LOOKING IS NOT SEEING Graduate Exhibition 2010 OPENING NIGHT

Time	19 November · 19:00 - 21:00

Location	La Trobe University Bendigo Campus Visual Arts & Design

More info	LOOKING IS NOT SEEING Graduate Exhibition 2010 La Trobe University Bendigo Campus Visual Arts & Design Official opening: Friday 19 November 2010 at 7pm Exhibition open 15–26 November Phyllis Palmer Gallery& Graphic Design Exhibition Space La Trobe University Flora Hill Bendigo Gate 8 Sharon Street

Synergy Exhibition

Mid-Year Exhibition

presented by third year students from La Trobe University, Bendigo. The

Exhibition was a showcase for current works and the direction that these forthcoming graduates are engaged in.

My work:

Dawn Climb 2

Charcoal on Fabriano Academia

Acrylic on canvas paintings with the addition of pure pigments and Nepalese paper.

Shuttered

View Outside and detail

Large landscape

Some preliminary drawings for my large landscape on canvas.

Base colour red-violet and burnt sienna layers in acrylic.

Layers of white and blue-green tonings.

Finished painting (could probably do with a little tweeking).

Candy Bag Series

To start this painting I made a series of studies and thumbnails to organise my thoughts with regard to colour, composition, brush mark and tonal values. Examples of these follow:

I then made a full scale drawing in charcoal, once again to organise the tonal values and ensure that I knew intimately the detail of the subject and its placement in the space. The size of the canvas to be used was 1800mm x 1500mm and the paper corresponded exactly to this.

Partially finished charcoal drawing.

Details of Charcoal drawing.

Finished Charcoal drawing.

The next stage was to do a full scale painting on paper. The medium used is student acrylic Aquacryl. I chose to use this as it is firstly cheap and secondly I could manipulate it easily, although there were some problems with transparency and cracking. To overcome the cracking a binder was at first used and then a gel medium, although the gel appeared to have a slight yellowish cast.

Finally I drafted up the image on the canvas, using a light toning of the background paint hue, after putting a base coat of burnt umber with a pthalo wash over. Paint was applied using loose direct brush marks, placement of paint as fresh as possible, no overworking. The full range of tones was mixed prior to starting and the background was left until later.

Details of the brush marks and working of the background are shown below.

Sculptures: Limestone & Soapstone

I have been engaged in a sculpture practice for a number of years now. My initial introduction was by instruction with Joska, now deceased, who had a studio called Stone Thoughts at the Old Castlemaine Jail.
This involved working with limestone and some soapstone and the knowledge of the tools and care thereof. Limestone is easy to work with and can be sanded to a smooth surface. There are various grades of limestone. The blocks that were worked here are of Mount Gambier limestone that is usually cream or white and fairly large grained. European, North American and Asian limestones are usually finer grained and more varied in their colours.

A selection of the sculptures executed at this time are shown below:

Griffon

Reclining Woman and

Woman

These pieces are all in limestone, the Woman piece at far right is unfinished in this photograph.

All were created during the 1990s.

Below these are Sorrow, private collection Ken and Carol Morris, Loss

(shown unfinished), private collection Susan Wilks, and Meryl, all in limestone. The final piece is called Nurture and is in the private collection of Trio Arts' Director Maxine McKee.

Soapstone, a soft and variously coloured stone, is fairly easy to work with (if not too flaky) and can be polished to an high shine. Examples of my early pieces are hereunder:

Joska gave me some assistance on the first piece, but I wanted to make a hole through the piece to take the eye through as well as around the piece. The second sculpture is called Love and is probably my favourite of these and remains in my collection. The difference in colour shows, this being a bluer stone whereas Waiting, private collection Ann Mullan, is browner. These stones come from Australia, whereas the black piece She (alternative name Curve) is made from Canadian black Kenora soapstone and is very hard.

The sculpture Hand, Highly Commended, Trentham Art and Craft Show 2009, is made from a green soapstone that is very flaky. The thumb was initially in an outward pointing position, but fell off and had to be realigned.

I am currently working on a piece of translucent white alabaster and am excited to see what it will look like when finished.

Flags and Landscape

These two subjects go in conjunction with one another as one grew from the other. The initial intention was to paint rows of flags and I commenced with studies of these on a somewhat mountainous background. I was struggling with the brush mark and eventually abandoned the flags to revisit at a later date.

I then concentrated on the landscape and made a couple of small studies that I will develop and enlarge.

The first of these studies is the background for the flag painting; the other two are smaller studies. The first has been concluded with a blue hue in the sky and some foreground work, the second has an experimental snow working that will be developed in a much larger painting.

I have chosen a canvas 1500mm x 1200mm to execute the first of the larger landscape paintings and have cut a piece of 160gm paper to this size to make an initial study. These are in preparation for a very large landscape on a canvas that I wish to use that has been abandoned by a former student at the university, if I am quick enough to score it.

Artworks TAFE and earlier

The painting shown first was undertaken as part of a programme run by Maxine McKee at the Kyneton School of Arts in the early 1990s called Inner Journey. The imagery involved finding a way out into a scene, mine being at the roof line. The tiles were the finger tile seen in Mediterranean region, where I had travelled, and a well featured very strongly. The perspective was very difficult, being three point, and I am the dragonfly, only seen as a shadow.

This is an A1 size sheet of

watercolour paper with flat washes of watercolour.

The painting below is a small oil painting on board undertaken as part of an oil painting workshop with Mary Larnach Jones at the Jennings Street premises of KSA.

The painting to the right is called Urban Sprawl, 1992, and is Gouache on paper. It is in a triadic harmony and a medium was used with the paint. This is a large painting and comments on the swamping of our environment as we take up more land for development. This was inspired by the landscape on the way to Bacchus Marsh that I passed when going to visit my parents. Gradually more and more valleys were being engulfed by housing as the human parasites increased and spread.

Tafe: Diploma of Visual Arts

The initial painting follows a set theme given by the lecturers Stan Farley and Janet Goodchild Cuffley. A personal item was wrapped and rendered in oil paint. The object had to be oversize and the wrapping anthropomorphises the object. Ropes needed to be incorporated in some way and something else in the background should give a clue to the object. In my case the object was a handmade candle holder that relates to the flame in the window and the fire axe.

The theme I followed in my major in my final year at TAFE related to the marginalised members of our society and is a statement regarding the lack of concern in our modern world.

The painting with the dustbins is called Rich Pickings, 2007. It is painted in acrylic on canvas and is a statement about greed and excessive waste and the luxurious excess of our modern times.

Next is They don't see me, 2007, a quote from the Big Issue magazine that is sold on the street by homeless, or previously homeless persons. This painting is oil on canvas and was wiped with turps to give a rainy effect and was the winner of an oil painting prize at the Blackwood Art Show, 2009.

Below these are Grundy, 2007, oil on canvas, the largest of the four, which was chosen to hang in the Tertiary Art Award at the Phyllis Palmer Gallery, LaTrobe University, Bendigo, Victoria in 2007. The title refers to the name given by the children at the local primary school to the rubbish skip and implies a scenario, only too common in cities, of homeless youth, where they sleep and and the lifestyle choices that can be forced on them.

The painting of the kerbside is Not All That Glitters... and sets up a scenario for the viewer to interpret. There is something disturbing but we are not sure what as the colours and autumn leaves are attractive but on closer inspection sinister imagery could be revealed.

The final painting is Archway, 2007, oil on canvas and fairly obvious in its comparison of a destitute person sleeping rough while across the river the casino looms bright,

beckoning and rich.

Illustration

The pen and wash illustration of the man and dog was published in a book called Painted Words, 2006, to illustrate the story Perceptions by Fiona Kilgower. This book was was the second in the Painted Words series, and is an anthology of work by Professional Writing and Editing students at Bendigo Institute of Tafe, in collaboration with the Visual Arts students who illustrated the works.

The second illustration is from Painted Words 2005, and illustrated the story An Overseas Holiday in Africa, a non-fiction piece by Dr. Joe Reilly.