In the art world, an artist painting for a mere five years is a baby, an “early career” artist. For Dickie Minyintiri, his babyhood began when he was 91 which was when he first started painting. Five years later, he has just won Australia’s most prestigious prize for Indigenous art.
Forget birthdays, Christmas, New Years Eve. I have my own grand day of the year and it’s got nothing to do with anniversaries and passing time.
It is the day of the first sniff of jasmine. Jasminum polyanthum (commonly known as pink jasmine) is the tiny white star, originating in China, naturalised in Australia, which grows on a vine that grows like Topsy.
Remember my friend Jan Flook, designer of luxury luminaire, and part-time king of recycling? Remember his light fixture created from the lids of baked bean tins?
I met his mother the other day and turns out she’s an artist too.
Cindy Flook, born in England, proved in New Zealand, is a fine photographer and artist. That’s her work at the beginning of the post, a work entitled The Long Walk. It was a finalist in the 2010 Wallace Art Awards and was purchased by the award’s patron, the James Wallace Arts Trust.
One of the startling things about Cindy’s works, including The Long Walk, is that they’re untouched or unmanipulated by Photoshop, and it strikes me this is very similar to what her son does in making art from found objects. Both are making art from the sights and scenes and materials around them; making art as they find it.
Following is a selection of Cindy’s works. It’s a great pleasure to show them here.
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Observe the wonderful frizzled line in this image from her Perception and Illusion series.
And the intense fibrous feeling of this from the same series:
These from her spectacular Train series:
And these from the Portside series:
To see more of Cindy Flook’s beautiful images, including the tantalising Olive Grove Triptych, go to her website here: http://www.cindyflook.co.nz/
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And just in case you’re wondering what Jan did with all those baked bean tins, minus their lids, here is a picture of one of the 30 or 40 lamps he created from them for a housewarming party. The lamps, each with a candle casting light on a simple piece of paper, were placed on pathways to light the guests’ way or hung from lemon trees in the garden.
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One experience really excites me: the experience in which an insight or revelation does not occur as something new and unfamiliar, but as something I already knew which I’d forgotten. The insight bursts in on me like an old friend, a friend whom, it suddenly occurs to me, I’ve somehow mislaid but needed all along.
I have the feeling that I’ve drawn on a well of knowledge that was lying there all the time, only I didn’t see it. An oceanic body of all the things that have ever been thought or seen or gotten, by every person who’s ever lived, which has been lying in wait somewhere in some other dimension.
The Vienna of 1900 has come to Melbourne in the exhibition at the NGV – Vienna Art & Design – and it is spectacular.
Room after room is packed with exquisite paintings, furniture and household objects from the capital of the vast Austro-Hungarian empire at the moment of its apogee: when Modernism was being born, when Freud was writing about dreams and discontents, when artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele were painting real women and an architect called Josef Hoffmann, with Freudian brio, was burrowing his way into the most intimate recesses of the daily lives of the populace with his genius for beauty.
Hoffmann (1870 – 1956) is the star of the show.
News just in.
The winner of one of Australia’s most prestigious art awards was chosen by the toss of a coin, reports Andrew Taylor in The Age.
Last week, portrait painter, Peter Smeeth was pronounced the winner of the Sulman Prize, awarded by The Art Gallery of NSW, and given a cheque for $20,000. His winning portrait entitled, The Artist’s Fate, depicts an artist being eviscerated.
When day dawned that Saturday everyone could smell danger. Here in the city, officials had been warning for days of catastrophic temperatures and high winds. Even the plane trees had heeded the warning, dumping their leaves on one single night in readiness for the trial to come.
By 10am on 7 February 2009, the wind was roaring and the temperature close to its horrid maximum. Continue reading
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent.
~ Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents
To Montalto, the glorious vineyard and olive grove (is that not among the sweetest possible combinations of two words?) on the Mornington Peninsula, just south of Melbourne a few weeks ago.
It happened to be the opening of their annual Sculpture Prize. The finalists’ sculptures, together with previous winning works, were dotted through the landscape of pleasure, all rolling hills, glass restaurant, gambolling children.
Two sculptures were particularly interesting for being exemplars of two different strands in art, what I’ll call the “naturally-occurring” strand and the “prosthetic” strand.
One of the sculptures in question won the judges’ prize for 2011; the other won the prize awarded as the favourite of the Mitchell family, the vintners who created this lovely place.
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Among the 29 finalists there was the obligatory kangaroo, this one by Joanna Rhodes.
Yellow was a popular colour. Perhaps the kangaroo lost something. Dan Stewart-Moore’s Egg Cubed.
Roh Singh’s By the Night’s Sky was composed of white plastic bucket shapes, transformed at night on its hill opposite the vineyard’s restaurant into a starry constellation in the shape of a rowboat.
Greer Taylor’s well-named Cellular Memory was installed in the same location she had installed a work in a previous competition. And here, in the niftiness of her idea, we begin to approach the issue of prosthetic art.
This is Frank Veldze’s Dream Home, a work:
constructed entirely from discarded mattress frames, sourced from Melbourne’s Ozanam House, a home for the homeless. It is a life-sized classic Australian miner’s cottage, like the structures built by this country’s early pioneers, looking to make a home far from all they knew, to safeguard themselves from what they perceived as an alien landscape; yet Dream Home offers no protection from wind or rain, no shelter from the storm.
Now, OK, this is very clever. But with that final ratcheting up of the emotion in the “yet Dream Home … offers no shelter from the storm” I baulk.
This is prosthetic art par excellence. Art which needs an idea to live. Art which has no life outside idea. Art, above all, that extorts response. Ughhhh. I despise it for this extortion, even as I say “ohhhh, how poetic, how interesting.” It is art which mandates only one response and does everything to extract it.
And then what?
I’ll tell you. Nothing is what. Not a sausage. It sinks without trace. An idea surfaces, is represented in a medium or two, says its little party piece, and then vanishes.
In contrast, there is art that exists without idea. Art which achieves being on its own terms, not those of the artist, and not those of the viewer. Art which arises into being and takes its place among “the silent presence of things.” An art that doesn’t foreclose on response, but expands on it, opening itself to the world.
It is an art that Craig MacDonald, the judge’s winner of the 2011 Montalto Sculpture Prize, has created in his modest and intriguing Witness:
Hovering just above the surface of the ground, Witness appears as if from another time — aged and totem like, its presence and movement is a reminder that time is not static and what has been seen before can be witnessed again.
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They arrived in Florence on a Sunday in August. The streets were hot and deserted and a fan toiled in the shuttered pensione room.
Only the gelato sellers were open.
The monastery of San Marco where the artist priest, Fra Angelico, lived and worked in the 1430s, was on a corner behind high walls. The tourists, the only people left in the city, shuffled around the bottom of the stairs, staring vacantly.
The couple, not yet surfeited with heat and art, struck out and climbed the stairs. As they neared the top a giant wing came into view. Bronze and green, in stylised scales, it belonged, they saw, to an angel talking to a woman in a porticoed back verandah. There was a paling fence and lush grass, as in a suburban backyard, and an odd black sightline.
“Could this be it?” they thought.
Is this the painting? Just so? Painted on a wall in the cramped second floor on this nondescript building? Could it be so bright and perfect and casual? Could a monk living in one of the small rooms nearby have painted this, his bedroom wall, like teenagers do the world over? Was it not the touristic facsimile of a small painting in a pious frame in the abbot’s private rooms?
Later, they learned the renaissance painters all knew something about the casualness of the divine. For wherever they went that somnabulant summer they found Mary and her angel caller in a rude intimacy.
In the Uffizi gift shop, they found her on a postcard in the cool and regal greenness of a ravishing da Vinci.
Here she was the equal in grace and stature to Gabriel. She was wary, surprised, willing to be delighted. She’d been sewing or writing or dreaming when, looking up, she’d found him suddenly there, ardent, keen-eyed. Each of them mirrored the other, hand upraised, palm offered. Meanwhile, her right hand played and her knees were parted.
Da Vinci’s was the painting of a sensual man, not a devout one like the sweet San Marco father. It was also the painting of a man in supreme command of the renaissance invention of perspective, a paradigm leap Fra Angelico, 50 years earlier, had still been learning and which he’d so touchingly announced with the black sightline.
In the Uffizi proper, they found Mary at her most human. Ironically, it was in a painting still not fully emerged from the pre-renaissance world of Byzantium, a world known for the extreme stylisation and hieratic figures of its art.
The painting was by Simone Martini, a painter from Sienna, the great city that would eventually be eclipsed by Florence. Martini was painting 100 years before Fra Angelico, and the invention of perspective still lay in the future.
Here was Mary deeply reluctant, resentful and afraid of this caller who kept shouting something about “her destiny … mankind’s destiny”.
The angel too had none of the grace of the later paintings. He was grim, intent, insistent, so insistent his words were written in the air between them.
There would be no shirking this responsibility for Mary, and no help from the two saints who studiously looked elsewhere.
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The couple learnt much about Mary and her angel that summer, about the dance of art and history, about the miracle of the renaissance. Most of all, they laughed and ate and thought how lucky they were to be in love and in Florence in summer.
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“All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air …
I just watched Sonny’s face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn’t with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realised that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, wailing on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing — he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water …
And Sonny hadn’t been near a piano for over a year. And he wasn’t on much better terms with his life … He and the piano stammered, started one way, got scared, stopped; started another way, panicked, marked time, started again; then seemed to have found a new direction, panicked again, got stuck …
Yet, watching Creole’s face as they neared the end of the first set, I had the feeling that something had happened, something I hadn’t heard. Then they finished, there was scattered applause, and then, without an instant’s warning, Creole started into something else, it was almost sardonic, it was Am I Blue. And, as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low, black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horn insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. Then they all came together again, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face. He seemed to have found, right there beneath his fingers, a damn brand-new piano. It seemed that he couldn’t get over it. Then, for a while, just being happy with Sonny, they seemed to be agreeing with him that brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.
Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music tightened, and deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
And this tale, according to that face, that body, those strong hands on those strings, has another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation. Listen, Creole seemed to be saying, listen. Now these are Sonny’s blues. He made the little black man on the drums know it, and the bright, brown man on the horn. Creole wasn’t trying any longer to get Sonny in the water. He was wishing him Godspeed. Then he stepped back, very slowly, filling the air with the immense suggestion that Sonny speak for himself.
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”
~ From Sonny’s Blues, by James Baldwin
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Image: James Baldwin (top), courtesy Wikipedia
