Melissa Nolan McDougall

The Illuminated Art

of

Melissa Nolan McDougall

Melissa Nolan McDougall

Way to Blue

Pencil on Paper - 30 w x 20 cm h

The experience of viewing Melissa Nolan McDougall’s artworks conjures memories of walking into an old cathedral where the dark interior of the church is illuminated by the radiant beauty from the sun’s rays piercing through the coloured stained-glass windows presenting a sort of warm phantasmagorical experience.

The aforementioned soft prismatic glow of sunlight within the darkened church space creates an atmosphere of wonderment, especially as one can waft through such ephemeral splendour whilst enjoying of the coloured shards of glass cascading onto oneself within this cruciform designed building engendering a wonderful sensation.

The dark arts, as evidenced within McDougall’s artworks, are not dark in any negative way but provide a visual path along which to travel with the illumination of the senses yielding a space where contemplation of the surrounding worlds is slowed down. This allows for analysis of the information to be distilled to enhance one’s qualities of life.

Civilizations have long used the dark of night for enlightenment from sources such as the moon, stars and any other solar phenomena that they may experience, each epoch with its peoples searching for some sort of partial resolutions as to why they exist and where they are going; this is a natural quest and desire.

McDougall is engaged in her own unique quest for some kind of personal illumination and enlightenment through drawn/painted motifs as exemplified in the title of the drawing above: Way to Blue.  Both self-portrait and floral still life, seemingly exists in omnipresent space without the shackles of time attached to it, apart from the human constructed clock time.

To assign McDougall’s artworks to one category or another is difficult because they virtually defy classification. There is a kind of resonating phenomenological presence that appears to emanate from them which intensifies the complexities of her works so that, in viewing them, it is almost like looking at some sort of transcendent mercury that collides with the senses and resonates in the far reaches of human consciousness of love, sadness, family, nature and happiness with the overall thematic feeling of enlightenment. However, this does not act in any deterministic manner but rather offers a retreat through which to move forward from aspects of contemporary desires that clog and fog the human mind.

If creating art as a sanctuary within the human consciousness is the raison d’étre for McDougall’s artworks, then she has been very successful in creating a space for the human mind to engage and relax in peace, thus making her work all the more contemporary within the modern anxieties of the contemporary community’s societal memory.

Dr Peter Davidson

Painter

George Haynes, Western Australian artist

I was fortunate to visit George Haynes at his studio in Spearwood recently and discuss colour mixing at length with this amazing painter. Here is some footage of George showing how to lay down a coloured ground. This is a link to his website:
http://www.georgehaynes.com.au/

Louis Moncrieff



The Art of Louis Moncrieff

A quest for aesthetic simplicity by the working family man Painter

Louis Moncrieff - White Noise 2018

acrylic on canvas

102 cm x 102 cm

Louis Moncrieff’s studio praxis space only comes to life at the end of the day after family and working life. It’s an aesthetic space dominated by all the things that happen in clock time between waking up and sleeping so it affords precious moments in a busy world where the intermittent thoughts coalesce late at night and are then forged into paintings. Studio painting praxis under pressure from life’s external demands in providing food, home, love and caring for his family, as well as full time employment is a working well for Moncrieff within this current series of artworks as he strives for the idea of simplicity.

Simplicity is hard to achieve within one’s life, let alone in painting it, as it doesn’t happen so easily. Rather it comes from the systematic unravelling of the myriad of unnecessary wants and desires experienced within quotidian life. For example, some Buddhists spend their entire existence in trying to achieve simplicity as it is considered a utopian way of being, thus producing a clarity of vision regarding what might be necessary and unnecessary in one’s survival.

Moncrieff’s painting (see above titled White Noise 2018) in some ways reminds me of artworks by the American artist Agnes Martin and how she partially used Zen Buddhist philosophies amongst other metaphysical and phenomenological sources in her pursuit of uncluttered imagery. But in Moncrieff’s White Noise painting there is the realism of frenetic daily work and family life portrayed though the greyish chromatic paint marks, much like an old black and white television without a focus. Yet, in another way, it’s a self-portrait as a sounding board for his busy schedule of work, home and play as, emerging through these greyish paint marks and representative of that dense fog of daily life. is a series of thin but very focused linear circles.

Within the painting titled White Noise Moncrieff’s painted circles seem to have their origins in Japanese Ensō aesthetics as they materialise, being a representative series of profound moments of enlightenment where things become harmonised through personalized clarity.  They appear almost like some metaphysical apparition, a refuge against the tide of human wants that certainly serve to clutter contemporary daily life, signifying intelligent painting

Moncrieff is now on a painterly journey of enlightenment through the theme of simplicity giving rise to the problem as to how does one paint such a complex idea? In the aforementioned painting Moncrieff has partially answered that question convincingly and is now well on his way to achieving a unique contribution to the uncharted horizons of personal painterly minimalism.

 

Dr Peter Davidson

Painter

Michael Doherty

Michael Doherty

The Great Storm of 2020, oil on canvas, 100 cm x 100 cm

 Image courtesy of the artist

The Western Australian coastline with its associated current, past, oral, written and painted histories, along with the clear sunny weathers, storms and maritime stories are now a major part of those communities’ societal memories across all peoples who reside in that state.

Michael Doherty is a painter who lives in Perth’s southern metropolitan coastal area of Waikiki which is a beautiful part of Western Australia and deceptively picturesque due to the wild storms that hit the coastline in winter.

As an artist Doherty paints a wide variety of subject matter from many varied sources but it is no surprise to me that he has a passionate connection to the shorelines around Point Peron. This is a great place to paint with its rocks, beaches and off shore islands and right on the edge of one of earth’s most powerful oceanic wildernesses.

Often some very heavy gales rage over that part of the Western Australian coastline in winter from the deep wild primeval southern oceans and in the painting above by Doherty titled The Great Storm of 2020, one of those storms sits ominously in the distance for the time being yet  its effects are being transferred through the surges in the ocean, creating a tossed and turbulent sandy shoreline that Doherty has so masterly revealed through his unique system of applying brushwork and fingers in oily paint marks onto canvas.

Doherty is not alone in his awe of marine nature with its associated power. The French painter Gustave Courbet in the late 1860s completed a fantastic series of Wave themed paintings from his observations on the French coast, several which I have viewed in Japan; it’s majestic viewing.

And in Western Australia prior to Doherty there was another noteworthy coastal painter  Audrey Greenhalgh (1903 – 1991) who appears to have had a similar passion for painting the seascapes and again, like Doherty, used a very interesting systems within studio painting praxis, especially in some of her more successful works, where she rendered the seas with loaded brush strokes of oily colour.

It now appears that Doherty is painting with a fluency and competency that very few Western Australian painters can do or have achieved so far in rendering the calm/wild seaside of Perth’s metropolitan southern coastal waters coupled with its clear atmosphere of clouds racing across the sky, pushed by the strong winds of the southerly seas into the vast landscapes of Australia and, in so doing, he is the process of producing some of the most iconic Western Australian seascape paintings for future generations to come – reminiscent of  Courbet’s Wave series.

Dr Peter Davidson

Painter





Fiona Harman & Steve Paraksos: Sinking, Floating

Artist Fiona Harman discusses her latest paintings of water, involving a collaboration with WAAPA Bachelor of Music graduate, Steve Paraksos for the exhibition "Sinking, Floating" at Edith Cowan University’s Spectrum Project Space.

Peter Davidson, Still Life & Super Kitsch

EARLYWORK Gallery
330 South Terrace, South Fremantle, Western Australia.
19-29 July, 2019
Drawn from life in Japan; small scale drawings - ink bottles and oil pastels, clay maquettes and sketches made of them and 'super kitsch' gold plates.

Peter Davidson speaking about his latest exhibition "Still Life & Super Kitsch".

Darryn Ansted, Aspects of a Puzzle

Unity Lane Projects
Perth, Western Australia
3-18 November 2018

                                Darryn Ansted, Walker, 2016, Oil on linen, 71 x 51 cm

 

Looking for Clews

To be confronted by a puzzle can be at once both a charming and an intimidating experience. A puzzle is a test of intelligence, a quality that though always important, has become increasingly valued. A puzzle tests us, and the outcome must be unambiguous–indeed in ancient Greek and Roman mythology, a wrong answer could mean death. But the charm of puzzles is also alluring. A maze is a visual puzzle that has its own beauty, but for Theseus, the Labyrinth was also a life testing experience.

Darryn Ansted presents a series of paintings in this exhibition Aspects of a Puzzle that engage with an architectural motif that appears both modernist and suburban. The colours and light that infuse these landscapes is pleasant and is recognisable as a West Coast phenomenon, familiar in both America and Australia. Titles such as Limelight and Magnolia further impress, with this feeling that ‘everything is fine’, but is this an allurement into the trap of the puzzle?

We are also enticed into puzzles by clues. The Minotaur inhabited a Labyrinth, in the myth, which was designed by the architect Daedalus, who also designed a hollow dummy cow in which Pasiphaë could hide to consummate her love for a beautiful white bull. The Minotaur is the monster love child, half bull, half human, imprisoned in the Labyrinth until he is eventually slain by the hero, Theseus. Such was the fate of monsters, for whom there was no compassion. The maze was so difficult to escape from that Theseus was given a ball of thread (called a ‘clew’) to use to find his way back out. This is an etymological root of the modern word ‘clue’, which we need to navigate our way out of a puzzle.

What are the clues that Ansted gives us in his paintings? A lemon on a table and a figure providing clues for the scale of the spaces represented in the paintings. There is perspective also (another clue), indicating that these may be real spaces, but something warns us that this belief is a trap. The sense of unreality is also ubiquitous in these works. A tiny figure gazes on a glass and stone monolith framed by geometric clouds. If de Chirico had lived in San Francisco or Perth, this is the strange atmosphere he may have painted.  But he didn’t live in either of these places, so this too may be a distraction or red herring rather than an actual clue.

At some point in an exhibition, as in the Labyrinth, we turn a bend to find something that may overpower us. Painting exhibitions always find their final form as a sequence within an architectural setting and in this case there is architecture inside architecture. Around a corner, somewhere in this exhibition, can we expect a major work that puts all our fears and insecurities about our intelligence to the true test? Is this for instance in the massive Garden, where a cube on a table reminds us of the shared artifice of both puzzles and paintings? Is this the clue that lets us safely out of the maze with our reputations intact—or another allurement? Or, it may be in the earlier, small, beautifully simple, abstract works such as “Umber” or “Ochre” that provide a ‘clew’, stripped of portent, showing the path in, in order to indicate the way out.

Aspects of a Puzzle provides just that, different views of the unnamed problem. There is no ultimate conflict point or resolution as in the Labyrinth of Crete. Instead we hover inside one space then glide to the next. Within the presence of these paintings we stay suspended and engaged in their many intriguing qualities.

 

Dr Kevin Robertson, 2018

Kevin Robertson's Heathcote Studio Session.

Painting the Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater

Caspar Fairhall: Below is Above

Caspar Fairhall discussing his exhibition "Below is Above" at the Art Collective WA with Kevin Robertson, 2016.

"So Hollow, So Pure" by Kim Kim Kim

July 21, 2015

Blank Spaces

"When the face expresses an affect, it becomes a surface or a plane that coincides with the affect itself. It loses its autonomous existence to become a "pure" affect"(Malabou, S E L, 2013, p.46).

I am looking for Kim Kim Kim's studio entrance on the fourth floor of a car park. I shout out her name and the sound echoes under the concrete ceiling and then I hear her reply come back to me. The door to an ex-department store is unlocked and we walk through the massive space, barely lit by citrus-hued fluorescent lights. There are reflective panels on her industrial overalls, catching this strange light and directing me like an usher's torch to her studio space. Inside are some familiar paintings of disaffected twenty-somethings placed randomly around the studio like a morose party. My attention is directed to the new works, large portrait heads on titanium white cotton canvases. The subjects are similar to her art school work, but something new is happening in the paintings. The execution is more refined and less cluttered. There is plenty of white space showing, the graphic sense of the paintings is more confident. The interior planes of the faces of the subjects are stridently represented, recalling Jenny Savill's work, the opposite of a smoothly rendered photograph or Renaissance painting. This is a zone where something expressive is occurring. But not expressions, as A.R. Penck once noted, that can be read like a book, which would be entirely false – instead they suggest feelings that are hard to name. This is where Kim Kim Kim's paintings leave behind the normal categories of basic emotions and delve into difficult undefined areas of feeling which she refers to as "blankness". But term blankness does not seem to be used to denote emotional neutrality. Blankness can be associated with an absence of feeling, which could be a way of describing depression, but equally it could also be about aloofness or indifference. In Kim Kim Kim's portraits we are directed to territory where we can then project our own feelings, but the blankness in the work comes with its own valence; it modifies how those feelings are reflected back to us.

The contrast of surface quality in Kim Kim Kim's paintings, from large passages of bare canvas to accents of impasto, is a kind of inverted-Bacon technique, reversed in the sense that the support is not a dark ground. Also, the accents not are traditional highlights to show form (tonally there are no higher “notes” than pure white to reach anyway). Instead it is the features, the expressive planes of the face and the points where the skull is more fully implicated by the face, where the more intense manipulation of colour of paint quality occur. This is in itself not unusual, but there is another step to Kim Kim Kim's work that maintains the viewer's engagement – her sensitive response to her subjects. In Brent, for example, she presents with a dissonant mixture of vulnerability and formal detachment in a young, androgynous male face.

Kim Kim Kim uses digital photographs to project the contours of her subjects onto the canvas. It is partly this element that makes the works appear unequivocally from the present time. The structure of the perfect proportion in these faces reminds us that we live in a screen-based world where the authority of the digital image is unquestionable – well almost. Kim Kim Kim finds an interstice somewhere between the cold anti-utopia of relentlessly posted social media images and the brutality of expressionist painting. In that confined space, the double-brick gap between the interior and the outside world, there is room for constricted movement, for contained-feeling or narrow-banded expression. In a post-ironic age, maybe this is the most anyone can do at the moment without being labelled naïve.

The expressive plane of the paintings is two-fold. It is both the face of the subject revealing a projected affect and also the two dimensional surface of the picture plane, where non-geometric and incidental gestures occur. This is happening in Kim Kim Kim's work with a controlled awareness of the inherently abstract nature of painting, through the calligraphy of the painted mark and formal beauty of the plain white ground. This is the fulcrum on which Kim Kim Kim's paintings pivot –   between formal abstraction and expressive representation. A mad thylacine in a cage, a fish cell twitching to artificially induced electrical impulses, reminding us that, in spite of what the tranquilising light of the LCD screen may be doing to us, we are also still alive to feeling.

Kevin Robertson is a sessional academic and PhD candidate at Curtin University.

14 August to 29 August 2015

Opening night Friday 14 August from 6.30pm

MERENDA CONTEMPORARY 

The F word

The F word – An exhibition of Australian Figurative painting
Gallery Central
12 Aberdeen St Perth
gallery@central.wa.edu.au

Artist floor talk – Friday 14th of November at 10.30am 

 In discussion with the artist Thomas Hoareau and artist and curator Kevin Robertson.
 Academic and Artist Nicole Slatter from Curtin University will lead a discussion with artist Thomas Hoareau and Artist/ curator Kevin Roberston along with some of the other exhibiting artists.
‘The tradition of figurative painting goes in and out of fashion but audiences never fail to be seduced by the figure and representational art; and figurative Australian artists continue to observe and translate the world, from the everyday to the spectacular, with passion and nuance.’ 

This exhibition features Nicole Slatter, Thomas Hoareau, Kevin Robertson, Richard Gunning from Perth and Tom Alberts, Stewart MacFarlane, Nerissa Lea and Yvette Coppersmith from around Australia, with prints by Richard Bosman, USA

Joanna Lamb and Kevin Robertson

Kevin Robertson - artist's talk at Art Collective WA, 2014

Matthew Hunt, Mask (Free Associations) 2010; scraperboard; 44 x 45 cm
Courtesy Kerry Stokes Collection from Angel Hair


ANGEL HAIR: CONTEMPORARY WA ART FROM THE KERRY STOKES COLLECTION
19 SEPTEMBER – 7 OCTOBER

The works in this exhibition explore the shift that occurred from art being about private experiences to art that deals with essentially shared social and cultural issues. It draws on ethereal elements of the Collection in reference to the mysterious substance, Angel Hair, said to emanate from UFOs. What happens when such subversive and impersonal stuff starts falling from the sky right outside your own town?
GALLERY CENTRAL
12 Aberdeen Street, Perth
Gallery hours: Mon-Fri, 10am-4.45pm, Sat 2-4.45pm
Closed Public Holidays, Free Admission
T 9427 1318
gallerycentral.com.au