Innehållsförteckning för Issue 36 från Artist Profile

THE AP TEAM EDITOR Kon Gouriotis artistprofile@nextmedia.com.au ART DIRECTOR Kim Gregory kgregory@nextmedia.com.au DEPUTY EDITOR Lucy Stranger artistprofile@nextmedia.com.au SUB-EDITOR Jamie McIlwraith CONTRIBUTORS STEVE LOPES is a Sydney-based painter. His work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. He is represented by Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney ASHLEY CRAWFORD is a freelance cultural critic and arts journalist based in Melbourne. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. SARA SWEET is a Sydney-based arts writer and artist. ANNA JOHNSON is a Sydney-based arts and cultural writer. CHLOE MANDRYK is a Sydney-based writer and curator. She is the Editor of Art Almanac and Manager of ARTAND Foundation. JOE KINSELA is an historian of Australian architecture. BRIDGET MACLEOD is an arts writer and curator. She works for…

THE PATH TO BECOMING A PAINTER OF LANDSCAPES has not been a straight one for Ross Laurie. Introduced to the Old Masters of European art by a fondly remembered art teacher and later inspired by modern American painting, he was not initially driven to capture the lie of the land around Walcha, his home town on the New England tablelands of New South Wales. It may even be that the 18-year-old Laurie, leaving the town in 1979 to enrol at the Sydney College of the Arts, wanted to escape the place altogether, the better to immerse himself in the alternative reality of art. His hankering to stand before the monuments of art history and the desire to make his own mark led him in time to the other side of…

DANELLE BERGSTROM COMPOSES AND RIFFS IN PAINT. As they coalesce, the earth, air and water enrich the visual vocabulary of her story. In the presence of her large and outstretched works you get a sense of the reciprocity between the artist and her subject. By mixing a palette of memory, emotion, sketches, music and library of art books Bergstrom sensitively presents portraits and the landscapes of Hill End, Darwin, Ireland and, increasingly, Sweden. Though classically trained, she follows her intuition, because for Bergstrom the ultimate goal is to rewind a formal art education and to lead with heart and soul. At home, she exhibits with Arthouse and is an Archibald finalist many times over. Bergstrom’s painting of Guy Warren is hung in the popular Art Gallery of NSW prize now…

I LOVE PAINTING. IT IS MY WAY OF understanding the world around me. Everywhere I look I see a face or a landscape that demands to be caught on canvas. I do lots of drawings with ink, pencil and charcoal to know a subject, but it is oil paint that really excites me. There is nothing like the smell and feel of oils, they have a tactile, physical quality. Each brushstroke is like trying to catch hold of time, to pin it down before it slips away. How I compose a picture is very important to me. I swing between a Classical and Romantic sense of pictorial composition. The Classical is all verticals and horizontals, echoing the edges of the canvas. This way of composing can be seen in paintings…

“IT’S A DISTURBING THING THAT WE STILL HAVE TO defend the National Arts School,” Ann Thompson says in the most recent issue of ARTIST PROFILE. Ann was referring to the possible merger with a Sydney university and the relocation of the National Art School (NAS) from its historic Darlinghurst gaol site. Hopefully the future of NAS will be more assured while this issue is current. Ann, like Reg Mombassa, who features on our cover, is a former NAS student. The diversity of Australian tertiary art education, through university or TAFE, has served the community well in the development of artists. Institutions have continually pushed the boundaries and constantly improved. Some of the world’s most important artists, including Jane Campion and Marc Newson, have come from Australian tertiary art institutions, and…

SYDNEY-BORN AND COUNTRY-BRED in NSW, I have always been impressed by my visits to rural Victoria, where state governments of all political views have encouraged the arts, heritage and, hence, tourism. Within an hour’s drive of each other, Benalla on the Hume and Shepparton on the Newell Highway are inspiring examples of contemporary vision. Both rural cities are planning to expand their visual arts complexes. Benalla’s gallery is one of the most beautiful pieces of modern architecture in Australia. Sitting beside the water on stilts, a crushed box in white, it is reflected in the large lake on the Broken River, beside a bridge at the southern entrance to the town. The challenge for Architect Alan Powell was to extend the accommodation to house the café/restaurant and enlarge the galleries…

ANDREW CHRISTOFIDES IS VERY well-known to serious artists and curators in Australia for his relief constructions and paintings. Since his very first show in the early 1980s, few artists have been as uncompromising in their pursuit of pure abstraction as Christofides. The Wollongong Art Gallery has commissioned Christofides to curate Visions of Utopia, an exhibition of his ideas on the pure elements of painting. This is the first time he has curated for the Gallery, but in 2007 the Gallery curated a survey of his works from 1982-2006. For Visions of Utopia, opening on 3 September, Christofides has selected 36 works from 30 Australian painters. The earliest work in the exhibition is Ralph Balson’s, ‘Construction, Transparent Planes’, (1942), the latest being John Aslanidis’, ‘Sonic No.49’, (2015). Christofides’ selection of painters…

MY PRACTICE DEALS WITH THE inherent desire of young people, particularly males, towards risk-taking behaviour as a means of understanding themselves and their place in the world, even if it ends in scenes of failure or disaster. I use personal narrative and instances of extreme sports as a vessel to implement my ideas. My primary works are large-scale sculptures examining high risk/high reward behaviour. The hubris, schadenfreude and jouissance that follow these actions activate a charge and helps to reveal their desirability. Exploring masculinity and rites of passage gives grounding to the inescapable tradition of this behaviour. These jubilant instances of hubris can be extrapolated and are found in both historical and contemporary political and cultural falls from grace. In these moments, the myth of Icarus and the teenage skateboarder…

IN 2016, THE ART GALLERY OF NEW SOUTH WALES (AGNSW) is my church. I am an artist and an addict of culture and the visual language of contemporary art. I am also resolute in my belief in the power of art to engage and shape and change my society for the better. As a Trustee of the AGNSW, I spoke publicly for the fi rst time last year of my excitement about the Gallery’s expansion plans. I stood alongside Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, who are working with the Gallery as architects on the Sydney Modern Project. The expanded museum will instantly join the ranks of the most famous cultural institutions in the world. It will be an icon in my country…

“I’ve always had the two approaches – the sublime and the ridiculous or the ugly and beautiful. YOU HAVE A BOOK COMING OUT WHICH CHRONICLES 50 years of your work, focusing particularly on your landscapes. The first work in it, I did from my bedroom window when I was 16. It has been a fiddly process sorting images because I have thousands in my catalogue. The trick is to not be too repetitive. It is more or less in chronological order plus some sections with themed subjects, such as houses, charcoal drawings, trees and telegraph poles, etc – things that have interested me over the years. I have drawn assiduously since the age of three, like most children, but more keenly I guess than other kids did. My early subject…

DURING HER CHILDHOOD, KAREN MILLS KNEW LITTLE about the origins of her Aboriginal family. Born in Katherine in the Northern Territory, she was adopted as a baby and raised in South Australia. After leaving home, she returned to the Territory to reconnect with her family history, so we started our conversation with_Karen in the years after that key point in her life. You became an artist later in life; what led you to this decision? I was 35 years old when I started studying at the Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University). It was a time in my life where I had the opportunity to become a mature-age student and I had a supportive partner who encouraged me to go and study. Art just seemed like a natural choice.…

WHEN DID YOU BEGIN MAKING ART? I’d been in Guatemala and picked up hepatitis from food, by the time I’d reached London I ended up in an isolation room, in Coppetts Wood Hospital. As I got better, I started drawing a series of heads, and then I became fascinated with the marks, how the most minimal mark could mean so much to the mind, and how one could read so much meaning into something so slight. I became really fascinated with that, and it led to a whole lot of work I’m still playing with, like the head images. After my recovery I went to New York and saw a massive Picasso retrospective, it was 1981 by that stage. Then I ended up in San Francisco where I saw the…

Something strikes a chord in me when I see the huge blocks of geometric colour of a ship against the rather drab and hazy landscape behind. I MOVED FROM SYDNEY TO THE industrial town of Port Kembla, south of Wollongong, four years ago. While settling into my new home I started to draw the view of the industrial landscape of the steelworks and busy port from my verandah. Although this was initially just a means of keeping some sort of art practice going, it soon became a daily ritual and it wasn’t long before I started venturing out into the surrounding area to get a closer look at the steelworks and the enormous ships. I had been somewhat familiar with Port Kembla as I had been visiting printmaker Tom Goulder…