Starting the new year with a bang!

Ok so I’ve overcommitted myself. It’s natural, you’d say. Don’t worry about it. But I feel like I’ve let someone down if I promise to pay for something then pull out a month later. In the past month I’ve been very busy and here I am, looking down the barrel at insolvency or, worse, making my name objectionable in London art circles. The outfit I’m talking about sticks up posters in the Underground but charges almost 500 pounds, which is like 1000 dollars Australian, and I have to pay my car insurance. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe I can get along without car insurance. This isn’t third party insurance that covers people who sustain bodily damage as a result of an accident you cause. This is insurance of the car itself.

I think I’ll let the car insurance go.

In 2023 I applied to a number of galleries and I have six shows booked in ’24. There are another six proposals out there that haven’t been answered, plus one that I put in in ’23 that’s so far gone unanswered – I am sure because I’ve checked my emails like three times. While all this has been going on I’ve been making art, but again paramontages and combines that rely on computer work. I haven’t done any watercolours since early December.

This period of a month has been validating, I feel as though for the first time I have something that I can talk about. Certain documents are starting to come together, as well, notably the ‘Artist statement’ and CV. I have tried to be thorough with these but starting from nothing in August made me wonder what I should say. It seems easier now, partly because I can write down the actual shows I’ve been selected for, but that’s not the only reason.

One thing that I’ve been doing while occupied on the computer is moderating a Facebook group. I think it offers something that people can benefit from, a feeling perhaps of acceptance, a space where their ideas can raise a response but in a safe way, a place of confraternity and ease. I like that people can post their drawings or paintings. I see the comments other people leave.

The other reason I’ve found it easier to write about making art is that I sort of better understand the basic principles behind it. That’s not to say I don’t welcome feedback from outside. I do, and have in fact asked for comment from people who are well-placed to give it.

On the poetry front I’ve also done some work, getting back to a website (Submittable) I had forgotten about entirely since I last used it in 2013. That’s the last time I was rejected. It seems like when it comes to literary arts I’ve got a thin skin. I also found an editor, but I have to get some more funds ready so I can pay him – (come now it can’t be that hard right? – well it is!

I will just keep on moving forward. With any luck I’ll get an acceptance for my poetry and so won’t have to wait a decade in order to look up the website name again.

New works to start the year

Last night I was busy busy busy making combines, starting with one about NY Eve.

'Observatory Hill 31 Dec 2007', 2024.

Other things followed overnight, as I combined photos of country roads, city streets, and fireworks, TV dramas. All of the things that I love. Dad told me once that Joao Luis' family got preference in Portugal by pyrotechnics, I wonder if it's true. Maybe in 2024 I'll talk more with my family over there, they sort of got upset with me because I had been complaining about my father.

'Highway III', 2024.

'Pink', 2024.

'Proof III', 2024.

I charged through all night, making 17 combines in the space of about 12 hours. It was an epic session and I had a great deal of fun combining colours.

New works to round out the year

I wanted to put up a few images to show what I've been up to. As many of you know the end of year period is hard for me, and like many people I find myself at a loose end. Perhaps if I'd made better life choices when I was younger things might've worked out differently. Or perhaps there were other factors, factors outside my control. I sometimes question myself. 

In any case i like to keep busy.. A few days ago I was doing so on social media when I entered a parallel universe that I normally stay away from, the universe in question being a flame war zone. Normally I steer clear of such controversy but because I was bored and because I assumed that people would exercise their imaginations with me (they didn't, it needs to be said at the outset) I posted something that was taken badly by several people.

This was a shock to the system but I did what I normally do in such situations, I stepped away and entered my own universe, the one circumscribed (or, rather, not circumscribed) by art. The first image I will  share was the result of this contretemps. I won't need to add any commentary I think, the gist is pretty obvious, especially as you've read already the chronicle of the period of gestation.

'Looking up at the helicopter the thought police', 2023.

Having done this I naturally felt pretty pleased with myself. How might I react to having made such a fetching object? It was easy. And because it was easy I got to making more.

'Bright yellow stripe (Automotive fabrication)', 2023.

The last time I had made such things was in October 2022. In November I started making watercolours so sort of overnight abandoned making my paramontages (see link above for more details abot this word). I started making paramontages in April that year but before that the last time I'd used graphical manipulation software to make images was in about 2014. I actually made others in 2008, and some of the photos that I'm now using to make combines date from that era.

The main reason for posting about these things now is that the blog is like evidence. It's proof of practice. So I can say to someone who asks when i started making the combines, "Take a look at the blog for details." I can easily just tell them to Google the blog name and they're set. In fact we're both set. They get the reassurance they were after and I get peace of mind.

Another reason is that I just like to share.

Sharing was, after all, the thing that led me to make this series of works. Since we're on this track I'lkl share something else as well. The following combine was made using images I captured with my camera (not phone) in the period from July 2016 to June 2017. My mother died in July 2016 so I know now why I took the shots. In the middle of 2017 I started to come back to life, and I began to make myself busy, for example my homelessness series of posts dated from the second half of 2017, as does my series of posts on brutalism. So the period matching the financial year 16-17 was a period of mourning, and I titled the series I'm going to give you a sample of, accordingly.

'Mourning raiments XI', 2023.

There are 14 panels in the series, each of which has six selfies. I gathered 84 such images early this morning and made the entire et overnight, finally getting around to the business of tidying up late this afternoon. Each panel uses different colours, red blue yellow teal, and I sort of like the fact that when I took the photos I had no notion that I would one day use them in this way.

TV review: This Is A Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, Netflix (2021)

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was poorly protected and badly staffed in 1990 when robbers dressed as cops tricked their way inside, trussed up the guards, and over a period of 81 minutes stole works of art valued at over $200 million. The thieves cut the paintings out of their frames, damaging them irrevocably. It’s a heart-breaking scenario and it really happened.

This is why I love Netflix. What fictional crime drama can compete with the emotions that this show promises to invoke? If killing is a symbol of separation and love for unity, then ‘This Is A Robbery’ is a celebration of separation and loss because there is no neatly tied-up finale.

They never found the works.

The people the police and the FBI fingered for the heist are or were all petty criminals, not dashing thieves with high-tech gadgetry. Sure the playbook the thieves wrote for the robbery was inventive but the aftermath didn’t involve a car screeching off into the darkness with the cops hot on their heels. It involved a museum guard with duct tape wrapped around his head, abandoned gilt frames scattered around the exhibition room, and a guard’s office in disarray.

It involved merely destruction.

The habits and character of the people involved in the robbery warrant further inspection so if they ever find the art I hope they make a new series. Rembrandt is such a gigantic name in the art world and when a painting by the master goes missing you stand up and take notice. I took notice and I lament the loss and possible damage to his painting of a boat on the Sea of Galilee. Christ knows there are a lot of Old Masters in America but every one of them is worth preservation. This is why owning a painting such as this is a responsibility as well as a benefit. If you own a Picasso or a Matisse you have to look after it so that everyone can have the benefit of seeing it in real life.

Listed works for sale from first solo show

Naturally I didn't sell everything from the first show I held, so I found a site called Bluethumb where you ca list your works for sale. I did the measurements and weight yesterday for a number of works (see below). It was a relatively painless process made a bit more difficult by the fact that my phone was on low charge so I had to sit in the lounge chair instead of on the couch.

Bridge 9340, 2023 (watercolour colalge and posca on paper)

FOCARE II, 2023 (watercolour and collage on paper)

FOCARE VI, 2023 (watercolour and collage on paper)

Social animals III, 2023 (mixed media)

Trial by media, 2023 (watercolour and collage on paper)

I have other things to list on Bluethumb and will get around to it in the future. I hope someone sees the works and likes them enough to buy. I haven't thought too much about packaging because I think it's a bridge to cross when I get to it, my first goal is to get a "view" on Bluethumb.

What do you think? Are these the sorts of things you'd like to have on your wall? Do they make any sense at all? It's Pop art I think, at least that's the way I classified them in Bluethumb. You can put in little descriptions as well where you can note your influences or write down any explanatory ttext detailing what your work is mean to be about. But these things are all relative. When I see these works I see one thing but when someone else sees them they might see something completely different.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. For me, this journey is just beginning and I have been making lots of new work over the past few weeks. I made two paintings last night, for example, which feature cars and koalas. You can guess my meaning already?

Is there a divide between beautful art and meaningful art?

This post is a response to Andrew McIlroy’s article on “value-free” art in Australia. I read the post with eagerness because this is something I think about a lot, the difference in art between the purely decorative and the meaningful. I wonder how you can split the two things into separate categories? Is it a question of working withing a specific tradition? How has popular culture, specifically advertising and other media such as cinema and TV affected the fine arts? What barriers are there in people’s minds, people in the street or in the commercial gallery who come along to a show opening to mix and mingle, chat and view the works for sale?

It's a conundrum.

I think Andrew has a point in that there is a lot of art available that is objectively beautiful, and you think that the gallerist and the artist want to offer something for sale that will be acceptable to buyers who might want to take a work home and put it on a wall. I mean, it’s easier to feel comfortable with a Klee than a Kollwitz. Because of the coexistence of different styles now – it’s just as acceptable to paint an abstract as a figurative landscape – there is a lot of choice for artists who want to appeal to buyers. I wonder if Francis Bacon if he were an up-and-coming artist would have many buyers? For my part I am not a fan of Bacon but accept that he’s a valuable commodity.

In literature I coined a new term Divergism to describe the market for books, there are so many genres available now that there’s no longer a mainstream, there are several mainstreams. In visual arts it’s the same, you can do anything now it’s fine people will understand (or at least the community of collectors and aficionados will understand) if you paint abstract, figurative, semi-figurative, semi-abstract; anything goes. I guess this means that it’s possible to paint something that is objectively beautiful and that simultaneously is meaningful. I might borrow tropes from commercial art, styles of combining colours or of making lines that are common to advertising, but in doing so make a comment on life more broadly. Or I might try to be ugly, or use just black and white, and do something that is essentially designed to be merely beautiful. I fear I’m not making myself clear however, and so I’ll backtrack a bit.

In television there are two very popular types of program: cooking shows and shows that feature real estate. Both are innately highbrow but they also manage to be popular. Some are more popular than others, so for example while Nine Entertainment has ‘The Block’ the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has ‘Grand Designs’. Network Ten has on weekends many cooking shows in the afternoon. You get tradies and sportspeople cooking on ‘MasterChef’ and you get everywoman and her dog fronting up for ‘The Block’. Food and shelter are perennials.

It's different for art. It’s hard to get someone coming in off the street to front up $1000 for a painting where you can use the same amount of money to eat for two months for the whole family. But the people who are buying the paintings are the same people who are watching ‘The Block’ and ‘Grand Designs’. You know they’re interested in culture (design and food are great cultural products) and you know they value their way of life. So if all art is flattery what are the triggers that are going to separate the punter from that elusive $1k?

In the era of ‘Kath & Kim’ what’s low brow enough to please the average gallery visitor? It has to be something they want to live with, but they also want to feel as though they’re getting in on the ground floor. Everyone likes a bargain but art is inherently exclusive. It’s a fine line that commercial galleries have to walk in order to do conflicting things. On the one hand they need to appeal to the masses but on the other they need to signal that what they’re offering is high-brow.

I think that at a time when we’re confronted by Postmodern works of art that were written by our grandparents we need to find ways to accommodate a range of imperatives. I don’t think that purely decorative art is meaningless but perhaps we have too much choice. There literally are no rules, there are galleries in Sydney aimed at a range of tastes (I can’t speak about Melbourne) from Pop to Neofigurative, from Abstract to Aboriginal. In this world of zero boundaries perhaps our preference for the beautiful is a way to anchor us to something in the face of too much liberty. Perhaps we need the chain of gorgeousness to stop us from floating away on a wave of excessive feeling?

Colour as a plot device

It feels like eternity has passed but since I did the ‘Death by cop’ series only two months has gone by. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the show in July so haven’t been painting much, but a few days ago I went back to what I did last year.

And reinvented it.

Last year I was making colour watercolours with collage but I hadn’t turned the paintings into series yet. A month ago I did so and therefore had something to think about when it came to doing ‘Colour as a plot device’ (which will also be the title of the show). I specifically wanted to use nine panels and made nine watercolours but then at the last minute broke up another series and used one panel from that in this new work.

I think about how artists are portrayed in popular culture, they’re usually denigrated on account of their enthusiasms, rendered in a way that makes them unpalatable. They don’t fit in. They’re deliberately different and use that as a weapon to attack the status quo. But ‘Colour as a plot device’ uses tropes from that same place to turn the mirror around, you see familiar elements of cultural iconography but the gorgeous background makes them look like they’re seen in front of a splendid sunset. We all seek to escape and when we’re caught up in a net we struggle all the harder.

I think about popular culture and what it means. That policeman, that joker, that criminal, that reigning monarch, all fit into destiny’s tableau like parts of a puzzle. You belong to an organisation you fit into its matrix, you belong to a community you conform. You settle in for the ride. You mix and mingle. 

And smile.

'Magnificent obsessions' series

I was out with friends on Saturday but stayed home all day Sun giving me time and space to dream. 

Because I’d flattened out a whole lot of watercolours I had given them a second life and resurrected possibilities. The confluence of events led me to making a bunch of standalone paintings into a series I titled ‘Magnificent obsessions’ in honour of Sydneysiders’ penchant for food and real estate. The title is similar to my old boss’ film title, what she made after she left the company we worked at. 

Like my collage I’m not really stealing the film title, it’s more like payment because I made some graphics for the credits, and anyway her film title is not precisely the same. I repurpose magazines to make collage so why not repurpose a pair of words?

There is something unwieldy about our obsession with real estate, more recently paired with an interest in food – see all the cooking shows about farm-to-fork etc – and it’s a bit of a stretch to call it “magnificent” though we have nationally a much higher mobility rate than other countries apart from those in Scandinavia, so evidently the use of dwellings to improve one’s material wellbeing isn’t all bad. 

We’re yet to see if the state and federal governments can do something about homelessness, which is still too high. We know what to do about homelessness it’s just a matter of authorities biting the bullet and taking the necessary actions to make sure people are housed. The measures required imply an all-of-government response. I wonder if siloing – which is inevitable where you have organisations responding – isn’t going to throw a spanner in the works.

Abstract chevron sets

I can’t remember exactly when it was, yesterday or the day before, but I assembled the abstract series of works into sets (see below) giving the individual paintings a second opportunity to glow. One viewer said they are “luscious” and I’m grateful for the feedback, but for myself I think they create meaning when they’re considered together because of the sheer diversity the new work embodies.

Seeing the thing here online you don’t get the full effect but in real life when seen together the paintings secure new life because in addition to the range of colours, the arrow (chevron) shapes all point in different directions so the eye is constantly changing its point of focus from one panel to another. The sense of movement you get from the work has something to do with this diversity, as though a sink full of soapy water were being stirred.

Because I had two panels left over after putting the two sets together I am making a third set to accommodate the two spare paintings. I explained in the previous blogpost how I came to have three of the first set, and not two.

Abstract series

On Thursday I was due to meet friends for dinner in Darlinghurst and there was a show opening also nearby to go to. A friend had furthermore offered to give me things for the baby (my daughter is expecting) so I had three reasons to go into town, and caught a bus at around 3pm. I went to the Sheraton Hotel to pick up the bibs and cap then went to Dymocks and bought some more children’s books as well as some art books.

I started reading one on abstract painters when I was in the CBD at Westfield’s food court where you can sit freely for as long as you like, then I tried getting on the train but it didn’t come so resigned myself to resorting to a bus, which I caught on Elizabeth St.

The walk down from Oxford St to Rushcutters bay was a little stressful because I was always wondering as I went along when my heart would start thumping but it stayed calm. I took in the show by myself – you can see the review on the Esag blog – then sauntered back up the hill to Victoria St where I sat down on a bench reading.

The cars were buzzing behind me and one popped and snorted as it changed gears because it was owned by a young man and he thinks that making noise is as fun for everyone else as it is for him. For about 30 minutes I wandered mentally through different worlds, art movements, manifestos, declarations etc and I came away amused at the frailty of human endeavour, we think what we do has a certain meaning and it turns out that other people (in the future, say) don’t care a fig about what we say and only admire the pretty pictures.

Last night I talked with my friend Basia about all these earnest people and their exhortations and “position statements” etc and we laughed (I love the pretty pictures though). We also talked about the abstract works I made in response to reading the book (see below), I started with an unused base watercolour from a previous series and did four more to make five in the ‘Yellow abstract’ set, then did four ‘Orange abstract’ paintings using some of the new paint I picked up on Thursday.

At dinner a friend of a friend commented on my paintings (not from the abstract series) and later I saw an SMS she sent regarding them that noted their preliminary nature, I think she wants me to make acrylic or oil paintings and use these watercolours as studies. I took this person’s words to heart thinking about the future and its mysteries but haven't moved away from my current method yet and possibly never will. I’d shown her some of my return to the ad slogan series (see below) and I hadn’t started on the abstract ones at that point. her husband also said I should use larger paper but after talking with Basia about both of these suggestions I'm deciding to stay put for the moment. I'm enjoying myself.

Going back to 'Social animals' series

I’d just done some “double overlay” paintings, in fact four of them (see last post) and decided to go back to November when I made the original “social animals” series. The reason for this move was that I didn’t have any new Japanese “kotowaza” to use but needed a break. The ‘Social animals’ paintings are easy to do and this time I’d be making sets deliberately, originally I made up the sets in the end with extra ‘Party animal’ paintings having made a bunch of the other ones. You’ll see (if it’s not clear what I’m talking about right now).

I had always wanted to make ‘Social animal’ paintings in red and blue, and now added yellow as well for variety. Perhaps in future I’ll just do red and blue alone or maybe red, white and blue. That’s the thing about painting it’s not just WHAT you draw of paint, it’s also the colours you use, or else the overall tone.

I chose brightness this time because red, blue and yellow is a happy combination. For the collage I used some old paramontage rejects photos that were still usable in this way but that I otherwise had no use for. I have a bunch of paramontages upstairs not being used that people can’t even see because the living room is on a different floor, but I haven’t made up my mind to cut them up yet. Maybe some of the less successful ones I’ll cannibalise in this way I haven’t made up my mind yet.

The photo paper these paramontages are printed on is very thick relative to ordinary magazine paper so it takes a while to get the collage to stick but I spend a good deal of effort making sure it does. Following the red-blue-yellow ‘Social animals’ set I’ve also started a maroon/purple set so will post those later on the blog. The reason I chose the maroon/purple colour scheme is that a friend recommended this for a “kotowaza” series and I got some positive feedback on the colours then.

New collage series 2

I started this “double overlay” collage series last week and you can see the post about it on the blog if you go to look in the menu, then I got caught up in “kotowaza” paintings again before coming back to it. I did these four paintings a couple of days ago and while I still have some reservations about this series, especially with regards to framing, I am pretty happy with how things are progressing.

It takes a while to plan a painting like this because you need to work out spacially where the underpainting is going to get cut off by the pasted letters. It’s like writing a sonnet where you need to work out how to make the rhymes match the sense, you start with the hard bit then let the rest of it take care of itself.

I made the Twitter pair first, one morning getting my paints and brush ready along with water, a cutting knife, and a sheet of paper towel. I use the cheap Officeworks paints mainly substituting Japanese watercolours occasionally. I don’t use paint from a tube for these paintings as I need a wide range of paints quickly and it takes too long to open the tube, squeeze a tiny bit out onto a takeaway-container lid, and put back the cap.

I did ‘Alone Denmark’ next then ‘Gobbledygook’ to round out the day’s work. I enjoy every part of the process with the exception of the underpainting in watercolour. The reason I don’t enjoy this part is because it’s permanent and the placement is critical making it a bit nerve-wracking, so for example you can see in ‘Alone Denmark’ I didn’t quite hit the mark and the subject’s eye is missing in the final assembly.

The Posca marks that are put over the top are also a bit nerve-wracking because of the care needed to make them clean and in place so I don’t completely enjoy this part of the process but the selection of colours like the collage part is a lot of fun. I always look forward to seeing what it will look like in the end.

New kotowaza paintings

I wonder if getting “kotowaza” (Japanese sayings) from my family is quite fair, if it’s just a way to get approval in advance for a piece. I’m not sure. All I know is that it makes sense to do paintings in this way, by getting other people involved. Perhaps this was my weakness all those years ago in that the reason I didn’t continue with art practice when I was a young man was because I needed approval.

Perhaps.

Nevertheless that’s who I am. I have another friend who helped with these paintings and her name is Basia, she helped by suggesting the colours. She said I should go outside my comfort zone and do green/blue and maroon/purple and that’s what I did.

'Chalk and cheese' (the moon and a turtle).

'Loost a fly to catch a trout' (a loss leads to a benefit).

'An impossible task' (eye medicine from the second floor).

'Ups and downs' (fall down seven times get up eight).

This wasn't the order in which they were made it was 1, 2, 4, 3 but I started with the green/blue ones and then did the maroon/purple ones. If you have suggestions for the colours for the nexdt lot, let me know in the comments. I will try to get more "kotowaza" sayings from my family soon ...

Progress of collage

It’s been four-and-a-half months since I started making collage, it started with Esag and a vision board then we had another session where we made small, A5 collages on any theme though it began with a sky.

A sky.

How to make one with watercolour? I think you have to imagine when sitting in the room what a sky might look like if you’d been asked to design one. Once you have a sky you can put things under it, like mountains and rivers, spaceships and dogs.

Anything you like.

This is the first collage apart from the vision board that I made. Under the sky is a body of water, some bicycle wheels, and then there are the words, things that we partly take for granted – if they’re what we expect to see – and that challenge our understanding.

The second collage I made is below. In fact this painting also includes a sky but this time in violet instead of blue. The orange hill or mountain range at the bottom was deliberately added to give a sense of depth, but this sense of depth is challenged by the cut-outs in the sky that sort of give a view into an alternate universe where there are trees and some sort of galaxy.

Or cheese. 

Maybe it’s from a cooking magazine, in fact that’s it, I got it from a women’s magazine where on one page you have the universe of celebrity and on the next page you have the galaxy of skincare. Hyaluronic acid right with the royals!

A royal flush.

Skin care is not a big issue for men, though I understand that this is changing. Perhaps I should spend more time watching ‘Married at First Sight’ or ‘The Bachelor’. Instead I waste my evening hours with stupid 90s crime dramas, it seems like so many memorable ones were pioneered in that decade, on both sides of the Atlantic. Under the sky the ocean, but which ocean? A bicycle wheel means a machine, but one powered by humans. Today it’s raining tomorrow will be sun, true believers they march as one.

New collage series

I wanted to get back to six-letter phrases and chose names to make the jump from what I was working on prior. I made two items in the new collage series, one dedicated to Jeffrey Dahmer (‘Dahmer mostro’) which is a subject I’d earlier tried in the initial collage series. I actually had the first one at the framers’ months ago but stopped the work because I wasn’t happy with it. I’m much happier with the new version.

Even though I’m much happier with the result the second time around I still worry that the underlying collage letters perhaps take up too much real estate. What do you think? If the letters were thinner would the result be better?

The second item in the new series is dedicated to Barry Manilow, a singer I was fond of when I was young.

To make the collage in each case I took pages out of ‘New Scientist’ magazine as I still have lots of this publication in reserve to use for collage.

'Death by cop' series

I took advice from a woman who sometimes comes to Eastern Suburbs Art Group gatherings and stopped putting collage on some of my works. This won’t mean that collage has been banished just that I’ll be more selective about where and when it appears. 

The new series ‘Death by cop’ is also figurative and comes from old photos taken in The Rocks one day. I enjoy the colours, the ways they meld and merge and stay separate, the ways that they create meaning just by sitting on the paper, or at least I hope they do. I enjoy making these things despite the title (which is, admittedly, a bit macabre) and there will be more to follow in the same vein.

I think that ‘Death by cop’ represents a new beginning, as for me this is the start of something that has space for experimentation. By this time I’ve started a number of series, including the ‘CAPitalism’ series and the ‘Kotowaza’ (Japanese sayings) series. Looking back to where all of this artmaking started I see in the placement of framed photos on shelves in my house, and in the hanging of pictures on the walls, an effort to bridge a divide. It’s hard to put it into words even though I’ve spent so many years writing in various ways, including poetry, journalism, and in my journal. If I try to pinpoint the significance of all of this artmaking I feel forced to stumble, just as, when I was a boy racing round a track, I felt the need to tap my toe on the ground – left and right, left, left and right, right – in order to keep the balance.

The balance?

Like I said it’s difficult to explain. I guess the reason why I started using collage is because of the years I spent making magazines and promotional brochures, newsletters and use manuals, reams and reams of “useful” literature that is probably now all pulped and recycled, or thrown into landfill. I remember and you’ll never know the careful effort that went into making those publications, the hours, minutes, weeks, months – scattered shards of time – now almost forgotten. Perhaps it’s in an effort to recycle that time that I now imagine worlds using collage.

The thing about collage is its rapidity, and this is allied to its potential for reuse. If I clip a piece of paper out of a magazine I can just quickly paste it down on top of the painting. The colours on the printed paper – if they remain unfaded – spark off in contrast with what lies on the paper. In the same way thoughts associated with current events or with my surroundings contrast with memories.

CAPitalism series revisited

I just can’t get enough … of the CAPitalism series, to which I’ve added four images. 

Unlike other series I think these ones work ok with collage. I don’t know exactly what it is and someone else might be better situated to comment on these artworks, but the collage in the CAPitalism (car, ad, pop music) seems to cohere with the images. 

What do you think?

In recent weeks I’ve had cars hanging on my living room walls because I reorganised the hang, I brought down from upstairs some paintings I bought 15 years back. I also put up some photos of Aunt Madge’s which I’d had framed.

On crime dramas cars have a special significance also, on Monday night I watched a particularly bizarre episode of ‘Chief Inspector Morse’ where his red Jaguar is vandalised with Masonic symbols. Morse is the suspect in a killing and another inspector is brought in to investigate the case. The attacker has a vendetta against Morse and scratches his car leaving it badly damaged. The replacement inspector is a Mason and at the end of the ep he invited Morse to join. It’s totally mad. Morse tracks the killer down to a house in Oxford and the murderer has plastered the walls with images of Morse in order to indicate in a televisual fashion that he’s obsessed with the detective. But the thing is that in this show the red car morse drives is almost like a character, when Morse and Lewis see the killer’s car in the driveway it turns out to be a Jaguar as well BUT A MORE MODERN MODEL and Morse disparagingly makes a comment so Lewis can hear. He mocks the style of the killer’s Jaguar as if the older style is MUCH BETTER when in fact (objectively speaking) you’d have to say a more modern car would be better in an engineering sense.

Then there’s Vera Stanhope’s Land Rover.

I did a four-panel painting in honour of ‘Vera’ where one panel features the car she drives, a boxy contraption square as the little hat she always wears around the traps. I did one panel for the hat as well. One for the hat and one for the car. The first and second panels are taken up with that aeroplane man statue they erected ‘Angel of the North’ or something I can’t remember I watched a YouTube video about it once. Engineering marvel. Pity the Japanese make better cars!

Bridge 9340

In a burst of creativity I completed these four paintings in one evening this week, the photos from my archives. In fact some of you might recognise the bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis up in the headwaters that collapsed under the weight of traffic in August 2007.

The bridge was rebuilt within a year, so it, like the paintings, was fixed in a rush.

Where there’s a will there’s a way. I’m using so many old Japanese sayings that it is suitable to use an ancient (like me) English saying as well. 

Over the next few days I’ll be alone as houseguests are out of town so will be doing more painting. ‘Bridge 9340’ says “please do not panic” and I’ve got sentences lined up for the next two series, I’ll see if I feel like posting them when they’re finished, enough to say that they’ll be colourful like ‘Bridge 9340’.

When I think of Bridge 9340 I also think of those forgotten spaces in cities that we use to move from one place to another. Near the entrance to the M5 here in Sydney there’s an intersection that is similarly unlovely, with constant traffic despite the existence on the road of houses. The traffic is made worse by trucks that use the surface roads even though there’s a tunnel under the suburbs they could use if they could see a way to paying the fare. Some times I imagine what it must be to live on a road that is so heavily used, but most of the time I ignore it. When I’m in the intersection I am too busy trying to negotiate the traffic to spare a thought for the residents who have to put up with the incessant noise.