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.

The Studio

light and chaos

Just so followers of this blog won't be left with a creepy Strontium-90 Hazmat head peering out at them on their blog, i'll post some pics of studio.

I work beside a bay window that looks out onto a terrace garden, with trees and lots of birds. But as you see, the window is filled with clutter. The studio is way too small for my needs and storage is a scarce commodity. Fortunately, it is not my only source of light. The ceiling over where i work has a large skylight and i work with the door open so that myriad skink lizards the run in, manic with sunlight,  can find their way back out again in their own good time.

easel and a lot more spilt paint

store and saw

drawing & watercolor desk

It's now semester break and in a couple of weeks i'm off to London and a cruise on the Rhone River - a chance to check out Vincent's Arle.

outside work area

 

So endeth Semester 1.

Post script: proof that i can also paint out of just a small box of paints! (Yes, it IS me!).

Strontium-90 and the poisoned earth

Strontium-90: poisoned earth, oil on paper, 42x30 cm

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Strontium-90: poisoned earth is the third of a trilogy including Iodine-131: winds of change  and Cesium-137: bitter harvest .  This series can be seen as a form of Neo Arte Nucleare (a French art movement of 1950's Art Informel).

I won't write at length about how nasty strontium-90 is or document how it has been leaking from the Fukushima plant. Suffice it to say, i had always connected strontium-90 with nuclear weapons and leukemia and bone cancer. But i learn that it is present in those half a million spent and damaged fuel rods that were for some reason stored in the Fukushima reactor buildings, stored on the floor right above the reactors only to collapse into them.

From my youth i had always associated strontium-90 with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bitter irony that it is now being released in Japan once again but this time courtesy of Japanese industry and government.

This painting is the last of my experiments with monoprint, originally inspired by the wonderfully evocative small landscapes of John Stinson (visit his fascinating blog here) though he uses quite a different process than the one i have evolved for my more messy approach. It may also be the last of my Fukushima series. I am not sure what's next or where to from here, other than continue to work on large format works and revisit self-portraiture.

Thanks everyone for the interest you have shown in these Fukushima works. It is confronting subject-matter and they have been confronting images - not ideal fare for a relaxing browse among art blogs. But i have aimed to be relevant, current and expressive in my work, and the on-going events of Fukushima grabbed my imagination. So once again, thank you my bloggy friends.

Cesium-137 and the bitter harvest

Cesium-137: bitter harvest, oil on Fabriano paper, 58x38 cm

This image is part of my exploration of the artistic fallout of the bitter events at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. It started life as an oil monoprint on Fabriano Artistico 300gsm cold press W/C paper. It is a companion piece to Iodine-131: winds of change and Strontium-90: poisoned earth. This series can be seen as a form of Neo Arte Nucleare (a French art movement of 1950's Art Informel).

Cesium-137 is a particularly nasty by-product of fission in nuclear power plants  - and of atomic weapons, of course. As it undergoes decay to barium-137m it emits strong gamma radiation which makes it extremely hazardous.

Cesium, as well as cesium-137, is a soft, silvery white metal that is chemically related to potassium. It's this chemical similarity that makes it so dangerous to life-forms, for we all need to constantly take up potassium to live. But plants and animals will take up cesium instead, mistaking it for potassium. It will then make its way up the food chain in growing concentrations.

Cesium-137

Though the metal itself is silver, this pic (from here) of a mound of powdered Cesium-137 has the sickly radio-active green look of Kryptonite in old B class Sci Fi movies, and hence inspired  the fluro-green vapour enveloping the Hazmat-suited figure in the painting.



The USA Environment Protection Agency (EPA) explains that breathing in contaminated dust would result in internal exposure, which means leaving the contaminated site would not end the exposure. Drinking contaminated water would also place the cesium-137 inside the body where it would expose living tissue to intense gamma and beta radiation. Cesium-137 has a half-life of 30 years, which means it will contaminate soil for hundreds of years. Which is still better than the mildly radioactive cesium-135 which, however, has a half-life of 2.3 million years. Where do cesium-137 and cesium-135 come from around Fukushima Daiici? From exposed fuel rods.

But it's worse. These are not just the fuel rods involved in the melt-down of the reactors there. In a decision that defies the common sense of ordinary folk nuclear engineers decided to store old spent rod inside the reactor buildings, on the first floor right above the reactors. It is estimated that as many as 600,000 radioactive old rods were stored on site, 70% of which may be damaged and leaking.

But wait, there's more. Because they were stored on the floor above the reactors it meant that when the containment buildings of Units 1 & 3 exploded, thousands of old rods dropped into the reactors below. And the rest got blown sky-high, which is why bits of rod could be found up to 2km away! The rest are in the ocean and scattered in the surrounding terrain.

What makes TEPCO even more culpable is that it was known that Mark 1 reactors of the kind at Fukushima are vulnerable to explosion. Thirty-five years ago, Dale G. Bridenbaugh and two of his colleagues at General Electric resigned from their jobs after becoming increasingly convinced that the nuclear reactor design they were reviewing - the Mark 1 - was so flawed it could lead to a devastating accident.

"The problems we identified in 1975 were that, in doing the design of the containment, they did not take into account the dynamic loads that could be experienced with a loss of coolant," Bridenbaugh told ABC News in an interview. "The impact loads the containment would receive by this very rapid release of energy could tear the containment apart and create an uncontrolled release."

The Fukushima reactors were so old they had already exceeded their operational design life and were due to be mothballed. So why store those spent rods in there? This has nothing to do with abstruse nuclear physics and everything to do with sound risk management and responsible decision-making. Seems to me that too many managers, engineers and government officials were too complacent, too self-assured and cocky for too long and their luck ran out. As it has now, regrettably, for the people living in the region.

Chu-oni, in Japan, has blown the whistle on the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science and Technology (MEXT) by revealing that the accumulated Cesium 137 on the land as far away as 80km from the plant was higher in May than the areas around Chernobyl which people evacuated. He concludes that "the Japanese government's intervention after the accident is much less humane than the former Soviet Union".

Cesium-137 was discovered at levels 100 times higher the usual in Osaka on 19 May. Authorities claimed these were trace amounts and had no implications from human health. But what were they doing there? Nuclear reactors should not be putting Cesium-137 into the environment unless a melt-down has occurred and the containment vessel has been breached.

Osaka is a long way from Fukushima. So maybe it is less surprising that 500,000 becquerels per kg of dust collected from the roof drains of Yamagata University, 70 kms away, is far less benign. The government measure to deal with this reality? Local high schools are allowing students to continue their winter uniform of long sleeves, although the summer season has now started, to prevent Cesium-137 landing on their skin.

A local mum has had enough and is moving away with her children. "We haven't believed the government from the start," Mrs Watanabe says. "When the explosion happened, they didn't say anything about it being dangerous. We don't trust the media either, since the nuclear plant operator sponsors many newspapers and television stations." Parents with their own radiation monitors believe the government has been under-reporting radiation levels. Already school gutters contain 60 times the level considered safe, and that's what is officially conceded.


Months later, in November 2011, reports were out that the area of eastern Fukushima had levels of the radioactive element that exceeded official government limits for arable land. Fukishima's neighbouring regions, such as, Iwate, Miyagi, Yamagata, Niigata, Tochigi, Ibaraki, and Chiba are very likely  affected, though the government is producing contamination figures lower than those discovered by the Universities Space Research Association in Columbia, US in a recent survey of 47 regions. A serious drop in food production in Japan can be expected.

But cesium-137 has also been found in milk in Vermont. Indeed, cesium-137 has been detected in drinking water and milk, albeit in levels well below the EPA's maximum contaminant level, in Boise, Las Vegas, Nome and Dutch Harbor, Honolulu, Kauai and Oahu, Anaheim, Riverside, San Francisco, and San Bernardino, Jacksonville and Orlando, Salt Lake City, Guam, and Saipan. Cesium-137 depositation over the USA is being tracked by numerous governmental, scientific, and academic organisations, and you can link to their results here.

I guess it's a small world after all.


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Iodine-131 and the winds of change

Iodine-131: winds of change, oil on paper, 76x56 cm

Iodine is a mysterious element. At room temperature it appears to have no liquid state. It's dark crystals sublimate directly into violet fumes (watch it do that here). That is why this latest 'portrait' is not only a representation of a hazmat-suited Fukushima worker but also a personification of airborne iodine vapour. Hence the purple curling fumes and haze in the painting. This is a companion piece in a trilogy along with Cesium-137: bitter harvest and Strontium-90: poisoned earth. This series can be seen as a form of Neo Arte Nucleare (a French art movement of 1950's Art Informel).

We need trace amounts of iodine in our diet to keep thyroid growth normal. Maybe that's because we once came from the ocean (our blood serum is basically seawater) and ocean is the greatest source of iodine compounds. Countries far from the ocean experience the most iodine deficiencies for it seems iodine compounds are wind born in ocean spray and deposit on our crops, get ingested by cows, get concentrated in milk.

All good for us - until you substitute good old home-brand iodine for radio-active Iodine -131 that gets taken up by the thyroid in the usual way. But it leaves unusual results in its train - cancer.

As the American Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) explains, "The primary risk of concern with iodine-131 is thyroid cancer, with children more at risk than adults. A high enough intake of iodine-131 by children can also cause developmental problems and other thyroid diseases. Young girls are at greater risk than boys. Female infants have a risk of thyroid cancer 70 times greater than adult males for the same radiation exposure. Some iodine-131 deposits on land, including pastures. When contaminated grass is eaten by cows and goats, iodine-131 concentrates in milk. It has a half-life of about eight days, meaning that appreciable amounts will remain in the environment for a few months after large releases." One blogger has declared himself radiolactoseintollerant.

So in Fukushima prefecture during May there were restrictions on the distribution and consumption of fish, milk, turnips, bamboo shoots, spinach, cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and shiitake mushrooms. But it's contamination has spread well outside of Japan.

Too late for Nagasaki staffers exposed to Fukushima radiation while on a mission there to assist. Blogger Gabi Greve in Japan reports that Nagasaki University Hospital says that at least 40% of the Nagasaki helpers sent to Fukushima Prefecture returned suffering internal radiation exposure from iodine-131 and cesium-137.

The Fukushima-meltdown dispersion cloud has deposited Iodine-131 onto Michigan and California. In Hawaii boron is being feed to cows and sprayed on crops to absorb radioactive iodine. Berkley has radioactive strawberries. It was reported that on 9 April iodine-131 had been found, albeit in levels well below the EPA's maximum contaminant level, in the milk of Oak Ridge, Chatanooga, Helena,  Columbia, Cincinatti, Pittsburgh, Painesville, Denver, Detroit, Trenton, Waretown NJ and Muscle Shoals, AL.

Meanwhile,  Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire" has asked permission to publish a painting or two in their tri-monthly magazine from my Fukushima series. I have agreed and have forwarded Fukushima Future, Fukushima Samurai I, Fukushima Samurai II, and Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires for them to choose from. My work is expected to appear in the July edition of the magazine.

Sortir du nucléaire is an anti-nuclear alliance of 874 organisations based in France. Their charter is to rid the world of nuclear weapons and power plants. With a membership of 50,251 individuals, Sortir du nucléaire publishes a monthly newsletter with a circulation of 20,000. You can visit their website here and see clips of some of their anti-nuclear activities here, here, here and here. Or follow them on Faceook here. One can subscribe to their monthly digital newsletter by emailing this web address.

But the last word today i will give i to French rappeur Duval Mc, his rap rage made chic by the seductive sibilants, exquisite edgy vowels, and cultured charm of French language on the attack. The spirit of Rousseau lives: "Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains."

Expressive mark-making and 'likeness' in abstract figurative portraiture

Fukushima Ghosts III, oil on paper, 58x46 cm

My experimentation continues at creating evocative and  expressive images of people under extreme stress with this piece, the third of my Fukushima ghosts (see the previous two here) . My aims are to explore expressive mark-making in portrait painting, to make social comment on a current world event, and to create eloquent images about the human condition.

For this painting i switched to a black absorbent paper that soaked up the oil paint and medium. I flooded the paper with both. The pigment moved about through gravity as i rotated the paper at strategic moments. I was allowing the paint its agency. I was relying on its agency. It was a partnership. We, the paint and i, are co-responsible for the way the work turned out.

The  first painting  of my Fukushima series was fairly realistic, if somewhat stylized. Subsequent images have moved progressively deeper into what may be described as an abstract figurative style.

Abstract figurative painting developed as American Abstract Expressionism was running out of steam in the 1950's. Many had declared the death of figurative painting some years earlier, and saw Abstract Figurative painting as a contradiction in terms. These theorists maintained that abstraction and figuration were at opposite ends of a continuum and so it made no sense to mix them.

But in hindsight such assertions were silly and pointless. As Kandinsky says, "There is no must in art, for art is free." This was quite the sentiment of the new journal Reality, founded in 1953, when the founding committee stated  that the Journal's intention was “to rise to the defense of any painter’s right to paint any ways he wants.”

The movement referred to itself as Figurative Expressionism. So i guess that makes me a Neo-figurative Expressionist painter dabbling in Abstract Figurative portraiture. Not that i'm setting out to revive any art movement nor to prove some abstruse point in art theory. I'm just following the principle of a painter's right to paint any damn way he wants to.

But all that abstraction and expressionism does the raise the question, "What ever happened to portraiture being the painting of a likeness to someone?". How can a puddle of paint be called a 'likeness'? It may, at a stretch, be called figurative, but surely not portraiture.

I have touched on this issue in a  previous post when considering the legitimacy of using photography as a basis for portrait painting. Let me just add now that notions of what might be a portrait have considerably expanded over the previous century.

The Social Media Group observe that, "Traditionally, the ideal portrait both resembled the subject's physical appearance and captured the essence of that person. Contemporary portraits, however, are made within a cultural and artistic context with deep questions about the nature of identity, of representation, and of authenticity ... and technology is also changing the how we think about human identity: to portray the essence of a person, do we show the face? DNA? surveillance data? shopping transactions?" 

William Dobell's 1943 Archibald Prize win was controversial, as some people argued that his portrait of Joshua Smith so distorted Smith's features that it could not be called a portrait. The issue went to court, the case hinging on the accepted definition of portraiture: how faithfully did a portrait have to represent the sitter? Dobell's vindication expanded the concept of what could be a portrait, and abstract interpretations as well as conventional portraits were subsequently admitted to the Archibald.

The Post-Sigmund Freud years have seen more interest in the personality, the neuroses even, of the subject, and less insistence on accurate draughtsmanship in the production of a photographic physical likeness. With the rise of Expressionism we have come to value discovering the personality of the artist in his or her work. We prize Egon Schiele's drawings for those very reasons.

Francis Bacon painted a portrait of Lucian Freud not from a sitting by LF, not even from a photo of LF, but from a photo of Kafka as his inspiration (Kafa was LF's fav author at the time). Bacon's self-portraits contain some talisman of himself (a bag under an eye, or the sweep of hair across the forehead) but these iconic indicators hardly constitute a likeness in the conventional sense. Yet we accept that Bacon painted a portrait of Lucian Freud and numerous self-portraits.

A spokesperson from the British National Portrait Gallery put the view in an on-line portrait painting forum that “all of the body is a portrait. I've seen fabulous portraits, full of character, showing only a hand, personified in such a way that the entire character of the person was contained. Such work is rare, but possible.”

So a mere personification may be considered a portrait. Paintings containing symbolic objects alluding to the identity of the sitter may be considered portraits. A DNA printout, suitably framed and hung in the National Portrait Gallery, would be considered a portrait.

Maybe Fukushima Ghosts III is not a portrait. It is not of any known individual. Even if it were, the face is contained within the mask of a Hazmat suit. And the painterly treatment of the suit is so fluid that it is hardly even recognizable as a protective item of clothing.

Furthermore, the painting purports to be that of a ghost. And ghosts don't exist. So all-in-all, it can't be a portrait. It can't really even be called a figurative painting. Maybe a fantasy painting? Surreal?

Yet i don't think so. I think it is a portrait. It is a generic portrait representing many anonymous individuals currently alive and working hard in Japan. Indeed, the anonymity of the workers has been one the key themes running through my Fukushima series, for it is a socially telling marker. Their anonymity is revealing!

These generic portraits of anonymous workers are like the statues at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The identity of the statue does not have to be known but the sense of humanity, of service and of suffering behind the work is palpable come Remembrance Day ceremonials.

Actually, we don't recognize the persons in the vast majority of portraits we come across in our lives! And i'm talking Rembrandt and Singer Sargent.

That leaves us unable to say anything about the quality of the likeness. Yet we prize the portraits of these artists. We prize them for the painterly skill in their execution and we prize them for the humanity they reveal about an unknown sitter, about an artist long dead, about a time and society otherwise obscured in history.

Fukushima Ghosts

Fukushima Ghosts 1, oil on paper, 76x56 cm

The fiasco at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will haunt Japan and the world's nuclear industry for a long time to come. The web is rife with rumour and anecdote, largely because the Japanese government, meteorologists, and most of all, TEPCO, are so parsimonious with information, let alone frank and open disclosure.

So, for example, the chief of the Meteorological Society of Japan has drawn flak from within the academic circles over his request for meteorologists to refrain from releasing forecasts on the spread of radioactive substances from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. I guess that's because of the numerous animated maps of the fallout moving over Canada and the US were populating Youtube and made plausible by reports of levels of Iodine-131 in Californian water 181 times higher than normal. Michigan was reporting elevated wind-born Iodine-131 levels. Now even Europe has fallen into line and stopped prognostications.

Or the case of Professor Toshiso Kosako  who resigned in disgust a few weeks back as nuclear advisor to Japanese Prime Minister because the government simply moved the goal posts for nuclear exposure for children despite the Professor's stern warnings. So now the children around Fukushima play in radioactive playgrounds.

And so stories circulate about TEPCO's inept handling of situation as they lurch from crisis to crisis due to an apparent incapacity to take quick executive decisions, assume irresponsible for the turn of events, and to stop worrying about the 80% share plunge and care a little more about the anonymous workers in the front line battle to contain disaster.

For example, this account dated 15 May:

"The crap coming out of this disaster is nightmarish. A temp worker that had truck driving experience took what he was told was a job driving truck for the tsunami clean up. He was put on a bus and taken to Fukushima to do liquidation work that had nothing to do with driving a truck. A guy that was a sub contractor was put to work installing hoses. He had no plumbing experience and the connections required some level of plumbing knowledge. The people he was working with dropped the hose in radioactive water in the turbine building because they were heavy. Then they had to pick up the hose to move it. He got hit with the wet hose in the back of the neck. The protection suits they were wearing are not waterproof and he has contamination they can't remove on the back of his neck."

So while the Keystone Cops run the site containment measures, the first deaths are starting to trickle in. A worker died on May 14. The place he was working exposed to him to 0.17 millisieverts of radiation. Butch geeks who love to parade their cool savvy delight in doing their Sievert sums to prove he was not actually a radiation victim.

No, he died of heat-stress and possibly a heart attack. He was 60 years old, worked longer in that heat-containing Hazmat suit than he should have, carrying heavy debris, and collapsed at the scene.

TEPCO is hiring older workers. By the time their cancers appear many years from now they will either already be near-dead from some other cause or have a difficult time proving in a court it was working for TEPCO that was the cause. Old age will claim them and tidy up for TEPCO. Maybe they are trying to spare young workers still in their reproductive years. Just part of the no-win that is Fukushima. Meanwhile with similar set of beliefs and a sense that their generation is responsible, elderly retirees are volunteering to rebuild the cooling systems

They say there were no ambulances or medics on standby at the scene, despite the risks of such dangerous work environment and the age of the workers. No helicopter to rush some-one, any-one, this old gent, to hospital. So he rode in a car to hospital for 2 hours instead. DOA. So they say. 

Meanwhile, despite the moratorium on weather maps prognosticating the drift of Iodine-133, assorted sources have been calculating likely deaths from Fukushima. To date it has released about 10% as much radiation as Chernobyl. It is reported that crops up to 75 miles from the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant were found to be unsafe to eat, and tap water in greater Tokyo – home to 30 million people – has also been contaminated by fall-out.

Already, says Arnold Gunderson, Fukushima is going to kill 200,000 from increased cancers over the next 50 years. John Large, a British nuc­lear engineer, predicted the eventual toll could exceed 500,00. The International Atomic Energy Agency has its own formula for projecting population deaths - 0.05 fatal cancers per Sievert of radiation released. Chernobyl released an estimated total collective dose of 600,000 Sieverts over 50 years. Chernobyl was located in a sparsely populated rural region. Fukushima is in a densely populated urbanised region. Time will tell.

In my Fukushima series of paintings (still on-going) i have been using the Hazmat suit as a motif and metaphor (see previous post). Now i need to expand my understanding.

The Hazmat suit is not only the armour of anonymous worker-samurai. It is also their shroud and coffin.

They die in there - from pride, over zealous sense of duty, macho determination, lack of training, inadequate supervision, insufficient back-up, poor executive planning, stingy allocation of funds to do the job at hand.

They die from weary old hearts working on a heart-breaking task in a heart-broken region of Japan.

The ghosts of Fukushima are released. They already haunt the land.

Fukushima Ghosts 2, oil on paper, 76x56 cm

UPDATE 10-1-12:
Fukushima Ghosts I has just been published by Kosmos Journal. Read the details HERE.



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Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires

Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires, oil and bitumen on board, 90x120 cm

UPDATE 8-8-11: 
Fukushima samurai in the nuclear fires has been published in the tri-annual journal Sortir du nucléaire, 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. It is out in the Summer edition, No. 50, which you can read HERE. Xavier Rabilloud, the editor, found my Fukushima work on line and asked if i would allow him to publish a reproduction.

I find it very satisfying that my art is seen as a relevant contemporary voice in the world and is sought out for publication.

 I guess that makes the whole of my Fukushima series a sort of Neo-Arte Nucleare. (Arte Nucleare was a French art movement of 1950's Art Informel).

Now there were three children from the land of Israel

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!
Ah they took a little trip to the land of Babylon

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

And ol’ Nebudchanezzer was the king of Babylon

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

So they took a lot of gold, and made ‘em an idol

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

“Oh, you gotta bow down and worship the idol!”

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

Ah, but the children of Israel would not bow down!

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

So the king cast the children in the fiery furnace

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!
He heaped on coal and red-hot brimstone

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

Even made it seven times hotter than it oughtta be!

    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!

Now they burned up the soldiers that the king had put there
    Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego!
Oh, Shadrack! Meshach, Abednego!

Shadrack, song written by Robert MacGimsey In 1930.

Hear the inimitable Louis Armstrong perform this song on Youtube here.

Which leads us to story-time.

Nebuchadnezzar ran a prosperous economy. Soon everyone in Babylon worshipped the golden idol of high dividend yields and strong capital gains. Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego, three foreign workers, would not bend the knee to Babylonian glory. So Big N had them cast into the fiery furnace.

Both the energy company's plant operating procedures and government regulations specified the permissible upper ranges for thermal production. But there is no rage like that of an emperor who has been revealed to have no clothes, so Nebuchadnezzar ordered the furnace stoked seven times hotter than it ought to be.

The plant CEO, seeing an opportunity for greater shareholder returns, was only too willing to bend the rules. Security personnel patrolling the facility, believed to be a safe distance from the thermal source, were consumed by the radiant heat in direct violation of the occupational health and safety standards for all non-engineering human resource units. Dutiful workers became collateral damage to a boom economy.

It was into this furnace that the Babylonian State executive, with the connivance of the courts, condemned Shadrack, Meshach, Abednego, while Nebuchadnezzar, from the safety of his ziggarat penthouse God-King suite overlooking the Tiber, watched them on TV as they pushed on through the flames .

His spin doctors were already working on the press release: something about "volunteer plant workers suffering regrettable collateral damage while struggling to contain Unit One" but that "the government assures the populace that there is absolutely no risk to nearby residents" because "a meltdown of the furnace core is an impossibility" given the advanced state of Babylonian technology.

And, gentle reader, you may make your own connections, if any, between this story, that song and this my latest painting, Fukushima Samurai in the nuclear fires.

This is not a large format painting. In terms of my art practice, this one is about consolidating an artistic concept.  The concept in question is the motif of the hazmat suit as metaphor for the events at Fukushima Daiichi. 

And so a fragmanted figure, all identity swallowed in the shell of the suit and by the ambiguity of smokey fallout, struggles through the consuming elemental fluxus all around.

These events in turn, to my mind, are representative of the limitations of human endeavour, that is, the feet of clay in all human enterprise - human imperfection.

But my Masters Degree research project is about expressive mark-making, and therefore I also wanted to refine my monoprinting mark-making technique. Through creating this particular work i now have far greater understanding of the degree of randomness of the mark. Tis a function of: the wetness of the paint, the amount of pressure during printing, and how various tools maybe used for applying that pressure.

However, i never want complete control or anything near it because that would rob the paint of its unique material agency and so remove happen-chance from the work. Serendipity is not only essential to the technique but, subliminally, to the expressive force and meaning of the work.

The chaos of the flow of paint is eloquent about the chaos of events, the chaos at the edges of civilisation, the chaos in the heart of human social organisation ... and the unpredictable fluxus in our own lives. 

Labours in Hades: the Fukushima Samurai

Fukushima Samurai II, oil and bitumen on paper, 170x152cm

Continuing my theme on the Fukushima workers, this painting is a vision of the Daiichi plant workers as the mythical heroes who entered Hell to discharge their labours - Aeneas, Odysseus, Orpheus. Even Hercules who had destroy the three-headed monster, Cerberus. These workers have been sent into the nuclear fires to battle the contamination that threatens the lives and well-being of literally millions. A Herculean labour indeed.

This work is a development of the ealier piece,  Fukushima Samurai I (left)

which in turn evolved from the initial painting Fukushima Future (left).

Fukushima Samurai II also represents my second attempt at a large format painting. Working large format presents a whole new set of problems. But i sense a greater freedom at this scale. Brush-work becomes a whole-body exercise. Hogs hair bristles give way to 3 inch commercial house-paint brushes. The sheer quantity of volatile fumes from solvents sprayed onto an extensive surface presents some special health and safety challenges. I find myself working outdoors much more. 

Even photographing the work at the end is problematic. The craft paper, though 300gsm or more, curls because it come off a roll and I have no wall large enough to pin it out. The result is that the black bar underscoring and supporting  the figure is no longer horizontal in the photo. The gloss surface reflects the sky and so the colours and tonal values are not true. Ironically, a photo doesn't even give a real sense of the overall composition, as one gets from seeing the painting at a considerable distance (the thumbnail pic does that better).

But mostly what is missing from the photo, as with the photo of any large scale painting, is the IMPACT! Whoaaaa. You have turn your neck to take it all in when up close. It is immersive. You ARE in those colors. Marks that barely register in the photo are read as machinery wreathed in smoke when in front of the actual painting.

Similarly, I have no easel large enough to support a 2.5 sq m sheet of paper , so i've jerry-rigged some rickety structures. A properly stretched canvas would be so much easier but would also cost $100. These are just learning exercises and don't warrant such expenditure.

And as important, i've come to realise that using canvases and quality oil paints has robbed me of freedom. I feel too much the burden of responsibility to 'paint a good painting' onto expensive supports. Because small Chinese canvases are cheap i inadvertently became a painter of small paintings.  

Now,  even my artists' oil paints have given way to tins of bitumen and old house paint and varnish stock that has been languishing out in the garden shed for decades. Some is so settled and compacted that stirring the paint to life is impossible. So i'm pouring off the solvents and mixing them with pigments and agents i discover elsewhere.

These are indeed Heidegger's at hand materials. And the constant need to innovate equipment, supports, media, brushes and applicators, body movement and materials skills in my creative praxis well and truly call forth my material thinking (my thoughts on Heidegger, Barbara Bolt and material thinking are here.).

Painting on a large scale almost for free is very liberating. Is the work any good? Dunno. Seems like it's neither fish nor fowl at the moment.  But it's energizing and i am learning a lot.

And .... I'm having fun.

a detail from Fukushima Samurai II

Gary Everest wanted a better sense of the painting's size, so ive added a pic of it pinned up on the lichen-covered awning protecting the door of my studio. The tressel tables on which i sometimes work can be seen outside the bay window.

It makes me realize that size is relative. This seemed huge and difficult to handle in my small studio building. But really it is barely as tall as a person stands. So i will aim to paint something at least twice the size, just for the experience

Fukushima Kamikaze

Fukushima Kamikaze, oil on paper, 83x60 cm

The plight of Fukushima seems to have left our news services in recent weeks. I guess the TV channels figured it had lost its entertainment value as a modern-day disaster movie. The press too have moved on. There was a royal wedding, you know.

Fortunately Elizabeth Anderson's recent post on her blog brought the realities back into focus. She gave a link to an excellent update by Arnie Gunderson (Chief Nuclear Engineer) of fairewinds.com.

Reactor One is now known to be uncovered, exposed to the air. The radiation levels in Unit 1 are consequently at incredibly high levels for humans. At that level a person dies very quickly after 4 or 5 hours of exposure. You get sick after much much much less.

And here is the thing. They sent in some workers - to an uncovered core - to fit new gauges so that technicians can monitor the disaster. So who were those brave men who went in there to fit new gauges? How much radiation had those workers already absorbed over recent weeks?

Seems to me some of these men are on suicide missions for the nation. Fukushima kamikaze. Read about these Nuclear Ninja and their suicide mission here.

Gunderson also reports that meanwhile radiation has entered the sewerage system of a local town (contaminated ground water seeping into earthquake-cracked sewer pipes) while a high school in the area has told the kids they have to wear masks and long-sleeved shirts (to prevent skin burns) at all times. The school's parking lot has had the soil stripped because it was so contaminated that if the kids went outside they would be exposed to adult nuclear worker levels of radiation. The government's swift response? They  increased the permissible dose of radiation for children - twenty-fold!

Where i come from they close schools when the flu gets bad.

I guess this what the Fukushima Kamikaze are willing to give their lives for - to do their duty as workers, to save school children, and just maybe, to yet save the day.

Gary Everest's portrait arrives

here

Early in May, Gary Everest's wonderful portrait of yours truly (see my previous post here) arrived at my front door, hot from Oregon. In the following days i re-arranged the paintings in my study to give Gary's painting pride of place behind my chair.

I was reluctant to post a photo at first because my study is, well, a kind of an inner sanctum. Few people have ever been in here, or even seen in. But i am so thrilled with Gary's portrait of me that i will break a rule and post a pic of it here, among friends. I know you will keep our little secret.

You can follow the evolution of the painting and some Gary's steps and adventures along the way here, here, here, and here. Or you visit Gary at his wonderful blog gleverestpaintings.blogspot.com and see other fantastic portraits he has painted. A warm, wonderful and modest artist.

Thanks Gary. Your work gives me a lift every time i step into my study.

It gives me food for thought - who i am, where i've come from, where i'm going.

It gives me delight in the masterful paint-handling .

And it warms the cockles of the heart that it was a generous gift from a distant but dear bloggy friend.

Tribute to Gulpilil

Gulpilil, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 41x30 cm SOLD

 

For many years, along with countless other Australians, i have admired the work of Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil. This goes all the way back to my young adulthood when i saw his mesmerizing performance in Walkabout (1971). He was just 15 years old. You can see the trailer HERE or the whole movie HERE .

His other 27 film credits include

Nick Cave's tense and explosive The Proposition (2005) (see a clip HERE);    the eerie The Tracker (2002), such an atmospheric film (see a clip HERE);    the moving The Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)(see a trailer HERE);    the enigmatic and spine tingling The Last Wave  (1977) (see a trailer HERE).

Gulpilil's personal story is a mix of great achievement and an endemic and gnawing sense of loss that corrodes and erodes himself, as well as his people. I don't wish to open up the issues around the historical,  economic, health, legal, and social life of our indigenous Australians.

Suffice it to say, it is a national disgrace, despite the efforts of many according to their lights at the time and today. Western paternalism, materialism,avarice, cruelty and hardness of heart have more than played their parts too. The poverty, life-expectancy, social break-down, and substance abuse among many (though by no means all) Aboriginal communities remains appalling.

So why isn't David living in a swish Sydney habour-side apartment with the millions he has made from his films?  

Firstly because his set of values are not those of Western consumer society. His obligation is to family and tribe. So that is where he chooses to live, even if in fairly squalid conditions.

Secondly, what millions? I can't help feeling he has been stitched up by film companies who appear to sometimes have exploited his talent for a mere retainer. He makes a few thousand. They make the millions plus.

Gulpilil stradles two worlds and can no longer be at home in either of them. That is his tragedy. But that is also the pain that fuels his art. That is the story that is etched on his expressive and majestic face.

David Guliplil is friends with the indigenous Australian band Yothu Yindi . If you wish to peek into the emotional and cultural space Gulpilil inhabits, listen as Western and indigenous culture and language meet in their song One Blood.

"Can you hear it

it's all around you

the beating of heart

waking up the land

the beating of a heart - one blood."

When i listen to this song i hear an ancient people tell me: 

We and the animals are one.

We and the land are one.

We and and all mankind are one.

One blood. All life is one blood.

The painting at the top of this post was commissioned from me for a woman whose Aboriginal heritage led her to deeply admire Gulpilil . She had seen the painting below when it was in an exhibition for sale and had regretted not buying it. So a friend of hers employed me to paint the second one, above, just for her.

Gulpilili, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 41x30 cm SOLD

But this one evolved from a previous version i had painted earlier in 2007, seen below. The hand is featured because i imagined Gulpilil as not only a contemporary celebrity but also as a timeless figure at one with the ancient hand prints and stencils in Aboriginal rock art that i recall seeing in Arnhem Land when i visited the Kakadu rock paintings in caves that had already been inhabited  20,000 years ago.

Gulpilil's Cave, watercolor on paper, 41x30 cm

But even this grew out of an earlier work still. Or maybe better just called a doodle (below) rather than anything as lofty as a 'work'. Early in 2007 i had read an account of David Gulpilil's life. And i remembered him from Walkabout. I had seen some of his dance performance.

And so in a moment of reverie i doodled my first Gulpilil, he in his dreaming, i in mine.

Gulpilil's Dreaming, ink and watercolour on paper, 41x30 cm

 

Dreaming, or The Dreaming, has a special meaning for Aboriginal people. It is not only a personal and group spiritual communion but also a connection to The Dreamtime. It is not a day-dreaming or wishful thinking but rather an contemplative and meditative insight that produces narratives of totemic power. They dream existence into being.

I believe that as creative artists we should have our Dreaming too.

We should cultivate a numinous place not visible to the naked eye, a place that we strive to visit, to inhabit, and allow to inhabit us.

It is the mission of creative artists to make the Dreaming visible to all humanity so they may know there is more to life than shopping.