Thursday, June 20, 2013

Death and Ashes: Sport vs.Art


Once again I am disappointed to be Australian. On today’s ABC News 24, normally an intelligent and partial news source, Ricky Ponting’s retirement from Australian cricket was given ten times more coverage then the death of Jeffery Smart.

3 sentences were allocated to Smarts passing - he painted urban landscapes (no image was shown), he studied in Australia and Europe and he was an ex-pat living in Italy. Nothing was said about his life long contribution to Australian art.

The section of Ponting’s achievements covered, his vast contributions to cricket, and the significant effects his retirement will have on the Australian team and ‘our’ performance at the Ashes, and was given 3 ½ minutes.

I don’t want to take away this moment from Ricky, but what miffs me is why that kind of coverage couldn’t be equally given to an iconic Modern Australian artist. If sport, which let’s be honest is not news, can occupy 10 mins of news time on most channels, why can’t wider cultural activities and achievements also be broadcast. People will argue that its not popular enough, but isn’t that partly because it there is so little coverage.

So for those of you interested in finding out a bit about this great of Australian Modernism here is a youtube link.

 
Jeffrey Smart
 Jeffery Smart Cahill Expressway. 1962

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

"Do you feel sad when you sweep up the work?"

I have done a few interviews recently with some online journals. The first of these has been published online today.  So click here to read my interview and a selection of other wonderful interviews about creative people  Meander Journal


Monday, June 10, 2013

Another 24 Hour Drawing Project

When Miso moved out of my studio she bequeathed me a glorious roll of rich, creamy, weighty, expensive looking paper. Normally I work with scrap paper or the cheapest possible roll of cartridge, so this fancy expanse of paper seemed luxurious. Almost too luxurious to use.

But i got over that pretty quickly and decided on a project for another 24hrDP. For 24 hours I would draw patterns that would over lap, become disjointed and incur irregularities. I keep thinking about undoing patterns. Making patterns that have all the motifs of decoration, but none of the repetition of a pattern. The material I wanted to use was dirty water. It is a by-product of making the ash pieces, and I have for a long time wanted to use it to create documentation of these ephemeral works. This project provided a concentrated time to develop a process for drawing with dirty water and playing with the possibility of entropy within my patterns.