Tim Olsen Drawing Prize from this Tuesday

So, I happen to be very good at forgetting to tell people when I'm in exhibitions! It just so happens that I'm in the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, which opens this Tuesday evening, 5-7.30pm at Kudos Gallery, Napier st, Paddington. It's on for two weeks and the gallery is open Wed-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-4pm. I am planning to put in two animated portraits.

Steve Weymouth - The Illusion of Life

I just listened to an interesting short clip of Steve Weymouth (who teaches at COFA), on the subject of defining what is animation. Here it is:

Link to Kinds of Blue review

I just read a nice review of the Kinds of Blue anthology, which may be found here.

Portraits of me!

Over the last few weeks I have enjoyed the inter-semester break. For an honours student this roughly translates as a class-free time to further progress our art practice and research for our thesis. It has been lovely for me to meet, sketch and get to know more people over this time as well. Today in particular was a real treat - so special that I just had to write a blog post about it. I sketched Cam and his brother Lockie, and then, they wanted to sketch me! I was very flattered. As far as I can remember, the only other time someone has drawn me was my friend Melanie Borham, and that was only because we decided one day to sit down and sketch each other... Here are Cam and Lockie's sketches.

Kinds of Blue

It is a curious fact that during my time in France last year I illustrated my first five-page comic. It was written by Karen Bielharz and was called A Friend In Need. It was one of a thirteen-comic anthology on the theme of depression, titled Kinds of Blue. Almost a year after I emailed the final art back to Australia I am excited to say we're on the verge of publishing it. Karen and others have been working very hard sending the anthology to publishers but without success (although there were many affirmations of the high quality of the work). Now, we have turned to self-publishing and today Karen launched a crowd-funding campaign on Pozible. The book is excellent and I encourage you to both read it, support the campaign that will give us the money to print it and buy it! (You can read it for free on the Kinds of Blue website.)

A Portrait of Surry Hills

My honours project for this year involves creating the portraits of a lot of people in my suburb. This takes sketching, lots of sketching and also much socialising, all of which has been very enjoyable. The rationale for this continues to adjust and refine itself, as is normal with the development of acquiring new knowledge and thoughts, and my perception of what form these portraits will take has also changed since the beginning of the year. I intend to create the portraits of a range of people within a geographically defined area (namely the suburb in which I live, Surry Hills) and who come from right across the socio-economic range of inhabitants of this suburb.

Surry Hills has an interesting mix of highly paid trendy young workers living in close proximity with a lot of housing commission apartments, crisis accommodation centres and other support services for people who are homeless for whatever reason. Scattered throughout this mix are also students, and residents who may be considered remnants of the old Surry Hills - that is, people who have lived in the area since before it started to become trendy. For the most part, it seems middle-to-low income families do not live there due to the high rental prices and the limited choice of near-by affordable schools (the exception to this is clergy).

While some artists may seek to document the feel of a suburb through recording the appearance of buildings, gardens and anonymous passer-bys, my portrait of Surry Hills is primarily a social one. All of the people I have sketched so far have been through social connections, which is exciting as because of this project I am meeting more and more of my neighbours.

My reason for wanting to paint people from the different socio-economic backgrounds is that I feel often it is easy as a society to place less value on people who we see as ‘the homeless’ or who are in housing commission accommodation. People we prefer to focus on are the accomplished, the successful, the beautiful, the well-known and respected. However, as a Christian I consider every human as having equal worth in the eyes of our creator since we are made in his image. In this respect, each resident of Surry Hills is an equally valuable element of it - a suburb is made up of all of its inhabitants - and I intend to present each of my subjects as equally valuable regardless of their socio-economic background. What I find especially interesting is how some of the people I have sketched felt that it was the very mix of wealthy and less-well-off that they found appealing about the place. One person even said that she would rather move if the increasing level of trendiness in the suburb led to the expulsion of the housing-commission places and their residents: it was the presence of such interesting characters that she found refreshing.

So this is my project, what I am up to this year... I could say more about how this connects to my consideration of the wider place of portraiture in Australia but I might save that for another entry... as well as speculations on exactly what the final portraits might look like. For the moment, here are a number of the sketches I have done so far...

To re-pick-up the blog train...

So, this year I started doing more delightfully arty things and decided that I should finally put a post together and re-start my train of blogging thought, so to speak. This artful thought is currently being structured by the program of 'Honours in Fine Arts' at COFA. Already I feel like it has given me a spurt of excited creative energy and I am enjoying the research that it entails.

Last week I went to a number of very interesting exhibitions. Shannon Field, a PHD student at COFA currently has a show at Kudos Gallery, called Busted. He looks at convicts and historical colonial Australian figures in the context of exploring Australian masculinity. The work he presents is likened to a police line-up of faces, each grotesquely abstracted and chunky, but with wonderful uses of flat colour and fabrics in some. Very worth a look.

Wenmin li, a COFA graduate, also has a show on currently - at the Flinders St Gallery. Her work presents a beautiful intersection between her Chinese heritage and life in Australia. With delicate drawings, prints and work on tiles she creates dreamy, floating images with elements drawing on memories and experiences of life in both cultures.

Another exhibition I saw was at the Paper Mill gallery in Angel place (Sydney CBD). A friend of mine, Chris Ross was part of a group show: Second Nature. This show presents a taste of the work of a number of young, emerging artists, much of which had strong conceptual frameworks behind it.