Entries Tagged 'ARTISTS' ↓

Every day the Magic Realist Jack Featherstone walks up Mt Gillamatong, a couple of clicks south-west of Braidwood. Recently, when he got to the top, he found the valley was blanketed in fog: “a real pea-souper”. Jack committed the scene to memory, and so, a week later, this painting (acrylic on stone) is the result… And then…

And then, Jack always exhibits in the Canberra Show. Last weekend this painting of Mt Bendethera and Deua Valley (looking due East to Moruya over the distant mountains) took out the Reserve Champion Prize (plus a number of others along the way). Jack was well pleased.

… I had nothing to do with this.

The Bear Grylls of Art Journalism is back at it again! While I love the fact that Aboriginal ladies like Nyurapaia Nampitjinpa gain due recognition for their work in the pages of the national press, one wonders at Nicolas Rothwell’s adoption of The Bear’s hyper-effusive style as he romanticises the complex historical realities of his subjects. Or is his version of the history of inter-racial contact in the Western Desert crafted to suit his own discovery of Nyurapaia Nampitjinpa’s work in the art gallery of a friendly Alice Springs enterpreneur with a smooth sale pitch? See his not-unsympathetic update on the Alice Springs market for Aboriginal Art in December last year? Sets the scene for this particular review…

History aside, what is most disturbing about his mode of review is the sense that the artist subject’s days are numbered, and the suggestion that she is the sole member of her generation to carry such collective knowledge. And so, he suggests, when she goes, “the last custodian”, “the climax of a great tradition”, it’s the end of the line, the end of the authenticity he sees “embodied” in her art. But this is a recurrent theme in his writing: “…what live[s] on in their artworks: they are obituaries of landscape cast in paint” (“Remembrance of things past” April 1-2, 2006, cute title). And as he wrote in 2007: “Death is calling the great painters of the Western Desert”  (“In Remembrance of Times Passing” Nov 24-25 2007, title now a little over-worked). Or, see his “dying man” story of Spider Kalbybidi: “She [Emily Rohr] has come to believe that the disappearances of old northwest desert Aborigines, which are relatively common events, can best be understood as elevations.” (“The Vanishing”, December 13-14, 2008). This is not only a false trope of art historical discourse, it’s a well-established trope of art market promotion. In this case it’s disrespectful of the bodies of work which continue to be produced by the other senior women of the desert.

Wondering what they look like? Here is a recent painting by Nyurapaia Nampitjinpa, painted at Warakurna in 2009.

P.S. And if you really want to know how fortunate we all are to have someone like The Roth gracing our shores, read on…

Iconophilia feels sure readers will enjoy Paul Merton’s visit to Mr Woo. Thanks to Julie for the lead…

…reveal (maybe) the deep source of certain aspects of my recent exmodern moment. See Mel Ramsden (and Michael Baldwin) testing the limits of secrecy and invisibility here.

The Iconophile (your ExMo) presents his first sculpture for 2010, Octopussy, a readymade altered in steel, rubber, and plastic, (dimensions variable). It’s a work which exhibits the five cardinal virtues of The Exmodern. As demonstrated here, exmodernism is characterised by site-specificity, ephemerality, (proto)invisibility, performativity (it’s phenomenological), and/or it has a digital presence. This example is currently located deep in the Spotted Gum (Eucalyptus maculata) forest at Narra Bukulla, on Marr Grounds’ property, near Tanja, New South Wales. “A masterpiece! A triumph of form over function“…

P.S. For an account of Lawrence E. Cahoone’s use of the term exmodernism in his The Ten Modernisms, see the comments below…

Iconophilia is pleased to introduce the work of Braidwood artist Jack Featherstone. Born in 1929, Jack is a prolific artist who for the last thirty years has painted scenes of everyday life in and around the local area and the South Coast of NSW -  as well as other personal and historical accounts of his journeys through Central Australia  and the Northern Territory.

This painting of a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Penrith is painted on Sydney sandstone.

As well as his paintings on canvas, Jack has developed his own techniques of working on strips of bark taken from (dead) Mountain Ash trees (Euc. regnans), sourced from near Central Tilba, as well as the paintings on stone. This is one panel (the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial) from a series on the subject of Australia at war.

Some of the paintings reproduce the original vertical format of a strip of bark, while others take advantage of the horizontal to depict his narratives in panoramic format. Here’s his latest work in progress in his studio.

Keep watching! We’ll be showing more of his work, and filling in the gaps, in the next month or so…

the things you find… Never heard of him? Start here…

This may seem a strange thing to read on Iconophilia, but… Just look at the article on the collection of oversize sculptures on New Zealander Alan Gibbs’ property north of Auckland, in the Oz Art and Design supplement last Friday called Wish, although in keeping with Mr Murdoch’s new money-aggregator policy, you have to subscribe to read what is, after all, a hyper-glossy supplement to carry advertisements for Maseratis and expensive watches.  At the other end of the scale of consumerism, The Iconophile asks: is it healthy to spend one’s lazy dollars to commission such gargantuan aesthetic objects as this Anish Kapoor? And why am I thinking it has a Middle Earth feel about it all? Are there Hobbits just over the hill?