A day off in Winter

Well, this post has been in draft form for a few weeks now, owing to ongoing, boring issues involving my laptop (which doesn't work as well as it used to), my newish ipad (which I can't get to do everything I'd hoped it would) and finally the library computer. I was almost going to abandon it, with all the other unfinished drafts(!!!) but decided that it might still be on interest. So...

I had been working really hard over the past couple of weeks and so, despite several impending deadlines, I decided to give myself a day off on Sunday and took the train to Swan Hill - on the Murray River, which is the border between Victoria and New South Wales.
Sunday is the only day you can get there and back by train from central Victoria, or indeed from Melbourne. (From Melbourne it would be a considerably longer day!) A mid afternoon train from Swan Hill to Melbourne is scheduled on Sundays only - presumably to take all the Swan Hill locals back to work or study after spending the weekend at home.
Because it’s quite a long country trip the train is one of the really comfortable ones with a buffet car if you need it. On a mid-Winder Sunday, it was also confortable empty, with plenty of room to spread out. I really enjoy travelling by train - sitting watching the the changing landscape, the small towns and farms, the flat land and silos dotted around northern Victoria. I had knitting and music and found it very fulfilling and relaxing 'slow' time.
If you were travelling with small children, they may be enjoy the simple pleasure of watching the farm animals along the way. Because you’re higher up than when travelling in a car and the train passes only a few times a day, there was a lovely view of cattle and sheep along the line, some grazing contently, others dashing in fright from the passing train. I saw quite a few calves and was highly amused by gamboling lambs. Now I really know what gamboling means - a joyous kicking up of both front and then back legs, a bit like a bucking horse.
I discovered that you can’t actually get to Swan Hill using a Myki travel card; you need a paper ticket. Fortunately the conductor was friendly and helpful, touching my Myki off after Eaglehawk (just past Bendigo) and selling me the required paper ticket. Also fortunately I had enough cash!
I arrived at Swan Hill at about 12.30 and enjoyed a twenty minute walk along the river to the Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery - my actual destination. Before going in I stopped at Spoons Riverside restaurant, just next door on the river, for lunch.  It’s really quite nice, with a big bright indoor space with full length glass all around and plenty of outdoor seating, all overlooking the Murray. The menu is fresh, with a focus on local produce.  They didn’t have the delicious terrine I had last time, so I opted for a chicken pie, one of the just-baked second batch for the day. It was on the small side, but tasty.
If you felt inclined and were more organised than I was there are lots of tables and seating along the riverside.  I saw quite a few people, caravanners mostly, enjoying their sandwiches in the sunshine, watching the river go by. There's also a lot playground equipment and free exercise machines along the river

Later in the afternoon, I got adventurous and crossed the very rickety-looking bridge to the other side for a very quick visit to New South Wales. I thought I was pretty brave. Signs indicated that only one large vehicle was allowed on at any time. (What's a large vehicle?!) The centre part of the old bridge lifts up to allow large boats to pass...or, at least it did once. There was also a sign saying that no more than six people at any time should be on the footpath part of the lift section. 

So, the real reason of my journey was to see the Swan Hill Print and Drawing Acquisitive Awards. I caught it on the final day, in fact.  It was well worth the trip. There was a terrific range of works. 

The winning drawing was Jan Davis’s quite minimalist Georgica #25, 2017, ink and stitching on Nepalese paper. (below)

The winning print was a lovely quiet book by Elizabth Banfield, from Loftia Park, 2017, linocut prints and stitching on kozo paper.

Interestingly the two winning works are similar in many ways - the use of colour, stitching and light handmade paper. Elizabeth's work was one of two artists books, both inspired by bushfires. The other, by Dianne Fogwell, was also a wonderful book 

Besides her prize-winning drawing, Jan Davis also had a print in the exhibition,which I liked very much.

Another work that I really enjoyed was one of the two video works in the show. Todd Fuller's Billy's Swan is a very beautiful and moving stop motion video created using hundreds of chalk and charcoal drawings based upon a dream sequence from the 2000 film Billy Elliott.  The drawings are bookended by footage of Fuller himself dancing the sequence.

I caught the exhibition on its last day and unfortunately couldn't get a catalogue as they were sold out...which is a good thing (although not for me).

Fuller's work can still be seen at Bendigo Art Gallery, as it is a finalist in the Paul Guest Drawing Prize. I would recommend a trip to Bendigo to see this too, especially as you can also see Myuran Sukumaran: Another Day in Paradise, curated by Ben Quilty and Michael Dagostino.

Below is an installation shot of part of the Swan Hill exhibition.

After spending  some more time wandering along the river I returned  to the station, admiring the giant Murray Cod, before catching the train back home. It had been a really lovely day!

Working with what I have

I know I'm not the only one who has days sometimes when nothing works, I have no ideas and I feel like I should just give up trying to be an artist.  Last Friday was one of those - just terrible! (It didn't help that I was trying to print in greens. That, I think I should give up on!)
At least I have other creative interests and after giving up for the day I could do some knitting!

I have had a couple of much more positive days in the studio in the last week and also have to remind myself that part of the issue at the moment is that I'm working under the self-imposed restriction of working with what I have. As a printmaker who doesn't often work on a large scale I have lots of small pieces of 'leftover' paper and this year (being somewhat financially challenged!) I am attempting to use up what I have.

Also, I suppose part of the problem at the moment is that I have been working on a body of work that will hopefully have several  groups of outcomes - a series of square format prints in different (smallish) sizes, some larger works that will be pieced from yet smaller squares and a series of small artist books. So currently I have a lot of work in progress, but at times have difficulty in seeing how I will get to a finished state with much of it.
So these are some of the pieces that hopefully will eventually be part of something!

And trying out some possibilities for a pieced work in blues...

or this

(Most days) I have enjoyed experimenting with colour and layering forms both natural and manmade, using stencils on a gelatin plate, working with cardboard collagraph plates, and finally overprinting some with linocut text - fragments of Leonard Cohen lyrics/poetry.
Still a way to go!

Work in Progress - and some finished!

I have been working!
I've been enjoying experimenting with collagraphs and gelatin printing, layering and experimenting with colour.

The main collagraph plate I've been using recently - a bit steam-punk!

Building up layers - gelatin prints and collagraph.

Recently got to the point of finishing some small  (18 x 18 cm) works off - with some linocut text for an exhibition with a 30 x 30 cm size limit.  The size they will be when framed.
Still a bit Leonard Cohen obsessed!

For Leonard 1

For Leonard 2

For Leonard 3

For Leonard 4

Too late for a quick look back !!

Oh my goodness, I started writing this post as a quick look at the last few months of 2015 as the year was finishing!
But now it's long gone!
I was just going to touch upon some of the highlights of the last two or three months of the year.
I'm going to have to give up on that and just mention a couple of things here now, then start off 2016 with a new post about current things.
Forgive me.

During 2015, my first full year of living in central Victoria I was very happy to become part of the Goldfields Printmakers group. More information about the group can be found here.
James Pasakos, from Federation University, Ballarat, attended  IMPACT9 - the international biennial printmaking, held in 2015 in Hangzhou, China, from 18 to 21 September. There he presented a folio of prints by members of the group referencing the history of the Chinese prospectors in the region during the gold rush of the later 19th century.
For my research I visited Bendigo's Golden Dragon Museum and Chinese Garden. I was very impressed by the huge collection of artefacts, objects and installations.  I could have stayed much longer than the time I'd allowed! I'll have to get back there.

I've always been attracted to ginger jars, so used one on each print, combined with
calligraphy on the first taken from the inner wall of the garden.
Well-known Beijing poet and calligrapher Ke Wen Hui arrived in Australia for a family visit in 1998. Upon viewing the Golden Dragon Museum he was impressed by the Chinese heritage in Bendigo, and composed several poems, painting them on the walls.
The given translation of the poem I used is:
'In deep thinking, visitors will go home with cranes nestled in their sleeves. Behold the beauty and prosperity of the Garden. Surrounded by the tranquility of this environment, you will only think reflective thoughts.'
The other image on the second print is a detail from an embroidered garment.
(Somewhat dodgy images, sorry.)

My last post was just before a small solo exhibition I had in October/November at 69 Smith Street gallery, a small artist-run gallery in Collingwood (an inner suburb of Melbourne). The gallery is a double-storey shopfront with multiple spaces. It's nice to exhibit there because there are always several other solo or group shows there at the same time and so you get quite a good audience.  I had a small space upstairs and showed prints from four different bodies of work.  The last year or so has been a time of trying to work out where I'm going.

At the opening, with a couple of works from the series With these hands - self portrait.

I have made quite a lot of work relating to knitting and other needlecrafts over the years.
The works in the image above continue that theme.

There were a couple of recent works from the ongoing series, A Taxonomy of (Art) Cats and new works messing about with still life elements and layering.
This one is more recent; getting a bit braver with colour!

I'm really enjoying working on this series, being very playful and experimental with colour.
I'll post some more images quite soon.

 

Progress - circles and gelatin

Just a few images of the progress I've made recently. 
The shoe-box is just about done.  It's been a lot of work!

 

And I've had a few more sessions messing about with gelatin printing - some days more successfully than others. These are some beginnings, works in progress, experiments and a couple just about done...the print, anyway.  They might be book pages.

 

As you can see, some more successful than others.  But there are possibilities!

Jackie Gorring @ The Light Factory Gallery in Eltham

Just a very quick post to share a couple of images from Jackie Gorring's exhibition Balkote - zing up life, which finishes this Sunday. Jackie is a printmaker who I first met six years ago at the 6th Australian Print Symposium at The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. I ran into her again at a Print Council of Australia forum in Hobart a couple of years ago and discovered that she had moved from NSW to central Victoria.  I have been fascinated by her inventive low-tech printmaking methods, many of which utilise found material such as polystyrene, packaging and pipe cleaners as matrix.
This body of work was made during an artist residency at Ragini Art Village in Balkote, a few kilometres from Katmandu, late last year.
For more information http://thelightfactorygallery.com.au/exhibitions/current-upcoming-exhibitions/jackie-gorring-printmaker/

Zing up life relief print on canvas

Installation shot - Teeth over Katmandu and Spiralia spiralia, both relief prints on canvas



Watsup relief print on canvas

 

Fourfold at The Light Factory Gallery, Eltham

I've been to see an excellent print exhibition a week or so ago - Fourfold at The Light Factory Gallery in Eltham. A green-belt suburb on the outer-north of Mebourne, Eltham has a reputation and history as a hub of artisitic activity. While Montsalvat, the artist-community established by Justus Jorgensen in the 1930s, remains a thriving focus for the area, today there are  few other galleries in Eltham.  The Light Factory Gallery, though only a couple of years old, is embedded in Eltham's history as the building was designed by Alistair Knox.  It's quite a beautiful building and makes a wonderful gallery with banks of windows up at roof-level that fill the space with light.
The current exhibition is called Fourfold, an exhibition of four printmakers. Kate Hudson, Clare Humphries, Violeta Capovska and Georgia Thorpe all work in relief printmaking, but with a great diversity in style and aesthetic.  Hudson's black and white linocut prints of floral still-lifes recall the work of Margaret Preston with their crisp lines, patterning and  stylisation of forms.  Preston hand coloured her flowers after printing in black, while Hudson offers both simple black and white and multi-coloured examples using the reduction technique.   In other works pairs of birds set within a network of foliage are similarly decorative - and I don't consider that a perjorative term at all!  See some of her works from the exhibition here.
Clare Humphries' linocut prints offer simple objects which emerge from a dark ground.  Central to her current practice is the idea  that objects, often quite simple objects, that belonged to deceasd loved ones may hold some essence or tactile memory of their owners.  Her process is time consuming and exacting, involving creating a reduction linoprint of an object such as a handkerchief or a thimble, overprinting it with layers of black ink and then hand burnishing so that the object re-emerges from the darkness.  Content and process are inextricably linked; the objects lost beneath the surface of the ink, but recovered (as a memory?) through the laborious process of burnishing.
Examples of the works in this exhibition can be seen here.
Violeta Capovska's large-scale images of flowers, tightly framed, reminiscent of some of Georgia O'Keefe's paintings are printed in severeal shades of violet, suggesting highly enlarged magazine photographs. I read that her work explores cultural approaches towards the female body and this would also suggest a connection to the work of Georgia O'Keefe. Some of Capovska's work can be seen here. 

Georgia Thorpe

 I was perhaps most attracted to Georgia Thorpe's work - large prints, richly coloured, layered,  textured, and artist's books printed on soft mulberry paper.   The main compositional elements of the  prints are woodcuts, with layers of intaglio texture, and hand colouring added. As this method of working might suggest, Thorpe does not generally produce editions of prints, but rather series of ‘unique states.’  She also showed a groups of fascinating altered books - quite old stab-bound Japanese script books, a couple of which contained the libretto (perhaps not quite the correct term) for Noh play - an ancient Japanese masked theatre combining drama, music and dance.  The books are quite beautiful and fascinating objects in themselves.  Thorpe has inserted her prints of knots and dipped the books in dark dyes, adding to their mystery.Some of her work can be seen here.

Travelling to see art

Part of the reason that I haven't posted for a while is that I've been off travelling to see art!  I've had a couple of weeks off work and did a little tour of NSW - flying to Newcastle, bussing to Port Macquarie, where I stayed wuith my friend, George, for a couple of days, then we drove to Armidale; I took the train to Tamworth - for the main purpose of my trip, to see the fabulous GW Bot, 30 year retrospective, The Long Paddock, then I took the train to Sydney where I spent the day at the AGNSW, ejoying the Picasso and the Kaldor Collection in new contemporary galleries.  I had a lovely time!
Besides Sydney, I'd never been to any of these places before.
I would have liked to spend longer in Newcastle. Enjoyed the walk along the harbour/wharf and out along the breakwater.

   In my short time there I also found the Newcastle Art Gallery where I saw Leaving a Legacy, Margaret Olley's gifts to Newcastle, and Shay Docking - Works from the Newcastle Collection.  They are both well worth a look.  Of the Shay Docking works, I was particularly impressed by those from the 1960s.
Margaret Olley's donation was quite diverse; mostly paintings - from a 1960s Carl Plate abstract work to Ben Quilty's very loose expressionist portraits of Adam Cullen from 2006.  I was particularly attracted to Elisabeth Kruger's lush Taffeta - a large-scale detail of two white roses, reminiscent of Georgia O'Keefe in its tight framing, but with more emphasis upon luxuriance and texture, and Kevin Lincoln's pared down still life, Grey Jug 1999.

Kevin Lincoln Grey Jug 1999 oil on canvas Newcastle Art Gallery, Gift of the Margaret Olley Art Trust 1999

 I was very interested to see three examples of Cressida Campbell's work.  I confess, I'm not sure that I see the point of her process - cutting a woodcut plate, then painting/inking(?) the plate to take a single print impression.  Olley's gift included two such prints and also a painted plate, or a plate retaining the paint after the single  print was pulled.  I was most interested in the plate.  It reminded me of learning in Art History of the  Spanish wooden sculptures that were originally brightly coloured (polychromed - that we would now perhaps see as gaudy.)  
Spent a couple of days in Port Macquarie, enjoying the beaches and the rainforest walk at Sea Acres National Park.

One evening we went for a cruise on the river, where I was pretty excited to see some dolphins.  They were too quick for me to catch on film, but here's the last of the sun on the water.

We spent a long but very pleasant day driving from Port Macquarie to Armidale, along the Waterfall Way, stopping at Bellingen for lunch, as well as three of the falls for which the Way is named!
The modest Newell Falls,

The very spectacular Ebor Falls, with a series of drops, the first image being the upper section, the second the lower.

 and finally Dangar Falls.  I wondered if they had been named for the family of Anne Dangar, a contemporary and great friend of Gace Crowley, who spent most of her life working at Moly-Sabata in France.

We walked out on the Skywalk at Dorrigo National Park.  Shorter than I expected but very high with fabulous views over the valley. Next post, I'll get to the art!

A couple more recent works

Still trying to find my way around as a blogger...  Pleased to have been able to add a list of blogs I read. Let's see what happens if I...

These are two linocut prints from the series, From the Book of LC, using fragments of leonard Cohen lyrics...most are essentially text...in a sort of concrete poetry.  The are two playful variations that incorporate a bird (as a pictogram)...instead of the word.

This is the first of the series, in which the words take the form of the image.

from Undertow, on Dear Heather.

Impact7...belatedly

A very tardy post about highlights of the Impact7 http://impact7.org.au/  printmaking conference at Monash University.

The conference was full-on, lots to see and hear – very stimulating but exhausting. 

Some of my highlights – a paper by Macushla Robinson about Bea Maddock’s Being and Nothingness, a work in which Maddock transcribed part of Sartre’s text as homage.  She referred to Benjamin who talked of reading a text as like flying over a landscape, but transcribing it like walking through the landscape; coming to know it through the action of the body (phenomenologically).

Paul Coldwell’s keynote discussion of the folio of prints as a means of exploration of the series, sequence and variation…particularly fascinating were Henry Moore’s Elephant Skull and Paula Rego’s Nursery Rhymes.

Mike Parr wasn’t able to appear but a video of him working on huge etching plates nailed to the wall with an angle grinder was pretty amazing and his printer, John Loane,  talked about their collaboration over the years.

I was looking forward to Johanna Drucker’s talk, but the skype was a bit problematic and her focus was on ephemeral, online, performance/hybrid/new media works which wasn't really what I was hoping for.

Listened to Sarah Bodman speak twice – once at the State Library on the night before the conference and she was interesting – gave an overview of the range of artists’ book practice internationally rather than anything terribly challenging or theoretical.  She is very enthusiastic and active.

Found lots to inspire and incite.

There was also lots of work to look at – lots of exhibitions on campus as well as open folio presentations each day…besides all the exhibitions around Melbourne.   Familiar Unfamiliar, curated by Rona Green, at C3  was a highlight. http://c3artspace.blogspot.com/

Hello!

I am an art historian, arts writer, printmaker and artist's book maker.  Sometimes I think I should focus on just writing or just making but I prefer to try to follow the excellent advice to 'bite of more than you can chew'!

For the last four days I've been at the Impact7 Printmaking conference at Monash University. Enjoyed the papers, the exhibitions and meeting lots of interesting people.
To coincide with the conference printmakers all over Victoria and further were encouraged to hold exhibitions of their work in the Month of Print. 
I have a solo exhibition at Synergy Gallery in Northcote, which runs for just two more days.  It was a struggle to get it up and not everything is quite as I would have hoped.  There are several related bodies of work, some of which didn't get as far as I had planned, but I'm pleased with the overall look of the exhibition.

Here are a few images.
The first is  a series of linocut works called Nude as Wallpaper. Text from Kenneth Clark's The Nude is overlayed with a nude from Art History, simplified and repeated.
Then a series of monoprints with collaged silhouettes of female figures from Art History cut from linocut prints of knitted textures.
And finally a group of playful collaborations.