a private moment

Harry Kent, Private Moment, charcoal and oil on board, 56 x 72 cm

this is the third and last of my three charcoal-and-oil self-portraits for the time being.

i will now endeavour to head out in fresh directions.

firstly, new media ... i will try and create some self-portraits incorporating fabrics for texture, color, and pattern ... i will experiment with new kinds of paint, such as automotive enamels combined with traditional oils.

secondly, in developing my theme of aging, i will extend my focus beyond self-portraits. Still wishing to get in touch with feelings partially hidden from myself, i will attempt some portraits of family members, especially those invoking memories or reworking memories. I will use old family photos to revive buried memories. Needless to say, some of this will be painful for me.

But i believe the more it hurts, the more i will know i am in the 'zone'. The more intensely personal, sublimated into sound painting, the more universal its significance will be. Hopefully. The level of my success in that endeavour will be for my fellow bloggers to decide.

This painting, A Private Moment, is a precursor to that process.

My over-arching aim is to keep pressing forwards in my creative practice to discover mark-making methods that are both expressive and that feel native to me - my discover own unique style.

Howl with Alan Ginsberg

Howl, a self-portrait in charcoal and oil on board, 56 x 74 cm

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked ... 
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under the stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels!

from Howl, by Alan Ginsberg


listen to Alan Ginsberg read this section (Part II) of Howl on Youtube here

Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)


This self-portrait is a refinement of the technique i developed and described here.

Still on the theme of aging, this self-portrait is a generational piece. It does not carry the same intimately personal charge as the self-portrait Regrets. Instead it concerns itself with the social visions and convictions of a generation.

This was the 'beat' generation of the 1950's. It was the generation before mine but their lifestyle and voices were to sound loud and clear through the 1960's and on into the '70s. The Ginsberg poem voices all the excesses, optimism, despair, restlessness and fervor of youth. It contains the protest voice of youth which was to reach a crescendo in the 1960's.

Youth and old age actually have a surprising amount in common. Both are not deeply immersed in careers and therefore deeply attached to the socio-political and economic order of the day. Both are relatively free to raise a critical voice which those raising families and paying mortgages are not as mentally free to do.

I believe the elderly, because they have seen so much, have a particularly important social role to play as reviewers and commentators.

Once again, the young and the old are called to be the prophets of our age.

This self-portrait aims to express a howl of pain at the state of global industrial civilisation, and a prophetic howl by once again invoking Ginsberg's rage against the corporate machinery, the urban madhouse, the planetary plunder that has marked this generation and has marred this generation.

For Blake's dark satanic mills are still pumping the fetid effluvia of a long dead geological age off the coast of Florida to give an angry fix to a world hooked on octane, pelicans drowning in our black decay while we ineffectually jog off our obesity in trendy trainers from the sweat-shops of Asia.

And thanks, Elizabeth Anderson, for your comment below which put me in mind of Peter Finch's stirring prophetic outburst of outrage in the movie Network.

"I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

You can watch Peter Finch's stunning performance on Youtube here.

but the last voice here today belongs to Alan Ginsberg, so if you want another taste, read on:

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments!
invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible mad houses!
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pavements, trees, radios, tons!
lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!

Regrets

Regrets, oil on board, 90 x 60 cm

There is no flock, however watched and tended,
But one dead lamb is there!
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended,
But has one vacant chair!

The air is full of farewells to the dying,
And mournings for the dead;
The heart of Rachel, for her children crying,
Will not be comforted!

from Resignation , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 
 
It's not for laws I've broken
That bitter tears I've wept,
But solemn vows I've spoken
And promises unkept;
It's not for sins committed
My heart is full of rue,
but gentle acts omitted,
Kind deeds I did not do.

from Regrets, Robert William Service

Back to the serious business of expressive self-portraits.
 
With each one i focus on an emotion as i work, especially emotions i believe common in the adult world. More common with advancing age, yet seldom depicted in self-portraiture or even spoken of in the slick dream that has become our public media.
 
Today, yes, regrets i've got a few. Robert Frost had miles to go before he slept and still had promises to keep when he wrote his evocative little poem.
 
The elderly have very few miles left to go, and carry the burden of promises not kept.

collaborative abstract painting

back from my semester break, i turned up yesterday for the first critique session of the Post-graduate Painters Group at the Academy of Arts.

while i was waiting for the session to start my eyes toyed with the random patination of marks on one of the work tables. These had been incidentally built by students over the years as they spilled bits of paint, or over-painted the edges of their work, or scored the surface with a cut-off knife.

not having any work of mine own to blog, i thought i would photograph these marks by arranging them into abstract compositions in my camera view-finder. The results you have seen above.

are these 'Art'?
because i arranged them into a composition in a viewfinder?
does this make them 'photographic art', not 'painting art'?
does the lack of compositional intention on the part of those who made the marks matter?
doesn't a lot of contemporary art use randomness and serendipity, so how are these different?
can they legitimately be called collaborative art since there was no conscious collaboration between artists?
so what should we call these images?

the work-table in question is in the far corner of the Painting Studio (above). I've thrown in a couple of additional images of the Academy world i inhabit to help set the scene.

 

 

 

 

Brett Whiteley - in memory of

Brett Whiteley self-portrait, Remembering Lao Tse (Shaving off a Second), 1967
[image link from artquotes.net]

A few blogs back, a reference to Australian artist Brett Whitely came up, and since my Visitors Counter (no, my goons don't know where you live, just what flag you fly) now tells me I've had visitors from 125 countries, i thought i would introduce Brett to those in the wider world who might be unfamiliar with his work.

in Australia  Bret Whitely is a legend, a national treasure, an icon, an artist as well known as a football star.

There are plenty of biographies of Brett on the web, so i won't attempt one, other than give a few incredibly brief impressions of the man and his art.

Impression 1:
The ultimate self-portrait - a  painting of made oils, gold leaf,  collage, rock, perspex, electricity, pencil, PVA, varnish, brain, earth, twig, taxidermied bird, nest, egg, feathers, cicada, bone, dentures, rubber and metal sink plug, pins, shell and glass eye on eighteen wood panels, 2 x 16 meters!; not signed, not dated. It is a spiritual autobiography housed in the wonderful Art Gallery of NSW.

Brett Whiteley Alchemy, mixed media on 18 wood panels, 203 × 1615 cm, 1973
photo by Kitty Cate, www.flickriver.com/photos/catef/popular-interesting/

You can see very detailed close-ups of the work here and here.


Impression 2:
An Archibald Prize-winning (the Aussie Oscar for portrait painting) self portrait depicting the interior of his Sydney apartment (his face is in the hand-held mirror).

Brett Whiteley, Self portrait in the studio, 1975.
[image link from artquotes.net]

The Gallery of NSW, for the exhibition Whiteley himself and his friends 2004, described him as:
"Twice winner of the Archibald Prize, Whiteley is one of Australia's best-known and popular artists. He was a charismatic and energetic individual who gained early success and international acclaim during the heady 1960s and 70s. From a very early age he was fascinated by the romantic vision of the artist as hero - or anti-hero - and enthusiastically pursued his passions in both his art and life-style. When he painted himself or other artists he was relentless in his insightful psychological investigations of his subjects. Artists he admired included Vincent Van Gogh and Francis Bacon. Their faces fascinated him, as did their work, and he created many portraits of these two extraordinary individuals".



Impression 3:
A sometimes marine artist ... in love with Ultramarine,  celebrating the view from his balcony over Sydney harbour.

oil on canvas, 203 x 365 cm, 1975

It was hanging beside a wonderful John Olsen, Five Bells (oil on hardboard, 1963) on the day i visited, which i thought most apt for the two were good friends. My thanks to the Gallery of NSW who gave me permission to take these photos of Brett's The Balcony.

Brett Whiteley The balcony 2 hanging beside John Olsen's Five Bells
in the Gallery of NSW.

Below are some details i photographed from close up.

Detailed views from Brett Whiteley's The balcony 2.

Also on the harbour is the famous Sydney Opera House which he started to paint in 1971 while it was still being built. He had just returned from New York and was now living at Lavender Bay from where the Opera House was very visible.

Brett Whiteley, Opera House, 1982, oil and mixed media on canvas, 203x244cm
[image link from artquotes.net]

It was first exhbited in 1972, but in 1982, after some finishing touches, Brett gave it to Qantas (the airline) in exchange for free air travel. They decorated their club lounge at Sydney airport with it for amost 20 years before selling it off at auction.

Although the proceeds went towards establishing the Qantas Foundation Art Award, aimed to encourage emerging Australian artists, this corporate trading of creative soul bring some lines from Bob Dylan's (with whom Brett hung out while in NY) All Along The Watchtower to mind:
"Businessmen they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them know along the line
What any of this is worth".

See Brett's view from his Lavender Bay window in this clip (trying to ignore the fatuous tone of the narrator)







Impression 4:
Animal lover.

Well, he did say,
"Art should astonish, transmute, transfix. One must work at the tissue between truth and paranoia".

Brett Whiteley, Baboon, mixed media on panel, 90 x 77 cm, 1978
[image from artquotes.net ]

Actually, this painting is part the self-portrait triptych entitled Art, Life and the Other Thing which won the Archibald Prize in 1978.

Artquotes.net explains the significance of this work:
"In the lower left panel is a baboon that represents the addicted self of the artist or the "monkey on the back". The baboon is handcuffed and pinned to the ground with nails. It has its mouth open, screaming, while a hand in the top left corner of the panel offers him a syringe of heroin".

Despite his struggle with his drug addiction, Brett was to eventually die from it in 1992.

Though as Barry Pearce explains,
"Brett Whiteley is Australia's most sublime painter of birds. They have appeared, often larger than life, in many of his most important paintings. To him, birds are the essential symbol of the song of creation… It is not too fanciful to think of Whiteley’s bird paintings as self portraits"

Brett Whiteley, Untitled (Bird), oil on board with mixed media, 82 x 86 cm, 1978
[image linked from www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au]

Impression 5:
Portrait artist.

Brett Whiteley, Head of Christie, oil on board, 70cm x 61 cm, 1964
[image link from artquotes.net]

In this instance, of the British necrophile murderer, John Christie.

"Whiteley was an avid researcher for detail and the Christie Series in particular signify a fascination with the macabre. John Christie was a serial killer who lured woman to his home only to gas them to death and then rape the corpse. Whiteley spent many hours researching newspapers and case files to then create the series of photographs, screen prints and large mixed media paintings".  (Saville Galleries)

Impression 6:

Sometimes landscape artist in love Australian natural forms

Anything resembling the natural Australian female form, actually.

Brett Whiteley, The Olgas for Ernest Giles,
oil and mixed media on board,  210 x 240 cm, 1985.
[image link from www.abc.net.au]

This painting was inspired by Brett's trip to central Australia in the early 1980's and was painted in  tribute to the 19th century explorer to whom it is dedicated. It has been described as "all tits and bums", and yes, it does remind one of Brett's earlier nudes. Having been to the Olgas myself, I can attest to their rounded sensual forms, though walking among them gave me a distinctly eerie and numinous feeling, nothing like the rollicking love-buds celebrated here.

The Olgas sold in 2007 for AU$3,408,000.

UPDATE 6-1-12:
My interest in Brett Whiteley has surged again to the point that i have embarked on a series of works starting with contemplations in ink and leading via lino cuts to a large works in oil.

Harry Kent,
Brett Whiteley contemplates old age.

Harry Kent,
Brett Whiteley in Ultramarine

Viewers can jump to the start of the series HERE .



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more Julia Kay's Portrait Party

some more of my recent contributions to Julia Kay's Portrait Party

Sue, ink, watercolor and crayon on paper, 30 x 40 cm

Raena, watercolor on paper, 30 x 40 cm

Juilia, charcoal on paper, 30 x 40 cm

and a Springer Spaniel, dear friend of a dear friend, that i painted as present

Gemma, watercolor on paper, 40 x 30 cm

Harry Kent self-portrait collage

ink and magazine clippings on paper, 38 x 56 cm

two weeks left of my semester break and i'm off to the big island just north of Tasmania for warmer weather but i will continue to add regular new posts to my photography blog, the crystal cornea  from assorted wi fi hot spots

because i can't have a post without some work in it, i've popped in a self-portrait collage i made a couple of years back into this post (to give you a break from all that drippy paint)

thanks everybody for all the wonderful support and encouragement you have given me since April - way beyond any expectation i had

Harry, Invictus

Harry, Invictus, charcoal and oil on board, 56 x 74 cm

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

from Invictus, William Ernest Henley, 1875

Manel asked me how i combine charcoal with oil paint. So i thought i'd give an explanation here. (If anyone is really interested i can always make a short demo clip, post on Youtube and link it here).

an important discovery i made was to use a fine-grain foam roller for applying the white gesso, not a brush. This leaves a keyed surface (like the texture of shark-skin) that takes charcoal really well.

i first completed a tonal drawing in charcoal, lots of charcoal, leaving the surface dusty. I coulld take my time over this to get it just as i wanted it (well, as good as i could get it - am only really happy with eyelids in this one).

i then gave it all a light spray with turpentine to dampen it without disturbing the surface prior to actually painting into it. Then, using a soft watercolor brush and oil paint thinned with plenty of turps, i deftly work into it, not worrying too much about the runs but conscious i can quickly have the whole image oozing down the surface if not judiciously pacing myself.

One can't brush vigorously or revisit the same place too often or else it quickly turns into black cement. Frequent rinsing of the brush in clean turps, esp before starting on a new area, helps prevent turning everything into a grey monotone.

Once almost as i want it, i touch in some commercial medium, otherwise the turps will simply evaporate and leave the charcoal as raw dust again. The oil in the medium embeds the charcoal.

To finish, i sprayed the whole thing with workable fixative to stabalize any charcoal not touched by the medium. And i deliberately leave quite a bit of that for delicacy and variety of marks  because the medium intensifies but deadens tonal marks (after all, this blog is about my explorations in expressive mark-making).

Along the way I used a little titanium white to imply some form in totally dark areas like the throat, and some mere touches purple and green (complimentary colors for hidden internal pop) for skin and around hair.

I guess most visitors will just glance at the above image without clicking on it to enlarge, thinking that they have seen and understood the work. But this color aspect is not really visible unless one does see the enlarged version.

So there you have it. Work fast, work with a light touch, and watch the magic happen.

Facing Autumn

Facing Autumn, oil on board, 51 x 60 cm

Oh it’s a long, long while
from May ‘till December
And the days grow short
When you reach September.

When the Autumn weather
turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time
For the waiting game.
For the days dwindle down
To a precious few...
September...November...

from September Song composed Kurt Weill, lyrics Maxwell Anderson.


The acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.

For suddenly, flush-fallen,
All my life, in a rush
Of shedding away, has left me
Naked, exposed on the bush.

from Dolor of Autumn, D. H. Lawrence

Emily for Julia Kay's Portrait Party

Emily, oil on polypropylene, 35 x 45 cm  SOLD

here is a portrait of Emily that i knocked off for Julia Kay's Portrait Party (my semester break fun) over the last couple of days.

The original photo supplied to JKPP by Emily can be seen here.

I painted onto white polyproylene panel knowing the brilliant white reflective surface would contribute a luminous quality to Emily's skin. The painting came out nothing much like an Alex Kanevsky (see my earlier post on his technique here). Seems my mark-making is just more restless and variegated than his calm and methodical layering.

Emily has amazing eyes  and skin, and i wanted to feature them by juxtaposing a finely worked face in a sea of painterly  marks.

Placing idealized features directly beside abstract expressionist fields of impasto alla prima color, where the clothing, hair and background are none realistic,  has the effect of bringing out the porcelain doll quality in her photos. Can one legitimately  mix styles in a painting?

Julie Kay's Portrait Party

the other day i kindly received an invitation to join Julie Kay's portrait painting group on Flickr.

the idea is that one sends in photos of oneself, and then paints and posts portraits of the others who have sent in their photos. The huge attraction for this blogger is that NO SELF-PORTRAITS ARE ALLOWED!

The whole thing is a lot of fun, with 231(last count)  talented members creating a constant stream of brilliant, clever, humorous, beautiful, dramatic, whimsical, insightful, inventive portraits in every imaginable style. Thanks Julia for organising it all.

yahooooo, a holiday for me, and for you, gentle reader, from morbid introspection (it is actually my semester break).

so here are some of the paintings and drawings i completed and posted on the Painters Party over the last few days. They are a mixed bag because i'm using the oppotunity to motivate me to revisit some of my older styles of working and to try out some new ones.

goat transforming, oil on black paper, 23 x 28 cm

Inma, watercolour on paper, 27 x 23 cm

Allan, reed pen and ink on paper, 26 x 34 cm

Herman, brush and ink on paper, 26 x 34 cm

FlickChick, Conte crayon on paper, 32 x 24 cm

i will arise and go now

I Will Arise And Go Now, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 cm

It is time to explain myself—Let us stand up.
What is known I strip away;
I launch all men and women forward with me into THE UNKNOWN.
I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

from Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
in Song of Myself: And Other Poems by Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman

                          ~O~

I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet

My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade

In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

from Bob Dylan's  Mr Tambourine Man

                         ~O~


I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
from Yeats,   The Lake Isle Of Innisfree


                        ~O~

What is there in my name for you?
It will die away like the sad sound
Of a wave splashing on a far shore,
A noise in a deep wood at night

But in the day of sorrow, in silence,
Pronounce it longingly.
Say: There is a memory of me;
In the world there is a heart where I live.

from Pushkin in Poets of Modern Russia (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature (p.9)


more intimations  of mortality
but low-key compared the previous emotive images with their expressive mark-making

unfortunately the photograph doesn't really capture the the three-dimensional relief of the heavy sculpted impasto of the coat and jeans

The bright yellow shoes, among other things, reference Whitman's boot-soles that will wander over our mortal remains, composting, carbon-captured in the municipal lawns.

But also Mr Tambourine Man's boot-heels as they dance Shiva's dance of creation and destruction ... the figure borrowing something from classic Indian sculpture of Shiva inside his aureole of flames, lifting his leg, extending his arm.

In the jingle jangle morning we all follow Death in the Danse Macabre, Danza Macabra, Dança da Morte, Totentanz.

i wanted some ambiguity between figure and ground.  i wanted the forms to beg the question about
what stays and what goes,
what is permanent and what is ephemeral,
what is substantial and what is fragile
what is solid and what is hollow,
what is lively and what is dead,
what is real and what is illusion.

rage against the dying of the light

Rage Against the Dying of the Light, oil on board, 76 x 60 cm

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

from Dylan Thomas,  Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (free copy) 

in Selected Poems 1934-1952, New Revised Edition

or you can listen as Rodney Dangerfield recites Dylan Thomas on YouTube


This is another painting examining the emotions of associated with aging, with entering the winter of life's seasons. Earlier I had looked at horror of dying, and briefly looked at stoic resilience in the face of loss of physical and mental functions. This time i wished to examine rage, what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross saw as a stage of anger in the grieving process. And i believe aging and approaching the end of life to be a kind of pre-grieving, for oneself, and for loved ones that are left behind, bereft.

and so i read afresh Dylan Thomas' wonderful poem, and its words repeated in my head as i savaged the paint from the tubes and grasped the nearest hogs hairs with which to stab at the surface.

i was intending to produce a sequel to my Pulvis et Umbra painting from a couple of weeks back. Thinking i would be doing an overwash of zinc white (it is more transparent than titanium white) as before, with the resulting loss of detail, i did not bother with a charcoal drawing nor with underpainting, as i had with a number of other works in this blog.

instead, direct application of paint to a bare black gesso surface. Black, to signify the absence of light, the infinite black, eternal darkness . "Turn out the light and then turn out the light".  So i reserved a large blank black area to the right to explore how a black space can somehow talk to the figure in a painting (to me, they seem to resonnate off each other, the black almost a figure in its own right).

Fast work, quickly developing an image, not getting bogged down in exact perspectives or precise naturalistic representation. Rather, aiming for just the basic feel of the thing, welcoming distortion as part of the expressive load in the image.

But as i was about to wash over the top in white, my eye caught the quality of the brush marks, and i recalled that my project is an exploration into expressive mark-making in portraiture. And so i left it, rough, raw, urgent.

my belief is that the manner of the brush marks betray, or rather leaks, the emotions of the painter at the time of painting them. The Italian Renaissance had a saying 'Ogni pittore dipinge se" - Every painter paints himself. The characteristic way one makes marks, rather as in handwriting, is specific to the individual and reveals something of the habitual disposition of the painter.  What others recognize as his or her style.

my desire always is for fresh marks of spontaneous energy and power. Maybe this painting will be a step in my journey towards that objective. That is really for others to judge.

so here it is. Rage Against The Dying of the Light, a self-portrait, of striving towards the light, of raging against the engulfing blackness all around, of the blackness seemingly speaking back in dialogue with the figure.

[To accompany this painting, i have posted some photographs celebrating Light and Lamps in my photo blog, the crystal cornea. See column on the right for a blog link.]