Squares 2013

Squares exhibition is on at the moment at Strathnairn.  Beautiful to visit with a delicious cafe and friendly atmosphere.  Unfortunately this year I was a bit off preparing for the exhibition to start 1st of September so I will not be displaying my pieces there as the start date was 9th of August to finish 1st of September.  So here they are commenced yesterday thinking I still had a week but there is still a week to go of the Squares exhibition and there are some great pieces.  Lots of wonderful young artists have contributed this year, we were actually headed out there today because my two little artists seeing me working wanted to contribute their own pieces.  All inspired by Valparaiso and the street art there.

More work to be done on these but not so much impetus to complete in any time frame.

Harrison Art Show

The Harrison Art Show will be accepting entries until the 21st of June for 28th of June exhibition.
$10 per painting with a maximum of five entries.  They also accept sculptures.  $550 dollars in tattoo and piercing credit and cash prizes are on offer.

I know I haven't quite captured the intricate, geometric, serial mass of intermingled and interdependent metal, cement, life and urban living of Rio de Janeiro but this is part of the inspiration for one of the pieces I will be submitting.

Goldilocks

Art Space

The children's easel is squeezed in beside the fridge, all of our art gear is squashed into small cupboard and most of my half finished canvases are leaning against each other in a corner or our main living area.  Soon, fingers crossed, we will be moving into a new house where I will have my own dedicated art space.  This has been enough inspiration to pull out some unfinished pieces and start working on them again.

Squares

Finally finished.  Squares exhibition will be running from Friday 21st September – Sunday 14th October, 2012.

90 Stockdill Drive, Holt ACT 2615
PO Box 4746, Higgins ACT 2615
F (02) 6254 6924
E info@strathnairn.com.au

Squares

The squares exhibition held at the Strathnairn Arts Association Gallery in Holt, Canberra, is on soon.  I started working on these when I first found out about the exhibition and bought my entry packs.  The essence of the exhibition is that you buy the canvases as part of the squares entry pack and produce works to go into the exhibition on these 30x30cm squares.  Initially all my ideas where about little boxes and geeks but my real inspiration and creativity started working when I thought about statements I felt compelled to make.  So I have one motivated by refugees, one by surveillance and another by domestic abuse.

Initial sketches above: the far right was based on a Confucius quote "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount".  Middle was a preliminary sketch for the 'Stats' painting.  Right was a geek inspired idea with a male and female square thumb wrestling which I was going to call "Boys wee standing up, girls wee sitting down".  My son came home from school and suddenly started making all these assertions about things that my daughter couldn't do because she was a girl.  We overcame this for now by saying the only difference between boys and girls is girls wee sitting down and boys wee standing up.    

 

Stats.  There will be things in each house for statistical representation of domestic violence, child abuse, neglect and alcoholism.  While researching for this work I discovered the following which I will be representing symbolically in the painting.  15% of households are filled with domestic violence, of this 4% is committed against men, 14% of children are sexually abused, of this percentage over 70% is perpetrated by a parent, 27% of Australian children are subjected to physical, emotional abuse or neglect.

 'The waves are made of hands' is symbolic of the loss of lives escaping persecution, civil war or famine on a perilous journey to Australia.  Ever since the Vietnam war Australia has seen refugees making a dangerous and often disastrous trip by boat to seek refuge.  The Howard government turned these asylum seekers into 'boat people' and fueled hatred, fear and racisism for these "illegal immigrants" who were flooding in via unprotected boarders.  This worked nicely to get people believing the only way to stop this unabating tide was to re-elect him.

This is more inspired by the idea of painting squares or geeks for the Squares exhibition, I was going to have them holding cables, folders and xbox controllers but I think this is working out.  The problem now is I've lost my creative motivation and need to get it back before the 12th of September.

Robot dinosaur bunnies

Robots, dinosaurs, need to work on the diggers.  Some expired etsy items I don't think I'll be reactivating.

Exhibitions and Art Prizes

It can be  a challenge to get organised to take part in local exhibitions and art prizes, especially if you are pretty much disconnected from the art scene.  Thanks to the wonderful people on Canetsy I have been able to get ready for inclusion into some great exhibitions this year and have just felt really grateful, nervous and uncertain to get the pieces I have recently completed hung.  As I seem to keep missing or only just getting organised in time I wanted to create a place for me and other disorganised people like me who are just starting to get exhibited.

Exhibition/Prize	Region	Closing Date
Bentley Art Prize	Bentley, NSW	25th July
Paddington Art Prize	Paddington, NSW	1st October
Cranleigh Art Show	Holt, ACT	21 September
Cliftons Art Prize	ACT and more	16th April
Strathnairn Squares - People's Choice Awards	Holt, ACT	31st August
Canberra Times Outdoor Art Show	Canberra, ACT	26th February
Canberra Botanical Art Exhibition	CSIRO Discovery Center, Canberra	September
Midwinter Art and Craft Fair	Yarralumla, ACT	20th June
Corangamarah Art Prize	Colac, VIC	4th May
Basil Sellers Art Prize	the University of Melbourne, VIC	24th June
Condition: Open for students aged 16-20
Benedict House Re-Art Award	Queanbeyan, NSW	November

Spiritualitree

Yes, it's one of those terms, hybrid terms that think they're very clever.  It's a tree filled with spiritual apes.  I did this sketch and started painting this many years ago and am really happy to have attacked and finally finished it.  I can't remember why I started this piece, what I was thinking but it has come down to just enjoying painting.

 Finally finished and pretty satisfied with this one.  Lots of intricate work and when it's back in its frame it looks good, complete, ready to hang at the Curtin Primary exhibition.

GCAP Exhibition

 Heading back to Canberra with a beautiful waxing moon in the distance above the wind farms near lake George.  Looking forward to making a trip to see these graceful monolithic turbines up close, with a picnic and a sketchpad.  A little bit hectic getting back to prepare for the GCAP exhibition.  This is my first exhibition since my deviation into the world of Unix, IT and motherhood.

 GCAP have a great little art space in the middle of suburbia in Harrison which opened with an exhibition of local artists on Saturday.  It was great meeting some of the Canetsy members and other Canberra artists.  Surprised that I wasn't more nervous to be putting my work out for public consumption, nice and relaxed atmosphere of artists happy to be coming together to exhibit in this new space.  Diverse works from local artists.

Painting - possibilities

So many possibilities when you start a piece, there is a particular idea, image, end product you try to work towards.  These paintings are more of the ones that I pulled out from a different lifetime, the life before children.  When I got into doing these ones I was getting so excited about how they were looking and suddenly every brush stroke seemed to just be ruining them.  Time for a break from them and some perspective.
Original sketch from around 2006.

 Added some definition with some beautiful Indian ink.  I have such bad luck with my beautiful Indian ink, one carpet and two other ink covered, child related incidents in this thankfully wooden floored house.

 Still pretty happy with how things are going at this stage.

 What have I done.

 

It's curled a bit but framing will fix that.  Every brush stroke I was adding with the pink was accompanied by "damn, what a mistake, white paint, damn".

I'm not sure If I like this or the other one in this series but I don't know what to do with either of them now.  At least I've got some high res pics of the original sketches.