Abstracted

 

Another abstracted landscape.
Prismacolor pencil on A4, 250 gsm
Clairefontaine paper.

Paintings on wall of Art Cafe, Richmond

These seven acrylic paintings (two on hard board - top left and top right), one oil pastel (bottom left) and pencil drawing (bottom right) are also on the wall at the Art Cafe, 255 Bridge Road, Richmond (Open every day). They are all priced under $300.00. Great thing that is, unlike a gallery showing you do not have to wait to collect the work. You can take it off the wall and taken it home after purchase. Eftpost facilities are available. An artwork that you buy for $300, works out to be only $5.00 a week or a minuscule amount over your lifetime.

FALLING

Falling. Acrylic paint on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas.

Julie Clarke (c) 2017

I struggled with this painting both yesterday and this morning. I was attempting to depict emotion - the light and the dark of it. I remembered light falling on the ranges and the beautiful seeds encased within a transparent sphere that fell from the trees whilst I was in Bendigo on Wednesday & tried to combine both in the image of light. This morning after I posted this photograph of the painting on Facebook, Jason Knight made the following comment, which I really appreciated since I only remember attempting one landscape painting in my life and that was in first year at RMIT in 1989. I should point out that I have never tried to be realistic in these paintings. They are imaginary landscapes, drawn from or inspired by photographs I've taken and from memory. Here are Jason's comments, which include commentary on the other paintings of landscape I've done of late:

The others from the cycle of work had enormous atmosphere and depth as a result of very beautiful and sensitive colouration. This one seems to be more about the brush mark and approaches pointillism and mark-making as a dominate theme in the hills and tree branches.

The earthen-green and emerald tones almost dayglo green sits uncomfortably next to the more umber and slightly muddy tones of the hill and forest. I love the band of light, that is sublime, but wish to see it throughout the whole work in the grass of the rolling knoll. I hesitate whenever I see almost pure white tones in natural studies, because natural whites never occurs in nature or our perception.

I think it could use more variety and complexity in the brushmarks and other rendition tools. I think it is still a work in progress and not a completed painting relative to the others in the series which I really like. The colour is very nice overall - I really like the three diagonal bands created by the shadow - this is the most interesting theme of the painting to my eye. & there is awkwardness and revelation of the mark making implement which I really like.

Jason Knight, artist at ELAN Quebec & Associate Professor at Concordia University

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JOHN POWER Locus Amoenus

Still from John Power's Locus Amoenus (colors not accurate).

When I entered John Power's Locus Amoenus installed in a small, darkened room complete with large, three channel video display on the ground floor of the State Library of Vctoria, I sat in a chair at the back of the room rather than in one of the many bean-bags situated in front of the screens, which, on reflection may have afforded a more emersive experience consistent with the title of the exhibition interpreted as 'place of comfort'.

As I perused the environment I recalled sitting uncomfortably for an hour on the floor in a room in Union House at The University of Melbourne in the mid 1980s watching short experimental films by the pioneering Melbourne avant-guard filmmakers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. The Cantrill's films at that time and the subject of John Power's Locus Amoenus today is the Australian landscape and although Power's interpretation is of an imagined landscape seamlessly melding depictions of actual locations around Victoria with the aid of computer generated imagery and advanced algorithms interacting with weather information from data provided by the Bureau of Meterology, the Cantrill's achieved a changing perspective of the terrain by filming the distant hills, trees and sky from the window of a moving car. In both, the point of view is from the perspective of the artist who makes aesthetic choices as to what is to be seen and how it is to be viewed; all these artists used movement to suggest the eye of the beholder perusing the landscape, a matter of virtually being there.

I was constantly aware whilst viewing the changing landscape in Locus Amoenus that although Power's vision was beautiful in its undulating planes, craggy outlook, calm sea and cloudy skies, his view, already stated as a 'place of comfort' is one that reflects perhaps his desire for 'nature' to be orderly and controlled, peaceful and beautiful. His desire to contrive a place touched only by non-human elements is utopian. I found the imagery too perfect, the computer generated colors sometimes unrealistic, indeed not at all like unruley landscapes, with partially fallen branches, dense undergrowth, shade and muted light that I'm accustomed to. I'm privy constantly to the McCubbinesque dusky blues and myriad soft browns of land and twisted roots that is the terrain of Yarra Bend and Studley Park; the largest area of natural bushland still left in Melbourne and a sacred site of the Wurundjeri Aboriginal people. So, this construct of 'nature' continually jolted me into asking questions about why technologies like this are used to construct a reality that is within the reach of many if we commit to venturing outdoors away from virtual and technological mediated spaces? Is comfort possible only if we maintain as sense of control over unpredictable nature? Paradoxically although Locus Amoenus is highly constructed, the trees, grass and shaded areas within its terrain mirror the natural world in that they are at the mercy of the elements. It was a cold and still Saturday morning outside and therefore little movement in the animation save soft movement in the grass, fly over shots and 360 degree turns through the landscape that made me a little nauseous.

The most interesting aspect of Power's work for me was the suggestion that this landscape bereft of humans bore traces of indigenous and non-indigenous human intervention in the form of ruinous material objects. Leaning monoliths, like rampaged gravestones in a discarded cemetry, disturbed the otherwise still, quiescent landscape that screamed extinction of a species since the only audible sounds was the calling songs of birds.

At one point a Daliesque figure appeared to be forming in an undulating rock formation, like Salvador Dali's Metamorphosis of Narcissus the torso and limbs arise from a body of water, but as yet have no face. In this place of 'posthuman', 'hyperreal' comfort there is some foreboding in the clusters of inchoate beings within the rocks that speak to this age of perfection in which we persistently turn to medical, communications and advanced computer technologies to reconfigue the human body and the physical environment. Perhaps after all this is Power's message; that we live in an age in which the actual affects the virtual and the virtual likewise exerts an abiding presence and influence.