Innehållsförteckning för Issue 35 från Artist Profile

MICK RICHARDS is a freelance photographer and filmmaker whose work is regularly published nationally and internationally. ROGER D’SOUZA is an Australian photographer based in Brisbane. He travels the world shooting places, projects and people. JUDITH PUGH is a regional NSW based writer. She is completing a doctoral thesis on Commonwealth visual arts funding. MICHAEL YOUNG is a journalist and visual arts writer based in Australia who regularly travels to China. SARA SWEET is a Sydney-based arts writer and artist. BRIDGET MACLEOD is an arts writer and curator. She holds a Masters in Curatorial Studies and works for Defiance Gallery, Sydney. PRUE GIBSON is the author of Janet Laurence: The Pharmacy of Plants (New South Press, 2015) and The Rapture of Death (Boccalatte Publishing 2010). She also publishes short fiction stories…

Ann Thomson has been an important force in Australian art since she graduated from The National Art School over five decades ago. We visit the painter and sculptor in her Waverley studio to speak about her practice, upcoming projects and how both her work and the Sydney art scene have changed over the last 50 years. YOU’VE JUST COME BACK FROM an artists’ expedition to Moonie Beach – are these trips important to your work? I’ve always been a studio painter, but I really enjoy going out on painting trips with other artists and producing work in a different landscape. I find that a place I’ve scrutinised in this way will come through in my studio paintings. I’ve always made works on paper that I think of as “input” for…

From his self-created outpost amid the stark, denuded landscape around Queenstown in Tasmania, Raymond Arnold is an aesthete and activist, a practical polemicist whose printmaking creates a vision of the landscape that at times borders on portraiture. IN 1967 RAYMOND ARNOLD LEFT SUBURBAN Melbourne on a school walking trip in Tasmania. He hiked for days to arrive in the rocky, desolate mountains surrounding the mining settlement of Queenstown, Tasmania. As the artist describes it, this trip was something like an initiation. “This place,” he told me, “is where I first felt free.” Few artists have a relationship with landscape so profound that it forges their life path, but this is definitely the case with this master printer. Since his first encounter in Western Tasmania, he has walked, cycled, camped and…

Annette Bezor has been painting since the 1980s and during this time she has produced large-scale works that showcase the faces of many women. Some of her subjects are recognisably famous and they can be seen depicted in moments of heightened beauty and momentary elevation. The transfixing pose of each subject finds its way through the overlays of erosion, rainbow colour blocks and circular gold leaf impressions. The techniques applied allow the viewer to peer through the slightly obscuring markings to see the subjects at face value. “I’m heading towards abstraction which means that in a show that I might have in two years’ time, there will be a painting in there that is an abstract painting, but not out of place.” ANNETTE BEZOR’S ART-MAKING PROCESS requires time and so…

I WAS IN EDINBURGH, Scotland in 1978 and was amazed by the dramatic landscapes of that fine city. At one point as I looked down from the Royal Mile, leading up the slope to the famous Castle, I saw in the valley below a classical building that, in scale and character, reminded me of Sydney’s art gallery in the Domain. Next day I found out that it was the Scottish National Gallery. In 1904, when the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) was being designed by the Government Architect of the day, Walter Liberty Vernon, it was suggested that he take as his model the Scottish National Gallery. Upon learning this fact recently, I knew at once why I was reminded of Sydney’s gallery which, while not in any…

TO THE REST OF THE WORLD, Australia is exotic and “other”. I celebrate the uncelebrated as culturally significant. Most of my career has been spent in obscurity – overlooked, ignored and with no gallery representation. I am convinced that being a serious artist is about exploring personal truth and authenticity. It’s not necessarily about dazzling technique, or producing meaningless, pretty wallpaper, or clinging to the latest technology. I feel, as an artist, it’s my job to report what I see. Contemporary life appears to be driven by the instant, empty, self-gratification of social media and an obsession with popular culture and fatuous celebrity. My work offers an antidote to this consumer-led horror. I record things the general population don’t usually aspire to, or are used to rejecting. I have an…

MARGARET LOY PULA, born in 1956, is a painter who belongs to the Anmatyerre people of Utopia, in Central Australia. She concentrates her vision of a captivating experience on a somewhat finite area. For the short time she has been painting, Pula has scarcely painted anything other than the bush and sweet potatoes. This reliable food source and her Utopia land are settled into pictorial relationships of infinite expanse, suggesting two people were involved in the making. There is considerably more than a commitment to the search of her bush and sweet potatoes from her familiar surrounds. Within specific places of her land she slowly jabs the red ochre earth with her crowbar to reveal the microcosm of her culture, her totem and her father’s dreaming – “Anatye” or bush…

IT HAS BEEN SAID that for centuries artists have been fascinated with the questions of how we fit into and exist in the world. How are artists confronting these issues now? Our writers have gone to extraordinary lengths again to be there with the artists and to empathise with their examinations on science and philosophy. You will be inspired by their long commitments to their diverse visions and in this issue we celebrate these achievements. Lucy Stranger explores our cover artist Lindy Lee’s philosophy. She examines Lee’s dual identity, and the years of serious focus in Zen Buddhism. Lee is at a pivotal moment in her long career, pushing to new scales with her latest works. Sara Morawetz’s aesthetic responses to Macushla Robinson’s questions about her recent durational performance projects…

Heath Franco’s next exhibition, ‘Home Town Two’ at Galerie Pompom is a sequel to his cinematically inspired video ‘Home Town’ (2004). In it he draws upon horror movies of the 80s and 90s, Ren & Stimpy cartoons, popular culture and memory to create the wild, grotesque characters that populate his video works, all performed by himself. We spoke to Franco while he was in the midst of making this new work for what will be his last exhibition before he departs to the US. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE LOCATION of your new work, ‘Home Town Two’? ‘Home Town’ and the new work, ‘Home Town Two’ are both filmed in Berridale. I was born in Cooma, in southern NSW and I grew up in nearby Berridale, close to the…

Victoria Reichelt is a painter of colour. Her experimentation with abstraction and minimalism, analogue and digital, to rebel icily against herself, is a measure of her growing confidence. Her paintings are of archives: libraries’ books, magazines and, recently, medical files, where human presences are absent, yet always present. ARTIST PROFILE met with her at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane where we discussed Art16, in London this May. IS THERE A TRADITION OF ARTISTS IN YOUR FAMILY? No, all of my family are scientists. My sister works on heart research at the University of Queensland. We are polar opposites, and several of my aunts and uncles are also scientists. Somehow, they fit with my painting style, particularly the technical and precision elements. I feel I couldn’t be an expressive abstract…

Chris Dyson explores and invents imagery in a variety of media: paintings, computer graphics, film, sculpture and printmaking. We caught up with Chris at his place in the goldfields country in Victoria, on the day he finished the move from Melbourne. Bringing everything up over some weeks gave him the opportunity to look back at his work. WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR PAINTINGS ARE ABOUT? There’s just a general … concern, probably just “how do you look at a picture?” I think deep down that’s what it’s about. It has no subject as such. I think most artists get to that point eventually, you are just dealing with something that you don’t really know what it is, but it manifests in the pictures. If you read a novel, its what…

A quartet of established artists who are united by their passion for drawing – Dagmar Cyrulla, Maryanne Coutts, Wendy Sharpe and Mary Tonkin – are connected to one another by their friendships, their shared desire to draw from life and their need to exchange the intellectual experience of that process. Like the magnetic points of a compass, these artists have created a force of energy that unites eye, hand, experience and heart. DRAWING IS VIBRANT ACTION. The stimulus for drawing is something that provokes vitality. This could be the curve of a figure, the wilt of a leaf or the light in a room. Wendy Sharpe says, “I make drawings as an end in themselves but also to discover, understand, explain, reveal, compose or plan, record for pleasure and for…

Australian painter John Peter Russell was a close friend of Vincent Van Gogh, and our testament to this is a perceptive portrait of the Dutch master in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. So why do so few Australians know of Russell? ANYONE WALKING INTO the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam today is greeted on the ground floor by a series of portraits of the iconic artist. The very first one, an absolute ripper of a portrait, is by the Australian expatriate artist, John Peter Russell. A thoughtful, perceptive rendering of the man who wanted to be a great artist, worked tirelessly to be, but never really believed that he was, Russell captures the essence of the painter he wanted to be, and for that reason it was a treasured possession to…

THE BIENNIAL MELBOURNE ART FAIR (MAF) run by the non-profit Melbourne Art Foundation has a noble pedigree. Every second year since 1988 it has dusted off its petticoats, let down its hair and filled Melbourne’s magnificent heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Centre with art. It may not always have been cutting edge work but was at least acceptable. However its fate deserved something better than the terse statement issued by MAF’s chairperson Anna Pappas last February signalling its end: the 2016 edition planned for August 2016 was cancelled until further notice. It was the end of MAF, or so we all thought. The Melbourne art fraternity went into overdrive, casting its net wide to apportion blame: there were suggestions that the fair suffered from mismanagement, it was too establishment, there was a…

Paul Ryan’s gutsy paintings pack a punch that has won him many fans over the years. Ryan is not afraid to experiment with subject matter. A 13-time Archibald finalist, he regularly collaborates with other artists and also musicians, and often chooses to deal with confronting topics. He is happy with the choices he has made in his art career, and the apparent ease of life in his comfortable seaside studio belies the “collateral damage” that painting can bring to a life devoted to art. YOUR SUBJECT MATTER is very New South Wales South Coast, with the dark hills, Norfolk pines and dark coastal landscape. Do you see yourself as a localised painter or are you more universal in your approach? It’s a marriage of both, really. Interestingly, the landscape I…

Sara Morawetz’s performances explore the emotional cadences of scientific systems. Her recent works examine the ways in which we measure and understand time. From delicate, repetitive mark-making to conceptual mapping projects and durational performances, her works have a systematic elegance that is redolent of 1960s Conceptualism and Fluxus. ARTIST PROFILE caught up with Sara in her Brooklyn apartment to talk about three recent works. THE FIRST SHOW that I saw in New York was How the Stars Stand, a durational performance that you staged at Open Source Gallery in Brooklyn. The piece required you to live according to time on Mars, whose days are longer than those on Earth. For the performance you lived in the gallery, which was open to the public. As your time cycled out of sync…

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MY NAME IS MATTHEW CLARKE and I was born in 1986. I live in a wooded hamlet near Warrnambool in south-west Victoria. I am an artist who has a disability. In year 12 I was struggling with the academic side of school. My school advised me that I shouldn’t go to study visual arts because I was unable to draw a clock. Nonetheless my dad insisted that I attend South West TAFE in the former Fletcher Jones Building, a Warrnambool icon that formerly employed 1200 clothing workers. I started painting one session a week. After one year at TAFE, I was excited about the final year TAFE exhibition where I was given a large space for a mini exhibition within the exhibition. A year earlier this would have been totally…