THESE NEW PURITANS

Some might consider this jumping the gun just a little but, with Hidden, TNP make an early bid for album of 2010. I don't want to renounce my previous life, sell all my worldly possessions and follow these guys around the world or anything but it's a close call. This music is so unlike anything else being made that it may as well have been beamed in from a parallel dimension.

In approach, if not overall aesthetic, it does bring to mind Construction Time Again era Depeche Mode, with it's incorporation of sampled sounds. At various times one hears chains, swords being drawn from scabbards and, reportedly, an elaborate set up featuring a hammer, cream crackers and a watermelon simulating the sound of a skull being crushed. Three Thousand also sports the same kind of terrifying drone in the background that the alien tripods made in the Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds. The guitars that dominated their superlative debut Beat Pyramid are all but absent. Along with the aforementioned samples, the songs are constructed from an enormous range of drums and percussive instruments, keyboards, the sparingly use of a children's choir and such unlikely rock'n'roll equipment as clarinet, French horn, flugelhorn, trombone and tuba.

Hidden, although challenging, is also as catchy as swine flu. Seven minute plus lead single We Want War glides by like a track a fraction of its length and, like the album overall, sports an arsenal of unlikely hooks that lodge in your head and have you returning to it again and again.

Sure, it might be pretentious and sometimes over-reach in it's ambition but how refreshing is that in the current musical climate?

Play it loud.

While I'm at it, here's my belated list of the ten best from last year.

Wild Beasts- Two Dancers

Dirty Projectors- Bitte Orca

Patrick Wolf- The Bachelor

Handsome Furs- Face Control

Neko Case- Middle Cyclone

The Decemberists- The Hazards of Love

The Flaming Lips- Embryonic

The Church- Untitled #23

Sea Wolf- White Water White Bloom

Bad Veins- Bad Veins

And a special mention of Melbourne's St Helens with Heavy Profession.

Natural Histories

This is the draft of the artist statement I'm writing for the catalogue for my show. Get it into ya...

NATURAL HISTORIES…

As a realist painter I deal in contradiction. I produce images that, ostensibly, portray an objective view of reality- a seemingly concrete environment that one might inhabit and navigate. In truth, this is, of course, an illusion- a trick played in pigment and oil on a flat surface. Further, the scenes depicted are completely synthetic, more often than not constructed of details drawn from multiple sources and vantage points, rather than a single real place that one might actually visit. Hopefully, all these disparate elements are woven together in a fashion that is convincing enough to suspend disbelief in the viewer. In this way a painting can become more than mere reportage- it can allude to something larger and become greater than just the sum of its parts.

This exhibition, my first with Walter Granek and Art at Cyclone, represents a transitional period in my work. The earlier paintings are set in the outdoors, usually rooted in the landscape and concerned with notions of the Romantic and the sublime. The later works are exclusively interiors, all imagined as an expanding vision of some grand, virtual museum. Uniting both bodies of work is an overarching concern with a quality of memento mori, an attempt to prompt in the viewer a moment of existential reflection.

Museums have always been magical, liminal places to me. I have strong memories of visiting, on school excursions, the old museum on Swanston Street (where I first made Phar-Lap’s acquaintance) and of other museums throughout my childhood. Museums are places where objects and creatures, some dangerous or long gone, are removed from their context and can be examined with impunity. And, like painting, museums are also about illusion. They project an air of control and suspended animation yet cannot help but reflect upon the inexorable passing of time.

This new body of work was begun with the White Shark paintings- they, like museums, have been an abiding fascination for as long as I can remember. Indeed, the model for these paintings hangs, with a big toothy grin, in the foyer of The Melbourne Museum. During the course of these first few paintings, I came to realize the versatility of the museum as subject, and its ability to ground and give context to a seemingly unlimited range of concerns. I imagine I will be exploring it for some time to come.

Melbourne Side-Show Please...

I've been meaning to write about Wild Beasts' Two Dancers for some time now. The band have just been announced as one of the acts playing St Jerome's Laneway Festival, here in Melbourne, in January next year. I'm currently crossing every bit of my anatomy that can possibly be crossed that they'll also play a side-show somewhere. I am, after all, too old to be doing with Festivals. Bad sound, over-priced beer and all that sun. These days, of course, they also tend to be full of drugged up Gen Yers in skinny black jeans, wearing pre-faded T-Shirts emblazoned with cultural milestones they are too young to have experienced or places they've never actually been. Call me narrow minded but anyone under thirty is too dense to give the time of day. It's also a delicious irony that the 80's, a time for which I have some affection, are widely lamented as the decade that good taste forgot and yet it seems to me that the vast majority of current yoof cultcha seems to be aping that very decade in some way- whether it's the fashion (those stovepipe jeans and the faux pre-loved Ghostbusters T-Shirts) or, most especially, the music. Mind you, I'm sure a sizeable chunk of Generation Y think that, like, that band Joy Division are, like, really ripping off Interpol... That's if they've even heard of Joy Division. They don't even know they've been born, as some old geezer once said in an add for a certain multi-national burger chain.

Anyway, where was I? Wild Beasts fabulous recent record- which is, of course, heavily influenced by the 80's. See, there is method in my madness, if you just stick with me. The influences here aren't the usual suspects, however, but acts like The Smiths and Orange Juice. This is clever (though it never rubs your face in it), knowing, literate pop music. Sample lyric, from the album opener, The Fun Powder Plot: "This is a booty call/ My boot up your arsehole! This is a Freudian slip/ My slipper in your bits!" Hilarious but also slightly menacing over the burbling synth and and minor key guitar accompaniment. I should also add that the same track brings into play what might be a deal breaker for many- the falsetto of lead vocalist, Hayden Thorpe. I'm generally not a big fan of your squeaky, male vocal and I did find bits of their previous record (debut Limbo Panto) heavy going. Here, he seems to have reigned some of the vocal gymnastics of that first effort. He is also added and abetted by the deeper tones of fellow band-member, Tom Fleming (who provides backing vocals and even lead on a couple of tracks), for the first time.

Two Dancers seethes with lust and violence. "A crude Art/ A bovver boot ballet/ Equally elegant and ugly," runs a line from lead single, Hooting and Howling. While later, in We've Still Got The Taste Dancin' On Our Tongues, "Us kids are cold and cagey/ Rattling around the town/ Scaring the oldies into their dressing gowns/ As the dribbling dogs howl." Sounds like Melbourne on a Friday night- and, damn it, just how I feel about those bloody Gen Yers! This is all accomplished very tunefully and with spare, crystalline production- the nihilism and rage or the more powerful for being carried by such melodic and restrained music.

Every time I buy a CD, I secretly hope it will turn out to be one of those select few that I hold close to my heart- or, at the very least, never tire of hearing. Two Dancers is actually one of those records.

Those Post-Painting Blues

Well, yesterday I finally finished and photographed the last four paintings for my November show. My favourite of these (Four Primates) is pictured above. Although I'll be continuing this particular theme (museums) after the show, when I come to the end of a body of work, I always feel a bit depressed. Not because it's over, exactly- more because, at this point, the paintings are what they are. Whatever shortcomings each painting has seem particularly glaring- as do my own limitations as a painter. I have found that, given time, I'll probably feel more sanguine about most of them but that's not much help now.

Each and every painting is a leap of faith. You begin thinking that each particular work is a fantastic idea, with no thought that it could possibly fail or be less then a master-work. Inevitably, that same painting will arrive at a stage where I find myself thinking, oh, crap, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to pull this off... I've never been a runner but I imagine that getting through this is much like pushing through the pain barrier. I can find myself persisting with something that is never going to work, just because I've invested so much time and effort in it. Sometimes, to move forward, I need to do something fairly radical to the work, make a real mess that I can (hopefully) redeem, or else abandon the painting all-together. Actually someone, I forget who, once said that no painting is ever actually finished, just abandoned. There's probably something in that- but this is all about the technical side of painting. Before I even make it this far, it's amazing that it never seems to cross one's mind that, perhaps, no one will want to buy a painting of, say, a dinosaur or a Wooly Mammoth. That's for worrying about later...

If the opening doesn't go well, these feelings will only be magnified when I wake up the next day. Resilience, I've come to understand, is one of the most important qualities an artist needs to have. It can be very hard to convince yourself that an absence of sales doesn't mean that the work is of no value.

There's still the mundane "finishing" jobs to be done to get ready for the exhibition. I'll clean up the sides of the paintings, attach the picture wire, varnish them or, in the case of the paintings too fresh to varnish, give them a coat of Liquin (a painting medium) to even out the reflective qualities of the surface. Then I'll organise the courier, suddenly be confronted with a house that feels empty without every available space being taken up by a painting and worry about performing adequately at the opening...

The Tyranny of the Gallery System

Sorry about the poor quality of the pictures above- it must have been my hands shaking with barely controlled anger and dismay as I focused and pressed the shutter. This is the kind of professionalism extended to my work by my previous gallery. Scratches on a few paintings and tears or holes in two of them. And this, you understand, is heavy, primed Belgian linen- one really must make a determined effort to put a hole in it. It takes some force and dedication. And, of course, the gallery in question got away with it because, really, what was I going to do? As it was it took me over a month to get the work the gallery still held back. In the end, I only succeeded by threatening to go to the Police and lodge a complaint. All the while the gallery director carried on like he was the injured party and I was being unreasonable.

But here's the rub- what's a painter without a gallery? How else does one find an audience? Musicians are finally breaking the stranglehold of The Man, escaping the poisonous grip of the Labels (with the likes of Radiohead offering their last album for download at whatever you wanted to pay for it) but a visual artist is probably in a more difficult position. I know I wouldn't buy a painting based on seeing a reproduction on-line, without having seen it in the flesh. For the artist, The Gallery is The Man. Ah, the tyranny of the gallery system. A seemingly necessary evil. You need to be good, or lucky enough to get into a reputable gallery and then, when you've achieved that milestone, the standard commission is in excess of 40%, these days. But that's all by the by. My previous gallery was slipshod and inconsistent enough to be bordering on incompetent, the Director a wide-boy pretender more interested in being cool than he was in paintings or building the reputation of the artists in his stable. I'd spend three weeks or more making a painting and he, for his part, would poke a hole in it. Now that's what I call professional practice.

It's a funny old existence, being an artist. You spend around a year, in my case at least, in a room by yourself (well, my cat does keep me company) painting the damn things and then you have to face a room full of people- if you're lucky- for One Night at The Opening. And you're the centre of attention. Parties are my idea of hell and I don't do birthdays because I'd rather chew off my own arm than be the centre of attention at a social gathering. But an opening is Work and to give the paintings a chance one must be available, witty, interesting and informative. Anyone who know me understands this can be a stretch.

I've got an opening coming up in mid-November. New gallery, new Director. I like the new lot. Walter Granek and the guys at Cyclone seem great and are certainly more involved and professional than the money trap in Rankins Lane I was with. Their commission is also considerably below the industry standard. You should come along and watch me perform. If I don't manage to entertain you, there'll be lots of paintings of sharks, snakes, dinosaurs and even a Wooly Mammoth... Now that's entertainment...