Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 39 i Artist Profile

THIS ISSUE OF ARTIST PROFILE focuses on painters who make prints. We want to understand a painter’s relationship to the rather mystical powers of printmaking and the social and cultural engagement implicit in printmaking, which have left their mark on the work of many painters. Not all painters make prints, so these important, yet often unpredictable encounters are closely examined in this issue, especially in the essays by Jeremy Eccles, Michael Kempson and Lesley Conran. Most of the artists in this issue are best known as painters but, both in painting and printing, they speak for the handmade and for a contemporary art that is inclusive. In this way, for them, traditions, art histories and memory matter, and both painting and printmaking are enriched by working back and forward between…

THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SHOW Being Tiwi, currently touring various regional centres, has already been to Moree in New South Wales, Tandanya in South Australia, and Mackay in Queensland. The national tour will be visiting other centres in the rest of 2017: Albury and Port Macquarie in New South Wales, and the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia. I wonder how it would be received on the islands themselves? Being Tiwi. A good question. And where does art or art production figure in that self-definition? There is little point asserting uniqueness unless the content of that uniqueness is specified. And not just what it is but what the implications are. In the case of the Tiwi one manifestation is that they have a degree of…

Katherine Hattam’s Melbourne house and studio sing with her paintings, in clear, bright sharply defined colours. Each of her prints, and their plywood blocks, has only one colour, but these have a tonal quality she doesn’t seek in her painting. Thus the prints and blocks form a sort of baseline, a depth, to the visual song. Katherine recently talked to Judith Pugh, for ARTIST PROFILE. YOU EXHIBITED BEFORE YOU TRAINED FORMALLY? For a long time, from about 16 to 38, I just drew unconsciously, from what was around me, immediately. I’d been to university majoring in literature and political science. I liked that whole academic thing, but I kept drawing, and had my first exhibition at the George Paton Gallery at Melbourne University. It’s been a very long process, getting…

After listening to Ray Beattie and Peter Daly discussing painters who print, I became enthused by the dialogue between these two respected artists. They were stirred by the unconventional approach of painters to the technical concerns of printers. After numerous exchanges they were prepared to respond to Artist Profile’s questions on their printing past. WHEN RAY BEATTIE AND PETER DALY RETURNED FROM active service in the Vietnam War in 1970 and 1969 respectively, they unknowingly brought with them a new and provocative subject. However, it would take two decades before the narratives of these returned servicemen found an empathetic space in Australian art. By 1992 Daly, with another artist and Vietnam veteran, Archibald Zammit-Ross, co-curated Dog Tags Australia’s first international exhibition of veterans’ art (including refugees) from the Vietnam War.…

AS WITH ALL TRULY CREATIVE ART practices, artists continually question the process, those workings by which the work is brought together into its final form. In printmaking and screen-printing, these influences are brought to them by other artists, art practices and advances in technology. This questioning of processes produces various innovations, some of which become part of the mainstream, and some are lost in translation “in the flood of new technology or thinking”, to coin a phrase. I use the term ‘heliograph’ to describe my prints, however ‘cliché verre’, ‘heliographique’ and ‘autographie heliographique’ are other terms used to describe this process. This, along with its pre-Impressionist beginnings, may have helped this process to be lost, as it did not seem to fit in with either the earlier definitions of printmaking…

Wendy Sharpe engages with the figure. Known for the vibrant and dynamic compositions in her paintings, it is then interesting to see this energy of line and form distilled in her etchings. Printmaking reveals an avid engagement with tone, line and composition – drawing points of inspiration from her travels in Europe. PARIS HAS BEEN A POINT OF RETURN FOR YOU? Yes, I had a residency at the Cité in 1987 and then another in the same place in 2007, but I also stayed in the Cité many other times. I’d spent a lot of time in Paris before we got the apartment in 2010. Which artists influenced you in your travels there? Looking at your treatment of the figure, and play with tone reminds of me of Degas monoprints.…

WHILE STUDYING AT THE WEST Surrey College of Art in Farnham and the Royal Academy Schools London during the 1970s, David Fairbairn ignored his instincts to work from the life model and followed the advice of his lecturers to produce flat abstract paintings. After visiting in 1981 and meeting artist Suzanne Archer, Fairbairn decided to move to Australia a year later. Subsequently, he decided to return to working from a life model to create figurative drawings. This saw the beginning of his exploration into mixed media drawing techniques. Since producing his seminal works in 1998 and 1999, an ongoing exploration in Fairbairn’s process has been the conversation between wet and dry media. His mixed media drawings involve working with gouache, ink, charcoal, pastel and acrylic on paper. As curator Renee…

USING HISTORICALLY TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUES TO look at our contemporary digital world, Shannon McCulloch has an eye on the relevance of his mediums. Working primarily in oil on board paintings, as well as etchings and drawings, McCulloch could be described as a contemporary portrait artist, though first and foremost he is an artist of his generation. The 21-year-old finds his practice a meditative sojourn from a world mediated to us through a surge of images on our screens. In a daylight-flooded studio at Fremantle Arts Centre, where he is in residence until June 2017, McCulloch’s new body of works exemplifies an amalgamation of the traditional and contemporary. Last year was a breakout year for the artist. His debut solo exhibition, Old Mates, New Phones explored “debaucheries prevalent in adolescent male social…

It feels like the right time; it’s good seeing the links, the crossovers, the clear sense of intent and the distinct themes. PETER POWDITCH’S DEALER, CAMPBELL ROBERTSONSwann at Defiance Gallery, replies with a vehement “No” when asked whether he could see rhyme or reason in describing the artist as falling into an “Australian Pop” context. “That was a tag put upon him at some point, as it was Martin Sharp and Brett Whiteley.” Standing in the midst of Powditch’s major survey at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Coast: Peter Powditch – A Retrospective, which closed on May 21, he adds, “Peter was certainly loud and hard-edge and out there, but he wasn’t interested in Pop as such. They’re much more ‘now’ things. Standing here amongst the works you’d swear that he’s…

Judy Watson’s contemplative, original, seductive art exposes suppressed histories. A frequent traveller, with 20 years of exhibiting internationally including Europe, Britain, North America and Asia, Watson uses inspiration from her connection to specific places and situations to recall concealed pasts. Accessing her Aboriginal culture, and strongly anchored to drawing and printmaking practices, her aesthetic has expanded to painting and public art. WHEN DID PRINTMAKING ENTER YOUR ART-MAKING? When I was at high school in Brisbane, I did a small amount of printmaking, predominantly screen-printing, also a bit of lino block printing. At DDIAE now, the University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, I studied all visual art subjects and histories. Then, I focused on printmaking, because with the other subjects I wasn’t sure where I was going, in particular painting. I didn’t…

Michael Zavros is well-known for his supreme fluency with paint. His visual vernacular of brushless trompe l’oeil rendering fetishised objects is unmistakable. Zavros constructs contemporary mythologies surrounding materialism, consumerism and narcissism. While his hyperreal paintings bask in the glow of public acclaim, Zavros’ printmaking practice lingers in the shadows, despite being a formative spark in the artist’s output. IT MAY BE SURPRISING TO SOME THAT YOU MAJORED in printmaking at the Queensland College of Art (QCA) and didn’t paint at all during your studies. Why did you decide to study printmaking? I so loved the little taster we had in first year but I also wanted to learn a specific process, to come away from my undergraduate degree with new skills. The lecturers were all master printers and the facilities…

FOR MANY INDIGENOUS ARTISTS, printmaking is, at least initially, a completely alien idea.” Thus wrote ANU Professor Sasha Grishin in a Canberra Times review of a 2016 exhibition of mainly Aboriginal prints – Etched in the Sun II – at the Nancy Sever Gallery in the capital. In 2008, Etched in the Sun I had been held at the ANU’s Drill Hall Gallery, so there are plenty of such ‘alien’ prints around today. What’s more, there’s a logical reason why Canberra should be an appropriate home for showing work that is made by artists from the distant deserts, Arnhem Land, The Kimberley and Far North Queensland. The record books show that the first remote Aboriginal art prints were sponsored by the Catholic Bishop of Darwin, John O’Loughlin in 1969, inspired…

STILL LIFE PAINTING – ADAM PYET A 10-year survey for the Melbourne artist from native flowers to Foster’s beer cans. Until 16 July 2017 Geelong Gallery, Vic www.geelonggallery.org.au JENNY WATSON From Punk and feminism to a cast of longhaired women – this is a conceptual survey of four decades. 5 July – 2 October 2017 MCA Australia, Sydney www.mca.com.au GABRIELLE ADAMIK |THREADS AND TRACES Weaving wire to play with space and form, Gabrielle Adamik creates delicate structures that are familiar yet retain an otherness. Leading the viewer’s eye around the vessel-like forms, a sense of motion is drawn from Adamik’s background in dance and movement. Until 17 June 2017 The Egg & Dart, NSW www.egganddart.com.au TRAVELLERS Exploring the idea of the journey – works by Jan Senbergs, Jeffrey Smart, Hiroaki…