care for the landscape, the landscape returns the favour and cares back.

Here at Wamboin, there’s a tiger snake under every rock.

Life is beautiful.

Potion 1 120 cm x 180 cm oil on canvas 2021

Mush v taut

It doesn’t really matter where or how you start. There can be no good beginning. With any beginning there is room for failure, all the failure in the world. 

There is room for failure in the middle. Form cannot arise out of no catastrophe. Mistakes in the beginning and the middle do not exist. 

There is nothing you can retreat from having begun and middled.

The canvas is blank from very near the end and everything is still wide open. 

For all of that though, the conclusion gives form to everything that came before and without the end being succinct, everything else is mush. 

Mush is opposite taut and there is nothing, no structure without taut. 

Painting as a verb

You’d think a painting

Would be that place where the paint landed, was spread, brushed, but that is not necessarily the case.

That place may lie elsewhere.

 You might think that a painting is where colours and shapes could be organised according to intent or intuition or accident.

Maybe not.

 What if the painting took place elsewhere, where the paint was still separated from other colours, still held inside its tubes in which the manufacturers had pumped it?

What if the tubes of paint lay side by side on the painter’s table, each tube waiting to be identified as ‘the one’, waiting for its lid to be unscrewed?

What if all the lids had been taken off? All the tubes are lying side by side each waiting to be chosen as ‘the one’? The paint is still moist, wet, ready to be squeezed, expressed. They are all waiting with baited breath. 

What if in waiting, with the artist not having made their choice, the opened tubes allow the paint inside to harden with less capacity to be squeezed to the artist’s intent? In that case when the hole size is reduced by the paint’s hardening, the paint then requires the artist’s muscle to be employed to persuade the paint out and when muscle is required then all sorts of unnecessary efforts are made which then serves to blunt the artist’s intent?

Where does the painting take place? Perhaps there is no painting as a noun, only painting as a verb and there is never any end to it, only perpetually painting without end. 

The queue

The broken chapter

The Broken Chapter has featured on the blog before. The work was moved today. The sculptures here move around. It is a consequence of seeing opportunities and having a crane and time.

The Broken Chapter

This work is a sculpture by accident. It had been the bottom third, the first chapter in The Book, before the storm blew it over. Because The Broken Chapter is a fragment of The Book, it has not been considered an autonomous work.

The tree which stands next to this work had three limbs torn off in another storm. With The Broken Chapter placed next to the broken tree, new life has been added to both the tree and the sculpture. Each, despite being handicapped, is now complete.

The Broken Chapter

Making an impression

Prints

We would like to make a good impression, a big one if possible. Sometimes though, with a modest mark, only a modest impression can be made. That should not diminish our commitment to finding our voice, where ever, however and whenever it speaks.

Despite devout rinsing of the electric tooth brush after use, it leaves a deposit on the bathroom cabinet every night.

When the brush is placed randomly with the other objects on the cabinet, it leaves random prints.
After a week or so, the prints lay scattered among the other objects. They find room where there is room. They are not decorative in any way, as other prints might be. These prints are carelessly applied like muddy boots inside make and always leave a poor impression.

I have reminded myself to take a little care with my toothbrush and its mark. Every night for the last week or so, I have lined up the toothbrush next to where it had been the previous night. While it may still constitute ‘a mess’, this new order determines that it is at least not random.

I was disappointed however, that on the crowded floor of the bathroom cabinet, there was no scope for social distancing.

Every night the toothbrush would have to peer over the shoulder of its prior placement.

From the folded forest

FF28

The sculptures arrive here at Wamboin. They are initially held on ‘the arena’ until their natural site is determined. FF28 remained connected to The Folded Forest out of which it grew until this new site was found yesterday. It speaks for itself now, rather than on behalf of the group. Its simplicity has a purpose and a clarity. It’s clarity helps to clarify the landscape in which it stands.

FF28

There is not much to it. It is as sparse as the landscape. The variability of light, sunlight and shadow bring a richness the sculpture lacks. There are two sentinels now, at the bottom of the hill, on the rear boundary. The other is Two Chapters from The Book which stands 50 metres away.

FF28 with Two Chapters

Gavel

Gavel 2016

Works benefit from being separated from the land, to accommodate them. The addition of a plinth makes an outdoor room. Steel sculptures corrode from the ground. The concrete serves as a moisture barrier.

Gavel 2016

Some works hold themselves from a distance and from up close. Some works are only legible up close and some works are only legible from a distance. Gavel welcomes us as we arrive at Wamboin. There’s a large welcome party here. The sculptures are always on duty.

Gavel on ‘Prairie’ tinted plinth.

Tinting the concrete warms the natural cool grey of the concrete, helping it to blend with the landscape colour.

All the sculptures have a strong relationship with the horizontal. The plinth allows this aspect to be better expressed. The plinth aids legibility of the work.

3

On Norton Road

There are three objects in this picture. 

Three characters in the play. There are no humans. They are in the background out of sight. 

The three parts have equal value. If it was music and the the three parts instruments, it would be a trio, probably a jazz trio, but not necessarily. Let’s not be distracted by the saxophone! 

This is an unusual dialogue. These objects do not normally share a conversation. They normally exist in separate universes. We can see the plant for example but we do not grasp how it feels, or is, in this life. 

The sign just keeps pointing and promising over and over. All it can do otherwise is fade, or be run over. 

The truck with the door open, is the drummer, the domineering background that keeps a lid on chaos. The truck imagines it to be in control of the wheel affair. 

The picture can tell a story. We can imagine the tales spun by each voice to make the story click. 

It’s not that it’s a lonely place out there, on the road. It’s only that it’s unfamiliar and the relationships ungainly. 

With three objects not moving, it’s a still life and by being still commands our attention so we can concentrate. 

New home

We used to watch television from an armchair. Because of the harmful rays emitted, the tv was always on the other side of the room . The tv technology then, was room compatible. Technology was architecture compatible.

More recently the relationship between the two has broken down.

The mobile phone has changed everything.

Because everyone has one everywhere, we watch the phone in the way we watched tv. Because we carry it, we can move and watch, moving inside and outside at will.

Because the phone is portable, you move.

We still mostly live indoors in buildings but now there is an another door. There’s outdoors, indoors and ‘alldoors’.

Our devices remove the intermediate spaces in our lives as significant. We are all always both out and at home because of them.

Is there an architecture waiting in the wings to accommodate the new door? Do we need to suspend the relationship between home and a building?

Phone is the new home.

The empty panorama

Pocket Pano No.1

Pocket calls, pockets photos, pocket videos. Pocket panos is new. A panorama of emptiness is something else, something to appeal to a minimalist sensibility.

I shouldn’t spoil it though, to give away how this image came about. I can only take credit for having noticed it. I might otherwise have overlooked it as another phone foible.

Pocket Pano No.2

Our phones have a will of their own. Mine though was onto something and produced this too for me to notice. It helped there were precedents in painting that explored similar emptiness, similar structures.

Pocket Pano No,3

The panorama option on the phone presents a breadth of vision only available from scanning the landscape. That one could span an emptiness and derive an equally satisfying richness is a testament to the early modern adage that less is more.

The Pocket Panos employ an aesthetic derived from contemporary practices. Their value here is diminished by being wrought in light on this screen.

The Blood

It can’t be shown here. 

What’s outside the picture can only be imagined. 

There’s blood spilt though, enough of it to pool, to settle, to attract flies. 

No flies have come. There’s a paucity of insects now. Windscreens remain transparent even after a long drive. 

Enough blood to fill the gutters though, is a measure of the severity of the violence that took place. Even rain requires a heavy fall to make the gutters run. Blood to fill the gutters requires mayhem, chaos, anarchy. 

The pooling suggests the violence has passed, the air no longer full of screaming. There’s a sense of relief as if a pressure been released. 

A violence was necessary, unfortunately, to bring this sense of calm. 

The red brings relief too from the unrelenting grey of the asphalt and concrete on my morning walk. 

The blood