Old figure sketches

a very early still life exercise

I was sorting through my old art files when i came across my figure drawings from some years back. They are mostly speed sketches (quick tonal studies, fast gestural drawings, a few contour drawings) drawn from life in assorted art classes and using assorted professional models.

I have put an exercise from 10 years ago, when i was starting out, at the very top so that those who include tachisme among their blogs visited directory will not have a boobs 'n tummies icon on their home page, lolz. No joke actually. Flickr (where i was just going to dump these drawings) wouldn't upload the nudes! Or else they would have changed my family friendly rating! So, this blog post instead.

Since my latest painting is almost (but not quite) finished  - not yet ready to show - and since it might be handy for me to have a record in this blog of how my drawing has developed over time, i thought i'd pop a whole bunch of oldies here, just for the record.

And also this post is a follow-up from Brett's Ghost in the dark last time. The terror of blank page. The aversion to being judged. I figure whacking out a lot of learner's stuff, warts and all, will simply swamp any possibility of contriving an 'arty' image. It's what psychologists call 'flooding' when treating phobias. 

I'll follow up with some old portrait attempts in another post soon, just to finish my 'treatment'. Then all my amateurism will be out in public and i can just get on with muddling through into the future in my own flawed way.

UPDATE:  Have just returned from the theatre. During the play my mind wandered. The thought hit that, like Flickr, Blogspot may want to change my status from family-friendly too. They may insert one of those Adult Content warnings when visitors first try to enter my blog. So i think i had best take down any image containing representations of breasts over the next few days. I'll replace each of them with links to my Pinterest account where i can post these harmless sketches with impunity. Sigh.

Dianne #1

Dianne #3

Dianne #4

Dianne #5

Dianne #6

Emily #1

nude #3

nude #6

Laura #1

Laura #2

Laura #3

Laura #4

Laura #5

foreshortening

quick gestural paint sketch

Emily #4

Kim

Thank you, kind art bloggers, for sticking with me through thick and thin.


.

Painting in the dark

.

Brett Whiteley's ghost, oil on canvas, 

This portrait was painted in the dark.

Why?

Because I haven't been able to paint for months. I've been daunted by the blank page. A blank canvas seems a mountain i just cannot climb. Have i simply run out of ideas? Motivation? Bravado?

It is as if i have been as if frozen, trapped in a torpor, paralysed by self-doubt. No, it's not that i didn't have ideas or desire to work. It's that i was intimidated by the task. The responsibility of producing a 'good' painting was too great.

And along comes fellow post-grad student, Bec, who is exploring the notion of liberation from self-critical thinking during the process of painting. She is doing this through contour drawing and painting while looking away from the canvas. She has tried painting in low light as a gambit. So after we talked about, i was fired up enough to give it a try.

The process went as follows. After setting up the canvas and squeezing some Titanium white, Ultra Blue, Prussian blue, Cerulean, Viridian, Lemon Yellow and Indian Red onto a white plastic picnic plate (my disposable palettes), i went and turned out the lights in my studio. I found my way back to the easel with a torch, picked up palette and brush, and turned off the torch. I could just make out the shape the canvas in the gloom. When i looked at my palette, all the colours had turned to globs of black and grey.

I set to work to paint Brett Whiteley's features from recollection. I also carried a query in my head re Brett post postmortem. What might the ghost of Brett look like? Could i touch his presence in dark?

I guesstimated where the bits should be located on the canvas. Very quickly the blobs of black and grey on my plastic plate merged to become a dog's breakfast of vague grays. I pressed on. I could only gauge how loaded the brush was by the resistance as bristle dragged through paint, the weight at the business end as i lifted it to canvas. Sometimes i heard a splat as excess flipped off and smacked onto the canvas as i worked in haste. Whatever image was emerging in the dark, i was not responsible. I stabbed and slashed and squiggled. And then stopped to turn on the light.

Surprise. An image that had a rawness about it. Non-realist. Expressive. Parts were satisfying. Other parts silly or dead. The whole didn't hang together. So i poured on some gum turps to let osmosis fill in the gaps. A mistake, in hindsight. It killed off much of the immediacy and freshness.

But for better or worse, here it is, warts and all.
Art or a mess, interesting or silly, i don't care.
It's what happened in the dark.
I've called it Brett Whiteley's ghost. A visitation in my darkness.
Hopefully it will kick-start some deliberate work in coming weeks.

In the meantime, i've started some art-related 'busywork'. I've stared a Pinterest blog HERE. It enables me to gather together drawings and paintings i like and are influential on my own creative practice. It enables me to share my passions and my work among a growing online art community. If you too have an art Pinterest board i'd love to connect up!

Harry Kent art published in Singapore

.

 Blue Rain by Harry Kent

Two of my paintings have recently been reproduced and published in a monograph Big difference in a small world  by publication Art Director, Desmond Kon.

Big difference in a small world is a research study report by Peggy Leong Pek Kay into the job satisfaction and retention of almost 400 pre-school teachers from over 100 schools in Singapore. 

The art direction for this 124 page A4 monograph was done by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé. Desmond, himself an artist and poet, has edited more than ten books and co-produced three audio books. His work in entertainment and lifestyle journalism has taken him to Australia, France, Hong Kong and Spain. 

You can discover Desmond's extensive writing and publishing history HERE. 

Desmond contacted me back in April this year to request permission to publish two of my paintings. 

Along with the over 70 works by various artists around the world,  Desmond requested my Blue Rain and Private Moment for inclusion. 

Private Moment by Harry Kent

When i discovered he had trained in Professional Publishing (Books) at Stanford University, so i knew i was in good hands and  was most happy to give approval. 

Desmond has done a fine job putting together a quality publication that showcases arresting and expressive artwork from a broad range of excellent artists. I am honoured to be included among them.

Big difference in a small world,  p. 44.

The surprise is that the artwork is interspersed through an education research report. There is no direct linking of text to the art images. Rather, the two inhabit parallel worlds. And yet the overall effect is to humanize the statistics and analysis contained in the report and to somehow illustrate a key theme of report itself - the worth of human endeavour.

This brings to four the number of publishers who have discovered my work on line and went on publish reproductions.

Kosmos in the USA (see HERE)

Réseau "Sortir du nucléaire" in France (see HERE)

the cover of Konrád György's novel The Case Worker , Korean translation, in South Korea (see HERE)







and now Big difference in Singapore.

I am delighted with the outcome.

Much thanks, Desmond.

.

Harry Kent art on Youtube

.

Last week i chanced across a Youtube clip of my work at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieJXEk0zD2k !

Seems Dmitry Dreizin, using his immense musical knowledge, aptly set my work from Saatchi Online to music, and unbeknownst to me posted it on the web late last year.

Needless-to-say i was excited to discover it and am delighted with the showcase of my work at Saatchi that Dmitry has put together.

I did so enjoy my visit to the Saatchi Gallery, London, last year. The exhibition space was astonishing and the work on exhibition totally stunning.

Saatchi Gallery, London

Saatchi Gallery, London

So i'm delighted to even have this minor and distant artistic connection to the Saatchi name.


.

Brett Whiteley's autopsy

.

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 dances on water

.

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley dances on water, oil on hardboard, 90x120

Brett Whiteley, to my imagination, was always associated with water:

... his paintings of Sydney Harbour with their oceans of Ultramarine, his celebrations of Lavender Bay where he lived overlooking the Harbour, his series on waves that reference Taoist philosophy and Japanese water paintings.

source savill.com.au

(Prophetically enough, i see in this weekend's The Weekend Australian Review that Savill Art Galleries is offering Whiteley's Seagull (1988) for sale - the painting featuring a large white breaking wave).



... but also his whole life. This was a life not so much writ on water as one of walking on water. Indeed, waltzing on water. He saw painting as riding a fluxus, the artist as one who who plumbs the unconscious to retrieve its pearls as images, arts culture as a pool of illusions and tricks, and fame a wave to be surfed.

... yet i am left with the sense that he was always secretly afraid of sinking.

The image i have created contains a touch of surrealism as homage to Whiteley, the Australian Surrealist. It contains an elbow from Salvador Dali, the Sorcerer's Apprentice from Fantasia (battling the odds of mad and mystic water), and Schubert's Erlkönig wooing us away.

The image is ambiguous. Is the figure a demonic and omnipotent magician conjuring the wave? Or is he being overwhelmed and drowned by the tsunami of fate? Is he pirouetting with glee before sublime immensity or is he defensively fleeing the overwhelming darkness?

BW wanted to believe enough in his giftedness to enable him to walk on water ...  to be superhuman, semi-divine, a mediator between Man and the Gods.

But in fact he was all too human.

Daedalus-like, quietly he sank one night in Thirroul.

But it was not defeat for i also see him dance Zorba's dance of triumph-amid-catastrophe in the deserts of the heartland.

source myopera.com

As i watch Zorba, i see Brett as Bob Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man
"to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow."


Ah, but we who remain have not forgotten.

Brett Whiteley holds court

.

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 in the abstract

.

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley inspired, oil on canvas, 46x60cm

.

"A painting is a record of the extremely intensified moments of life - where more than one space, two senses of time, more than the law even seems to work, where the emotional forces seem to be propelling one to a dangerous limit, where reason and explanations become too enfeebled or too speeded up to matter."             Brett Whiteley

 
Why does Harry keep banging on about Brett Whiteley? Isn't it time he switched to some other theme?

Well, one reason i haven't is that i still find plenty of motivation to pick up a brush when i mull over 'Brettness'.

But another is that many of my drawings and paintings, though entitled with 'Brett Whiteley' in the title, could be about anybody. The physical likeness is pretty loose at the best of times.
In these most recent paintings likeness has been abandoned altogether. These are abstract figurative works - experimental, Expressionist, free-style, gestural. They nevertheless purport to be portraits but quite possibly are not. This very problem was raised for discussion during my Fukushima series here in May of last year.

I title them Brett Whiteleys because i had him and his life and art in mind as i worked. But viewers (if i still have any) should feel free to retitle them as they please. What's in a name?


.

Brett Whiteley remembers

.

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

.
.
.

'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 ponders fate

.

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley ponders fate, oil on canvas, 50x60cm

I'm seeking to make non-conventional images about an unconventional painter - my own images that express something of my own sense of the man and his art.

Why paint this way? I'm searching for expressive power and freshness. I'm turning to pure colours straight from the tube, mixing only on the canvas, for freshness and saturation. I'm turning to colour to carry emotion rather than produce accurate physical likeness.

How to render hair in a way that is not simply 'painting in'? How instead to trust in the agency of the medium to supply a myriad of marks which suggest hair texture? How to rely on plastic qualities of oil paint like paint viscosity, fluid dynamics of solvents, effects of suction and gravity? How to do enough yet not do too much?

detail from Brett Whiteley ponders fate

This painting is part portrait and part Rorschach. It was made the same way an inkblot is made.

Its ambiguous marks rely on the viewer to read form and meaning into the work.

Without the viewer this portrait would not be complete.

So thank you, gentle viewer, for visiting this blog and finishing this portrait for me.


.

Brett Whiteley tangled up in blue

.

Harry Kent, Whiteley tangled up in blue
oil on paper, 30x42cm

"I became withdrawn
The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keeping on
like a bird that flew
Tangled up in blue."
                            Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue

This is a series of 16 monoprints in oil on  29.5x42cm A3 Canson Oil Sketch 290gsm paper.

Although i call it monoprinting, actually sixteen impressions were made from a single image painted by brush onto plastic sheet. Impressions were taken by hand using an linoprint roller. Therefore pressures were inconsistent from one print to the next. I regarded that as a plus rather than a minus for it introduced some random vagaries that stopped the whole exercise simply becoming mechanical.

They are intended to viewed as a single work that traces the fading of image from heavy impasto  until only a ghost remains. If ever exhibited, they would be hung beside each other in a horizontal run along a wall at face height. Or maybe in 4 x 4 grid 118 x 168 cm as a single work.

Not so visible in photographs is the Viridian of the shadow side of the figure's face. However, it virtually spent by the 6th printing.

The dominant colours however are Ultramarine and Prussian Blue contrasting with the red-orange of the figure's hair. Brett Whiteley had red hair in real life though the colour has now taken on symbolic overtones for me. In my iconography his red hair repersents his passion and creative fire. Ultramarine is Brett's wild blue yonder where all things are possible while Prussian Blue is the darkness in his soul.

As the series advances the fire is gradually extinguished and darkness subsumes the figure.

As i worked, i also had my earlier drawing Brett Whiteley fades away in mind which was a response to a critic's comment:
"there is something unsettling in the way the BWS [Brett Whiteley Studio] is part gallery and part shrine to the memory of man who was once vital, and then faded away."

You can read the resulting discussion here.

.

.