Self-portrait in bitumen

Self portrait, bitumen, styrene and mesh on particle board, 73 x 91.5 cm



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"He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul." 
     (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 8)

"Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul"
      (from the song Vincent, lyrics by Josh Groban)

"Beneath the social mask we wear every day, we have a hidden shadow side: an impulsive, wounded, sad, or isolated part that we generally try to ignore."
     (from Romancing the Shadow by Connie Zwieg and Steve Wolf)

"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
     (Carl Jung, "The Philosophical Tree” (1945). In CW 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335)  

".. this thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine".
    (Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act 5, scene 1, 275-276)

Initially i deliberately didn't add my voice with explanations but just wanted the image and quotes to resonate (or not) with each viewer and each viewing. But Gary's questions and conjectures had me thinking, and before long, writing.

The painting is not a whimsy but born of a troubled few years  and chronically disturbed dreams since my mother's death. Anyway, i take myself far too seriously to be able to enjoy a mere whimsy, haha.

Made from stuff lying around my studio? For sure! This work belongs to my research into expressive mark-making. I see two prime routes to expressive mark-making.

One is to leave a trace of your handling of materials so that your character or emotions register and are preserved in the paint. This usually requires some kind of impasto. Vigor or lethargy, doodling or purposefulness, rage or melancholy are as trapped in the paint surface as a bug in amber.

The second route however, is to set up media to do their work, giving agency to the paint and solvents, enlisting gravity and capillary action, oozings and drippings, mixings and repellings. As i mentioned in an earlier discussion, Heidegger's concept of "at hand" materials is very salient to working in this way. Happen-chance, synchronicity, my material environment and the history of that environment, remnants of my past endeavours, under-workings and palimpsests, all come to the aid of my semi-sighted questing for an expressive image that tells a truth.

And i have been much concerned with truth - emotional truth - in my work.

Albert Tucker, Apocalyptic Horse, 1956 

Which brings to mind an Australian Expressionism pioneer, Albert Tucker, who spent his life exploring the darker side of the soul. (My thanks to the Gallery of NSW who gave me permission to photograph Tucker's amazing horse).

Tucker's art dealer said of one series of his works, that he dealt not in prettiness, but unsettling truths. The same could be applied to most of his life's work. "Often difficult and abrasive, the work reflects the artist's struggle to come to terms with a society he was at odds with".

Albert Tucker, Apocalyptic Horse, 1956, (detail).

In my case, i guess it is a Self i am at odds with. 

Because the painting is so dark and 'blotchy', it may seem formless at first glance. It may look nothing like a portrait at all and viewers might imagine i have simply entitled a black blob of asphalt a self portrait in a metaphorical way. Not so. If you look with a squint you might see the left side of my face lit in the painting rather like in this recent photo.


Just a word about the media, especially the bitumen. It has long been used by artists but not without criticism. Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa suffers areas that were once bitumen's velvety brown now having become an indiscernible black mass with age (Wikipedia). The Pre-Raphelite's emphasis on brilliance of colour was in reaction to the excessive use of bitumen by earlier British artists, such as Reynolds, David Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Bitumen produces unstable areas of muddy darkness, an effect that the Pre-Raphaelites despised. On top of that, there are OH&S issues - bitumen is carcinogenic.

So why have i used it? Well, in archival terms it is a durable medium, even if its brown is fugitive and turns to black. It is cheap. Very cheap compared to oil paints. It has interesting tactile properties in use, ranging from treacle-viscous to free-running stained-turps wash. Like with charcoal, images can be created by building up by applying, or created carving out by removing from a previously applied layer with a turps-dampened rag.

And i like the idea that it is a reject material from passé art movements. I like the idea that is unvalued, undervalued, devalued, even shunned. I like that is not to be found in art supply shops but on the bottom shelf in hardware departments. It is a humble material.

In other words,  mostly i like its poetic qualities. By that i mean its direct appeal to the senses and its metaphoric associations.

It stinks of Hell. It has oozed from the hidden bowels of the earth. It is the very substance of our unconscious.

Qualities all apt, i believe, for the subject of this work.


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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