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...

Painting Phar-Lap

How To Make A Painting Of A Big Snake.

This is the first of my museum paintings- Museum I (Python) - and below it is the initial study I made. I thought you might find a window onto my process interesting.

I always start with thumb-nail sketches and move through a number of steps before arriving at the final painting. The initial, exploratory pencil-work sometimes becomes quite detailed but is never intended to be seen by anyone. It's all about trying to give shape to whatever idea I am fumbling towards and I usually make a number of these drawings. Vertical and horizontal lines are very carefully considered and placed, sometimes taking the Golden Section into account. Linear perspective also has to be carefully adhered to in order to produce a convincing illusion of depth and space. The python painting is an example of two point perspective- that is, all the horizontal lines, depending on their direction, recede to vanishing points far outside either the left or the right side of the image. When I finally think I have things worked out, I may move on to the final painting or, as has been my habit lately, I might produce a small study in oils first. There are no hard and fast rules about how things proceed- it's a process of refining and distilling elements of the picture to arrive at the clearest statement I can make.

I tend to work on two or three paintings at a time so, although the python was the first of the series I conceived, I was also working on a dinosaur and another shark at the same time. The White Shark paintings are, of course, not really all that separate from these new paintings but I'd started them before the versatility of the museum, as an over-arching motif, had occurred to me- and so I think of them as a separate body of work, despite the shared setting. After my last show (and while I was painting the first shark paintings) I was thinking that all this new work would be in some way, even if only tangentially, related to the sea. I even made another pier painting between sharks, which now somehow feels like a waste of time. It's not a bad painting but, in retrospect, it seems like I wandered down a blind alley. Each painting can take three to six weeks to produce and so a mistake in direction can be costly. These things trend to evolve organically and I wish at times that I could just sit down and contrive an entire body of work ahead of time- you know, decide on the imagery, lay out the themes, work out what might be most likely to sell... For some reason it doesn't really work that way.

All of my paintings are grounded in something real. Sometimes a painting is prompted by something I've seen out in the world (as was the case with this painting) and sometimes I have an idea and have to go looking for the real-world details to flesh it out. It's too difficult to convincingly invent the particulars. The most entertaining examples of this lately (for me personally at least) are the dinosaurs. I have little museum-grade replica... "toys", for want of a more dignified word, that I photograph and then exaggerate in scale for the resulting paintings. Yes reader, buying toy dinosaurs is not only a legitimate thing to do but also a tax deduction. It's like a dream come true.

When it comes to the python painting, the general architecture and the glass display case are based on The Museum of Victoria and appear much as they do in life. At the actual location, however, the dinosaur display in the background features a skeleton while the glass case contains two stuffed pythons and also the skeleton of a third. Basically, I've tweaked and massively simplified things to make a better picture. That is, I've changed things to make a more concise statement, both aesthetically and conceptually. You can probably also spot differences between the study and the final painting. I've tightened the composition and further simplified things. The best example of all this is the doorway behind the snake. In the final version, I made the top of the glass case opaque and also moved the edge of the door further to the left so that it wasn't in conflict with the frame of the display case. Essentially, what I did was eliminate visual clutter.

The model for the shark paintings (a large fibre-glass fellow with an engagingly toothy smile) is also at The Museum of Victoria, incidentally- hanging in a very awkward position in the foyer. I wish the museum hadn't moved to it's present location in Carlton. I hate these shinny new, interactive museums. Give me some crumbling Victorian pile any day. It would be far better for the paintings, if not the edification of the general public...

Open Days And Boganburgers...

The second annual Open House day. Thirty-two significant buildings in Melbourne threw open their doors this year for a host of sticky-beaks (Peggy and myself included) to troop through. Thirty thousand people participated last year and I'm willing to bet there were more this time around. At the first building we lined up to look at (the Russell Place Substation) we were duly informed that the cue was two and a half hours long... Needless to say we went off in search of speedier rubber-necking. I rarely even do anything I like for two and a half hours and cueing is most assuredly not something I enjoy. Being able to wander at will around unfamiliar buildings is something I'v always loved. I have these dreams of living in a house so big that I occasionally stumble upon an entire wing I've previously overlooked.

Apart from the obvious enjoyment to be had in exploring these places, my main motivation was scouting locations for new paintings. Museum-like settings. I took a few reference photos in various places before we ended up at Town Hall. Promising glass cases that I can put various critters in and probably produce a somewhat Hopper-esque painting. Overstuffed chairs in front of all that polished wood and glass. Brought to mind some of his paintings of foyers and anterooms. Peggy dutifully stood in as a figure reference. I'll let that simmer for a while. Paintings need to percolate over time. Eventually those glass cases may end up combined with other elements from disparate locations, synthesised into a painting. Or maybe not. It's an uncertain business in more ways than one.

Earlier in the day, I'd spotted a big John Cattapan in the foyer of the RACV building and in Town Hall I stumbled across paintings by Rick Amor and Louise Hearman. How many of these treasures are tucked away in various nooks and crannies in inner Melbourne? Love the crannies.

After all this investigation, we retired to The Napier Hotel in Fitzroy to split a Boganburger. You are what you eat, a member of the Napier's bar staff once told me. I beg to differ but just look at the the thing! I think Peggy's photo captures its true majesty. It's too big a challenge for one mere mortal. Lettuce, tomato, beetroot, pineapple, a potato-cake, a chicken schnitzel, bacon, an egg and steak. As if this weren't enough, it comes with a side order of potato wedges and a green salad! She canna take any more, Captain!

Home in time for Merlin and final of Masterchef. I was hoping the final pressure test might feature the Boganburger but no such luck...

The Church and Idle Worship

I've become addicted to Steve Kilbey's blog, The Time Being. This is a first for me, not being entirely sympathetic (or sympa-pathetic, as a typical Kilbey pun might have it) with technology and electronic media. The recent Church biography (they come on paper between two sheets of cardboard) No Certainty Attached is usually more my speed than all this newfangled zeros and ones based stuff. For those joining us late, Steve Kilbey is the lead singer of seminal Australian band The Church. The Church were the first band I ever saw live and I suppose I've seen them four or five times over the years. Actually, the only band I've seen live more often is probably Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. The quality of those Church performances varied between ordinary and outstanding, perhaps mirroring the quality of their recorded output- although, in my opinion they're in the middle of a real purple patch at the moment. Their most recent, Untitled #23, is a cracking record.

I love every period of their music- I'm even, probably unreasonably, fond of the maligned Sometime Anywhere, on which Kilbey and, at the time, only other remaining member Marty Wilson Piper got electronic and experimental on our arses. There was, admittedly, a bit of an slump post Starfish, post fame in America, and into the early 90's- but the music they've made since then is some of the best of their career. Layered, mysterious, allusive. Kilbey's lyrics hint at places, characters and situations that remain, tantalisingly, vague and out of reach and the music follows. The songs seem to be set in altered realities, parallel worlds- all given substance by the conviction and seriousness of Kilbey's delivery, his caramel, sung/spoken vocals. I love that they've never become Heritage Rock, trawling around the RSL's endlessly pumping out uninspired versions of Under The Milky Way, The Unguarded Moment and Metropolis, as so easily might have happened.

All of that said, I don't rate the man's paintings...

John Aivide Lindqvist- Handling The Undead

There's quite the buzz, in genre circles at least, around John Aivide Linqvist. His first novel, Let The Right One In, an unconventional vampire tale set, like this book in his native Sweden, became a successful film. Arguably, the reason both the novel and the subsequent film adaptation work so well is their disavowal of Hollywood stereotype. Happily for the morons amongst us there's an English language, Hollywood remake set for a 2010 release. No doubt it will savage the source material, much in the same manner the recent, nasty film version of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend did. For those who haven't seen that particular gem, rabid zombie/vampires don't make me squirm anywhere near as much as the manipulative placing of a pet (in this case a German Shepherd) in mortal peril...

Handling The Undead finds us once again confronting the intrusion of the supernatural into the everyday world of suburban Stockholm. The population are near breaking point as an inexplicable electrical fault surges to a climax along with the paralysing headaches experienced by everyone in the greater Stockholm region. Just when it seems that no one can take any more, the pain disappear and everything returns to normal. Well, almost to normal because anyone recently deceased, whether in a morgue or cemetery, decides to get up again...

The plot follows the travails of a group of characters forced to confront the living dead- or the "Reliving" as they are euphemistically christened. The author uses this unlikely premise- for which the most vague and perfunctory of explanations is eventually offered- to explore the bonds of love, the power the state can exert and religious hysteria, among other things. One can't help but think, however, that any clarification of the central mystery comes at the detriment of the novel over all.

Only referred to as "zombies" in a handful of instances, the Reliving, although genuinely disturbing, remain, for much of the novel, an almost benign presence. The tension is gradually ratcheted up and their true nature is only revealed in the last third of the book. It probably says much about my own foibles that the substantial psychic element of the story (it is discovered that those who spend any time in the company of the Reliving can read each others minds) rubbed me the wrong way. It seems I'm far more able to accept the prospect of our loved ones returning from the grave than I am psychic abilities... Or maybe it's just the mixing of the two that I found awkward.

Handling The Undead (surely it was a missed opportunity to not call the book Handling The Reliving?) is a diverting enough way to spend your time but, ultimately, it isn't as satisfying a read as Let The Right One In. I bet the movie will be great though...

Christos Tsiolkas- The Slap

The Slap feels very much the novel of the moment- particularly if the waiting list at my local library is any indication. This years winner of The Commonwealth Writers Prize and one of the runners up (to Tim Winton's masterful Breath) in the Miles Franklin. Unlike that taut, razor sharp work, however, The Slap sprawls in many directions.

The narrative is peopled with a cast of characters more ethnically diverse than those encountered on an average visit to Preston Markets which is, one suspects, the point- the novel being set in Melbourne's inner north. Thankfully, my weekly, multicultural shop at the markets doesn't come with the weighty dose of inter-racial tension on display in this book.

The Slap is broken into eight chapters, each written from the point of view of a different character, and deals with the aftermath of a backyard barbecue gone wrong. A man slaps a child not his own. The child, admittedly, is a monster, apparently ineptly parented and out of control. The story cleverly has your allegiances shifting back and forth on this pivotal issue. Did the child deserve to be slapped? Should a child ever be struck? Will I ever be able to afford an enormous TV and a house in Northcote?

The Slap is certainly compelling and it took me a while to work out exactly why that was. Eventually I realised that it reads like the script of a racy TV soap- that's what keeps you turning the pages. This is perhaps a good thing because the majority of the characters are so unsympathetic and unlikable that I don't think I'd want to spend time with any of them, outside the pages of a novel. In terms of the prose on display, the Tim Winton book is a useful frame of reference. Breath is elegant and spare where The Slap is at times messy and ragged. It's structure does successfully convey the eight distict voices with great conviction but, paradoxically, some of the best writing is found in the passages that wander off-message. Despite this, it would, however, have been a tighter narrative had it restricted itself to the repercussions of the titular incident, rather than some of the unrelated minutia of the characters lives.

It's a page turner and left me thinking about the issues raised long after finishing but The Slap also left me vaguely unsatisfied- a bit like a High Street Kebab...

Album of the week:

The Phantom Band- "Checkmate Savage."

Checkmate Savage saw the light of day in the UK last November but has only recently secured a local release. The Glaswegian six piece have managed to concoct the most beguiling debut I've heard in a long time. I've been listening to it for a few weeks now and, as the play-count on my ipod testifies, I've given it quite a work out. Sinuous, ringing guitar lines, forceful, sometimes almost tribal, percussion and ominous, vaguely threatening lyrics (sample: "Something nameless/A creeping unrest...") make for an atmospheric and consistently entertaining listen. The music takes in elements of pop, prog, folk, funk and even techno. Obvious highlights among it's nine tracks include Burial Sounds (the source of the quoted lyric) and the singles, The Howling and Folksong Oblivion. The only slightly pedestrian moment comes with track four, the instrumental Crocodile- although it does provide breathing space at that point in proceedings. Hell, even the sleeve art is a trip. Highly recommended.

Painting Ramblings No.1 (An ongoing series...) or Why I Hate Video Art.

I'm not what you would describe a virtuosic painter. Don't misunderstand me, I think I'm a good technician (and getting better all the time) but I'm never going to be one of the Greats. I'm okay with that. Some of the painters I most admire (Smart, Hopper, Amor, for example) aren't the best technical painters either. My approach, while not completely workman-like, is all about getting the job done. The best way I am able and to the best of my ability at any given time. And, despite what the "how-to" manuals might tell you, producing a painting is not a linear process- there are innumerable branching paths along the way and taking any one of them influences the result.

When you get right down to it, what I am aiming for every time I start a painting is the perfect marriage of the plastic elements of painting (the gooey coloured mud that I shift about with a fuzzy stick on fabric) and the concept. No, that's not quite right. That makes the whole thing sound very cut and dried. Just as the actual act of painting can take an infinite variety of forms, this "concept", the idea of the painting, can also be a very nebulous thing. Sometimes it can even be spread across a whole body of work, each painting building on the another or showing different facets of what a painter is trying to say. And while there is certainly such a thing as visual literacy and visual language (one tries not to mumble) if this concept could be articulated in words, there would be no need to pick up a brush in the first place, of course.

So- Idea and Execution. A good painting (and this really applies to any work of art) shouldn't favour one at the expense of the other. The most virtuosic, technical display of painting without the underpinning of some intellectual rigour rarely rises above the level of decoration. While the most laudable or interesting conceptual pretext won't succeed without good technique.

This is why it surprised me to hear comments made by Victoria Lynn, the curator of the current exhibition of video art at The Art Gallery of New South Wales (Double Take:Anne Landa Award for Video and New Media). Not once but twice, in an interview with the ABC's Sunday Arts programme, she declared that the viewer should look past the medium and concentrate on the ideas. I wonder if this is because the medium is so often ugly and half-arsed? Not to mention down right dull. I've seen the odd piece that I don't too much mind- the Bill Viola installation at NGV International, for instance is quite engaging. At least for the first ten minutes- my, it does go on, though, doesn't it? Viola at least has high technical and production values. Many video artists seem to think that if they stick any old crap on a loop that we'll all be falling about ourselves, amazed at their genius...

What I'm getting at is that the medium can never be divorced from the message. I may not be a great painter but I'm always conscious of trying to be a good one. My technical ability, my eloquence with my chosen medium, is what lets me communicate my intention. And while there is a certain suspension of disbelief required of the viewer (they are looking at representations of objects, not the objects themselves, after-all) ultimately, I sure as hell don't want anyone to forget that they are, in-fact, looking at a painting.