Brett Whiteley's autopsy

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Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley's autopsy, charcoal & acrylic on paper, 59x42cm

“A large incision was made and the scalp peeled back to reveal the top of the skull, which was then opened up with a saw, disclosing the brain ... the brain was taken and placed in  formalin so that, after a period of time during which the tissues solidified, it could be sectioned and examined. There were no scalp, skull or brain injuries or diseases”.  Hilton, M & Blundell, G, 1996, Whiteley: an unauthorised life, Macmillan pp. 238-9.

As you know, I had made Brett's hair a motif in many of the drawings and paintings in this Whiteley series.

I had gotten to know the angle of his nose, its bridge and bulbous end, his straight mouth and cleft chin. My acquaintance had become somehow intimate and personal.

Then i read that they desecrated his corpse, that they peeled back his scalp, that they sundered the curly hair he was so proud of. That they pickled his brain.

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley's autopsy, acrylic on paper, 170x156cm

My intial shocked response drew a few quick charcoal/acrylic drawings.

Then i set to work with a floor mop to paint a large image (above).

I wanted to bash and splash.

I combed - literally, with a wide tooth comb - through his brain where his hair should been.

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley's autopsy (detail)

The work that followed (below) turned out as a rather adolescent piece of kitsch. But it started out as an experiment in process. I was searching for some way to conveying the sense of perpetrated violence. 

So  I took the piece round to a friend who owns a farming property and used the opportunity to 'paint' with a shotgun. I thought that by painting an image onto board and then blasting it from behind with a shotgun i might achieve an outplosion of splinters and shards.  These could then be fix into place on the scene with polymer gloss and, all going well, a dynamic piece taken home. 

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley's brain, mixed media on board, 46x66x24cm

I had embedded red and blue party balloons, each containing small quantities of red paint, into a mix of plaster, PVA glue, and cotton threads ... hoping that shards of plaster and shreds of balloon would end up dangling from the gun wound. I also hoped that the outward explosion of paint would register and be read by the viewer for the violent painting event that gave it life.

However, all didn't go well. The agency of media asserted itself, this time against my intentions. The board did not consist of splintery timber but was a 20mm thick piece of flooring particle board i had happened to have at hand. The result was that three shots from a 20 gauge firing 6 shot at 25 meters simply blew a hole through it. It punctured balloons but not explosively. The plaster was too brittle and simply blew away. I returned home with a failed experiment.

But i wanted to keep learning from what i had at hand and so i filled the blast hole with red and purple waterbomb balloons, allowing them to protrude as a cluster of organic lobes. I contrasted the tenderness and fragility of balloons with sharp-edged steel medical instruments.  I framed the piece in polished 0.8mm aluminium sheet, searching for a contrast between the 'organic' and the metallic, between the 'human' and 'medical'. But I lacked the tools and technique for cleanly cutting out a rectangle in sheet metal without distortion.

This small work was meant to be a pilot for a larger work of 90x120 cm. But i became too dispirited to continue and all my painting simply ground to a halt. My blogging lapsed into muteness. For many weeks now.

During which time i have survived a car collision in tact (a young man drove through a red light at speed, flashed across the front of me, i hit the anchors but still nudged him and spun him round while he ripped off my front fender).

To top it off this blog was declared public enemy number one by Google. Since end of June web searches that turned up tachisme.blogspot.com were told by Google that "This site may harm your computer or damage your mind" or some such. Seems their crawler didn't like a linked image of Bob Dylan, now removed. Western civilisation is once again safe.

So what next? I don't know. I have images in my head but can't face my studio. I think i'm just wearied by the whole academic process of painting for assessment. I have come to believe that painting belongs in art schools, not universities. Painting belongs to practitioners, not academics. Let universities research and teach art history, art theory and art criticism, but let art schools and artist communities teach the praxis.

I enjoyed the first couple of years of my Masters course when i was energised by the whole adventure of painting and free to explore the world of portraiture. But now i face my final semester. There are papers to be written, formal critiques to be presented. The adventure and lightness is gone, replaced by the grimness of assessment.

I am sick of being judged. 

Portrait painting using plaster and oils

Nostalgia: a portrait of recollection, plaster, acrylic and oil on cotton, 61 x 46 cm

This painting is the first foray into a new medium for mark-making – plaster on canvas. Nostalgia was painted with a plaster slurry by 3 inch brush over charcoal, then tinted with acrylic and finished with oils and lashings of oil medium to bind the plaster together (for how long??) and give it sheen to deepen the cool dreamy colors.

The archival properties, or lack thereof, is a real issue if i am to pursue this technique of mark-making further. The plaster is certainly a stable material, but how long will it stay on a canvas?
It is a self-portrait done without mirrors or photographs; simply my recollected self-image plus promptings from an 'inner me'.

In that sense it may be said to be a non-realist psychological self portrait - a self portrait of recollection.

I've dipped a toe into making some of my bits commercially available. I've signed up with RedBubble so that prints and cards of Nostalgia are now for sale from HERE.

While i was away a picture of my painting Fukushima samurai in the nuclear fires was published in the tri-annual journal Sortir du nucléaire, Issue No. 50, by the French anti-nuclear network Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire", a federation of over 900 anti-nuclear groups from around the world with a membership of over 53,000.

I find it very satisfying that my art is seen as a relevant contemporary voice in the world and is sought out for publication (Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire" discovered the image here in this very blog, folks).


Please be patient - it will take me a while to get around my many bloggy friends to see what wonderful things you have all been painting and writing in my absence.

Good to be back.

A Portrait of Fukushima Daiichi

Fukushima Future, mixed media on paper, 50 x 42 cm

This work is a personal response to the events at TEPCO's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

I am particularly struck by the depersonalisation of the elderly  and infants  receiving radiation screening.

One minute you're a mum going shopping. A piece of technology reacts when placed near you or your child by an anonymous masked figure wearing a white-cowled blue-striped jump-suit. Next minute, through no fault or choice of your own, your social status changes from 'shopper' to that of 'public safety risk' and 'medical case'.

I had a similar sense a couple of years back when i was flying to Europe and the swine flu panic was in full swing. At Asian airports everyone was running round in white surgical masks.

At every international airport i passed through a temperature scanner. If the device were to detect a fever, i would have been pulled out of line and marched off somewhere to enter a traveller’s limbo.

The situation is even more pronounced now with backscatter X-ray security scanners for airport passenger screening. The assurances law enforcment agencies gave, that the images would not and could not be stored turned out to be false.

Depersonalized, de-humanised images of travellers stripped of all dignity and privacy in the name of preventing terrorism flicker off screens.

The State has turned on its own citizens, airlines on their own customers, all in the name of “public safety”.

Meanwhile, helicopter gunships loose their canons at mere moving images on their sensor screens, people as Nintendo targets, as in the case of the recent Bagdad attack on driver (Saeed Chmagh) and photographer (Namir Noor-Eldeen) employed by the Reuters news service

Each in our own way, we all have a Fukushima future.

The Masque Goes On

The masque goes on, oil and crepe bandage on canvas, 30 x 40 cm

Are we really happy

With this lonely game we play

Looking for the right words to say?
Searching
But not finding understanding anyway
We're lost in a masquerade

We try to talk it over
But the words get in the way
We're lost inside
This lonely game we play.

No matter how hard we try
To understand the reasons why
We carry on this way
We're lost in this masquerade.

 

adapted from This Masquerade, Lyrics by George Benson, cover made famous by the Carpenters  (hear it on Youtube here).

 
I wanted to explore a bit further the use of crepe bandage in my art practice. I liked both its symbolic associations and the sculptural qualities of its surface.

And so, I  created this 3D piece. The nose and mouth are an impression taken from a plaster caste of my face. The impression was made by smearing the plaster with petroleum jelly (as a releasing agent) and then impregnating some crepe bandage with acrylic polymer gloss and pushing it into place to dry.

I wished to play with flat plane of the canvas. I was hoping for a tension of realities - through which channels do we get our information about a person? Which provides more readable information, the flat and barely suggested eyes, or the textured and fully-formed yet dark mouth? Do all the impressions we have of a person even sit together?

And how much of what we see of another person is mask, persona, social face? What lies beneath? Who is peeking out through the mask?

Society is a dance and we all come in costume, each wearing our masks. I was always struck by the line in T.S. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, that we "prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet".

The masks are not there simply there to conceal, but also to reveal. Or rather, to manage. Through our Persona we manage the impression we make on others. Our masks are a translator that conveys our inside world to the outside world in a way the outside world can receive and understand and embrace.

But one's social mask can also become a prison, locking us into a way of behaving and being that feels alien or that daily bruises the personhood within. The Man In The Iron Mask.

Though perhaps the worst fate of all is to identify totally with one's own mask, to believe there is no other mental reality, inner life or personal identity than our social face.

Or is that just a Western myth?

Enough musings for today. Below is a second photo of The masque goes on, but lit from right side.

inner voices

Inner Voices, oil & collage on canvas, 40 x 50 cm

and now for something completely different ... (though still a self-portrait)

i needed a break from the rather representational work of late.
i needed a bit a larff about the wailing and gnashing of teeth re aging.
i needed to have a bit of fun.

am now soberly back to depicting the next piece of anguish, promise.

when your intside's out and the outside's in

                    When your inside's out and the outside's in, oil on board (a door), 56 x 76 cm

UPDATE (11-8-10):
I have just been informed that this work has been selected as a finalist in the acquisitive Birchalls Tertiary Art Prize .

The prize is worth $2,500 and although a chief critereon is innovation, i suspect they chose to shortlist my work to hang something a bit unconventional and 'in your face'. But because the winner will hang in the gallery's permanent collection, i expect that in the end they will award the prize to a more conventional canvas. I'll find out 2 September.

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But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

from:  As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden;

Have been revisiting the work of the Canadian expressionist, Phil Iverson. I'm excited by his bold use of colour and impasto brush work in portraiture. And his use of found timber for painting surfaces. I enjoy the strength and drama of his work.

And so to this experiment. i haven't fully worked it out yet, but this painting is about portals and about insides and about Time. It is painted on a spare varnished wooden door to signify Doorways into this life and out of this life. And the trauma of passing through some of those doors. Some doors we can't wait to open. To turn 21, to be able to drive a car or buy a drink or take a bank loan. To step through the door of graduation or maybe of marriage.

But other doors we hope will not to have to open. The door of a prison, or the door to the operating theatre, or the oncology unit... or the door to the crematorium. Doors of pain. Doors of shame. Doors of doom.

this painting is also a response to Time. Our clocks are all ticking. We are each born with a fatal wound. We are each haemorrhaging time as our lives ebb away. As Bob Dylan sang in  It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),

“... he not busy being born
Is busy dying”.

and the painting is also about insides. Insides out. Outsides looking in. Subjective-Objective. Self-revelation. Self-portraiture as a kind of public self-immolation. Blood speaking to blood in a language more ancient than words. It passes over the boundaries of national borders and across the divide of centuries more effectively than a Google translator.

i became interested in old images of anatomy and autopsy as a metaphor of our concealed inner selves, a way of depicting what lies within, hidden from the world and even from ourselves.

for this work, I've also been interested in exploring Brett Whiteley's breaking of the surface plane (on what is otherwise a fairly conventionally painted surface, say in Alchemy. And so to bring these interests together i've  created a three dimensional 'wound', a fissure through which internal anatomy becomes external, through which Time ebbs. It is built from builder's putty extruded through fly-wire, with dangling plastic tubing to suggest arteries.

 Maybe i’ll rework the found timber some weeks from now.

paint over it more? though i did want the weathered timber to read as the tell-tale hand of Time

cut it into narrower sections (adjust compositional elements)?
though i did want the figure hemmed in and claustrophobic inside Time.

attack it with a blunt weapon (the violence of Time)?  ...  Igor, hand me my Berzerker axe.