Girls can do anything

 On location at Newport Lakes Park, Newport.

Ilona Nelson at he conclusion of her performance piece.

When I was in high school our 'career councillor' gave us stickers that said "Boronia High School girls can do anything".  I was in year ten and it was a time when girls were being encouraged to consider careers in the male dominated trades and continue to study the less popular subjects like science and maths.  Of course I chose none of the above, but it was the beginning of a new attitude towards women and careers.  What the governments, schools and career councillors failed to impart on us however, was that girls can not do everything.  

Speculating from my own view point, I wonder whether this push to place more women on career paths within the workforce resulted in many of us not conceiving until much later in our lives while we pursued progress and promotions.  Then we did marry and had families and returned to work as soon as we possibly could, because hey fellas, us girls can do not only anything, but everything.  Which may be the case for the first years of your child, but eventually the dream of being Wonder Woman Super Mum would hit the invisible wall.  Suddenly, for the first time, compromise and concession lead to confusion about identity and idealism.  Suddenly those bawdy broads who could do anything were thrust back in to their tradition roles of being mother and wife, the very kryptonite we had all been desperate to avoid.  

Which brings me to Newport Lakes Park last week.  My daughter and I participated in a performance piece by local artist Ilona Nelson for her upcoming exhibition 'This Place'.  Ilona's work explores the very reality that most mothers, and artists in particular, encounter when a child's survival depends on you and your art studio is left for the spiders to make cobwebs in.  For the performance piece we were asked to wear silky dressing gowns, reminiscent of the 1950s, and adorn her in items such as texta colour, water, sand, oats feathers, stickers and my daughters favourite, tinned spaghetti which Ella delicately painted over Ilonas arms.

The performance concluded with Ilona collapsing into the grass.  For me, this performance was about the burden of motherhood and all of those surprisingly light and unexpected items that piled upon you only weigh you down.   My daughter, who is now eight, kept asking questions as to why we were wearing these gowns and what we were doing.  Trying to explain to an eight year old why I would rather be painting than looking after her is not an easy thing, and inevitably leads to the other culprit I have not discussed with you today, guilt.

"This Place aims to break the barriers of the white cube, create interactive art in a family friendly space and, perhaps most importantly, prompt honest conversations about the complexities of parenthood".  Art Almanac Dec/Jan 2014-15.

'This Place' is showing at Town Hall Gallery in Hawthorn from January 10 to February 22.

http://www.ilonanelson.com/

What difference does it make?

'Oh The Devil Will Find Work For Idle Hands To Do' 1992 acrylic and cardboard on board.

'I Stole And Then I Lied Just Because You Asked Me To' 1992 acrylic, cardboard and paper on board.

Welcome to my youth and the beginnings of my painting career.  You may recall me telling you about  my love of the graphic and Pop Art?  Well no one spoke to these sensibilities quite like Jasper Johns.  I began painting and drawing American flags and targets the year I decided graphic communication was not the career path for me.  

The titles of these works refer to The Smiths song 'What Difference Does It Make?', the lyrics of which I later scratched in to another canvas with a safety pin.  It caused me so much pain I stuck and icy pole stick to my finger just to finish the work.  Now that is suffering for your art.  Actually not sticking the icy pole stick to my finger would have been closer to suffering for my art.  I was in fact suffering from a broken heart and found solace in wise and upbeat lyrics of The Smiths, and anyone who cares to contradict me surely has not suffered a heart as broken as mine.

These paintings have been photographed ''wrapped in plastic'' (Twin Peaks anyone?)  I love the effect.  They were recently unearthed from the cubby house in the back yard of my parents house.  The same cubby house that at least two brush tail possums have called home for the past past million years.  As far as the possums go, they only tried to eat one painting.  Actually it was the pine wood stretcher they either used as a scratching post or a toothbrush rather than the canvas.  One canvas we found had disintegrated so badly there was barely anything left of it.  The rest of the plastic covered paintings had a pleasant aroma of shellac and possum piss.  A smell that would turn even a true nature enthusiast.

While the rest of my angsty Smiths/ Johns ridden youth were duly photographed before hitting the scrap heap, these two paintings I kept for posterity.  They have since been relocated to the relative safety of the garage, where they are now at the mercy of two hatch backs and my parents driving ability.

Barry R Tape

Another project in the works.  For years I have wanted to photograph barrier tape in the landscape.  I think it appeals to my graphic sensibilities.  I love the bold red and white stripes that dominate their setting.  For several months now I have been scouring the landscape and roadsides for barrier tape.  I would eventually like to print and frame enough worthy images to have and exhibition.  

I am thinking of titling it Barry R Tape and titling the works with human attributes.  I am still working on titles for the above images.  I am thinking Flourish, Jaunty and Lofty.  I think they display a light hearted sense of playfulness and carelessness.  

My children have helped me collect feathers, leaves and beach treasures.  Now the yell "Barrier Tape" every time we drive past some.  I always have a camera in the car and stop when time permits.  Of course the conditions are not always ideal.  The sun is in the wrong place, the sky is so over cast it creates no contrast in the foreground, the ideal position to be standing is in the middle of a freeway, I guess that's why I have taken over 300 photos already. I have culled that to 37, but even they need to be edited again.

I don't know when, where or if this exhibition will ever take place, but I have certainly been having fun 

with Mr Barry R Tape.

Outdoor Studio

Blairgowrie 12x17.5cm acrylic on canvas

Friday 20x25.5cm acrylic on canvas board

Tootgarook 12x17.5cm acrylic on canvas

As is evident, I have been painting outside again.  My studio is like an ice box at present and completely uninspiring.  I have cut and arranged my leaves ready for sewing...ice box.  It is difficult to want to sit and sew on the floor of an ice box.  While it was still winter when I painted these, the days were windless and sunny.  I packed my paints, canvas, cameras and a toy trolley full of spades, rakes and dump trucks, then Charlie and I headed for the beach.  For this reason I have deliberately painted small.  Although Charlie could spend hours digging a hole six times his three year old self, even he has limits.  And I wanted this to be fun, something we could do together.  

I have also decided all of my plein air paintings, more or less, look exactly the same.  Flat, controlled, motionless, rather like my life I fear.  The more astute of you may have detected a variation in style of the above paintings?  As I have mentioned previously Australian Impressionism/ Heidelberg School is one of my favoured styles of painting.  I have stared for hours and hours in admiration at the swift and deliberate marks made by brush and knife that on close inspection are a blur of colour, but when viewed from a distance merge in to a leaf, or a fold in a ladies skirt.  While sitting on the beach, enjoying the windless sunny weather, I have been trying to channel something of a more spontaneous spirit.  I have been thinking of non-representational colour and I have been thinking about something I heard Arthur Boyd say once.  That the colour of the sky is reflected in the land.  I am not sure I am achieving any of these things at present.   The grand plan of course is to eventually paint on a much larger scale, around 50cm square, which is quite a bit more canvas to cover and will require larger brushes.  The hope is that scaling up will allow for something unexpected to happen.

I am excited by the prospect of painting outside on a larger scale (until the actual day arrives and I find my studio much warmer than I previously thought).  Until then I will continue my outdoor studies on the relative safety of a smaller scale. 

Spontaneity and success

works in progress

There is something wonderful about spontaneity in the studio.  Those happy accidents you can not hope to anticipate.  I have had plenty of these moments recently, especially the morning I walked in and discovered I had re-painted five canvases and left them to dry with the intention to continue re-painting them in the following studio session.  Had it been a week?  I remember at the time devoting myself to the re-painting of these canvases that I thought I could do something far more interesting with.  I had a system. Paint, dry, sandpaper, repeat.  Then when I walked in on Friday this whole system seemed entirely ludicrous so I immediately adopted a new system.  Paint, dry, repeat.  What was with the sand paper? So I have been re-painting.  Some of the canvases are for a future painting, the others I am allowing to mature until that spontaneous moment calls for them.  

This moment presented itself recently on an occasion when I least expected it.  I found some sea grass I had collected from the beach several years ago.  I had bound it together with cotton and placed it on a piece of chicken wire.  I took it from the bookshelves and placed it on the small stretcher I made ten years ago.  Behind it I placed a section of shipping chart.  As I looked at it I realised I had finally found the right combination of objects and solved the problem of how to use these small frames that had been moving around my studio for six months.  It all sounds so simple, but I had literally spent those six months trying a variety of objects in various combinations without success.  The simplicity of the act and the solution make the entire venture all the more satisfying.

The joys of a studio.  The nature of my work has changed dramatically thanks to finally having a space of my own to spread out, create a mess...and leave it.  So I look forward to the happy accident that occurs with the three remaining canvases, and I look forward to sharing that moment with you.

Sketches

Frangipani Bali, pencil on paper

Bali, pencil on paper

Ships at Anchor Singapore, pencil on paper

We have recently returned from a holiday to Bali and Singapore, which was obviously fantastic.  What I think we all love about holidays is being in a new location, experiencing different cultures, landscapes, adventures, lifestyles.  But what I love most about going away is the disruption to the everyday routine.  It is finally having the time to sit down and do nothing.  Most of my time in Bali was spent on the day bed reading and drawing.  What a luxury!

I have included a few of my pencil sketches for your perusal.  They are not necessarily the best drawings, they are merely a sample.  I still enjoy the act of sitting and observing.  It requires time and patience, neither of which I have.  Often I find I launch in to a plein air drawing or painting only to discover I haven't the patience required to complete it.  I admire the work of (old school) landscape artists such as Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Arthur Streeton who liberally apply paint to the canvas in a hurried and seemingly careless manner.  Upon close inspection the myriad of impasto coloured dots and blobs playfully entwine one another.  When viewed from a distance, the dots merge together to form a shaded leaf or the sunlight on grass or the shadow on a face.  

While I would love to throw paint across a canvas to capture the energy and vitality of the landscape, I find I more concerned with details, both when I paint and draw.  My lines are controlled and tight rather than loose and fluid.  It is the way I work and that is partly why I gave up on painting plein air.  I will return to it again, maybe in twenty years when my eye sight starts failing me, or when I no longer have time restraints, school pick up, dinner and the like.  Having said that I probably should challenge myself by completing a painting in ten minuets.  I do like that idea.  Might find those small canvas boards and my paint tubes and see what happens.

Sew?

Map, oil and acrylic on sewn canvas, 2005

I have been sewing canvas together since 1994, if not earlier.  It came out of necessity as much as anything.  By the time I was in the second year of my Bachelor of Fine Art degree, I had already spent three years studying graphics/ art straight out of high school. When I finally completed my degree I was not just poor, but in debt.  So I did what all thrifty creatives do and recycled.

I sewed together all the scraps of canvas I had to make them large enough to paint on.  When I say scraps most of them were already quite large, but not the size I wanted.  I often used the seams as divisions in the paintings.  I did one series (if you can call four paintings that) of the seasons in this manner using colour within the sewn panels to depict the variations.

The above is a map I sewed together when I was studying my Masters of Visual Art, some eleven years after the first sewing began.  It was created on pieces of an old painting that I cut up in to panels of 10 x 20cm.  I then painted part of a shipping chart onto each panel individually before placing lines and symbols in a manner that resembled a map. This was the same year I painted and sewed feathers to panels of identical size, although the original painting I cut up was one with washes of  white and pale yellow, which was more sympathetic to the feathers.  Eight years later these small feather paintings   inspired the painting Flock. 

I enjoy sewing, although I have no idea why.  I especially enjoy sewing different materials.  I have a piece I began so many years ago that I can't remember, lets call it the early 2000's, where I sewed the first 100 pages of the Melway (Melbourne street directory) together.  I have another painting  Compare, (100 x 200cm).  It dates back to 1997, and is a slightly abstracted sunset over water.  Behind the paint, sewn and glued together onto the canvas is a Melway map of the Mornington Peninsula, where I live.

I have two more leaves to paint before I begin the arranging and sewing of them.  Of course I have already begun sewing shipping charts together and my next project is to tackle...yes, the Melway again.  It's funny, but until now I hadn't realised how much the map and sewing have existed in my work, and how they continue to inform my decisions.  I guess we pursue the things we love, either consciously or sub-consiously.

Rosalie

'Found', sea charts and cotton 120x120cm (on completion)

"And they went along, and they went along", so the story goes according to Henny Penny, which precisely describes my practice at present, only without the rooster, duck, goose, turkey or fox and none of that sky falling stuff.

I guess my point is that I am happily producing both ideas and art works for the sake of it, with no consideration to theoretical background.  It is very liberating and a little disconcerting.  Does it matter that I have no idea what my work is about?  Not at the moment.  My studio practice, the producing of work and resolution of ideas is of greater importance to me at present than trying to understand any deeper meaning.

I have been looking at the work of Rosalie Gasgoine.  She is most well known for her wall based assemblages made from disused wooden creates and reflective road signs.  Rosalie herself was a collector (hoarder) of found objects or discarded materials, particularly anything that had been exposed to the elements and weathered, something that already had a story and a life embedded in it.  Most of her collections were rescued from the local rubbish tips around Canberra where she lived.  This began in the 1960's before tips became a place of order and cleanliness, when recycling was not a catch-phrase and before the burning and burying of junk.

Rosalie's art works are about the material and the arrangement of the material, not the theory.  Her assemblages speak of mass, repetition, pattern, colour, shape.  Collections of singular objects are arranged to create something larger and evoke the landscape and times past without nostalgia. 

Maybe the sky falling is not such a bad thing, after all it allows you to view life from a different perspective. 

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/galleries/australian/featured-works/gascoigne/

Possibilities

acrylic on paper

I have started a new body of work.  I am painting leaves on paper, water colour style only it's acrylic and much thicker, more like a gouache I guess.  Although the painting requires quite intense periods of concentration, I am enjoying working on a much smaller scale.  I am working on paper 20cmx40cm, which I have ruled into four panels, each containing a painting of a single leaf.  The idea at present is to paint roughly ninety-six individual leaves, cut each panel in to a separate piece and the sew them all together.  Why?  It's a fair question.  I want to present work that examines the notion of collecting and the obsessiveness of the collector.  I believe for the art works that I am proposing regarding the collection, mass is an important element.  I also want a response from the viewer along the lines of 'that is just crazy'.  I want to produce labour intensive works.  And while they are labour intensive as a whole, as an individual each leaf takes me about an hour to paint, which is great when you are time poor in the studio.

The collecting of the leaves has included my children who help me find them on my studio days.  They understand the type of leaf I like to paint, well seven year old Ella does at least, she has found some great leaves.  Three year old Charlie however finds mostly dry leaves that have already lost their lustre.    I tend not to paint his leaves, I prefer them brightly coloured with a waxy, flexible quality to them.

As I mentioned, the plan is to cut each panel and sew them together, but I am beginning to consider other possibilities for display.  Having said that I think I will finish this piece as intended and make another work to be displayed in another manner.

Think

My Pilbara collection January 2014.

I have been working, collecting, sewing, painting and thinking.  I often find thinking a difficult thing to do.  Not the day to day thinking of who does what today, where do I have to be and when, and most importantly, what is for dinner.  No I am talking about deep, contemplative thinking, the kind you do on your own in a quiet space.  Not the kind you do on your feet in a house of noise and chaos.  

Unfortunately my studio days are non consecutive and I find that the things I thought on one day may have disappeared entirely by the next studio visit, only to be rediscovered several days (maybe weeks) later.  The other thing about thinking is that it has to be quality thoughts.  Driving, for example, often provides a quiet time for contemplation, however I find myself 'vaguing out' and thinking about how dry the grass is, or the formation of the clouds, or the colour of the sky.  All very romantic, not very helpful when deciphering Jean Baudrillard's 'The Cultures of Collecting' and how any of it relates to my work...or doesn't.

So rather than over thinking, which is easily done, I opt for the more serene thought pattern of the grass, the clouds and the sky.  Sometimes it is easier to just drift rather than set a course.  Sometimes that is where the best ideas are found.

Studio

Studio desk

Studio shelving with 'Flock'

I am finding this increasingly difficult.  As you may have noticed, but probably didn't, I missed the December edition of my blog.  It was close.  I actually went so far as to open the page, upload an image and begin typing, but found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on what I was typing and eventually gave up.  That said, I have been extremely pro-active in the studio.  Yes, I now have a studio fully set up and equipped and I have to say it is the most wonderful thing to have a space of my own where I can work without distraction, where I can put something down for the day rather than pack it away and mostly wonderfully of all I finally have a place where my mind can wander freely.  I have a place I can switch off and switch over to think about things other than washing and cooking and cleaning and ironing and what everyone is going to eat for lunch.  My studio provides sanctuary, pure indulgent escape, something I have craved for years.

So with my new found freedom an emergence of new ideas has erupted.  I am finding it increasingly interesting the way my ideas are unravelling themselves.  Usually when I start a painting I have a very firm idea of what the finished work will look like.  However, at present I find myself viewing my work from the periphery.  I catch a glimpse, but if I turn to look it vanishes.  I have vague ideas, I have vast collections, I have no idea, I still have vast collections.  I have found my work to be cyclical in that I will pursue one line of inquiry for years until I it runs its course or I run out of momentum.  In this case my last few paintings began a line of inquiry that lead to a logic that required change - of subject matter, of materials, of investigation.

Chance played a wonderfully intervening role in providing me with an idea toyed with but not explored which I began some ten years ago and had since forgotten.  I have found it has taken on a life of its own, yet I only have parts, a glimpse and not the whole picture.  I don't think this is a bad thing, rather I am excited by the possibility of discovery and I am interested to see how the ideas unveil themselves and how the work will progress.  I am in no hurry for the work to be completed, preferring it to take its natural course.  I must say it is a relief after becoming so meticulous about the previous paintings to relax a little and allow the natural flow of creative thought take its course.