Past Exhibitions | 2011

asmp.org/articles/best-2011-sleeman.html

http://digitaledition.manlydaily.com.au/#folio=021

Wonderful Clouds J’aime les nuages…les nuages qui passent…

là-bas…lá-bas… les merveilleux nuages!

 Charles Baudelaire I love the clouds…the passing clouds…over there…over there…the wonderful clouds. Clouds are the things that dreams are made of, building up across a distant horizon, changing colours and shapes every moment and scattering away when you turn your head. Reflecting and highlighting the landscape below, splashing the valleys and mountainsides with light and shade or sweeping over broad stretches of shimmering sea.To me clouds are an integral part of every landscape providing drama, and in turn tranquility, either angry or calm the wonderful clouds provide me with a dream. Duncan Stothart

This series of work continues the artist’s exploration of nostalgic urban landscape subjects in Sydney and the New South Wales Coast.   Since the body of work was started several of the subjects have been altered for evermore by development or destruction.  Others instill sense of yearning for another time.  All of the paintings in this series have been made on a coloured ground or priming, to reflect the mood at a particular time of day.  To control for a sense of light, a strictly limited triadic palette of earth colours has been used in the under-layers and a similarly structured palette of primaries (each having a relationship to their corresponding earth hues) for the finishing layers.   As each layer builds some of the previous layer is left exposed, creating surface complexity which in turn creates depth and luminosity.

The Macquarie dictionary defines the word eclectic as, ‘derived from many sources’, a word I think fits perfectly my concept for this exhibition. My principal inspiration is landscape, that place where we find meaning and a connection to a sense of place. I’m not particularly interested in virgin bush landscapes, what interests me is the ‘cultivated landscape’, that is the visual traits of our attempts to fashion this land to our utilitarian, sometimes aesthetic notions of what ideal country should look like. Our landscape shows evidence of the many successes but equally it is littered with failures, ruins, abused earth, a testament to our clumsy struggle with forces over which we sometimes have no control. There is also the ‘landscape of the mind’ an altogether much more subtle and complex, shadowy place, inhabited by countless images and sensations looking to find meaning in a complex world. The more I paint, the more I see, and the more I see the more I want to paint, to try and fix that place or that sensation in a concrete image by the timeless technique of oil painting. By selecting an image or concept to paint and isolating a subject in a frame, I am inviting the viewer to consider my perception of that subject, to take a second look. My painting is all about the language of perception. My aim is to trigger an emotional response, an, ‘I know that’ moment. I believe that we all share a very sophisticated collective visual memory bank, and if an image draws a response then it’s doing its job.

This exhibition deals with the pictorial representation of situations arising from the complex relationship of our psychological structure and the external world. ”This involves the conflict of the self and the persona - on the one hand the self, with vulnerabilities and desires, and on the other, the persona, operating in a role of power play ‘through the mask’.This conflict within the self parallels a universal situation we all endure, creating a dilemma where internal drives are set against the competing demands of the external world. Tension resides in the moment prior to the ego regulating the id and the superego, at which point a compromise is reached which is an acceptable behaviour in the world. This prior moment is a liminal zone, a transition of being on the "threshold" between two contradictory existential planes. In this case they are psychological. Freud encapsulates the mediating process occurring beyond this threshold in his statement: ‘The ego is the mediator between the two contradictory terms, the instinctive corporeal strivings of the id on one hand and the demands and requirements of reality or civilization for the modification, control or postponement of instinctual satisfaction on the other.’1Within the imagery of the artwork I am seeking to create the psychological tension which is inherent in these conflicted states. In this discord there is an unspoken moment in which the figures are caught between two opposing demands, and are rendered mute. Many conflicts are involved here: first, between the self, with its inherent vulnerability, and the persona which presents an empowered position; second, the position between action and reflection which in this case renders the figures static and mute; third, the internal drives of sensuality that are restrained within codes of morality. All these conflicts leave the figures powerless and immobilized. My intention is to portray the threshold between these conflicted states in a moment of immobilization within the unspoken drama.Within these images I am seeking to represent the relationship between the interior and the exterior in which my subject’s body becomes an extension of the expression of the psyche.”  -  Deborah Marks1 S. Freud, The Ego and the Id (Martino Fine Books, London, 1927), p.54.

Retreat (a place of contemplation). It is the nature of contemplation that you eventually arrive at a place of no words. This is the place where paintings begin. A place of incubation where anything is possible, where ideas have not yet formed. It is a river rushing to the sea. It seems an impossible task to name an exhibition, to give meaning to a whole body of work. I started to think more about the process and where the paintings were made, than the actual paintings. How my life has unfolded in the past ten years since I moved from the city to the country, and how my work has evolved in my new environment. My bungalow is perched on the side of a hill, next to the river in a small pocket of paradise. Living in such an idyllic place, it is easy to reflect on life, to see the nature all around, to see the beauty and to feel the gratitude of being, of being part of this immense creation. This place, this time is my retreat, not a withdrawal but an embrace of the nature of nature, a place of quiet solitude, a retreat.  Stephen Gill

I have always been interested in images of the landscape. I was born in the Central West of NSW and I spent my early years on a farm, where my parents and grandparents owned a wheat growing property near Woodstock. I was often drawing and observing the landscape from an early age with an emphasis on crop farming areas. I have taken particular interest in portrayals of the landscape by early settler artists, such as Augustus Earle in his watercolour rendition of the Bathurst Plains and Eugene von Guerard’s “Ballarat as it was in the summer 1853-54”. In recent years I have taken a keen interest on the effects of climate on the landscape. With this in mind I began to focus on the communities with a view to establishing a better understanding of the psychological affects of climate on the populations and the sense of belonging that small communities experience and how this may have changed over time. This began with an investigation into my own family history and where this fits into the wider picture of European colonisation of grazing lands beyond the great dividing ranges.The main theme of my current work is small settlements and their purpose, vibrancy and history. I’m interested in the architecture, layout and the surrounding land features of towns, villages and significant properties in NSW and Victoria. Ivan Goodacre