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.