Materials and Stories

 

Rosalie Gasgoine

Lantern (detail), recycled retro reflective road signs on plywood 102.6x77cm 1990

Lorraine Connelly-Northey

Possum Skin Cloak, rusted  corrugated iron and wire 119.5x131.5x5cm 2005-2006

What a joy to finally go out in to the world and see some art again.  I ventured both locally and megalopolisly (Melbourne.  And yes, I just made that word up).  Most thrilling of all, was the opportunity to see Found And Gathered, the Rosalie Gasgoine and Lorraine Connelly-Northey exhibition at the Ian Potter Center in Federation Square.

Reflecting on this exhibition, several things come to mind.  The lack of people was eerily evident. The gallery was empty of patrons, which allowed for greater indulgence when spending time with the work.  The other thing that struck me, was the sense of light and space in this exhibition.  It was like the walls were breathing.  There seemed to be so much light and space, that each artwork floated in a sea of white space.  The combination of these two curatorial aspects allowed for a deeper contemplation and appreciation of each artwork on its own, and in relation to the exhibition as a whole.

My greatest admiration for these woman’s artwork, was the repurposing of discarded materials to create, or recreate, stories.While Rosalie creates an aesthetic from her collected objects, her titles often reflect poems or literary references.  Lorraine uses discarded materials associated with European settlement, wire, corrugated iron, pressed metal, and manipulates them in commentary on the relationship between European and indigenous cultures, the traditional stories of her maternal Waradgenrie Country.  

While Rosalies work explores repetition, wide open spaces, country and loneliness, Lorraines work explores her indigenous heritage and traditions, and stories of community and Country.  Both these women weave stories and experiences using industrial materials found in tips and roadside, documenting personal journeys and and a sense of place. It was my absolute pleasure spending time in an empty gallery with both of these remarkable women.

siobhankelleyartist.com

Experience and memory

Bay, acrylic on hand sewn canvas 42x54cm 2021

Intruder, acrylic on hand sewn canvas 153x123cm 2021

I have been pouring (pawing) over two of my Rosalie catalogues in awe of her love of the found object and her wonderful sense of aesthetic.  There is something about Rosalies sensibility in handling weathered and worn enamel, corrugated iron, road signs and wood that excites my imagination. Her work speaks about the experience of landscape in a way that is not literal, and yet it is. It is the experience of finding an object, washed up on a beach or discarded by the side of a road. The experience of walking through sun dappled trees in summer heat or driving through seemingly endless wheat fields, vineyards, cow paddocks. The endless expanse.

It speaks about the use of materials, abandoned when no longer required, left to weather and age in the landscape, often in tips. It talks about salvage and rescue and repurposing before it became a political agenda. It speaks of history made contemporary, and most importantly it speaks about our interaction with  the land.

I have been in adoration of Rosalie since high school, and while she was a huge influence on my work back then, it wasn’t until very recently that one of those pivotal moments occurred and I allowed her influence to once again wash over me. My interpretation of her work has emerged in the form of hand sewn canvas. I have been working on sewn canvas since my final year of undergraduate studies at university. By the third year of my degree, and after having moved out of home for the last two of them, I was pretty well financially ruined. In an attempt to both save money and keep painting, I began to sew together all the off cuts of canvas I had salvaged over the years. That year, I also began sewing paper together to create very large drawings. And now I find myself, once again at the top of that circle. Circle? Well, I guess it’s more like a spiral because it doesn’t end, it moves on. And I once again find myself creating the lush and textural finishes that make playing with paint a pure joy.

It is this that draws me to her work, how playing with such humble materials can evoke such emotion. 

 

Update from the studio

It has been a while, five years in fact, but I have decided to reinvigorate my blogspot, which I am then hoping to attach to my website…when I make the time and effort to sit down and do it. Harder for me is the business side of the self employed artist. Easier is the hiding in the studio, head down, brush in hand. This I could do, aspire to do every day. 

I wanted to share with you a painting I am currently working on. It’s based on a local boat shed that fell in to disrepair. At the beginning of last year I started painting over and cutting up old paintings, then hand sewed them back together to replicate weatherboard. For me the weatherboard represents the Australian landscape, everything from inner city workers cottages, to the country farm house, to the iconic boat sheds that line the Melbourne beaches. There is something about the pantina  piece of wood that intrigues me. It has a history, like everything else. It is also something I like to recreate with paint. There is something cathartic about applying and removing paint from canvas. It’s waiting for each layer to dry that makes me pace the studio impatiently.

The Secret World

 I have always found artists studios an intriguing and wonderous space.  I have always considered it a priveldge to enter another artists studio as it provides a glimpse in to the workings of another persons mind.  Artists studios are  filled with finished works, works in progress, abandoned work and those that are not working at all.  Visual refereces adorn walls and vie for space among the finished and incomplete pieces.  Sketches, marquettes, photographs, invitations and images of other artists work who inspire and nourish provide insight into potential and unrealised dreams.

I love the artistic language.  I love to hear artists speak about their work and their working methods with such confidence and clarity about the drive, the process and the realisation of completed work.  Whether it - in their opinion - achieved the original vision, fell short or exceeded expectation.  It is fascinating to hear them speak about the life experiences that inspire them and the processes of  reinterpreting and reinventing to achieve a completed work.

I love watching artists at work in their studios, watching the decisions that are made, the way materials are manipulated and applied,  the way tools are used to mark, carve, administer and smooth.  I love the artistic process and the extremes of emotions from the endless beating and berating in those long, dark, lonely hours when nothing seems possible (maybe not that part quite so much), to the sheer joy of the 'Aha' and the all over glow of success - how ever that may be defined.

 The artists studio is like entering a secret world.  Here is a small glimpse of mine.

In the studio

 Solitude, oil on canvas 120x120cm

Currently untitled (Gratitude/ Attitude), oil on canvas 120x120cm

It has been a while and there has been plenty happening.  As is evidenced from the two paintings above, I have been busy in the studio.  In another first for this year, this is the first time I have gone back in to the studio and painted landscapes from a combination of photographs and memory.  Obviously I have painted landscapes before.  I hardly think I could refer to myself as a landscape artist and not paint a landscape, but it has been ten years since I painted a horizon line or a sky in the studio.  When I returned to study a post graduate degree some...eleven(?) years ago It was all about movement and horizon.  I painted from photographs, or 'prints' as they were referred to and I observed colour and light.  Then in my first year of post graduate study my lecturer said to me 'I think you need to go outside and paint', and so I did.  (Have I mentioned this dialogue before?)  It was not until the masterclass with Euan MacLeod and he mentioned that he painted landscapes in the studio from photographs and memory that it actually occurred to me that this was a plausible method of painting.  Is that strange?  I also heard an interview with Amanda Penrose Hart, whose work appears so instant and lush and rich that it seems unimaginable she would spend more than half an hour applying paint to canvas or board, say that she had spent a year on one painting.  

Armed with all this information, several tubes of oil paint, a few old canvases and a couple of coastal photos that I took, I set forth to conquer the photographic landscape.  And do you know something?  I have actually been have fun!  I enjoy the play of paint, the experimentation, making a mark and then wiping it away again.  I have not become a slave to the image, which I thought I would having done so in every other painting I have copied from print, rather I use the image as a rough guide to colour, light and movement until the painting takes a life of its own and the image become irrelevant.  Essentially, the application of paint itself is all about line, depth, perspective, colour, light and tone, the language of art.

I am going to enter the top painting 'Solitude' in The Mission to Seafarers Victoria annual maritime art awards, The ANL Art Prize.  This painting is about not only those who spend months alone at sea, but the ones they leave on land.  Suitably melancholy.

The Blues

 

The Channel, acrylic on paper 21x15cm

 

The blues

 

At Anchor, acrylic on canvas 25x20cm

I am back in Port Hedland for two weeks of winter.  It has been winter, it rained three days in a row.  And it was cold.  I have been sitting at Cemetery Beach painting the ships as they journey in and out of the harbor, and those at anchor.  The challenges I have been faced with are numerous.  I have noticed how quickly the tide changes (I was nearly swamped on two occasions), how quickly the sun heats up in the morning, and how quickly it moves through the sky.  Light and tides changes more rapidly in winter here than at home on the peninsula.  Acrylic paint dries out in the pallet before it is applied to the canvas.

The other notable difference between Port Phillip Bay and the Indian Ocean is the colour of the water.  The bay is a variations of greens, turquiose and naples yellow.  The ocean is blue, cerulean, cobalt, ultramarine, phthalo or midnight depending on the intensity of the clouds, position of the sun and the flow of the tide.  Of course sometimes, in the afternoon when the sun is in the north, the ocean becomes as reflective as a mirror and emits an almost pure white, which you can tan yourself by.  I should know, I sat there long enough to turn a delicate shade of pink.

I think we are all conscious of the subtleties of the environment that surrounds us, but it is not until experiencing completely disparate environment that those subtleties are truly brought to light.  It has been a pleasure to finally be able to sit in this intense and desolate landscape and paint the ocean that has become so familiar to me over the past five years. I feel this is a very winter specific exercise for Port Hedland, as the thought of spending two hours painting in unrelenting sunshine over the summer does not excite me, but I do think next time I am here I will continue my studies of the Pilbaras light and colours with the intention of creating larger paintings in the relative comfort of my studio.

Masterclass

http://niagaragalleries.com.au/artist/euan-macleod

 Portsea, acrylic on canvas paper 21x30cm

 Queenscliff, acrylic on canvas paper 21x30cm

Queenscliff, acrylic on canvas paper 15x21cm

I am wondering how many adjectives I can use to describe the en plein air master class with Euan Macleod at Police Point last Tuesday.  Inspirational, broadening, beneficial, constructive, uplifting.  Unlike a previous en plein air workshop that I had attended through the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, that left me feeling lousy and debilitated, Euan actually liked my work and encouraged me to continue.

In the past two months I had set myself a number of goals to experiment with, the first being time.  I have been attempting, since February, to paint more immediately.  My tendency, I believe, is to over paint an image to the point where it looses the lovely fresh, spontaneous marks of paint on canvas that is achieved in the first few minuets of a painting.  The second was to try painting on different coloured grounds, rather than white to see what happened to colour and light.

With these things in mind I set out for Police Point with a purpose and questions.  Fortunately I met Euan at the opening of 'Country and Western, the landscape re-imagined'.  This was helpful because it broke that awful barrier of awe, which creates a sense of unworthiness on the admirers part.  I spoke to him about the masterclass and he told me to bring some other work with me.

Arriving at Police Point, I had a confidence and sense of purpose that usually alludes me on these type of occasions.  As a result I was able to talk to Euan about my work and received some encouraging feedback.  I brought with me some of the small plein air paintings I had completed in Sorrento while my daughter learned to sail.  I explained that I was concerned about the amount of time I was spending on these paintings and showed him a few that were done in fifteen minuets.  He told me the longer paintings were as good as the quick ones and not to be concerned about the time spent on them, rather try to make a painting that works.  He also thought scale was not an issue.  Most of my plein air paintings are quite small, I usually sit and paint them in my lap.  He told me to do what feels right, to experiment and enjoy the process, which I do.  

Then we discussed the grounds.  He told me he usually cleans his oil brushes on a clean canvas, rather than trying to wash it, resulting in a grey ground on which to start.  I have experimented with several colours and read about the appropriate ground colours for the various landscapes.  From experience and observation I have found that using a lighter yellow brings a peninsula autumn to life.

Euan also observed, which I had never really considered before, that all of my horizon lines are centre in my work.  It actually made me laugh when I looked at all of my work.  "It's what I do, I am not even conscious of it, I start by dividing a canvas in two and painting a sky and a ground."  He suggested mixing this up a little and then added, "Maybe you don't need too".

The final thing we discussed was my skies.  I have spent the majority of my plein air life painting water, the sky is usually something of an after thought and something I have not given much time or thought to.  I usually throw down a bit of blue and a bit of white and whalla...sky!  Then I stumbled across Amanda Penrose Hart.  Oh my goodness, sky!  Amanda paints moody, gutsy, atmospheric skies that dominate the landscape.  They are thick and rich and edible. 

That twenty minuet conversation with Euan created in me a desire to paint and paint and paint, something that had alluded me for so long.  From this conversation I made a decision to listen to my intuition, to play and experiment and have fun and not worry.  I have some boards I am preparing to take outside and paint, possibly in oil.  Everyday I go outside now I am observing the sky, its colours and shapes.  I paint it in my mind, and then I observe the colours and shapes of the land and how they contrast against the enormity of the sky.

I am hooked, once again on painting the land, the skies, the sea and the emotion of my part of the world.

http://niagaragalleries.com.au/artist/euan-macleod

http://kingstreetarchives.com.au/artists/amanda-penrose-hart/

http://mprg.mornpen.vic.gov.au/EXHIBITIONS/Country_Western