At first i thought it had started life as a doodle but closer inspection revealed it was done with a computer program called The Scribbler by zefrank.com. You probably already know it but it was the first i had ever heard of it.
It is a web-based drawing program where you do some free drawing with your mouse cursor and then, when you are ready, the program re-draws what you have done with those evocative web-like structures.
Needless to say i then also tried a self-portrait from memory, the results of which you see above.
You can have a go on Scribbler for yourself here. Have fun.
And by way of appreciation, i used Scribbler to draw a portrait of Maureen for JKPP from this photo.
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 fromThis 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.
"... he began to feel as if he had as much effect on the final outcome of the operation as a single piece of a jumbo jigsaw puzzle has to its predetermined final design. Only the addition of the missing fragments of the puzzle would reveal if the picture was as he guessed it would be. Stanley Kubrick
puz·zle (pzl) v. puz·zled, puz·zling, puz·zles
v.tr. 1. To baffle or confuse mentally by presenting or being a difficult problem or matter. 2. To clarify or solve (something confusing) by reasoning or study.
v.intr. 1. To be perplexed. 2. To ponder over a problem in an effort to solve or understand it.
n. 1. Something, such as a game, toy, or problem, that requires ingenuity and often persistence in solving or assembling. 2. Something that baffles or confuses. 3. The condition of being perplexed; bewilderment. The Free Dictionary
Last night I attended the opening of the Birchall's Teriary Art Prize Exhibition at the University of Tasmania's NEW Gallery.
I was delighted to have been selected as one of the 23 finalists from the field of 43 artists who had entered works. This being the first time I have ever first participated in an art prize competition it was exciting just to see my name neatly lettered on a gallery wall!
The winner was Hirad Yousefpour (congrads, Hirad) whose entry was Knock Me Not (hung to the left of the door in the photo above). His painting features the surreal image of a door-knocker over a cloud, a work questioning access to personal memories. On the right of the door is my entry, When your outside's in and your inside's out.
Big thanks to Birchalls of Launceston for sponsoring this acquisitive art prize worth $2,500. It sure is encouraging to struggling art students and is a great occasion for meeting fellow artists.
(Not to mention my catching up with the Professor of the Art Faculty, Noel Frankham, once himself a student of mine some decades ago! Doesn't life have its twists and turns!).
Landfall, automotive enamel and oil on hardboard, 90 x 60 cm
(click on image to enlarge)
This painting is from a very small black and white photo taken of my family upon our arrival in Australia as émigrés from war-torn Europe. Our ship, the Fairsea (link here), had just docked briefly in Fremantle on its passage to Melbourne, our destination. But we got off the boat just so our feet could be on Australian soil and we could be sure the dream was real.
I didn't know much about Australia other than that it had poisonous snakes and you could fry eggs on rocks in the desert sun. And that it had never known war. No more scrambling through the rubble of bombed-out buildings searching for few pfennig of scrap metal, for me.
To my right sit my mother and father. To my left, my brother. All are dead now.
I sit in my blue corduroy bib-trousers, my best and favourite piece of clothing. I could still wear them at the Bonegilla Migrant Camp (here and here) but at Glenroy Primary School i learnt that often one has to discard what one loves, and hide what one is, in order to fit in.
Thank you Ritaflo for your nostalgic portrait of me (link) in my beloved bib trousers, school satchel on my back.
I have made the figures small because i felt very small. I have located the group on a featureless black surround because I had arrived in Terra Incognita (link). I have, ever since, struggled to get my bearings.
This is still a self-portrait. But it also marks the beginning of some family portraits i have commenced based on family snaps (photos) from my formative years.
I want to paint the recollected family rather than the physical family, the echoes of emotion rather than naturalistic representation.
“Après un certain âge tout homme est responsable do son visage.”Albert Camus in La Chute, aka The Fall
"At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves". George Orwell's final entry in his notebooks.
My journey into expressive mark-making in portrait painting has led me to search for heavier texture. I was seeking for a low-cost solution that would bulk the surface into a decided relief, and in itself add underlying texture. I wanted a creative process that was essentially constructivist, building up an image of my face rather as i have been constructed over decades through the agency of social learning and personal experience.
I found a satisfying symbolism in using bandages to form the substructure of my self-portrait. They brought to mind the Invisible Man made visible, Frankenstein's creature taped and tacked together, the Mummy risen from its sarcophagus, trailing the emblems of its internment.
view of the thickness of paint compared to 4mm thick board
In a sense, each of us is a creation. First we are created physically by our parents. And then socially by our families, schools and friends.
And ultimately, we create our own selves through our life choices. Over the decades, within the limits of our genes, we craft our bodies and our character.
Camus and George Orwell would have us believe we thereby craft our own faces after decades of self-expression.
Harry Kent, Private Moment, charcoal and oil on board, 56 x 72 cm
this is the third and last of my three charcoal-and-oil self-portraits for the time being.
i will now endeavour to head out in fresh directions.
firstly, new media ... i will try and create some self-portraits incorporating fabrics for texture, color, and pattern ... i will experiment with new kinds of paint, such as automotive enamels combined with traditional oils.
secondly, in developing my theme of aging, i will extend my focus beyond self-portraits. Still wishing to get in touch with feelings partially hidden from myself, i will attempt some portraits of family members, especially those invoking memories or reworking memories. I will use old family photos to revive buried memories. Needless to say, some of this will be painful for me.
But i believe the more it hurts, the more i will know i am in the 'zone'. The more intensely personal, sublimated into sound painting, the more universal its significance will be. Hopefully. The level of my success in that endeavour will be for my fellow bloggers to decide.
This painting, A Private Moment, is a precursor to that process.
My over-arching aim is to keep pressing forwards in my creative practice to discover mark-making methods that are both expressive and that feel native to me - my discover own unique style.
Howl, a self-portrait in charcoal and oil on board, 56 x 74 cm
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ... What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels!
This self-portrait is a refinement of the technique i developed and described here.
Still on the theme of aging, this self-portrait is a generational piece. It does not carry the same intimately personal charge as the self-portrait Regrets. Instead it concerns itself with the social visions and convictions of a generation.
This was the 'beat' generation of the 1950's. It was the generation before mine but their lifestyle and voices were to sound loud and clear through the 1960's and on into the '70s. The Ginsberg poem voices all the excesses, optimism, despair, restlessness and fervor of youth. It contains the protest voice of youth which was to reach a crescendo in the 1960's.
Youth and old age actually have a surprising amount in common. Both are not deeply immersed in careers and therefore deeply attached to the socio-political and economic order of the day. Both are relatively free to raise a critical voice which those raising families and paying mortgages are not as mentally free to do.
I believe the elderly, because they have seen so much, have a particularly important social role to play as reviewers and commentators.
Once again, the young and the old are called to be the prophets of our age.
This self-portrait aims to express a howl of pain at the state of global industrial civilisation, and a prophetic howl by once again invoking Ginsberg's rage against the corporate machinery, the urban madhouse, the planetary plunder that has marked this generation and has marred this generation.
For Blake's dark satanic mills are still pumping the fetid effluvia of a long dead geological age off the coast of Florida to give an angry fix to a world hooked on octane, pelicans drowning in our black decay while we ineffectually jog off our obesity in trendy trainers from the sweat-shops of Asia.
And thanks, Elizabeth Anderson, for your comment below which put me in mind of Peter Finch's stirring prophetic outburst of outrage in the movie Network.
"I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'
You can watch Peter Finch's stunning performance on Youtube here.
but the last voice here today belongs to Alan Ginsberg, so if you want another taste, read on:
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
It's not for laws I've broken That bitter tears I've wept, But solemn vows I've spoken And promises unkept; It's not for sins committed My heart is full of rue, but gentle acts omitted, Kind deeds I did not do.
from Regrets, Robert William Service
Back to the serious business of expressive self-portraits.
With each one i focus on an emotion as i work, especially emotions i believe common in the adult world. More common with advancing age, yet seldom depicted in self-portraiture or even spoken of in the slick dream that has become our public media.
Today, yes, regrets i've got a few. Robert Frost had miles to go before he slept and still had promises to keep when he wrote his evocative little poem.
The elderly have very few miles left to go, and carry the burden of promises not kept.
back from my semester break, i turned up yesterday for the first critique session of the Post-graduate Painters Group at the Academy of Arts.
while i was waiting for the session to start my eyes toyed with the random patination of marks on one of the work tables. These had been incidentally built by students over the years as they spilled bits of paint, or over-painted the edges of their work, or scored the surface with a cut-off knife.
not having any work of mine own to blog, i thought i would photograph these marks by arranging them into abstract compositions in my camera view-finder. The results you have seen above.
are these 'Art'?
because i arranged them into a composition in a viewfinder?
does this make them 'photographic art', not 'painting art'?
does the lack of compositional intention on the part of those who made the marks matter?
doesn't a lot of contemporary art use randomness and serendipity, so how are these different?
can they legitimately be called collaborative art since there was no conscious collaboration between artists?
so what should we call these images?
the work-table in question is in the far corner of the Painting Studio (above). I've thrown in a couple of additional images of the Academy world i inhabit to help set the scene.
Brett Whiteley self-portrait, Remembering Lao Tse (Shaving off a Second), 1967 [image link from artquotes.net]
A few blogs back, a reference to Australian artist Brett Whitely came up, and since my Visitors Counter (no, my goons don't know where you live, just what flag you fly) now tells me I've had visitors from 125 countries, i thought i would introduce Brett to those in the wider world who might be unfamiliar with his work.
in Australia Bret Whitely is a legend, a national treasure, an icon, an artist as well known as a football star.
There are plenty of biographies of Brett on the web, so i won't attempt one, other than give a few incredibly brief impressions of the man and his art.
Impression 1:
The ultimate self-portrait - a painting of made oils, gold leaf, collage, rock, perspex, electricity, pencil, PVA, varnish, brain, earth, twig, taxidermied bird, nest, egg, feathers, cicada, bone, dentures, rubber and metal sink plug, pins, shell and glass eye on eighteen wood panels, 2 x 16 meters!; not signed, not dated. It is a spiritual autobiography housed in the wonderful Art Gallery of NSW.
You can see very detailed close-ups of the work here and here.
Impression 2:
An Archibald Prize-winning (the Aussie Oscar for portrait painting) self portrait depicting the interior of his Sydney apartment (his face is in the hand-held mirror).
Brett Whiteley, Self portrait in the studio, 1975. [image link from artquotes.net]
The Gallery of NSW, for the exhibition Whiteley himself and his friends 2004, described him as: "Twice winner of the Archibald Prize, Whiteley is one of Australia's best-known and popular artists. He was a charismatic and energetic individual who gained early success and international acclaim during the heady 1960s and 70s. From a very early age he was fascinated by the romantic vision of the artist as hero - or anti-hero - and enthusiastically pursued his passions in both his art and life-style. When he painted himself or other artists he was relentless in his insightful psychological investigations of his subjects. Artists he admired included Vincent Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. Their faces fascinated him, as did their work, and he created many portraits of these two extraordinary individuals".
Impression 3:
A sometimes marine artist ... in love with Ultramarine, celebrating the view from his balcony over Sydney harbour.
oil on canvas, 203 x 365 cm, 1975
It was hanging beside a wonderful John Olsen, Five Bells (oil on hardboard, 1963) on the day i visited, which i thought most apt for the two were good friends. My thanks to the Gallery of NSW who gave me permission to take these photos of Brett's The Balcony.
Brett Whiteley The balcony 2 hanging beside John Olsen's Five Bells
in the Gallery of NSW.
Below are some details i photographed from close up.
Detailed views from Brett Whiteley's The balcony 2.
Also on the harbour is the famous Sydney Opera House which he started to paint in 1971 while it was still being built. He had just returned from New York and was now living at Lavender Bay from where the Opera House was very visible.
Brett Whiteley, Opera House, 1982, oil and mixed media on canvas, 203x244cm [image link from artquotes.net]
It was first exhbited in 1972, but in 1982, after some finishing touches, Brett gave it to Qantas (the airline) in exchange for free air travel. They decorated their club lounge at Sydney airport with it for amost 20 years before selling it off at auction.
Although the proceeds went towards establishing the Qantas Foundation Art Award, aimed to encourage emerging Australian artists, this corporate trading of creative soul bring some lines from Bob Dylan's (with whom Brett hung out while in NY) All Along The Watchtower to mind: "Businessmen they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them know along the line
What any of this is worth".
See Brett's view from his Lavender Bay window in this clip (trying to ignore the fatuous tone of the narrator)
Impression 4:
Animal lover.
Well, he did say, "Art should astonish, transmute, transfix. One must work at the tissue between truth and paranoia".
Brett Whiteley, Baboon, mixed media on panel, 90 x 77 cm, 1978 [image from artquotes.net ]
Actually, this painting is part the self-portrait triptych entitled Art, Life and the Other Thing which won the Archibald Prize in 1978.
Artquotes.net explains the significance of this work: "In the lower left panel is a baboon that represents the addicted self of the artist or the "monkey on the back". The baboon is handcuffed and pinned to the ground with nails. It has its mouth open, screaming, while a hand in the top left corner of the panel offers him a syringe of heroin".
Despite his struggle with his drug addiction, Brett was to eventually die from it in 1992.
Though as Barry Pearceexplains, "Brett Whiteley is Australia's most sublime painter of birds. They have appeared, often larger than life, in many of his most important paintings. To him, birds are the essential symbol of the song of creation… It is not too fanciful to think of Whiteley’s bird paintings as self portraits"
Brett Whiteley, Untitled (Bird), oil on board with mixed media, 82 x 86 cm, 1978 [image linked from www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au]
Impression 5:
Portrait artist.
Brett Whiteley, Head of Christie, oil on board, 70cm x 61 cm, 1964 [image link from artquotes.net]
In this instance, of the British necrophile murderer, John Christie.
"Whiteley was an avid researcher for detail and the Christie Series in particular signify a fascination with the macabre. John Christie was a serial killer who lured woman to his home only to gas them to death and then rape the corpse. Whiteley spent many hours researching newspapers and case files to then create the series of photographs, screen prints and large mixed media paintings". (Saville Galleries)
Impression 6:
Sometimes landscape artist in love Australian natural forms
Anything resembling the natural Australian female form, actually.
Brett Whiteley, The Olgas for Ernest Giles, oil and mixed media on board, 210 x 240 cm, 1985. [image link from www.abc.net.au]
This painting was inspired by Brett's trip to central Australia in the early 1980's and was painted in tribute to the 19th century explorer to whom it is dedicated. It has been described as "all tits and bums", and yes, it does remind one of Brett's earlier nudes. Having been to the Olgas myself, I can attest to their rounded sensual forms, though walking among them gave me a distinctly eerie and numinous feeling, nothing like the rollicking love-buds celebrated here.
The Olgas sold in 2007 for AU$3,408,000.
UPDATE 6-1-12:
My interest in Brett Whiteley has surged again to the point that i have embarked on a series of works starting with contemplations in ink and leading via lino cuts to a large works in oil.
Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley contemplates old age.
Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley in Ultramarine
Viewers can jump to the start of the series HERE .
Currently undertaking a Master of Contemporary Arts degree focusing on expressive mark-making in portrait painting with the School of Visual & Performing Arts, Univerity of Tasmania. In a previous incarnation Harry was a psychologist and educator researching personality and psycho-social climate of groups, for which he was awarded a PhD, but he gladly gave up teaching and conferencing to become a mumbling recluse dabbling in oils
Visitors are most welcome to link to any of my work in their blogs and websites provided my authorship is acknowledged in each instance. No permission need be obtained, though I would appreciate knowing that you have done so.
Vistors may also download a copy of any image of my work for their own personal, non-commercial use.
Educational institutions such as schools, colleges and universities, their staff and their students, are free to copy and display my work for educational purposes.
Images may not be reproduced or transmitted to third parties, either electronically or in printed format, without my express consent.
My consent must be sought for any print publication of an image of my work.
Use of any of my work for any commercial purpose without a contractual agreement with myself is strictly forbidden. Please contact me here or at kentha@utas.edu.au if you wish to enter into some commercial arrangement over my work.
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