Let me start by welcoming you to the art. This is a video put together in a very rudimentary but purposeful manner, to introduce you as described by some of my friends and family as “Dark Sad Art”.
I, on the other hand saw it as a joyful manifestation of my inner thoughts?
I have a facility to create and foist these scribbles upon the world with unrestrained enthusiasm, no filtering and very little reference.
You see, I have drawn a lot throughout my existence recording our reality through the media. I was a Newspaper opinion page cartoonist/ illustrator for 32 years on THE AUSTRALIAN. Therefore most imagery is conjured up from this engorged memory bank of rehearsed scribbles.
This becomes helpful throughout the creation process. Yes, I can draw an elephant that looks like the current president and any emotion in a figurative pose without digging into photographic archives or having models pose for me. Thus the ideas come to life and rendered iteratively with one thing leading to another, allowing mark making to become a crucial catalyst to the discovery of new outcomes.
My research into the various subjects adds depth and narrative to the art making, ironically called “Scribbles” and “Random Thoughts” through process and new materials. I use sculpting, photography, drawing, digital drawing on the Ipad with great new Apple pens on procreate to develop these iterations, and monumentalised the scale through oil painting, photogravure, and monotypes and evolve an emotional response to a subject.
It is important to develop a narrative within the abstract nature and confluence of materials, especially to demonstrate the artist’s agency. I know I always want to see the mark makers hand in a work of art at the end of the day.
The process starts with an idea resonating within my contemporary experience, or an historical truth. I’m usually emotionally bound to new concepts or narratives with the need to express discoveries visually.
The “Southerly Buster” to me, having lived around Sydney’s Bondi beach and its environs, is one phenomena we experience every summer. After I swimming in Bondi under the twisty black cloud that formed off the coast on one of those scorching hot days, I read this poem: Henry Lawson, “The Southerly Buster”, and subsequently remembered that he was buried in Waverley cemetery. I strolled past his grave everyday of the COVID lockdown in the cemetery on my solo daily walks to Clovely Beach for the mandated isolated Swim.
Those Hot days turn to cold very quickly, reflected in the poem, Lawson using it as a metaphor for the fortunate rich people on the foreshore of Sydney harbour, receiving it’s cooling benefits much earlier than the inner city slum dwellers in Paddington or Surry Hills. This then became the starting point, subsequently I produced an allegorical plasticine sculpture proceeded by an other windswept figure in the second iteration.
By the third stage of the artwork, I had swam through another “Southerly”. I swim point to point at Bondi and left in the heat off the icebergs bogey whole mid afternoon to cool down for exercise, and returned in the cool of the southerly chop on the water slapping me on the face. The beach clears out with strong gusts of wind suddenly blowing up the sand and waves under the looming presence of a dark grey blue rolling cloud which turbines its way north west from a small point in the ocean north east off Ben Buckler, Bondi’s northern headland.
The artistic Scribblings of Random Thoughts begin their journey of possibilities from this point and looking at the 5 iterations already building up in the video presented, I can assure you my readers, it is only the introduction. Interestedly, just by typing into the internet I found out, there was a red light place high at the Martin place Post office, put out to warn Sydneysiders of the imminent weather change and also a flag with the letters JB (Jarvis Bay) hooked up the flagstaff at Observatory Hill when the wind had reached the south coast beach on its way up to cool the rich in the city.
The findings are fuelling my research and progressive interest in the visual vocabulary for the next artworks. My process is I enhanced by learning new techniques of printmaking. I am workshopping with renowned printer Jenny Robinson in the first week of April. I also work partime in a major Sydney Contemporary Gallery constantly talking to visitors about the works on display, adding another layer of complexity to my participation in the art world. Conceptually it investigates and invites new insights to my work and enables my SUSTAINABLE ART PRACTICE financially also.
Stay tuned for Southerly Buster #2
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