Collections

collection bags in progress

I am working on a new artwork.  It involves 21 jars that fit quite neatly in to an old wooden CD stand that became redundent several years ago.  It has been sitting in my studio - stand and empty jars -waiting for that moment of inspiration to hit, which it did when I realised we were spending three weeks of the school holidays in Port Hedland and three weeks equals twenty one days.  So I decided to make a collection bag for everyday that we are away.   

I have also spent quite some time thinking about the stand itself and what to do with that.  I finally decided to cover it in shipping charts of Port Hedland, over which I intend to paint images of knots.  It is quite a personal piece really.  As most of you are aware our family moved to Port Hedland for two years while my husband was training as a marine pilot.  I fell in love with the place, the landscape with its vast flat empty spaces, and the people.  Port Hedland is a community unlike any I have experienced before.  It is physically small with only one supermarket.  Everyone is within a five minuet drive of each other.  Families are largely based on a traditional model where the husband leaves for work every morning and the wife looks after the children and house.  Many morning exercise groups have sprung from a casual chat at drop off time and resulted in a daily workout.  Although this town is predominantly transitory everybody knows someone.  Even now, some two years after leaving, I can still walk into the supermarket and bump in to people I know, quite unlike home where there are five supermarkets and a remote chance of seeing anyone you know.

So the artwork relates to my personal connection to this town.  The shipping charts are the ones that Nath studied in the first weeks of his training and have always been related to him and his career.  The jars will reflect the daily happenings of our three weeks here.  It will reflect the colours, flora and quirks of Hedland. The knots were something I re-learned while I was sailing.  Knots are integral to sailing, even now on the giant Ore tankers, the ships are still tied to the berth.  They remind me of my time in Guides, where I learned to tie knots and make various shelving wracks and wash basin stands when camping.  They also have a literal meaning in 'the ties that bind'.  I still love this town and the people in it.  I love the landscape and the colours of sunrise and sunset, and I love beaches with their reefs and turtles and tiny little treasures.  

I am looking forward to returning to my studio, however to continue working on this latest project.  

Oil

The above are details of the painting I have started in oil based on a series of photos I took at Rye back beach one gloriously sunny, windy day.

There is a lot in that sentence I feel I need to explain.  Oil?  Yes.  Unfortunately I am at a loss to recall how it came that my dear friend Jackie sent me a link to Open Water Paintings by Ran Ortner, a man I have never heard of before.  Even now just looking through them on his website almost makes me want to cry.  They are enormous, immersive paintings of light on white washed water.  They are emotional, compelling living, breathing organisms...okay, maybe that is going a little too far, but they sparked in me a memory of painting waves from surf magazines.  These vast tributes to light and water compelled me to paint my own water paintings again.  But where to begin?

Initially I returned to the original source material, the surf magazine.  My favourite images are those from beneath the water looking up.  I have always loved that view - strictly photographic.  I should confess up front that I have a healthy respect for the sea and the multitudes of creatures that live in it.  I have been fascinated with the underwater world for decades, admiring it from the safety of the couch. When I was younger it was nothing for me to swim out past the breakers of surf beaches.  Now I am comforted just by sitting on sand and painting.  So I decided, I live ten minuets from a surf beach, I should go and take my own photographs and paint from them.  

Oil.  Oil is not acrylic.  Oil is malleable and translucent.  Oil can be painted with the hand or thickly with a brush or palette knife.  Gesture, energy, light, movement.  These are all qualities reflected by water that I just do not believe I can achieve with acrylic, not on a larger scale anyway.  For some time now I have wanted to capture the energy of the land, not merely replicate it.  I think this occurs within the first five minuets of the plein air painting, only I never stop there.  I refine until it looks more like someone has pushed the pause button.  

It has been ten years since I have used oil, and longer since painting waves, and I have to admit it has been a pleasure to reacquaint myself with this old friend.  Should I manage to wrangle something worthy from the oil on canvas, I will be sure to share it with you.

Please check out this website

http://www.ranortner.com/#!/portfolio/paintings//1

The Fraud Police

The Heads 2015, acrylic on linen

In her book 'The Art of Asking or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help', Amanda Palmer describes the Fraud Police.

“The Fraud Police are the imaginary, terrifying force of 'real' grown-ups who you believe - at some subconscious level - are going to come knocking on your door in the middle of the night, saying:
We've been watching you, and we have evidence that you have NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING. You stand accused of the crime of completely winging it, you are guilty of making shit up as you go along, you do not actually deserve your job, we are taking everything away and we are TELLING EVERYBODY.”

Only I do not believe them at some subconscious level, I know they are real.  They are the judges, the board, the critics, the public, the galleries, the curators, every person who looks at my art work and they are all thinking the same thing.  I know this from the volume of 'Unfortunately' letters and emails I receive.

I have just entered this reworked painting of the entrance of Port Phillip Bay known as 'The Heads', in the Paddington Art Prize.  Thus on Thursday when the short list is announced I expect to hear...nothing.  It is true, as stated in the 2015 Entry Terms and Conditions 18. SELECTED APPLICANTS ONLY will be notified, sparing the rest of us the indignity of yet another 'Unfortunately'.

The Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery are facilitating a symposium on this very topic, how do we judge art?  Do the judges of art exhibitions always get it right?  How does it feel to be refused today and can an artist survive outside the mainstream?  Because of course the judging of any work of art; painting, dance, performance, music, film, writing is all based on one persons opinion.  Actually, that's not entirely true.  Most art competitions comprise of three judges, still all with their own prejudices and opinions.  

And then you have to ask yourself, how many times do you have to be rejected before you either start listening or start believing?  I have never had gallery representation, and not from want of trying.  But I have reached a point where I just do not care anymore, and make work for myself, essentially.  I believe I have mentioned before that I refused to enter any competition for a period of many years.  It became pointless.  Now I have a new attitude, to once again throw everything out there and see what sticks.  I have such low expectations of my own work, hence for me the Fraud Police are alive and well and actively patrolling my area.

http://mprg.mornpen.vic.gov.au/EVENTS/How_do_we_judge_art_Success_rejection_scandal

Toorak Village Art Walk

Cove 36x36cm acrylic and cotton on canvas

Inlet 36x36cm acrylic and cotton on canvas

Reef 36x36cm acrylic and cotton on canvas

I have just entered these in the Toorak Village Art Walk, which is not a competition, but an annual event held by the Toorak Village Traders Association.  Artists are invited to submit three artworks to be exhibited in the shop front windows in Toorak Village.  What an opportunity.

The three images I selected are from a series of five I made based on a recent family holiday to Port Douglas.  They are painted strips of canvas, which I have sewn together to evoke a landscape.  Each piece took me roughly a day to sew.  I did this sitting on a cushion on the floor of my icebox (read studio).  My hands were red from cold and I believe I nearly froze to the floor.  By the time I had finished making these, Port Douglas was a distant memory.

The Toorak Village Art Walk will run for four weeks from Monday 19 October until Sunday 15 November.

http://www.toorakvillage.com.au/index.php?page=artwalk 

Spy Sea

Spy Sea 2015 41x21x5.5cm wood, acrylic, glass, plastic and found objects

I have had my work selected for the Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery (ACMD) Acquisitive Art Prize, which responds to the theme Art in Science, Science in Art.  There are a few exciting points related to this information.  Firstly, the work is three dimensional or relief.  It will still be hung on a wall but it is the first time I have ever entered a sculptural work in an art competition.  Secondly, it is a science based art prize.  I have an interest in natural history, geology, cartography and hydrology.  Mostly I feel like I skim the surface without delving into anything of great worth, but this provides a starting point for further research and discoveries.

The statement I wrote for Spy Sea described my fascination with, and exploration of, classification systems, presentation methods of natural history collections and a somewhat romantic notion of the naturalist as a collector, explorer and documenter, scouring the natural world engaged in the pursuit of scientific research.  My husband engaged in his own scientific scouring, discovering the spice rack in the front window of an op shop.  The objects themselves are from my collection found along shorelines from Port Hedland, Merimbula, Portsea and Flinders, hence the name Spy Sea.  They span a twenty year (probably more) period of collecting.

I began placing found objects in glass jars in my third year of bachelor studies, sometime back in the early 90's.  It was also a time when cameras took rolls of film and you had to take them to a shop to be processed.  I took panoramic photographs of landscapes (not on a panoramic setting because the camera back then did not have such a thing), but stood in the one spot and took twenty photographs, that when printed could be placed together, David Hockney style, to reveal the panorama.  In addition I also collected whatever objects were lying on the ground around me.  They might include plastic, wrappers and bottle tops from inner Melbourne, or shells, seaweed and fishing line from the beach suburbs.  These objects were placed in jars, which then included a label observing the date and location.

That is as far a that project went.  I never presented it for assessment or even discussed it with any of my lecturers.  It was the presentation of such items that I was unable to resolve in my own mind (having not discussed it with anyone).  I still own many of the jars, and now their labels look the way I intended them to some time in the early 90's.

I have found my work tends to be cyclical.  Ideas and themes re present themselves a decade (or two) later.  Anyway, I am very excited at having an object based work selected for a science prize and look forward to seeing it on the walls of St Vincent's Hospital.

David Hockney: Place Furtstenberg#1 Paris August 7-9 1985

DaDa

DDavid

Damsel

Ella Kelley 15.5x15.5cm pencil, acrylic, paper and ink on paper

Siobhan Kelley 15.5x15.5 acrylic, pencil, paper on canvas

Charlie Kelley 15.5x15.5 acrylic, pencil and paper on paper

Quite some time back, around March, I asked my sister what she would like for her birthday.  "A painting" was the reply, "A painting by you or Ella or Charlie or all three".  Oh, is that all? So I made the decision the painting would be by all three of us, although I was unsure how to create such a masterpiece.  My original thought was canvas.  Something substantial, something compelling, something worthy of hanging on a wall.  My son wanted to paint a pink and purple unicorn.  He borrowed Ella's pink and purple pillow pet unicorn for kinder.  It travelled to kinder in the front seat of the car.  For whatever reason he became quite fixated on painting the pink and purple unicorn in the front seat of the car.  The months rolled by and we found ourselves in May with only a pink and purple unicorn and little else.  Ella and I could only wonder at what we were going to produce to match Charlie's vision.

It was the school holidays.  I was working on a painting for the onefourfour April theme 'Transform'.  I had already made a painting, a collage of photocopied damselflies and dragonflies in nymph and adult stages pasted on layers of text and acrylic paint to produce a shallow perspective.  I had used these images more than twenty years ago when I was in the second year of my Bachelor of Fine Art studies at university.  Later, I made the decision to repeat the same image on paper but draw the insects instead.  So, when Charlie and Ella arrived in my studio I had squares of paper drawn up, photocopies and paint.  I left them to do the rest.

I have to admit I was surprised at how well the three paintings worked together. The red acts as an anchor for Ella and Charlie's pieces, while the green manages to unite all three paintings.  I had it framed with a teal green mount and a white frame.  When I gave it to my sister she became quite emotional.  I guess that means she thought it wall worthy.

Damsel 70x33cm mixed media 

Chance

Fence Sitter 26.5x60.5cm acrylic and paper on wood

alpaca wool

Chance is a wonderful thing.  I am by habit a creature of routine, but I often wish that I could live with more spontaneity in my life.  I remember a time, long before husbands and children, when I would wake in the morning and simply do what I felt like at that time.  I am quite sure those days will return to me, but for now I am strictly routine.

This is a round-a-bout way of explaining how I came in to possession of the gorgeously warm alpaca caplet - for want of another description - that I now own.  It occurred one afternoon in the playground at school.  There is a half hour time lapse between kinder pick up and the primary school bell, in which time parents with older children assemble around the playground and stare in disbelief at the amount of energy their four year olds still have at the end of the day.  This is where I met Alex.  Both of our boys are in the same kinder room, and as they played on the slide together, it seemed only natural to say hello.  We soon discovered that although we come from vastly different backgrounds (engineering/ art) that we both have a creative soul in common.  Alex knits and creates her own one off pieces,  some of which are for sale in boutique shops in Mount Eliza and Mordialloc.  

It was Alex who suggested that we swap our artistic wares.  We discussed our progress each afteroon in the playground.  She brought her knitting to school pick ups and I showed her the photos I had taken of my days progression.  Our ideas developed and changed, and by the end of the project we were both feeling apprehensive about revealing the work to one another.  It is always difficult when making a work for someone.  They have expectations, you have artistic vision.  There is also a desire for perfection in the work.  I think this is because it not only reflects yourself, but your regard for the other person.  

Needless to say we were both absolutely thrilled with the outcome.  Thanks for the inspiration Alex.

Nostalgia is not a dirty word.

Theme: Dreamworld 

-scape, photographs, paper on paper  6x6" 2015

Theme: Connection

Air Earth acrylic, pen on paper 6x6" 2015

I have become part of a group of twelve female artists titled onefourfour.  The group, (consisting of Sue Beyer, Tracie Grimwood, Julie Keating, Kara Rasmanis, Denise Reichenbach, Michelle Sanger, Sophie Towers, Amanda Van Gils, Irene Wellem, Shona Wilson and myself) has been organised by the very talented and equally lovely Ilona Nelson.  Each month one of the artists nominates a theme.  Everyone then has a month to produce an artwork in any medium based on that theme. According to Ms Nelson, "It is meant to be a fun project to encourage you to experiment and keep working". And it is just that.  I joined the group three months late, after one of the artists withdrew.  This provided me with the overwhelming task of producing three artworks for January - March, (dreamworld, diverge and connection) and then days later I was sent the theme for April (transform).  Thankfully I have been asked to choose the theme for May, which allows me an extra few weeks to plan and make.

Within these guidelines I have set some of my own parameters.  To make each artwork an individual.  Although when I compare the two images above I already feel that I have failed that goal.  They both contain a certain nostalgia.  They both display an atmosphere of space and distance.  They both have a horizon line, and to me they both present what I can only cringingly describe as, an inner peace.  Nostalgia.  

I was accused of committing such a crime in Post Grad.  It was frowned upon by certain members of staff to create anything of nostalgia, remotely nostalgic, or with any sentimentality.  Until  I looked at both images together I had not realised it was lurking.  I am currently working on the next two pieces, both of which are on canvas, one of which I am certain will fall in to the 'N' category again.  And so be it I say.  It will be interesting to see the twelve completed images together and to note the similarities and differences.  Now I am sounding like a post grad student.

http://onefourfour.org/

Creative arty things

Colour matching the Brisbane River

I own a book titled 'I'd Rather Be In The Studio'.  It describes itself as 'The Artist's No-Excuse Guide to Self-Promotion'.  It encourages you to explore chapters such as defining success, organising information, the power of your artists statement, creating a portfolio to impress people and how to amplify your online presence with social media.  As I said, I own this book.  I have even picked it up and opened it.  Hell, I've even read some of it.  It is full of fabulous positive methods of going out there (beyond the studio) and selling your art.  I often read it in bed at night and go to sleep full self confidence, and good vibes full of great ideas.  Then I wake up in the morning and beat (after dropping Ella and Charlie at school, shopping, buying petrol, swimming lessons, cooking, appointments...whatever else takes up my time) a hasty retreat straight back to the studio.  It is sanctuary, safety from the outside world and somewhere I can be in my creative zone, that currently feels more like a beaten up dog kennel than a palatial retreat for an uninterrupted thought process.

So, if you are wondering how the Siobhan Kelley art market is going...umm.  What I have done is finally unpack some canvases that I sent to Port Hedland three years ago and never unpacked.  That was confusing.  I discovered I owned six small square canvases that were completely blank.  Nothing drawn up, still wrapped in the same bubble wrap they left in.  Why do I own these?  Then weeks later I opened my visual diary, which also has not seen the light of day for an eternity, and I laughed out loud.  There was the plans for a painting incorporating six small canvases 'The Tropic of Capricorn', which spans the invisible line on maps through the three states it passes.  Two canvases for each state.  

I had thought I had moved on from the map paintings, but also packaged in these boxes were the beginning of 'Flow', a painting I had intended to enter in the Wynne.  It also consists of six square canvases - slightly larger than the unpainted ones.  This painting depicts a map of each capital city that has a river flowing through it.  The river is painted in pale blue with a darker blue outline and writing.  The idea is to join the rivers to produce one long flowing river.  Each canvas would be hung at different heights, depending on where the river ends and begins on each canvas.  It has been three years since I last touched any of those canvases, and do you know, I still like the painting enough to want to see it completed.  I actually still have a box with four containers of paint that I was using three years ago.  Naturally, most of it has dried up, so I spent an hour yesterday mixing new containers of paint with the thought that I will continue to work on this painting until its completion.  

I do not have it in me to sell art.  I hate selling art, I would rather give it away.  I would much rather be in my studio than any other place on earth...maybe.  I would much rather vacate my brain of all the useless information it has floating in it in order to fill it with deeply contemplated creative arty things.  Do you know something.  I think I will do just that.  Except for the bit about vacating all useless things.  Unfortunately I still need to know when the shoe sales are on.

Sales pitch

East Cape, acrylic on canvas board, 12.5x18cm

Sailors Grave, acrylic on canvas board, 12.5x18cm

Pearl Point, acrylic on canvas board, 12.5x18cm

Where to begin?  My mind is scatty and all over the place.  I have come to the realisation that in order to make more art work I need to make some money.  This is an incredibly difficult thing for me to do.  The thought of knocking on cafe, gallery, real estate and home wares shops makes me feel nervous, self conscious and sick to my stomach.  I dread it and yet it is the only way I can put my paintings out there on mass for the public to see at relatively no expense to myself.  I have been talking to my husband Nathan about this and am considering employing him to be my spokes person, at some considerable expense to myself.

These little landscapes on canvas board are what I am considering selling.  Fortunately this is something I love doing, small plein air paintings.  And the more I paint, the more competent I feel I become.  Just like knocking on doors no doubt.  The above paintings I had the pleasure of making while on a week long holiday at Cape Conran in far east Gippsland.  For two hours a day I sat on a beach and painted and despite some inclement weather, it was the most content I have been on a holiday. 

The idea is to frame these little gems myself and offer a small group to a premises that will allow me to hang them with the hope that if priced correctly, they might sell.  I call this bread and butter.  What I really want to do is paint leaves and feathers by the hundreds, but in order to do so I require materials (canvas), which is costly and as I have no income it makes it difficult to justify buying anything.

I am vaguely working towards an exhibition, which also incurs costs and, in my experience, results in negative sales.  For me art has never been about the money, it has always been about the making.  However it has come to a point where I need to start selling in order to pursue the ideas drifting around in my head.  So for now I guess I continue painting small landscapes, figure out a way to frame them and then...gulp...hit the streets.