The White Canvas

There was a time when the white canvas totally intimidated me.   I’m pleased to report those days are gone.  But I felt rather better about my initial hesitancy after seeing a program on Russell Drysdale.  Shortly before I acquired my first VCR (if only…) the ABC screened a program dating back to 1966 when Drysdale received a visit from an old pal George Johnston, a writer and journalist who wanted his portrait painted.

I once heard Drysdale described as the artist who ran away from the canvas.  Did he what!!  He would get Johnston into position in a chair and then faff about looking for distractions.  They would go fishing one day, then visit an old mate at the local boozer the next.  I can recall the camera focusing on the near blank canvas regularly. 

After about 2 weeks, Johnston gave up and returned to Sydney convinced his portrait would never be completed.  Drysdale must have made some progress during Johnston's stay because I can remember him saying it was as if Drysdale gone into a trance in front of the canvas.  Some 6 weeks later, Johnston gets the call, “I’ve finished”.

These days the white canvas represents possibilities and I focus on just getting something happening as quickly as possible.  So the next time I walk into the studio I can see I’ve made at least some progress – there is so much psychology involved.  To a point, I let the painting develop a life of its own although I do have a final image in the back of my mind.

A City In Flux

The city of Paris during the reign of Napoleon III underwent massive changes due, in part, to the migration of hordes of rural workers into the city as a result of the industrial revolution.  Artists such a Eduard Manet witnessed these changes and depicted them in their art.  According to a recent Four Corners episode on the ABC, Victoria's population grew by one million in the 10 years to 2016.  I'm not sure if this transformation is the motivation behind the painting below, but it may have been.

The Roar Of The Approaching Night           Oil On Canvas               75 cm x 150 cm

Nowhere is this transformation more evident than in the docklands area on the west side of Melbourne's Spencer Street where an entirely new central business district seems to be evolving housing, so it seems, a new class of the upwardly mobile.

Melbourne's Docklands today

Presumably, recreation for these residents would involve visiting the various restaurants and other attractions of the inner city, or jetting off interstate or overseas, rather than hopping in the car for a picnic in the countryside which, lets face it, would take all day to get there, given the suburban sprawl.

West of Spencer Street viewed from Transport House, 1985

Another motivation for my painting could be my brief and disastrous return to the workforce in 2008, when I discovered the recent trends to toxic working environments to be a reality, not a myth.  Anyway, Melbourne is a city in flux that I have trouble recognising, and this painting is intended to represent my increasing alienation from it.  The title of the painting is a line from the song "Tender Is The Night" by Jackson Browne.

To The Tortured Artist.....Get Over It

The recently departed author/actor Bob Ellis once claimed that artistic talent is not something you are born with, it's grafted onto you by a wound.  As much as I admired Ellis, in this instance I believe he was talking bollocks. 

And why?  Because many people who have suffered injustices (either perceived or actual) respond by inflicting harm on others rather than resorting to art.  The question as to why different people respond in different ways to adverse circumstances is something I wouldn't even contemplate answering.  All I know is that if I'm feeling down about aspects of my past, the last thing I feel like doing is picking up the paint brush.  To me it's logically impossible.

In her book "Big Magic", author Elizabeth Gilbert has some interesting thoughts on the topic of the tortured artist.  Gilbert argues that we must love our art and our art must love us.  "Nature provides the seed, man provides the garden, each is grateful for the other's help."

I have no doubt that some remarkable art has been the product of delving into the depths, but I doubt if the artist was wallowing in it at the time.  To me it's like looking back inside a tunnel from the outside, "yes, it was like that but it's not like that now".  To  me, the work of the tortured artist relies on past issues never being resolved, which begs a question.  What would happen to the art practice if he/she was suddenly at peace?

Gilbert quotes Francis Bacon "The feelings of desperation and unhappiness are more useful to an artist than feelings of contentment, because desperation and unhappiness stretch  your whole sensibility".   That may be the case but I bet Bacon wasn't feeling desperate whilst he painted.  Mark Rothko apparently wanted people to break down and cry in front of his paintings.  Then when he became ill and couldn't work any longer, he committed suicide. 

The price some artists pay for their pain!  Gilbert believes that many young artists today are told that if they want to become creative, they must open up a vein and bleed.  "Trusting in nothing but suffering is a dangerous path.  Suffering has a reputation for killing off artists.  But even when it doesn't kill them, an addiction to pain can sometimes throw artists into such severe mental disorder that they stop working at all."

I particularly like this comment of hers; "I believe our creativity grows like sidewalk weeds out of the cracks between our pathologies - not from the pathologies themselves.  But many people believe it's the other way around."  So I come back to an earlier comment - love who you are and what you do.

Painting And Photography

I still encounter the occasional individual who insists that to be a true landscape painter, one must paint outdoors, en plein air, to use the popular vernacular.  Whilst I accept that painting outdoors can be a useful exercise in that it encourages rapid, spontaneous work due to the ever changing light, en plein air painting only became fashionable in the mid nineteenth century because for the first time it became possible to do so easily.  This was due to three inventions; the paint tube, the foldaway easel and the train.  Suddenly a painter could hop on a train with his/her portable painting kit.

But painting in the studio has certain practical advantages.  It give artists the opportunity to impose their own deliberations on a scene, that is, changes to the composition, decisions on light, the time of day, and how they feel in that scene.

I photographed the scene below at Melbourne's Botanical Gardens in May 2016 and I've had a few friends insist I should paint it.  But for me, there is nothing I could do to enhance this scene as for me it has everything.

This scene has a balanced composition, tranquility, a certain wistfulness, even mystery.  There is nothing in this scene I would want to alter in any way.

The painting below was completed in late 2017.  In the photograph I used as a reference, the sky is completely white.  This gave me the opportunity to play with various lighting effects and to decide on the time and type of day and how I felt looking across the meadow to the trees and beyond.

Recently, a gallery director told me he has far fewer sales when holding a photography show compared to a painting show.  It appears the average patron thinks he or she can achieve the same results with their smart phone.  My response would be to say "OK. lets see you do it".  People just don't understand that taking a successful picture involves more than 'point and shoot'.  It's a matter of education and I really don't know where you would start.

Landscapes and Mindscapes

I have been a great admirer of many 19th Century landscape artists such at the German born Hermann Herzog (1832-1932) who moved to the US in the late 1860's.  This is his "The Old Water Mill", oil on canvas, 140 x 104 cm.

As a painter of moods, Herzog would appear to be amongst the best.  But I'm wondering if he is achieving little more than recording what's there.  Sure, it's likely this work was completed in the studio where he could impose his own deliberations, but there is a question as to how much the artist is revelling of himself in this work.

The Sky's Beginning To Bruise                             Oil On Canvas                                 109 cm x 129 cm

I completed the above painting in 2014, and it's based very loosely on a photo I saw in an encyclopaedia in the 1980's.  The instant I saw that image, it registered with me and I thought "I know this place", or the emotion it evoked.  It was is if I'd been there, even though it's a scene of the Norwegian tundra - a country I've never visited.

Luckily I still had access to that encyclopaedia when I decided to explore the possibilities of that scene a few years ago.  Yes, it's almost appallingly lonely, yet not entirely melancholy as it's a place where you can lose yourself in the enormity of the world we live in.  A place to absorb nature in its purist form - a place to chill out (both literally and metaphorically). 

Conceptual Clap Trap

This piece is called "Between A Cabbage And A Basketball", by Jan Nelson and is included in an exhibition called "Every Brilliant Eye - Australian Art Of The 1990's", currently being held at Melbourne's Federation Square.  Nelson was one of my lecturers at RMIT University when I was studying Fine Art and trying to major in painting during the 90's.  Do you perceive a problem?

In a recent article called "Art For Art's Sake", author Alain De Botton argues that during the 19th Century the "usefulness" of art was called into question for the first time due to industrialization and scientific discovery.  'Those who wished to attack art and its values asked what it really ever achieved, and therefore whether it still deserved the respect it had traditionally enjoyed'.

In response, the artistic community became brittle and defensive and argued that art was too lofty and important to be merely useful.  Art became a cult of "inutility" best loved and accomplished when devoid of purpose.  It was a deeply flawed, even tragic misunderstanding of what art can do for us and it survives to this very day.

A video of 2 guys sawing through surf boards.                                     I can't remember the artist

To lead good lives, we not only need electricity, money and telecommunications, we also need consolation for our griefs, guidance towards wisdom, relief from anxiety and a path to hope and broader horizons.  Art can provide these things.  Art is a very practical tool that can help us live and die well.  "Only under a desperately narrow vision of usefulness could art ever be dismissed as useless."  

I see the artistic community committing self-sabotage with this doctrine of art for art's sake in relation to gaining wider acceptance in the broader community and gaining additional funding from government.  "The phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ was born to defend art from unfair attack, but it ended up fatefully weakening it, blinding us to its real role in society."

From the exhibition "Every Brilliant Eye = Australian Art of the 1990's"

Fairfax Cutting Arts Journalists

Recently, Fairfax announced it was cutting a large number of specialist arts and culture writers in its latest round of job cuts, a move that has drawn criticism from the arts sector.

Available until June 24 is an ABC podcast titled "Off The Page" discussing the implications of the job cuts, not just for arts writers but the arts sector as a whole.  One opinion is that the cuts have little to do with cost savings and instead represent a move to a more populist model for the publisher.  And a warning, you may have to click twice on the link in ABC iview to get the podcast going.

PS, I haven't bought a news paper in years, so perhaps I shouldn't complain?

Time Passages

A plot of crown land with a trig station on top, near the centre of Melbourne, is the setting for a new series of paintings that I will exhibit at Tacit Contemporary Art in August.  The beauty of this location is that it is rarely visited, so it's quiet yet contains 360 degree views of this huge city.

There's incongruity in this location with She-oaks which are normally associated with semi-arid regions thriving only a few kilometers from the Melbourne CBD.

Also visible from this location is the former Willsmere Psychiatric Hospital, now "fashionable" inner city apartments.  The grand facade still looms over the city and is a poignant counter point to the insane apartment development going on in the inner city.

I hope this location, just above the Yarra Boulevard in Kew, never gets developed.  In a world obsessed with productivity, it can be refreshing to stand on this lonely hilltop where status and possessions mean nothing, and where I can contemplate the ambivalent relationship I have with this town - and perhaps with life in general.