Brett Whiteley's visitation

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Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley's ghost #3,
charcoal, watercolour and acrylic on paper, 76c55cm.

Continuing to explore Brett Whitetley's ghost, i have followed up Brett Whitetley's ghost #1 (which was painted in the dark) by making a few drawings in daylight.

These were exploratory 'doodles' in preparation for my final work, a 190 x 270 cm triptych depicting Brett Whiteley's apotheosis into the cultural firmament of Australia.

This triptych will culminate my Brett Whiteley series and be the final work towards my Masters degree. Hopefully my next posting will be able to show it!

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. 

Brett Whiteley holds court

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Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley holds court, acrylic on masonite, 73x87cm

'Brett did have a genius. A genius for self promotion ... That's what his great genius was for --- creating the myth of Brett Whiteley'.  [Jeff Makin]

'His great talent was for painting but it was not enough. It was never enough. He needed total attention'.  [David Millikan]

James Gleeson wrote of Bett's 'aesthetic integrity being swamped by showmanship'. 'He is an actor masquerading in a cultural charade'.

It was all theatre, the white BMW with BW numberplates, the red camellias he placed under the wipers, the black or white costumes, the sad-eyed addicted wife ... People loved the white suits and the rag-top BMW. They loved the bare bottoms on the beach, the auto-erotic touch, the idea of the artist as an act ... He was mobbed by schoolchildren, recognised wherever he went'. [Hilton & Blundell]

'From early on he was taken up by the glitterati, shallow people who responded. Then came the money-making exercise. It was pretty sad'. [Frank Watters]

all quotes from Hilton, M. & Blundell, G., Whiteley: An unauthorised life, Macmillan: Australia.

Brett Whiteley remembers

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Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley remembers, acrylic on canvas, 50x60cm

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'Memory is a wilful dog. It won't be summoned or dismissed ... It can leave you howling and it can make you smile.’

Elliot Perlman, The Street Sweeper

So i thought about Brett's memories, especially those of Wendy and of his heyday in the 1970's ... memories in the midst of his isolation and depression in the 1990's.

I wanted an image that did both - suggested Brett 'howling' and suggested Brett 'smiling', as the wilful dog came and went.

Brett Whiteley sees red

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Harry Kent, Whiteley sees red I
charcoal, ink and acrylic on Arches paper, 42x61cm

Brett once described his childhood as being filled with Napoleonic rage. (He liked everything in heroic proportions).

His sister Frannie, in her biography of Brett, writes of his childhood sense of abandonment when he was sent to boarding school and when the marriage of his parents failed and mum left home. And his grief over the loss of some close friends in death such as Joel Elenberg. And in his final years his sense of isolation, loneliness, and depression.

In his younger years he had been an obsessive hoarder (birds eggs, stamps, money, soft drink) and later, hoarding firewood made him feel secure. No one has said he was a kleptomaniac but he did used to pinch stuff. Frannie records the small skull artifact he stole from a Balinese grave despite the taboo attached. Blundell, in his unauthorised Whiteley, tells of the time Brett bestowed a massive collection of art books on a friend in London - all previously stolen from a library and hoarded.

I think all the above is symptomatic of Brett carrying a void within that longed to be filled. He hungered for love and belonging,  and sought an artist's fame and public approbation as the next best thing.

Harry Kent, Whiteley sees red II
charcoal, ink and acrylic on Arches paper, 42x61cm

When he met criticism or downright rejection of his work, he was cut adrift, disoriented, filled with despair ... filled with rage. Frannie records his sense of profound hurt when critics attacked him. She had seen him literally cry over harsh criticism. Instead of enjoying accolades after thirty-five years of hard work, in his final years he was bewildered as to why he should be dealt with so cruelly.

Harry Kent, Whiteley sees red III
charcoal, ink and acrylic on Arches paper, 42x61cm

His wife Wendy once said that while he was nice to live with, he could be vicious and switch from gentle to hard in a second.

He painted about rage. Rage against the dying of the light. The rage of the baboon with its paws nailed to addiction. Protective fury over his paintings if they were damaged or threatened. Fury at being told what to do by others.

Harry Kent, Whiteley sees red IV
charcoal, ink and acrylic on Arches paper, 42x61cm

And in his discourse there was fire.

Seems to me he spoke with passion and conviction, holding forth interminably as if to allow no silence in which doubt could creep in.

Frannie speaks of his his endless flow of wisdom, one-liners, put-downs and penetrating witticisms and idealistic tirades on everything from Communism, Australia's need to Asianize, war, pacifism, the Australian psyche, Bob Dylan, and always ...

... art.

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Negative capability in portrait painting

Facing Facts, acrylic gap filler and paint, 76 x 102 cm

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‘The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them.’

                                                           D.H. Lawrence

 I have been searching for a medium that allows impasto work (registering palette knife and brush marks) but that is much cheaper than oil paints yet suited to larger, more complex works. I chose a water based acrylic gap filler used in the building industry. The locally available product that i used is called Selley's No More Gaps. This sealant is water-based and therefore mixes readily with acrylic paints on the canvas.

It's native white color does not alter acrylics colors dropped into it though they are left with a matt finish. However,  once cured, after 24 hours, it can be sealed with polymer gloss which restores color vibrance and prepares the surface prior to glazing with oils. It gives off no toxic fumes during use and so can therefore be spread in large quantities in an enclosed space. Spraying with water softens it into a white buttery slurry.

a charcoal doodle for Facing Facts

The cheapness of the material and its haptic qualities are highly conducive to experimentation, exuberance in application, and exploration in image making. The medium itself contributes significantly to the finished work, becoming an active agent in artistic practice. All this leaves one open to a form of artistic practice that is more open-ended, vague in its intended outcomes, responsive to fluxus and receptive the gifts that serendipity can bring. All of which brings to mind John Keats' notion of negative capability.

John Keats, in 1817 when writing to his brothers about poetry, in a tantalizing brief reference said in his letter:
"I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." There is no surviving record of his ever mentioning it again but it has spawned a considerable commentary over the years ever since.

Robert French, Peter Simpson and Charles Harvey of the Bristol Business School, of all places, summed up the literature on negative capability.
"Negative Capability suggests a peculiarly human capacity for ‘containment’: that is, the capacity to live with and to tolerate ambiguity and paradox, and to ‘remain content with half knowledge’ (Ward, 1963, p. 161), ‘to tolerate anxiety and fear, to stay in the place of uncertainty in order to allow for the emergence of new thoughts or perceptions’ (Eisold, 2000: 65). It implies the capacity to engage in a non-defensive way with change, without being overwhelmed by the ever-present pressure merely to react. It also indicates empathy and even a certain flexibility of character, the ability ‘to tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’ (Hutter, 1982: 305)."

Particularly pertinent to my questing for images from the unconscious is Diana Voller's application of Keat's notion to psychoanalysis:
"Negative capability’ is the advanced ability of a person to tolerate uncertainty. This does not mean the passive uncertainty associated with ignorance or general insecurity but the active uncertainty that is to do with being without a template and yet being able to tolerate, or even relish, a sense of feeling lost. ‘Negative capability’ involves purposely submitting to being unsettled by a person, or situation, and embracing the feelings and possibilities that emerge ... In my search for clarification, a psycho-analyst I talked to described ‘negative capability’ as ‘the experience of the conscious mind in the presence of the unconscious’."

Her description of what it feels like to be in a state of negative capability is drawn from the accounts of experienced psychotherapists and is most illuminating:
"They described it as being immersed in something, feeling alert and aroused, having a sense of wondering where this is going to go, the excruciating sense of unknown-ness, shame and fraudulence at ‘not knowing’, a familiarity with the recognition that ‘this is the anxiety of not knowing’. At the same time it was also associated with playing, intuitiveness, and experienced as good fun!
No wonder we don’t communicate about it a lot outside the therapy world – shame, fraudulence, playing and fun – how can that be professional?"

This feeling of being a fraud, of floundering in the world of art ... how familiar!

In working on Facing Facts i ran the gamut of emotions. Sometimes i felt i was tapping something true in my character; other times it felt i was contriving an image. Sometimes the work felt spontaneous; other times it felt over-planned. Sometimes i really enjoyed myself and was fully absorbed; other times it was hard labour and a struggle. Sometimes i thought i knew what i wanted to say with this painting; other times i was groping blind and waiting upon the painting to tell me where it was going. Sometimes i felt like an artist; sometimes i felt a sham. I had to be content to be a state of fluxus. I had to be at ease with negative capability.

But to work with negative capability in portrait painting carries implications for me in how i conceptualize my creative practice. It colors my take on portrait painting, which is beginning to take shape as follows:
1   i feel a need for a freeing up and broadening of the definition of a the term portrait
2    i need liberation from realism and the quest for a 'likeness' for its own sake
3    i see 'painting' as process not as an object; the act of creative practice, not the product of that practice; i conceptualize painting as a verb, not a noun; i see a painting as the frozen track-marks resulting from the act of painting
4    the process of portrait painting is one of searching for personal emotional truth
5    in that sense, the work is expressive at its very root
6    freedom to search aspects of identity of the sitter apart from physical appearance
7    a greater openness to instinctive, non-rational creative processes (Surrealists)
8    a sensitization to inner emotional states during the process of painting
9    letting those inner states guide the the choice of, and especially the handling of, media
10   allowing the media to have significant agency in creative practice
11   if the emotion is true, then it is recognized by others (viewers)
12   conceptualizing painting as being an emotional communication stops the work sinking into solipsism, becoming mere self-indulgence
13    being a communication means painting to an audience, not for an audience
14    painting for an audience - for the sake of exhibition, adulation, commissions, or sales - puts static in the way of negative capability
15    for me, painting for an audience interferes with emotional integrity in the work, for the work likely becomes ever more consciously manipulative and formulaic
16   formulaic technique without emotional truth is painting without soul, it tends towards decorative illustration rather than serious art practice
17   a portrait must contain not only a truth but also a kind of beauty - it may be a seductive beauty or a terrible and dark beauty but there needs to an aesthetically satisfying load in the image or in the traces of its mark-making.

Whether i achieve these aspirations in any given work is a matter of doubt but these notions are gradually firming up into a personal 'manefesto'. (Manifestos in painting went out the window many decades ago which makes having one all the more anachronistically and archaically attractive to me).

In the meantime i always have .... negative capability!


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In search of my Trickster

Study for The Trickster in charcoal on canvas, 60x50cm

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My previous posting, Self portrait in bitumen, was a visual exploration of my Shadow - the dark, anti-Me lurking within. The work is a sombre heavy-brown monochrome.

Trickster Explorations 1, acrylic on paper

But there are other Me's milling round down there in my unconscious; colourful, chameleon, mercurial, edgy, playful, swaggering, gaudy.

So this is a posting of preparatory drawings for a self portrait which i shall call The Trickster. I am wrestling with the image just as i am wrestling to to understand the Jungian archetype of The Trickster within myself and to articulate him to myself.




We each have our own Trickster deep down inside somewhere and i suppose he/she looks different for each of us. Maybe i'm just kidding myself that a brief imaginative exercise is really accessing mine own. A psychoanalyst would no doubt scoff. But the exploration and reflection is fun trying.

So why am i now bothering with The Trickster? Well, Helen Lock, in her scholarly article Transformations of the Trickster, believes that:

"in understanding the trickster better, we better understand ourselves, and the perhaps subconscious aspects of ourselves that respond to the trickster’s unsettling and transformative behavior."

I wouldn't claim to actually be a trickster (I have a great distaste for practical jokes for a start - they are so often premised on cruel humiliation of others). But i do accept Jung's notion that we each have buried within us a Trickster tendency that often as not breaks out at our own expense. We become the butt of our own contrary impulses.

Once we are told, "on no account press the red button", how many of us can't resist, against our better judgement? And just who is it that can't resist? Our Trickster.

Trickster Explorations 2, acrylic on paper

Timothy Sexton describes him as follows:

"Jung's archetype of the Trickster is not simply a clown. The Trickster archetype is a rebel who refuses to conform to societal expectations. But he is not a rebel without a cause; the Trickster's resistance to conformity is based on challenging authority, not on simplistic adornments; he will not be seen sporting tattoos or piercings or corporate T-shirts flashing slogans. In fact, the Trickster may very well appear to be inconsequential on the outside. The most famous literary representation of the Trickster is the Fool in William Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear".

He goes on,

"Modern society has basically turned its back on the concept of trickster gods, but they still exist in the form of comics, satirists, and everyone who couches their wisdom behind the concept of the fool. At the same time, it is important to distinguish the Trickster from the actual Fool. Of course, there is no easy way to accomplish this other than by noticing if a fool is acting wise or idiotic.

The fool or clown is also about the ability to either laugh at the ridiculousness of life, or to cut through the social shams and reveal our hypocrisy in an acceptable way. This makes the fool or clown wise, because they can see through who we are and what people do. Their talent is to reveal such things to us".


Speaking of trickster gods, I remember  in my childhood reading stories of the Norse god Loki and his exploits. The character has always stayed with me. An ambiguous, ambivalent, trouble maker with a mean streak for sure, though as i recall, Loki was the one who stole fire from the gods. So he was also a bringer a light, comfort and cooking which also makes him a hero to us humans.

Trickster Explorations 3, acrylic on paper

But mostly i like Tony Crisp's description in Archetype of Trickster - Clown and the Fool.

"the clown has another aspect which is as a man, usually the clown is a male of sorrows. He leads us to tears as often as he leads us to laughter. This is because the clown shows us the wonderful and tragic human feelings underlying the masks we might wear in daily life. Love, life, loss, success and failure, all have their deeply human side and the clown reveals such things to us".

Stylistically these Explorations arguably may be seen as a return to my Fauvist painting Egon Schiele: Harlequin (left) from my Egon Schiele series of 2007 ... except now i am Harlequin!


Now, can i bring these Explorations to some fruition in a finished work? Dunno. What will that work look like? Dunno. When will it be finished? Dunno.

Instead, i am sailing on what John Keats called negative capability. More on that in my next post - if i get to complete The Trickster.


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Harry Kent drawings of self

self portrait, ink and acrylic on paper, 84x60cm

 

Have been rather poorly over the last two weeks - lots of coughing, no voice for 12 days! ... and no painting. A disaster of a semester so far.

self portrait, ink and acrylic on paper, 84x60cm

So to have something to blog i trawled through my drawings of a few years ago when i first started exploring expressive self portraiture.

self portrait, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 84x60cm

I would look into a mirror positioned beside a large sheet of white paper, look at the paper, look at the mirror, look at the paper, turn on the spot in agitated small circles, back to looking at blank paper, mirror, paper.

Then, still looking into the mirror, make a sudden desperate attack on the paper with gestural marks. These were almost blind contour drawings because my fixation was on the mirror rather than on the paper.

It was all over in a couple of minutes. It was the agitated small circles that took all time! 

self portrait while drawing, charcoal and pastel on paper, 84x60cm

Hopefully i'll be back in the studio producing new work soon ... dancing my little circles of angst.

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.

Harry Kent: Blue in Green

Blue in Green, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 140x115 cm

Little Boy Blue,

Come blow your horn,

The sheep's in the meadow,

The cow's in the corn;

Where is that boy

Who looks after the sheep?

Under the haystack

Fast asleep.

Will you wake him?

Oh no, not I,

For if I do

He will surely cry.

                             (Trad nursery rhyme circa 1744)

I noticed at my last Painters Group Critique session at the University how may images shrank down to banality as they were hung in the long corridor. If my work is to retain some force then i must learn to paint on a more monumental scale. At the same time, i'm trying to move away from realism.

This painting was done from a mirror, just a small hand-held affair which meant i had to paint one-handed. I was hoping to produce something wild and free and abstract. Instead i got the plodding image you see. So now ive also started doodling self-portraits from memory. No photos. No mirror. No-one to hold my hand. That will be my next large self-portrait.

Meanwhile, i'm still thinking about the Fukushims series. And new media, innovative use of materials.

And ive started work on a large landscape.

So, the inertia that has held me in its grip over recent months seems to be lifting. I have a lot of catching up to do. It's a race against time. People younger than me are dropping dead from heart disease.

It's always a race against time.

Fukushima Samurai

Fukushima Samurai, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 59 x 42 cm

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

Tokyo Electric's President, Masataka Shimizu, was too upset to apologize in person. The task of ritual apology, whatever that is worth, was delegated further down the food-chain to Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata.

Shimizu rested, as nameless neo-samurai  - the Fukushims 50 aka 'Atomic Samurai' - waded into radioactive waters, leaky protective gear failing to fend off the water-born radioactive isotopes soaking in round their ankles. Working in shifts of 50 at a time, Japan is hailing them as heroes. Because they have already exceeded the allowable radiation dose deemed safe, the government sprang into action. Leak-proof hazmat suits? Nope. It simply raised the legal maximum radiation dose.

When Shimizu did appear on TV to 'apologize', rather than accept a president's responsibility for his company's safety practices and contingency planning, he blamed "marvels of nature that we have never experienced before" - like earth quakes and tsunamis in Japan, i suppose.

I don't expect TEPCO executives to immolate themselves like the samurai of old as an honorable way out of their loss of face (and to avoid facing up to their failure). I'm not actually all that concerned about their sense of inadequacy. Rather, I'm concerned about the victims of the failed power-plant and of the ineffective remedial measures to contain the radiation to date.

I'm even concerned for the 1,000 tsunami dead whose bodies cannot be recovered in the radiation zone. And how do you cremate a radio-active corpse without creating further airborne contamination? How will they rest in peace?

But especially I'm concerned about the white hazmat-clad samurai working down in those dark tunnels. I wish the company's executives would poetically lead from the front.  Pull on a hazmat suit and climb down into those water-logged tunnels to turn whatever valves need turning. Share the radioactive iodine, cesium and strontium with your nameless workers.

Now that would be accountability.

That would make an apology worth something.

To my weary eyes, that would be Samurai.

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.

A personal vision of Paul Lennon

Our Premier, acrylic on paper, 50 x 70 cm

I was browsing Google images today after a prominent Tasmanian  was once again in the news making his personal views public, when among the photos of the man I saw the image of a painting of I did back in 2007 - Last night I dreamt of Paul Lennon (see below). This is an obscure, early experimental, almost throw-away learning piece so i was initially stunned to see it out in public without an escort. And since Google has seen fit to project it into the public domain i thought the least i can do now is to formally publish and give some background. (Skip to the final two paragraphs if you are not interest in Tasmanian environment politics, civic issues, matters of social justice and good governance).

At the time of painting, the subject of the portrait Paul Lennon, was Premier of Tasmania (equivalent to a State Governor in the US) and presided over a deeply divided community in this small island State. A former trade union official, Mr Lennon, holding the highest political office in Tasmania, pursued a personal set of values and beliefs with ruthless inefficiency.

I never doubted that he loved Tasmania, had its best interests at heart according to his lights, but as a working man he was blinkered by a limited eduaction combined with invincible convictions. Like many petty despots he was flawed by the erroneous belief that might made right, a bulling temperament, and limited capability for high office. For a handful of jobs he was willing to push through the construction of chlorine-compound based paper mill that would spew toxins into Bass Strait where traditionally our fishermen have harvested some of the world's finest prisitne seafood. The beautiful, idyllic Tamar Valley hosts many vineyards, olive groves, strawberry farms, organic food producers, oyser farms, waterfront homes and marinas. It is into this bucolic valley that the largest mill in the Southern hemisphere is to go. With his credo of jobs for forest workers he was dismissive of the dismay and growing resistance of the already existing businesses of the valley and their already many many employees.

Mr Lennon had a close personal connection to the board of the company that  intends to construct the mill. As Premier he pushed fast-track legislation through our State legislature which by-passed normal planning approval processes to grant approval to the mill just as the Planning Board was on the brink of rejecting the proposal. He threw millions of dollars in subsidies and in kind (cheap timber and water) at the project which he lauded as "world's best practice" though it patently wasn't (not chlorine free, not closed-loop).

But worst of all he enshrined in legislation the inability of citizens to so much as question in the coursts the basis of the government's legislated approval of the mill. Mr Lennon created a law that made recourse to law illegal. This deeply offended a great many in the population who saw their democratic rights abnegated out of perceived cronyism. Not a unique story. It plays repeatedly in third world countries. We never thought to see the like here. Paul Lennon, elected to represent the whole State, not just sectional interests, was the prime mover at the time and is unrepentant still today in retirement.

Is it karma or irony, but the forest industry he battled so hard to favour is now on its knees. The world's first Green Party was born in Tasmania and it has resisted old growth logging tooth and nail. The mill proponent's shares are now worth a fraction of their value just a year ago. Yes, the bottom has fallen out of wood-chip prices but i suspect the main reason, the one they can't admit to themselves, is their own mis-management of our forest resources and of the mill project.

The company has over the years bought out small saw mills that harvest timber for furniture and housing construction. Once bought out they were promptly closed down. The result was a monolithic near-monopoly that plundered the forests unhindered by competitors, abetted by government, and opposed only by peacefully protesting citizens. Even these they promptly sued for damages in order to silence their opposition. But the company, like their mono-culture plantations, is precariously positioned despite its size. Mono-cultures are not resilient. They are one trick ponies. The raze-old-growth-for-chips-and-chlorine-bleached-pulp trick had run its course. Repeated prognostications and warnings fell on deaf ears. Mr Lennon thought he knew better than to listen to a bunch university educated effetes who could never understand the working man the way he could. So now the forest contractors and timber workers are facing the heart-ache of financial ruin and unemployment - the complete reverse of what Paul Lennon had intended.

OK, back to the painting - Last night I dreamt of Paul Lennon - my personal artistic reponse the circumstances decribed above. This was a follow-on painting from the one shown at the top, Our Premier, my first departure from realism into something of a caricature and an excuse for me explore expressive use of color in portrait painting (though PL's nick-name was 'Big Red'). I wondered how I could make the polemic image above more emotive and thought i would trial some action painting as a means to an end. And so while the paint was still wet i attacked Last Night to vent my frustration over what had become of orderly governance and due process in my beautiful State. I wanted to create an image that would reflect the disorder and disharmony i felt this individual had visited onto our community.

Last night I dreamt of Paul Lennon, acrylic on paper, 50 x 70 cm

So there we have it. A retrospective of two of my earliest attempts at non-realist portrait painting, from 2007. Just for the historical record.

acrylic portrait in blue

the new piece i'm working on is proving very rebellious ... so while the paint is hardening prior to another attack, i climbed up a ladder in my room to fetch down a self-portrait that i have had up there since 2006 but have never photographed and so had no digital record. But it such an effort to get down, unframe, photograph, reframe, put back up. So now it it's sitting on the floor in a corner of my room stacked with several others.

I expect my story is not unique.

Indeed, so many pieces have disappeared - sold or out with the rubbish - of which i have no record. I really must be more systematic about this. But half the time i forget to sign things, and frame them only to have to pull it all apart again. I guess i feel that i'm not the important thing, the work is. It somehow comes to me from somewhere even though i can't draw or paint. So it often seems a bit presumptious to sign it.

And just to keep the pot boiling between actually having something to show, here is a photo i took the other day while trying to work out facial structure for my next study. But have decided next time back to contact lenses (so i can have more fun with the bags under my eyes).

So won’t be using this photo series with glasses.

Harry Kent landscapes

Twilight - The Cataract Gorge, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm  
SOLD 

While i'm working on my next nasty portrait, here are some tranquil Tasmanian landscapes i did over the last couple of years just to show my gentle pastoral side.

Twilight Cataract Gorge (above) was exhibited and sold at the Tasmanian Art Award  2010.

The preliminary charcoal sketch for this painting, as i searched for ideas, looked like this:

While i was wandering the Cataract Gorge looking for interesting rock formations, i came across this one near the First Basin.

Sentinel - The Cataract Gorge,
acrylic on paper, 60 x 140 cm 

I came up with this fantasy work while imagining the Gorge in the grip of glacial ice (i'm not sure it ever was, but the First Basin lake is immensely deep).

The Land of Ice and Snow, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm

"And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by"       

read the Coleridge's whole poem free from here: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ,
or buy the book:  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems

because i live 42° South,

in Tasmania,

with the Mariner's albatross

      and, of course,

... a lost penguin