From my first printmaking assignment for 2013 – chine collé. The image is based on photos of tree bark – it became quite abstract. I coloured the rice paper with water colour. I’m not that much into printmaking, but I quite like these.
I researched Louise Bourgeois for an assignment a while back, but I didn’t particularly like her work. But when I recently saw her work in the flesh at Heide Museum of Modern Art, I was impressed and moved.
Her large sculpture Spider (1997) – a huge metal spider enclosing a cage containing a chair, pieces of tapestry, an old fashioned perfume bottle, darning needles and hatpins, small bones, and a cameo, which seemed like personal objects from her past – lurked in the gloom, resonating with psychological unease. The more I looked at it, the more details I noticed. It’s like a strange museum exhibit of Bourgeois’s traumatic childhood.
Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor. L. Bourgeois
The headless and partially limbless torsos, made of bandages, fabric and wood, one with a knife instead of a head, and the headless, deformed couple apparently having sex, were a disturbing embodiment of dysfunction, desire, fear and sexuality. I also found the black female figure hanging upside down like a carcass quite confronting.
Blue Days (1996) – a collection of Bourgeois’ dresses and shirts, on stuffed headless torsos like dressmakers forms, hanging on hooks on metal rods – felt merely nostalgic and ‘lighter’ than some of the other work. A welcome respite from the psychological darkness.
Cinq is five stuffed fabric heads hanging from the same hook. It was suggested that they might represent Bourgeois’s family. I liked the simplicity and tenderness of this work.
There was also a collection of lithographs of drawings and text. I liked the phrase ‘To unravel a torment you must begin somewhere’. The word unravel continues the sewing metaphor which pervades the work.
When I was growing up all the women in my house were using needles. I’ve always had a fascination with…the magic power of the needle. The needle is used to repair the damage.
L. Bourgeois, 1992
In a way I suppose Bourgeois was repairing the damage of her early trauma, using her needle, for most of her life.
I’m still going, and I’ve only missed one day so far.
27/2/13 Happy cat, watercolour
28/2/13 I did three of the ugliest self portraits ever, so I won’t be posting them…
01/03/13 New painting, acrylic on canvas, stage 1
02/03/13 West gate, water colour and pastel
03/03/13 I missed a day…
04/03/13 New painting, acrylic on canvas, stage 2
05/03/13 Williamstown 1, pencil
05/03/13 Williamstown 2, pencil
06/03/13 Cinq, after Louise Bourgeois, ink
07/03/13 New painting, acrylic on canvas, stage 3
I’ve always found drawing people difficult, and have avoided it. But have decided to try more portraiture, as a challenge.
07/03/13 David, ink
I recently visited Action/Abstraction. It was inspiring. If you like abstract painting I highly recommend seeing this exhibition. Five painters are represented: Jo Davenport, Sally Gabori, Todd Hunter, Ildiko Kovacs, and Aida Tomescu. Let’s start with Aida Tomescu, a painter I’m growing to love more and more. Tomescu layers paint, scrapes back, drips and splatters, draws into the work, and adds more layers. Her paintings have a strong physical presence and are bold, complex, and beautiful.
Tomescu was a finalist in the Wynne Prize 2012 with Crossgrain.
What I wanted to get to was a unified presence, full and ordered with a light and clarity of its own.
Intensively worked, scraped back repeatedly, and reconsidered, Crossgrain is not a painting about texture. Nor is the image trying to create a special illusion of a representative world – though if you want to think in terms of earth, air, the soft steps of the sky, it is all of those things.
I think of Crossgrain more as a space where mood, movement, vibration, the linkages of marks across the surface and their special behaviour form a particular experience.
(from her artist statement)
The exhibition runs until 24 March.
Aida Tomescu, Aspen, 2010
Aida Tomescu, Tethys II, 2010
I was getting frustrated with myself for not doing enough work… I think not having a studio at the moment isn’t helping. But maybe that’s just an excuse. Anyway I decided to set myself the challenge of doing at least one drawing, sketch or small painting every day for a month. Here are the first few… I haven’t got anything for yesterday but I was printmaking at Uni all day and I made a few nice prints, but didn’t photograph them.
22/02/13 Kusama window, water colour
23/02/13 Kate, water colour
24/02/13 Succulents, water colour
25/02/13 collage
Traces of time, 2012, pigment ink on cotton rag
Today I visited Vestige II by Melissa Powell at Anita Traverso Gallery.
I met Melissa last year when visiting my artist friend Mars in Natimuk, so I was curious to see her work. It was absolutely amazing! Beautiful aerial photography of the landscape, mainly in the Wimmera. Paddocks of canola embellished with curving plough lines like a yellow plush carpet. The mineral colours and abstract shapes of a salt lake. The traces left on the earth by farming, mining, erosion, fire and flood. And Droughtbreaker, a dark photograph of the delicate tracery of dead trees contrasting with dark flood water. Her photographs have a beautiful meditative quality and give us a bird’s eye view of the land.
Droughtbreaker, 2011, pigment ink on cotton rag
Today I visited I thought I was where I wasn’t at C3 gallery at Abbotsford Convent – paintings by Shannon Smiley and pen and ink drawings by Helen Nodding. Shannon’s paintings are of fragments and forgotten corners of vegetation in the urban landscape that demonstrate the power of nature to reclaim our city environment. I find his paintings inspiring and powerful.
Helen’s meticulous pen and ink drawings are detailed examinations of everyday scenes – tree branches reflected in a ditch or a weed breaking through a footpath – beautifully recorded.
I visited the NGV St Kilda Road today with a friend from Adelaide and we spent some time lying on the couches in the Great Hall admiring the leadlight ceiling by Leonard French. The hall is a beautiful cathedral-like space bathed with light and the coloured glass mosaic reminds me of a kaleidoscope. It’s the largest stained glass ceiling in the world (according to Wikipedia).
kerynrobinson 