Art thoughts

Liminal

Cathy Blanchflower
Vivian Copper Smith
Bryan Spier
Karl Wiebke
curated by Emma Langridge
To Feb 16
Five Walls
Galleries 1 & 2
Suite 2, level 1 / 119 Hopkins St, Footscray
Open Wed-Sat 12-5pm

Bryan Spier

Painting by Cath Blanchflower
L-R: Aaron Martin (founder of Five Walls), Peter Summers and Misuzu Ueda.

‘A limen is the threshold or boundary which marks the transition from one space to another.
The four artists in this exhibition each capture a narrow yet penetrable visual territory, articulated variously via colour, form, line, and texture. This shallow, but nonetheless perceivable space, forms a stratum beyond the work’s surface, confounding the fullness of pictorial depth.’ Emma Langridge.

Vivian Copper Smith photo Emma Langridge.

Karl Wiebke

Liminal is the first in a series of Guest and Committee curated group shows in 2019.

James Langer

Indeterminist

To Feb 16

Five Walls

Gallery 3

suite 3 level 1 / 119 Hopkins St Footscray

Open Wed-Sat 12-5pm

Installation

‘Indeterminist is part of an ongoing visual exercise that probes the tension between cause and effect, and free will.

The are no answers here to the question about whether things are concurrent and therefore predetermined, or the accumulation of choices. The relationship is hard to discern, even in its most basic form.

Together the work is a cluster of abstraction combining a digital drawing method with silkscreen printing and paint. It depicts growth by progressively manipulating parts of a whole, adapting to environment and obstacles. It emulates entropy and evolution, two sides of the same process. It exemplifies nature as it exists in my mind: a series of confluences, expansions, and metamorphoses.’ Five Walls website

Peter Summers

Pink Cliffs
Five Walls
To Feb 16
Gallery 4
suite 4, level 1 / 119 Hopkins St Footscray

Open Wed-Sat 12-5pm

‘Summers’ recent trip to Heathcote’s Pink Cliffs in Central Victoria was the inspiration for this exhibition. The paintings highlight his dedication to rendering the landscape with exquisite evocation. His subtle and arresting works on canvas demonstrate a complex, intriguing expression of Minimalism. Pink Cliffs is so named because of the pinkish hued rock formations left behind from sluice mining during the gold rush era. The rock, which is actually powdery clay, changes colour depending on the time.

Peter Summers

Pink Cliffs is Summers’ follow up to his successful solo show Difficult Pleasure at Tacit Galleries Collingwood, late last year. In 2017 he was included in the very successful exhibition, Chromatopia, on the history of colour by chemist and writer David Coles. In 2012, he co-curated and participated in the exhibition Un:sighted at Fortyfive downstairs gallery, before relocating to Shanghai (2012-2016). In 2011, he was selected for the Yering station sculpture prize and awarded the Ella Donald Memorial scholarship. He has exhibited on a regular basis at Five Walls since 2015.’ Five Walls website

Installation

Local Walks

Local walk

Demolition, summer light

Local walk

Mechanical Drawing

Local walk

Fossil Process

Local walk

Street cleaning

Local walk

Form

Local walk

Art

Steven Parrino

“New York: The Eighties (part one)”

The Consortium Museum, Dijon, France

To April 14

ALLAN MCCOLLUM, CADY NOLAND, CHUCK NANNEY, DAN GRAHAM, DAVID ROBBINS, LAURIE PARSONS, LOUISE LAWLER, MICHAEL CORRIS, ON KAWARA, STEVEN PARRINO, STEVE DIBENEDETTO

Steven Parrino, Screaming Yellow Crush in Classy Chassis, 1992.

I find the work of Steven Parrino, 1958-2005, profound. Influenced by 1980s Deconstrucivism and the declaration that the painting avant-garde was dead in the 80s (one of the first in a succession of such declarations) Parrino with a Punk DIY attitude explored the entropic side of creation. His works are as relevant today with numerous artists world-wide exploring the boundaries of painting sculpture in the context of what Parrino termed 'misshaped paintings' as opposed to the 1960s movement of shaped canvases. In Italy, from my observations, that movement related to Arte Povera and was more 'constructive' notwithstanding the mark making of Luigi Fontana. He was famous for his destructive cutting and piercing of the canvas in a repetitive way.

Blinky Palermo

Blinky Palermo, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2009, was my first experience of the artist. I responded immediately to the scale and series aspect of the paintings which played with order and variation. The painting manner which was minimal but not hard edge has some reference in Arte Povera. I asked the German artist, Bernd Kirken who was with me if he was a good artist and he said ‘yes of course he’s very good’. So when home I researched Palermo’s work and a few years later saw some of his large material works at the MMK Museum, Frankfurt.

Blinky Palermo at Hamburger Bahnhoff, 2009.

Tony Tuckson

The Abstract Sublime

Art Gallery of NSW

To February 17

Tony Tuckson at the AGNSW (photo Jan Courtin).

Makeshift, Abstraction and the Australian Patina, Terri Brooks, excerpt PhD exegesis 2009.

'In Tuckson’s sketch book drawings[77] he reinvents the tradition of drawing with new perspectives and flattened fields. There is a merging of positive and negative space rendered in a spare lineal manner of simplification and reductionism. This influence undoubtedly stems from Tuckson’s visual observations of Indigenous art which carry the same values, but in Tuckson’s case the influence is synthesised rather than emulated.

Tuckson opted for makeshift, or do-it-yourself, materials. In his studio stood an old easel and ‘a sack curtain roughly stitched together by Tony’.[78] Tuckson, Fairweather and indeed Olsen at times painted on newspaper. Fairweather’s reasoning, ‘I ran out of other paper’, [79] while Tuckson, who painted ten thousand works on paper,[80] maybe just thought it expedient to ‘use what was at hand’. Similar reasoning of necessity was employed by earlier settlers in the use of newspaper as a substitute for wallpaper or the making of paper mâché baskets during the Great Depression. My grandparents used newspaper for insulation, wrapping rubbish, lining cupboard drawers and rolled up to catch insects in the vegetable garden.

Tony Tuckson at the AGNSW (photo Jan Courtin).

No 35: Drawing, 1962, at first glace is an interesting collage (Figure 26). It is also makeshift. Tuckson has grabbed whatever was at hand rather than search for the right or aesthetic piece of paper to use as you might find in more formal collage.[81] The cigarette packaging and newspaper strips are arranged unaesthetically, in a kind of ‘any old how’ slap dash manner and bear no real regard for the background. Visually, the continual repetition of the cigarette packaging creates an aesthetic of poverty (due to choice of materials) and simplicity. The very ordinariness of the collage materials combined with the almost unartful charcoal lines allows the full expression of emotion, the driver, to be absorbed.

Lyrical abstraction, with its heavy emphasis on expressive gesture requires the use and poise of the whole body; as such the surface of the canvas is the end product of a kind of painting performance.[82] Tuckson’s lyrical works from 1970–73, the works that set him apart, are direct, hard hitting paintings imbued or bound by the artist’s sensibilities. They traverse neither decorative nor narrative territory, which allows the work to stay true to its emotional impetus. It is ‘one hit’ painting, ‘a home slog’, and as such it is hard to beat. The beauty of this type of painting is that it hits you again and again in the same fresh way every time you see it. Like Fairweather, Tuckson’s work is convincing. Makeshift values are apparent in the painterly decisions he made, his brush work and the materials he favoured. Builders or ‘bush’ handyman materials were used. Cheap masonite sheeting (left in its raw and flexible state) was preferred to canvas. House paints and house painter’s brush and charcoal were used in equal preference to fine artist’s materials. His loaded brush was delivered at full force in an open and direct way without cosmetic fuss about how the paint landed on the canvas. Technique was superfluous to ‘getting the job done’ as dribbles, drips and splashes were incorporated into the composition. This created patina of Tuckson’s surface is akin to the rough appearance of Lanceley’s Self Portrait, or Gasgoine’s weathered found materials. His last works capitalise the open field of the picture plain, at once recalling the wide open space of the Australian landscape without rendering it, for Tuckson ‘everything was space’[83]. Tuckson often described his brush work as up, down and across.[84] You could not get a more simple, ‘down to earth’, honest or unartful arm movement or interpretation of the rectangular painting surface. To emulate Tuckson is to take a journey into a visual toughness that allows no fuss. His paintings are as cultural Australian ‘makeshift’ as Pollock’s paintings are verisimilitudes of the American Wild West. Tuckson’s sophistication lies in his lack of contrived finesse. It was a choice to use hard-hitting non-decorative marks aimed at purely expressive spiritual outcomes. This is different to the Americans as it is more direct, open and economical, as if drawing at full speed or intensity—one line could express everything.'

Tony Tuckson at the AGNSW (photo Jan Courtin).

77. Tuckson’s sketchbooks were displayed in an exhibition at the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

78. Daniel Thomas et al., Tony Tuckson, 2^nd ed. (Fishermans Bend, Vic.: Craftsman House, 2006), 19.

79. Ian Fairweather to T. Smith, (November 11, 1959) Bribie Island in Ian Fairweather, Bail, 160.

80. Daniel Thomas et al., Tony Tuckson, 9.

81. Ibor Holubizky, ‘Madonna Staunton: sorting through…organising things, in time…through time’, in Madonna Staunton, ed. Michael Snelling, 22, ‘the materials are very much related in the act of collage’.

82. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, Critical Terms, for Art History, 2^nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85. ‘French painter Georges Mathieu, following Harold Rosenberg’s interpretation of Jackson Pollock’s painting process, began to perform his action paintings before audiences in Europe, Japan, South America, and the United States’ in the 1950s. Author’s note: Kngwarray’s works have also been linked to a performance or the residue of.

83. Daniel Thomas et al., Tony Tuckson, 19.

84. Ibid.

Steve Riedell

Folded-Over Painting (white),2010,19 x 15 x 2.25”

‘Steve Riedell (American, b.1954) is a artist known for his three dimensional, mixed-media paintings. Born in Inglewood, CA, Riedell studied at Moorpark College and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In his early works, he experimented with pale colors and gradually transitioned into stronger palettes, which included bottle greens, fire-engine reds, and neon oranges. In his well-known series of "folded-over" paintings, Riedell developed an oil and beeswax surface on a flat canvas, which was then cut and applied—or folded over—a geometric wooden armature, with traces of the process still visible in the final work.’ Artnet

Steve Riedell, from the Folded-Over Painting Series.

Heidelberg School

Frederick McCubbin, Boy in the Bakery, oil on canvas, 48.9 x 59 cm.

Frederick McCubbin, Boy in the Bakery, and part of a fence about 30 meters from the marker of the Heidelberg School house in Eaglemont. I feel the oven is so similar in both images that the building remnant in the fence may well have been standing when the impressionists painted there. It may even have been part of the original house as it was a tea room and a farm house before that. Not suburban as it is now.

Building remnant

Vermillion

Inroads to abstraction in vermillion by Walter Sickert, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, 1880-90s.

Walter Sickert

James McNeill Whistler

John Singer Sargent