El Grecos' Motive

Contemporary scholars may argue the colours have faded and they may be right. The dead centre of the picture as it appears now is a mauve hole. Being as centred as it is makes it like an abstact element and the figure subject is made peripheral to this central spectral nothingness.

We might speculate whether the shapes here have a universal reference or a vaginal reference. Is this centre a big nothing around which all this other activity is decoration and distraction? The richness of the subject in the rest of the painting provides a stark contrast .

The disciples depicted in the picture to the right of Jesus seem to be as perplexed as I am, wondering at the meaning of this shape with their hand gestures. Jesus discourages this curiosity with his down pressed hand, which makes us to look harder.

Certainly the empty middle cannot be overlooked. One is left with no recourse other than to wonder.

Its central placement is reinforced by a blue sky shape immediately above and below a virtual plinth, being the shattered table.

Certainly Christ’s head is rendered secondary by this other emphasis and we are left with no option but to gaze here..

Perhaps the folds and the oval shape of this centre amplify the scope for this projection.

Greg's Mono-print

Gregory Snape Mono-print c.1975 70cm x 90cm

This is my brother Gregory’s work, a mono-print from the late seventies. 

He had been influenced by my work from earlier, but in this and other works improved upon my efforts. 

These works, his and mine, had riffed off the stuttering arcs provided by the then emerging, Sydney Opera House which we ferried past on our way to school and subsequently to work and to university. 

Such arcs had not appeared before at such a scale. I have in mind the thought I would go back there, to where it began with my work, before I went to art school. 

I trust that in going back so far it is not a premonition of an imminent end, but a reawakening, a rebirth, a new begging. Beginning.

Watch this space!

The work here grows off the bottom left right angle. It builds and bends and shapes are produced as it goes. The shapes comprise the dance.

There is no need for added colour or texture or graduation of tone. The language available is adequate to perform the task.

Dinner and the new bottom line

Sample No.1

Eating a meal brings the pleasure of the food, the tastes, textures, the nourishment provided, the focus for conversation, meeting, all the usual suspects.

It had not occurred before to this writer that all of the above is just process, the journey along the path to the main game, which is the meal reduced to nothing, or as near as nothing that a knife and fork can provide with food.

Sample No.2

It doesn’t matter whose is whose, but the eater is definitely in the making, bringing their take, their interpretation of the meal. Not everything is an artwork, but the extent the meal provides such a scope for variety in its execution is definitely there to be remarked upon as strong.

Sample No.3

We are perhaps accustomed to looking aside at the empty plate as if it presents a venue for shame as if some toilet has taken place. Our eyes are averted to the privacy of the empty plate. Manners argue that they are bad if found looking.

Sample No.4

We eat and as we eat, we arrange and organise. We order and measure. We eke out the meal as if it is the last. Our appetite when we eat lasts forever. or at least until we are full.

It’s exhausting finding opportunities for art practice everywhere. It’s an indulgence. Too many liberties taken does not serve the ultimate goal which is to make the most of opportunities presented.

That being said. the circular plates weave their magic, making the contents, remnants unified again.

A big picture

Wamboin workshop

This is an image of the outside of my Wamboin workshop at night.

The image is a picture, a big picture. A big frame can make a big picture. Once framed, the items within the picture become more compelling, richer, more magical. The bits get conscripted to the whole.

The photo is taken front on, not obliquely. This makes the frame more active, to make that which is contained, stronger, vivid.

A picture is closer to art than an image. An image is what you get mostly, when you shoot stuff on your iPhone. You might get a good photo but that’s not a picture.

Why is art better? It’s more enriching to the soul. It steadies you like an image can’t. It’s affirming, reassuring, deeply satisfying. Those are the experiences we need, to get by.

 It helps here having a big black night frame around the picture. What is contained by that just has to give in.

Ten-shun!

Inside the front door at Wamboin

Next to the front door objects gather to be picked up on the way out or hung when entering. Ease and speed of placement is the key. We are in a transit mode incapable of non transit actions, like, taking your time.

Hung is the action most applied in this place, for its speed and spatial economy. Coats jostle in a crowd of hooks, competing for pole position. Umbrellas don’t need a hook. Their handle inverted makes a hook and they cling like fingers above a precipice do, when only adequate purchase is available.

Sunscreen used to be called blockout, changed its name without notice or permission and sits here with insect repellant, a garden fork and machine oil for the squeaky gate.

Pegs hang in a hook-like crowd, conformists, only because it’s the thing to do round here. They lack rank, hanging out for a wet day.

The minute hand hangs permanently, posing for the subject. The I-pad pencil who normally reserves its attraction to its master, the I-pad, is moonlighting, calling to attention all the objects gathered here.

The pencil registers as an exclamation mark undotted. It’s a spare minute hand for a hurried space.

Like leaves gather round a drain, all these objects are seeking a determination between in and out.

Rupert Murdoch's Life Work

Rupert Murdoch’s life work represents the revenge to the world for setting Australians apart and separated from where they came.

 The message was, set us apart at your peril.

 We will come and overcome you.

 We will shape you as we see fit as we ourselves were shaped by where we went, were sent.

 There is no sense to this, no message profound, only, we will come over and over come you.

 Whatever you think you are, whoever you think you are, from where you think you came, all of this is nothing.

You will be made by the madness from which we were made. You will submit to the will of will, the core of will, the empty middle of will.

Rupert is a machete. We had to clear the bush. We have to clear the scrub of the world. Scrape the top. Scrape the middle. Scrape the core.

Scrape away the vanity of belief.

Scrape away the vestiges of belief.

Scrape and in scraping shape.

Shape to perfection.

We mean you no harm. Rupert is our message to you. Our letter back.

It’s lovely here.

For manifesting media material Murdoch is by this writer made an honorary member of the SSS. He is the only Melbournian in the group.

This blog seeks to determine the edges of SSS’s brief. It is important to stretch those parameters beyond their capacity. It makes a bigger space so you can stretch and relax.

SURRENDER

There is a condition in art, a condition when artists are in such a state of surrender, that they are able to get to places not available through the normal transport systems.

What are the normal transport systems?

Thought is one, planning, a program, time set aside, an idea that really needs to be expressed, discussed, making something for a show.

They’re all very well and get us by when we’re not guided by the state of surrender.

What are some examples of an artist in a state of surrender?

Locally.

Late Tony Tuckson, he was deputy director of the AGNSW. He had integrated twentieth century European innovation. He had immersed himself in Aboriginal culture. When he did his late work, there was nothing to lose.

A bit, not much, of paint on a sheet of 6 x 4 Masonite, smeared as much as painted.

All of Tuckson’s followers are accolites, designers in comparison. Yes, that’s you, sorry.

We none of us can be as loose as that again. The market can’t  take too many adventurers for one. Also, it is not often that artists have so little to lose, to take so little care, to such great effect.

Sidney Nolan had nothing to lose. In love with Sunday Reid, a virtual conscientious objector, with all the guilt that brought with it in 1940. When soldiers were heroes what was he to become? To be worthy in his own mind, but to be bigger in life than his contemporaries? He made war more than he made art. He made war against the prevailing mediocrity. He shaped post nuclear reality.

He and Tony Tuckson synthesised Picasso better that anybody. In fact if you could draw a line through the old ‘evolution’ of art from classicism through impressionism and Cezanne to Cubism, you would get to early Nolan as the pointy end of the arrow. Cubism had collapsed into mannerism through its other practitioners.

There’s Adam Cullen, street wily, had his bait out for ten years before he caught the death he craved. In the process, again, when nothing is at stake, when nothing can be lost, when standards can be flaunted even if they were not entirely understood, it kind of doesn’t matter. Cullen took the utmost care to take so little.

What do we have when nothing really matters? We have what we want.

Hany Armanius thirty years ago was full of hate and fun in equal measure. He was the embodiment of rebellion against art. Everything he did eschewed the values of art and the systems that processed it. Quite quickly though, the world caught on and assimilated his thinking and you really can’t be both in and out at the same time.

There’s a limit for an appetite for end game art, even if that’s what we crave.

It’s hard to live out and maintain a state of surrender. You have to be self destructive, helps. To be at the end of one’s innings with nothing to lose is useful.

Plodders can be winners if they cover their tracks.

And there’s Emily.  She more or less started painting at 80 with a golden flush every hand. She left a universe.

Even if we can’t maintain that state of terminal surrender, we still know the space. We wait for it to emerge and see it straightaway, as if it was the most obvious thing.

You just have to keep the prospect of that space alive, in your mind, and not be too tamed by the demands survival makes on us to be lame.

This state of surrender is a condition to which members of the SSS adhere as a condition of their membership.

Wamboin Postcard, Summer

Works here at Wamboin are jostling with each other and the space to find their rightful place. Some works here have been seen in other Wamboin Postcards, but each work changes with time, in a different space or season, or with new insights not had before. This writer swims with all the changes in an attempt to get closer to the……, closer to making improvements.

Folded Forest in the morning mist

Folded Forest among other works, in the afternoon.

First Coming obliquely

Folded Forest detail

Me 1983 and Dana’s Jeans 1987

A painting surrenders

A painting by this writer painted in 1975 has been hung high in the shed at Wamboin. It can’t be viewed at eye level as we are accustomed or might prefer to view paintings. Being high it is also distant and small. It claims no rank as an eye level displayed work would expect.
The painting is left to establish therefore, relationships with other parts of the building. The work is partly covered with a line just as within the painting other lines cover the ground of the painting. Above the painting, a skylight makes the blue square within the painting another window.
The painting is abstracted by the context. The context is appropriated by the painting.
The slope of lines within the painting reflects the slope of the ceiling.
The dawn light outside carries the same lack of brightness. The opacity of each conceals that which lies hidden behind, outside.
The blue mistiness of each is moody, ominous.

The painting was this writer’s favorite from their show at Watters Gallery in 1976.
At the same time they were in a group show with Michael Buzacott and Harry Georgeson at Gallery A, which Frank Watters, in his expectation for artist loyalty, never forgave them. *

Painting meets site

• The use of ‘them’ is employed in its current context. What denoted plural is now singular and is accompanied by they, to make them gender neutral.

Mostly,

the last gesture, the last brushstroke, the last element of the sculpture added, provides the keystone without which the arch of the composition falls. 

A piece of music which does not end, may as well have not been played. 

A beginning can be be strong, to get you started, or in,  but you’ll get by if the climax works. 

The working end allows you to step out of the transcendent moment, to appraise the experience. The end allows you you look back at something from which you have now become separated. 

The last part is not necessarily a conclusion but does function in a similar way. 

Likewise a joke without a punchline is just a story. 

Ideally, or often, the last mark, the key mark, is concealed and only the most hardened viewer will spot it. 

The last mark, the last gesture, the final element is the move without which the match is declared a stalemate. 

Hair Of the fire

The flames are the hair of the fire.
Both flames and hair play second fiddle to wood and bone. They are accessories to the main game.

Both draw the eye because they move independently from their source, because they move.

What moves is a dance. Movement invites time more than stillness does. To watch movement is to be caught in a flow of time. We love to dance in space but more, we love to dance in time, not just plod slowly to our demise.

Both hair and time do great solos but depend on their source to set the rhythm and the base to keep them grounded.

Both hair and flame grandstand. They both need a wheelbarrow to carry their ego.

Hair has hairspray to dampen its inclination to move. Flames have no flamespray to curb their nature. Flames only ever flicker, agitated, restless, wild.
In our imagination there is world where flames can be permed and parted, combed, tied in a bun.
They are at their best in the fire.
We all come to terms with our limits, because we’re such great negotiators!

Flames are like hair.

Self portrait, held under mobile portal

Self Portrait, Held Under Mobile Portal 2020

We’re all on the phone. We are held by the light, more transfixed here than ever we were by the television or the computer.
We are pinned down by it. Reason has no power to reduce the spell cast. Something here is always more compelling than anything away from here.
This is not home detention or restriction from freedom. The phone is a cuff, leaving one hand to achieve all other activities.
This is an emergency.
We are under siege.
This painting is a warning and a reminder of our predicament. The portal is fake.

This painting is a record of the artist held under that shadow.

Surfer

This writer looks to the horizon for opportunities to form an opinion. Little gives more pleasure than riding an opinion to shore.
It is exhilarating to be held up by the power and the momentum the opinion provides. Those who have not caught the wave tread water, and can only gaze as the rider flies past triumphant. The opinion rider is often moved to a point where they lose reason and don’t care!

Why spoil the ride with reason?

This blog provides a beach of opinions ridden to shore. Some opinions are formed by the power of the wave more than the substance of the thinking. You cannot pick and choose though. Opportunities that arise need to be seized. This moment of being alive will not last forever.

There is the size of the wave on the one hand, large, small, medium. There are big wave riders who can use the power of the wave to perform tricks and turns. Smaller waves can prove more persuasive in the long run.

As we ride the wave these pleasures add to the exhilaration. As the wave forms and rises and moves, so do we.

Of course, some opinions have no legs. You can see them coming, with their frothy tops, shapely prematurely. Surfer beware!

Grit cafe (aDvertisemenT)

The McDonald’s logo towers above Goulbourn as you drive past on the Hume. 

It sheds a sulphur light over the landscape. The golden gates do not invite this reader to pass through. 

You have to stop for petrol sometimes. Food and fuel are bedfellows and right next to McDonald’s The Grit Cafe plays David to Macca’s Goliath. 

Customers here used to park in the McDonald’s car park but McDonald’s built a fence to stop that happening.

The likes of me is drawn to the audacity. The place is packed, the food great. 

At the next table a couple driving to Melbourne from the Gold Coast have full brekkies.  Bacon and eggs, sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms. Strawberry milkshake for the wife. They found Grit on google, recommended. They have to get to Melbourne by tonight, haven’t seen their daughters for a year.

This is Grit news.

I’m riding The Grit wave, while it lasts. The staff are young. They’ll be drawn to bigger opportunities. Let’s hope there are none here at Goulburn too soon.

Adapting to changes

The Book 2020

The Book’s production was a partnership between inspiration, determination and coincidence, like most sculpture.

The work presented itself as a conclusion to the collection of work here at Wamboin, rising to meet the fall of land at the bottom end of the block.

Gails last night imposed a reshaping however, and the conclusion proved premature.

The Book blown over

The sculptor needs to integrate changes as they occur even if they lie outside the usual processes of production. Disappointment can blind the sculptor to fresh opportunities.

As a consequence the other more modest works in The Park* have had their scale restored, and are not overwhelmed by what now seems an now overblown conclusion.

The Book blown over

• The Park is the name given to the property on which these sculptures are assembled.

The Spawning

Regular readers of the blog might mistake the skylight here as a broken stick of celery, or displaced road markings.

Just as in the forest outside, there are parent trees that are surrounded by a community of younger, smaller trees, so it is that here below the skylight on the table, baby skylights make another community. At this stage they only glint, rather than shed light. Despite their being the size and shape of needles they still advertise the presence and appeal of the cherries.

The cherries Andrew brought from Bungendore.

Volume Variety in Music

The invention of the piano with other instruments around 1700, brought the control of volume not previously available.

Suddenly musicians had another aspect of sound material to employ. With digital pressure or with increased breath pressure, volume could be made more and less loud.

Volume control allows for a different kind of expression of mood than if the hammer hits the string to produce the same volume. The variability of volume creates an emotional response in the listener. With the new instruments composers and musicians were able to release emotion.

In so doing a more basic nature of music was sacrificed, that being the capacity of the note and the interval to provide all the necessary tools to find expression, to give shape.

The addition of variable volume muddies the water and in so doing gives rise to the terrible excesses of late classicism and romanticism and most of the rest that followed.

Too many tools is a punishment and serves to gag the artist’s voice and the desire for formal clarity.

Volume control spelt the end of a beautiful beginning for Western music.

The urge to bring a tear to the eye represents a failure of musical nerve. Likewise the heart is susceptible to volume lifted and lowered.

To be ‘moved’ is to be distracted.

The Germans did beautiful musical work but they led the world astray with technical and musical innovation. The emotional power generated through that music was terribly applied to promoting political causes, causing people to be ‘moved’, and act in the world inappropriately.

The Italians contributed to this emotional well spring. They devised words which became emotional passports to musical excess.

Piano. Forte! Fortissimo! Allegro. Moderato. The die was cast.

We were led to believe we could trust our heart and in so doing we would be led to the kingdom of heaven. That portal is available only through going for the gut.

Just as the points of view of experts can sometimes be warped by different lenses, so too does ignorance warp with equal clarity. This musical theory may itself be susceptible to the tyranny of volume.

The Team

Two flies

On the writer’s screen the flies are life size and three D.

Caught with a camera, not squashed with a fly swat.

They were in this formation on the bathroom wall, facing the same way, connected to each other through this action, communicating.

They find the same traction on the wall as we find on the floor. They’re not clinging here.

They are only distanced from each other because of our own distancing focus we shall soon forget.

It’s fly season here. The air is abuzz with them.

Because of the wet weather everything is alive here and we value all life expression.

From this respect shown, they share their intelligence with us and make themselves an ornament on the wall.

Indicating the ‘collaborative’ way.

Eye Failure

Pocket photo

We are all well aware of the tendency of the eye to be inaccurate in its assessments of things.

The eye, in its corrupt partnership the brain, shrinks rather than expands the world.

It would be pleased, you would think, to be the purveyor of the new, delivering material straight from the world, to be added to the wealth of information stored in the brain.

But no.

The eye gets its hands sticky in its haste to nominate what comes across its path and fails to deliver.

We always have to stay on guard, be wary of the eye’s mischievous inclinations.

The artist and the inventor are past masters of accident control.

It’s well documented, and yet, we often fail to be surprised when accidental opportunities offer themselves.

This writer takes a lot of photos with their phone. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to be presented, but even armed with this determination, much material is lost.

The ’pocket photo’ shown above might also be called a lapcall. Either way, it is a big place, even though taken at accidental close range. It is a mirror, it reflects where the writer is in the landscape.

It is tainted with walking out among the hills and rocks and trees. It’s a more accurate account of where they are, (the writer), than if the camera had been pointed away from the body, outside.

There are valleys here and a road and bush spread evenly, when it hasn’t been farmed or felled.

It is big and in being big makes the writer in awe of where they are, with a new respect.

PS. Most pocket photos fail to deliver news. They are as unreliable as taste driven photos.

Harbour Sculpture Prize Announcement

These notes were read at the announcement of The Harbour Sculpture Prize at Balmain Rowing Club on 21st November, 2020

First of all I would like acknowledge elders past and present from the Wangal people of the Eora Nation who have taken such good care of this place. Thank you.

Thank you to all the organisers of The Harbour Sculpture Prize, Linda Bell, Ingrid Tkatchew, Catherine Timbrell and all those I have not met, who believe in art and hope. The show looks amazing, so amazing that as of 2.30 pm today, I still have not made a decision.

Thank you to all the sculptors who applied and those sculptors who were selected. I am privileged to be part of this celebration of sculpture and culture.

I don’t know how many of you here who have been reading my blog, accessed from my website.

I have for some years been trying to identify what is The Sydney School of Sculpture. We know that a number of sculptors have been working within a sculptural language that is mainly applied to the use of steel and also to the experience and appearance of the local landscape. The project is coming up to being one hundred years in the making. Those sculptors have attempted to synthesise their experience into material. Amid discussion and competition over the years that language has flourished and developed and will be identified by culture historians to have been worthwhile.

Some of the steel works here today belong to the history of that discussion.

Some here today may imagine that my prejudice towards that history will eventually emerge in my choice today despite my stated openness to other modes of practice.

It is not what we are looking for ultimately that guides us. It is what takes us and holds us, that  surprises us and subverts our expectations.

Mastery of material really helps, when the sculptor can account for themselves and their experience. Seeing something that had not otherwise been identified is always good. Sometimes we encounter a sensation we have had, also has a shape we had not seen before.

It’s not what we are looking for but when it’s there in front of us we should have the grace to acknowledge it, so that it can grow and not be starved, as we are culturally, sometimes inclined to do.

The task then is in identifying quality that rises above category. Which work here will stand the test of time? Which of the sculptural songs will we keep humming, down the track?

Art prizes also produce so many more losers than winners. More pain is provided than pleasure here today, despite this festive and wonderful occasion. No matter how many times I have failed in my prize attempts, the bruising is short-lived, because I am there again the next year with the same trust in ‘truth’ I brought with me the last time I entered.

We are all privileged to be part of a culture that can find and hold its voice.  It is imperative this is acknowledged and protected when other forces can so easily dismantle achievements made.

Culture is always under threat. On top of the ongoing presence of the Wangal people, the cultural history of Balmain runs deep.  Since settlement we have been privileged to share our lives here with writers, trade unions, artists, musicians and poets.

That which is embedded needs to be actively maintained. We must continue to agitate against ‘compliance’ to survive here, culturally intact.

This exhibition contributes towards that.

Before I announce the prize winning work, and to extend this beautiful moment a little further, I would like to recite my short poem. It is called the Balmain Traffic Song. It was written in 1990, erected as a sculpture and fence in 1999 in Robert Street Rozelle and was removed last year. The work is awaiting re-installation somewhere in Balmain.  

Our lives are led, the streets are full. The air is filled with the wretched fuel.                    At night the cars are tucked up tight, as close as the curb allows.
By day they flee on a shopping spree, The Mullens Darling run.

From town we come past old White Bay, at 80, 90, a 100 K.
The roads are drains we waste along, Robert Street, here we come.
We're charging up, you can hear us roar.

From time and peace you will hear no more.
There's work and space, and things to do.                                                While the engine is running, our blood does too.                                        

We lock them and shine them and make them sing,                                  Their song is a siren, the Balmain sting.

STOP!

There is something we think we cannot do.                                               There are currents and waves and tides too.
There's a voice that is rising and floating along,                                         And we can steer it and shape it And make it as strong as the voice of the reason of machinery's song.

So while logic and facts and circumstance declare,  A brave new voice returns the stare. It can be done, the cars will go. We must know belief will show .                                    

The winner of The Harbour Sculpture Prize is Catherine Castillo Alferez.

Christine. Would you like to come and accept the award?

Harbour Sculpture Prize ‘Fungi Feet’ by Catherine Castillo Alferez.