qcapaintkirk-blog

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This is a screenshot of the garageband file where I’m playing around with the different contextualisations of the anthem melody - still a bit of a work in progress which might not be used but we’ll see

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These are some more of the prep studies before i started painting the real frames - I was going to paint the eyes and mouths individually (which are what the super scary portriats are for) but then I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2DDU4g0PRo and saw the technique they use for deep fakes and took that approach of only painting underneath the cheekbones

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I was playing around with the idea of doing a couple of different versions of the video using the finished paintings.  I’m still going to go into the scanned images of the frames and photoshop them to make the animation super smooth and close to the original footage stills but I was thinking of making another version where I photoshop the frames to fit to a video of scott morrison saying the words (doctored like how i made the dutton one) and then I was about making a version where I use the edit>fill>content aware fill tool in photoshop systematically on each frame, which creates an image like the one above.  I thought this might be interesting/talk to the way that media images of parliamentary figures are constructed but also thats dumb

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Up the top is the CYM with the smaller thread as a skinny scarf which i made for Mum - i’m pretty happy with it going to grey from really vibrant up close.  James also found that the effect works better when the weavings are stretched on a bias, so that your eyes don’t recognise the lines of the weft as much

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Continuing tests with weaving - Ive found a good combination for making a purple (easy red and blue) and a light grey (cyan, yellow magenta, with more yellow than the others) . I also tried weaving with sewing thread but turned out that it was so thin that the green warp doesnt work with the red to make yellow - the pink blue and yellow yarn picture in the middle is thinner yarn that I dyed myself, which is the way that I’m going to go forward with, as with a higher resolution the visual effect works better

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I got in touch with Chari Lawson, the lecturer for my Contemporary Global Art subject to try and get some more perspective on my work and she recommended I read this book, ‘Counter Memorial Aesthetics’, which I found really interesting, and is where I started thinking about counter memory.  In the book there were discussions of Dierk Schmidt’s idea of painting the sinking of the SIEV-X, a ship which was carrying refugees in the indian ocean off the coast of Australia.  This idea of history painting from here influenced me, as Schmidt’s rationaisation for continually painting this scene, of which no footage or photographs exist, was to try and, and i cant find the quote for this, but make sure that the Australian public didn’t forget about the disaster - which i thought was interesting.   He also contextualises some of his paintings as intended to be placed within the offices of parliament house, by placing a brown border around them which is synomous to the wooden panels in that space.

  Charles Green and Lyndal Brown were other artists investigated in this book which are certainly touch stones I should go back into because of their deeply painterly/aesthetic engagement

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Progress shots of the frames - I painted from darkest to lightest, starting with the neck, then the halftones reaching to the lighter parts of the face and lips last

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EXHIBITON REVIEW: Tony Albert - Visible

#1 We Can Be Heroes

#2 Sorry

#3 Pay Attention Mother Fuckers

Tony Albert’s Retrospective ‘Visible’ at QAG brings together multiple works which span his varied career.  Collected into one exhibition, the viewer gets a more totalising understanding of Albert’s engagement with the representation of Indigenous Australians in media.  In the various large scale works of carefully arranged collections of ‘Aboriginalia’, like ‘Sorry’, Albert arranges these strange objects, previously fashionably kitsch and now uncomfortably cringeworthy, into such a mass that works to reinforce their once held cultural ubiquitousness.  ‘Sorry’ in particular appropriates and complicates through reversal, the national apology given to those affected by the stolen generation by Kevin Rudd, after being denied by John Howard.

The text work ‘Pay Attention Mother Fuckers’ takes the text initially used by Bruce Nauman and divies out the surface of each letter to a different indigenous Australian artist to decorate. This disunity works to create an engaging juxtaposition with the works of Aboriginalia.  Wherein in ‘Pay Attention Mother Fuckers’ contains a disparate array of aesthetics created by Indigenous Australian artists, the collections of kitsch tend to unite in their exotisised aesthetic representations of Indigenous Australians likely created by non-Indigenous people.

‘We Can Be Heroes’ is also concerned with demonstrating the self determination of Indigenous Australian people’s own representation.  As part of Albert’s collaboration with children and artists in Warakurna in the Northern Territory ‘We Can Be Heroes’ documents the play of children in the community, dressed in outfits made in collaboration with Albert and under their own direction.  By incorporating the surrounding elements of rural landscape, Albert presents an empowering perspective of the possibility inherent in the lives of these young people.

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This is the shaky spliced footage of the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NOG2pWDoUA&t=19s which i was working from to paint the animation

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EXHIBITION REVIEW:  Clara Adolphs’s at Edwina Collette

#1: 6PM Mount Pleasant

#2: Burning Cane

#3: Afternoon Scene

#4: Vermillion Flowers

#5: Yellow Smoke

Using imagery from old photographs and newspaper clippings, this body of work, which is the culmination of the artist’s residency in Mackay, attempts to solidify an image of the history of the town through visual investigation.  Rooted in a sensory nostalgia through choices of colour and tone, Adolph breathes painterly life into her once flat subject matter, in which the attention seems to be on a directness of application which unifies and almost objectifies her figures.  

The subdued, sepia-ish tones of the compositions are effective not only at quickly dating the images to somewhere in the mid 20th century, but also as satisfying aesthetic devices which can harmonise to create deeply emotional pieces (Afternoon Scene and Yellow Smoke) as well as dramatic and exhilarating contrasts (Burning Cane and Vermillion Flowers).  By lowering the intensity of most hues in the exhibition, Adolphs allows for the viewers expectation of freshness in colours to be lowered so that when one sees a composition such as 6PM Mount Pleasant, which takes its hues more or less from life, they’re able to feel it more boldly, like sunshine after a rainstorm.

Through the exhibition, and maybe because of the consistency of the painting technique, the viewer is able to piece together these fragmentary representations into a whole, which takes on the spacial dimensionality of a rural city.  There’s explorations of history and events, most notably in Burning Cane, but the focus seems not to be on any particular narrative but just the kind of slice of life scenes which you could get in person from an afternoon’s stroll.  

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These are the studies i did after deciding that i would try and be more painterly and lyrical with the approach - I used some of James’s nice linen stretched over board (after trying just on board) because i wanted to try and force the painterly-ness of the works through the grain of the surface.    The top image is how I checked to see if each paint mix was the right tone for where on the face it was going - I would use the eyedropper tool in photoshop (with the colour window in grayscale) to get the tonal value of each portion of the face and then blot the paint onto this printed out value scale page which i would then look at through a mono filter on my phone to check it was the right value.

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EXHIBITION REVIEW:  Holly Anderson ‘The Oh No Sun’ at Outer Space Gallery

Note:  I forgot to get the names of the paintings in this exhibition so will refer just to figure 1, figure 2 etc. in the text of the review

Holly Anderson’s series of paintings at outer space ‘the oh no sun’ works with the painting medium in such a variety of ways that one could mistake the series to be constituted from a group show.  That’s not to say that there isn’t strong unity between the works (there surely is), but just that the multitude of approaches to brushwork present in the show exhibit a determined engagement and affection for the different ways to put paint on canvas.  In figure 1 the sunburnt back is covered in thin scratchy traces of the artist’s hand, giving a rough almost naive surface to this painful sight - making a mimetic association with lashes or pierced skin.  In Figure 2, directional brushstrokes create a bed of flowers which, due to their repetition and confidence of technique feel as though they’ve been printed to the surface of the works. In this painting, this rushed, blurred, photographic quality (which is amplified though the smattering of flat throw shadows) happens to be satisfyingly subverted with the inclusion of simple and brisk, painterly stems.  

Figure 4 shows another of Anderson’s strongest suits in this series; namely the alleviation of hue from being subservient to representation.  Likely influenced by photographic or computer editing processes, Anderson uses tones of blue grey and warm red almost interchangeably in this portrait, leading to a work which manages to have a textured flatness particularly around the eyes and top right browline.  

Upon reading the accompanying literature, this exhibition is aimed at representing a kind of eco-anxiety about climate forces challenging the planet, however this isn’t the feeling I received from the works.  Surely, Anderson’s skill is able to give a wonderfully oversaturated, wind blasted hotness to each canvas, but the gentleness and interest that’s given to each subject leads the viewer more strongly to nostalgia and lived experience rather than a global, political issue.  The silly, fun inclusion of little smily faces here and there, as well as the painted floats which lie on the surface of they eye take the work more toward the realm of personal documentation of sights and impressions and further from existential dread.

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EXHIBITION REVIEW:

#1: Normana WIGHT - Untitled – purple to yellow diagonal 1967 

#2: Inge KING - Red rings 1972–73 

#3: Mary WEBB - Abstract painting 1955 

‘ABSTRACTION: Celebrating Australian Women Abstract Artists’ at QUT Art Museum, Gardens Point presents a rich yet succinct tour through the contributions of Australian Women Artists to the history of abstraction.  The exhibition seeks to foreground works which, while instrumental to Australia’s engagement with abstraction, have in some cases become obscured through masculinist art historical narratives.  While the “resurrection" of the works of women abstract artists is central to the exhibition, the curatorial strategies employed create a cohesively informative experience which resists the urge to overstuff works as a correction of their historical treatment.

A feeling of quiet excitement reverberates through the exhibition, the wall space dominated by highly chromatic, almost luminous paintings which more closely resemble portals to alternate spaces than the classical painted illusionary window.  The hanging of the works on the wall, like the overall curation, balances eagerness with a focus on cohesion; each work being given enough room for their considerable presence to occupy without competing.  Architecture segments the space into three areas roughly connected to the movements of 20th century abstraction (early Geometric Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, Op Art).  This architectural guiding of the viewer regulates an experience which consists of well portioned impressions - never too busy or too disparate - the is viewer able to focus on their immediate surroundings, not distracted by the works ahead or behind.  Making the curatorial progression of the works more explicit, informational dialectics are printed onto the architecture of the exhibition space, creating a framework of logic through which to view not only the exhibition but also the development of abstract art in Australia.  

 As one enters the sunken exhibition level of the gallery they find immediately on their right a display cabinet of sculpture; painted ceramics giving way to biomorphic forms.  By way of broadening the forms of work presented, the exhibition presents abstraction more as an ethos of creation rather than simply a style of painting.  Throughout the exhibition sculptural works are positioned in the space and act as tangible solid ground, a centre of gravity to provide a foil to the fervency of the paintings which line the walls.

The first room, primarily made up of works from Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar and Margaret Preston, lays out a cursory introduction to the genesis of Australian Abstraction in the first half of the 20th century.  Crowley’s work in particular acts as a prime example of the dynamic exchange between figurative painting and burgeoning abstraction.  Through many of her paintings in the exhibition one can witness figurative considerations becoming subservient to the arrangement of the picture surface.  Woman (Annuncation), 1939, one of Crowley’s last figurative paintings, represents this transition spectacularly, with the central figure broken into planes of colour which immortalise Crowley’s hand in lively, sculptural marks.  Divorced from their subservience to representation, fields of colour are free to play off their surroundings, creating associations, vibrations and texture which would become central to the antecedent abstraction movements.  As it exists today, the painting verges on the paradoxical - time has dulled and dated the paint in which the artists’s presence is so strongly embodied that the painting feels as if it were only just completed.

Interspersed with works from the periods of Abstract Expressionism onward are a number of paintings by Indigenous Australian artists.  These works fit comfortably within the aesthetics of the surroundings paintings yet likely belie deeper symbolistic engagement than their neighbours.  The inclusion of these works is welcome as they broaden and challenge the canonised historical narrative of abstraction, however their placement within the exhibition situates their work within that same narrative.  The unrooting of the paintings from their context, essentially a given in institutional exhibiting of works within the symbolic tradition of Aboriginal art, is made more uneasy through the conflation of the two pictorial traditions.  The works of Indigenous Australian artists in the exhibition could therefore potentially be misread as being created under the influence of the movements of abstraction, instead of belonging to a seperate, vastly precedent, practice.  

The last room of the exhibition is the only space to be fully occupied by painting.  These massive works, possibly the most intensely chromatic collection of the show, each inhabit the entirety of their respective wall so that the viewer in the centre of the room finds themselves surrounded by dominant, visually demanding spectacles.  Devoid of the imposed gravitational force of the sculptural element, the works seem to pull tight at each other like strings, making the room buzz with energy.

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EXHIBITION REVIEW:  Julian Meagher’s ‘Tidelines’ at Edwina Collette, from 18 September to 10 October.

#1: TIDELINE #3 - 2018

#2: TIDELINE #6 - 2018

#3: TIDELINE #9 -2018

Having previously been making mostly works of still life and portraiture, this exhibition is the culmination of a recent engagement of the artist’s with the landscape genre.  The show is constituted of six landscapes depicting scenes of tidelines and a still life featuring a goon bag.  Having previously made works mostly within the realms of still life and portraiture, Meagher approaches this foray into landscape with a condensation of his planned ‘to a T’ painting technique. Meagher’s surfaces are covered with such sparse compositions and thin washy paint, that there’s no room for re-do’s or cover ups.

By using the natural tendencies of the material, drips and transparencies, Meagher creates landscapes which flit back and forth between surface abstraction and representational portals.  Tideline #3 pushes this tension the furthest, with a composition which could easily be misread as non-representational while perfectly placing the viewer in-front of a created space.  The lightly handled inclusion of the rocky objects in the top left hand side of the canvas snap the image back into the realm of depiction, and as this happens, the portion of the canvas below this point almost tilts and pushes the viewer zooming back in space over the shallow beach shore to the foreground.

While Meagher has been using the drippiness of his loaded brush to bring in elements of chance and materiality to his compositions for sometime, in this context with the portrayal of the sea, shore and clouds they’re given another dimension as speaking to the texture of their signified objects. In Tideline #3 again, the drips at the bottom of the canvas are seated so convincingly in the picture plane that one could almost believe they exist so in the three dimensional space being represented.

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These are some of the first paintings i did of his face to try and work out the way i wanted to paint the animation - I played around with a whole bunch of different base colours (eventually settling on the dark brown i went with I think because it makes the frames more striking).  I was also trying to, as evidenced in the 2nd and 3rd pictures, get a painting approach where every brush stroke was planned and could be laid out the same way in every frame with extreme economy - Eventually the doubt of knowing whether i was going to be able to find the best way became too much and I decided to just do every painting fresh and new, but with a focus on economical brushwork (which i wish I had stuck to a little more, but it was good practice regardless)

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random off thoughts about genre

it’s kind of pointless but i think it’s interesting (for me at least) to think about this project as a history painting of sorts - the footage which the paintings are based from is constructed from an interview in which I spliced together Dutton saying phenomes which related to the words in the line, but presumably he has at one point or another sung these words as a member of parliament.  I need to research a little more about it but I think this kind of plays with the notion of ‘counter-memory’ as discussed by Foucault, which ‘looks to the past for the hidden  histories excluded from dominant narratives’.  While counter-memory usually ‘focuses on localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and refocus dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience’ I think engaging this theory with this work is not 100% awful because the recognition of the existence of this line in the anthem does work to reframe the dominant narrative of the attitude of the Australian Identity toward immigrants.

This is totally irrelevant but i also kind of like the idea that the paintings as a series of portraits could, if one were to be wanky about it, be referred to a text work.

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Artist Statement

‘For those who’ve come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share,

With courage let us all combine to Advance Australia Fair’

- Advance Australia Fair, Australian National Anthem

This project is a painted animation of the (former) Australian minister for Immigration mouthing a line from the second verse of Advance Australia Fair, the national anthem of Australia.  The existence of this rhetoric in the national anthem feels dizzyingly contradictory as, since federation until the mid 20th century, the Australian government implemented the ‘White Australia Policy’ and more recently the institutional attitude toward Asylum seekers has been one of fear mongering and internationally criminal hostility.

As Immigration minister, Peter Dutton has become the face of Australian policies toward Asylum seekers and immigrants, so I wanted to try and construct a spectacle using his likeness to propagandise this line and promote awareness of it’s place in the national anthem.

In reading Susan Best’s writing on Reparative Aesthetics it’s been interesting to see her findings on how feelings of shame around a subject matter can cause viewers to disengage from the work to avoid experiencing guilt.  Best recommends the use of experimental aesthetic strategies to try and engage the viewer long enough for them to process and work through their shame so as not to initially alienate them.  While I started investigating Best’s research after beginning the project I think it puts nicely the way in which I was attempting to construct an aesthetically perplexing work, through almost needlessly laborious means, which aimed to be sufficiently engaging so as to hold the viewer and sear this line from the anthem in their memory.  

I think it’s important to outline what the work isn’t:  It isn’t a polemic argument for all asylum seekers in the world to be resettled in Australia. Nor is the work a call for Australian policy to be exclusively based on ideals from the turn of the last century.  More than anything this work calls for appeals to ‘Australian Values’ (a term popularised by John Howard, also the architect of our modern policy toward Asylum seekers) to be applied consistently.  By appropriating a tenant of patriotism, the national anthem, I’m trying to contribute to the idea of a national identity which is based on welcome and respect for the global makeup of the Australian population.