Archive for the ‘My Work’ Category
A poor photo of a new painting
Saturday, June 12th, 2010Installation
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010I finished this installation a few weeks back now. It’s been difficult to document; the video above is my best attempt.
It relates to the collage project I did at the beginning of the year. I had the thought as I was making them that I would like to walk round in these spaces. They worked much better as held objects: I think they are interesting from all angles, and have some nice surprises made-in.
I also connect it to the multimedia course I did when I first left school. I was quickly off-put by the lack of animation involved in computer animation, but fascinated by the building blocks. For those unaware, 3D models are made of polygons, of generally four or three sides. Typically nicely put together to give the illusion of rounded surfaces. More interesting to me were the effects you would get from clipping polygons through each other, the unreal effects from single-sided polygons, all sorts of glitchy, dirty, messy stuff, that reminded me of the beautiful, crude 3D we used to see in videogames.
I’m happy with it. I realised near the end that it was going to be dark (though not quite as dark as in the video) inside, which I hadn’t thought about. I spent most of my time carefully choosing the colour, grain, and texture of the pieces in there, all for little result! But, the effect of the light coming in between the cardboard is a wonderful surprise. I always felt I was working out problems in the same way I would for a drawing, and these lines become something like that. To think I spent so much time trying to fill those gaps! This use of the space between things reminds me of what I was doing with my painting, when the installating wasn’t taking up my painting time.
I’ve been drawing, and am about to start painting, from the structure. (Actually, I’ve been working from the collages too). I want to position people inside, and use the space as an illustration of an internal state. That’s the starting point, anyway.
Mostly seagulls
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010The best Saturday
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010Last Saturday the Supreme Court of Victoria had its annual open day. I was a shade disappointed to see a line to enter the building, and frustrated to not be able to get through the metal detectors without beeping. The security may have been in dress-up, like the visitor welcoming judge out the front, because I eventually got through with my camera and my knife.
Inside was fascinating. It was surprising to find many rooms open, and no one round to keep us behaved. My biggest regret of the day is not opening the bar-fridge you see early in the videos above.
After a while we headed to the library. The books make beautiful patterns, and I thought between that, oil paintings of Santa, and a dungeon tour, I’d have plenty to use up the battery of my camera. I was occupied playing with compositions using all the ladders and books on the mezzanine floor, when Erin found me with news of a staircase she found behind a bookshelf. This staircase led to an office, with piles of books, a book binding machine, and a modest wee door. Behind that door was a narrow, stone, spiral staircase.
The video at this point is mostly me being very excited. The further up I went the more excited I got. The staircase provides access to the beautiful dome. Outside, and inside.
(This image was loaned from the Walking Melbourne forum, which is a wonderful place for researching Melbourne’s architecture. This thread has some information on the building.)
The battery gave up as I was trying to open a hatch at the very top—the final inserted photo shows it. I couldn’t get it open, and was too full of excited feelings that I would explode if successful, to try enough. The battery woke back up after we went back down, and you can here me commenting in the video regarding going back up to keep filming. Next year!
There was also a dungeon tour, that we missed. But I think our time was well spent.
Oh, and we also saw the Dachshund UN. It’s better as a comment on the audience, than it is on the UN, and a bit mean, really. But I got some great footage behind the setup. I seem to be anchoring a lot of my compositions to the top of the frame recently.
Outside studio
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010This is old-ish. I probably had a good reason for not uploading it to Youtube.
It’s worth mentioning that my Lost Discarded Abandoned blog is going. In short it’s a repository for things I’ve found, and bought, that seem to have another life attached to them. Most of that comes from a box of family photos I bought from Ebay.
Direction
Saturday, April 24th, 2010
I’ve spent most of this year playing round with sources, styles, and techniques. Worthwhile, but to the extent that I’d gotten so far away from what I like about painting I couldn’t quite remember what that was. There was a lack of catharsis, which was part of why I was experimenting, and part of why I create: it was exercise.
Reading a (rather too Frencherly written) book on Nicolas de Staël—whom I discovered recently via Robert Hughes’ (rather insightfuly written) book on Frank Helmut Auerbach—was the wake-up moment.
Seeing (some) of his paintings, particularly the two paintings above, did what I find most art I really like does, and that is remind me of something inside myself. The artists I most like are the ones I feel I share something with. I am attracted to the way de Staël straddles abstraction and description. All his paintings come from his eye, but he describes what he sees in near-geometric forms. There’s tension, and contradiction in his work that I feel very sympathetic with. But there is also a distance that I want to avoid.