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 C-type photograph, 45 x 65 cm © Courtesy of the Artist
STEVE COX Steve Cox's art deals with the
darker side of the human psyche, and particularly that of the
adolescent. His exhibitions are filled with faces, painted uncomfortably
and uncompromisingly. Although composites of friends and colleagues,
or gleaned from the party pages of local rags and from amateur
photos on dating websites, Cox's faces are highly individualised.
Consciously or not, some of them are eerily reminiscent of the
artist's own features. Their stare is brazen, questioning, seditious.
Although his works are regularly
seen in public and commercials galleries, a Cox aficionado is
well advised to seek out the artist's works outside this rarefied
environment, and follow their appearance in group exhibitions
at rental galleries and artists' run spaces. It is here that
the new themes emerge, techniques and installations are challenged,
and new directions are tested. The inner ferocity was finally
allowed to emerge, primordial and undiluted, the alchemical mixture
of Ovidian metamorphoses and Darwinian atavisms, and perhaps
the Nitzschean exercise of out-monstering the monsters. In Old
Woman Pretending to be a Duck (2004, National Gallery of
Victoria) and Young Man Laughing (2005, Mornington Peninsula
Regional Gallery), the protagonists are consumed by their own
inner monsters, while bouncers from the eponymous series of paintings
(2005, mainly Private Collections) are portrayed through the
inner visage of their own demons, intoxicated on the cocktail
of power and rage. These works preceded and led in to the half-human
monsters at the Charles Nodrum Gallery in 2005, and to haunting
ghoulish scarecrows which dominated his bold installation at
the Red Gallery, Melbourne, in 2006. Cox's technically sophisticated paintings embody the artist's intimate knowledge of the working properties of watercolour and acrylic, and show his dexterity and ingenuity with these media. The depth of tone and colour, normally associated with more opaque paints, is achieved in a difficult and time-consuming process: multiple thin washes of pigment are laid down, and each layer is allowed to dry completely before applying the next, be it a thicker wash of colour, or a final highlight. The drying takes time; hence his practice of working on several canvasses or sheets of paper at the time. A chance visitor, stumbling into the artist's studio during this creative process, is greeted with an ingenious arrangement of desks and trestle tables stretching from the living room into the back garden. They're covered with a number of drying canvasses awaiting their turn for another layer of paint. Large sheets of paper are drying more prosaically, suspended by wooden pegs from the humble clothes line. The resulting images, built from the ground up, only reveal themselves in the final stages of their completion, not unlike a photograph that gradually reveals its mysteries from the depths of a dark room. Steve Cox shares his creative
space with his partner, the artist Daniel Dorall. The two work
in quite different ways - Dorall is best described as a sculptor,
a creator of miniature three-dimensional constructed realities.
His playful mise-en-scènes, innocent at the first glance,
reveal much darker under-currents upon closer examination. One
wonders whether, almost unaware, a certain dialogue occurs between
their works, their aesthetic and psychological directions. Although
both artists might be puzzled by this observation, one perceives
the inner demons from Cox's paintings re-enacted by Dorall's
miniature figures, while the large-scale portraits provide insightful
and revealing close-ups of minuscule featureless faces. © Eugene Barilo
von Reisberg, 2007  Lithograph on stone, 44.5 x 55.5 cm © Courtesy of the Artist
Paula Rego's Jane Eyre Since its publication in 1847, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre - one of the classic Victorian fictional autobiographies, filled with moralising incidents and sharply defined characters - has served as an inspiration for numerous artists, and has, as with her contemporaries Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, been re-interpreted for stage, film and television. Its cast of strong female characters, as well as passages abounding with complex physical, psychological and sexual tensions, struck a chord with Paula Rego and proved a natural source of inspiration. Each character in the novel is depicted forcefully and vividly, their facial features and physique deftly defined, and their individual attire minutely recorded. The flowing lines from Brontë's pen lend themselves easily to Rego's sharp eye & fertile imagination. In Rego's suite of 25 lithographs, we follow Jane Eyre - from her childhood at Gateshead in Girl Reading at Window, through her school years at Lowood in Schoolroom and Refectory, and to her adult life at Thornfield Hall. We meet Mr Rochester, Bertha and Adèle; we recognise the haughty Lady Ingram and her daughters in Getting Ready for the Ball, recoil at the stark features of Mr Brocklehurst in Inspection, and pity the doleful figure of Helen Burns in Jane & Helen. However, these lithographs are far from being mere illustrations for the novel. As with her previous series based on literary sources shown in this gallery - Nursery Rhymes, Peter Pan, Pendle Witches and A Children's Crusade - the works are replete with the artist's own interpretations of the characters and scenes, frequently imbued with autobiographical references, and informed by a contemporary analysis of classic tales. Jane Eyre is given the full range of emotions that the artist can muster. In Crumpled, we see her crushed and almost lifeless on the floor of the Red Room at Gateshead, in Night, deliberating on her course of action before taking flight, and in Crying, emotionally annihilated. Yet all her inner strength is gathered in Come to Me, inspired by a crucial moment of the novel where, in the aftermath of the fire, the blinded Rochester calls out for her. Depicted against the crimson of the fire, she is seen here torn by conflicting emotions. Rego the narrating artist is taking over from Brontë the artful narrator. Jane Eyre also inspired a prequel, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which focuses on the fate of Bertha Rochester. Rhys's interpretation - which sought to explain her sad state by implicating Rochester in her descent into madness, and thus to rehabilitate her character - plays its part in Rego's vision. In Bertha, which T.G. Rosenthal refers as "a very un-Victorian image of a most Victorian character, the mad woman in the attic", Rego delves into her own iconography to portray Bertha as a highly sexed and sensuous woman; and in Biting, she sides with her in rebelling against her fate. Contemporary theories of the double arguably inform the artist's choice of using the same model for Jane and Bertha; this comes to the fore in The Keeper, where Jane is imagined contemplating the grim possibility of her own future as the second Mrs Rochester. All three - Jane, Bertha and the artist herself - coalesce in the single pensive image In the Comfort of the Bonnet. The figure is eerily reminiscent of period photographs of the widowed Queen Victoria. Rego researched the fashions of the Victorian era, hiring period props and costumes, and playing dress-ups with her models. She dons this finery herself, complete with ball gown, chandelier earrings and sumptuous necklace in Self-Portrait with the Children, while her granddaughter Grace is the very picture of the Victorian upper-class young girl as Adèle in Pleasing Mr Rochester and La Ligue des Rats. The interaction between Adèle and Mr Rochester in the closely related Pleasing Mr Rochester and Dancing for Mr Rochester introduces the theme of nascent infantile eroticism, a controversial subject which reverberates through Rego's entire oeuvre, including her previous series of Peter Pan and A Children's Crusade. She gives full flight to her love of period detail in Getting Ready for the Ball, and plays the role of the interior decorator in Pleasing Mr Rochester with its heavy draperies, mantelpiece and furniture. This lithograph also features a curious painting in the background: the shipwreck with the drowning woman is based on Jane's description of one of her own drawings in the novel and serves a fascinating double purpose. It reminds us that Jane was an accomplished watercolourist and, on a quite different plane, works as a symbolic embrace of one artist with another to bridge their different chosen media and the gap of the intervening years. Several works in the suite appear more distantly related to Jane Eyre and read as an essentially visual response by Paula Rego to the written word. Loving Bewick, for example, evokes Eyre's fascination with natural history and, incorporating mythical aspects of the pelican, relates iconographically to Rego's earlier work, Baa Baa Black Sheep. In Dressing him up as Bluebeard, she dwells on Jane's impression of the upper floors of Thornfield Hall as a Bluebeard's attic, which contained several sequestered wives. The enigmatic Scarecrow is open to the viewer's interpretation, but looks uncannily like Rochester's imagined martyrdom at the hands of Bertha and Jane. This suite also marks her first full-scale foray into lithography. The works were produced during a six-month period during 2001-2002 at the Curwen Studios, Cambridge, with the master printer Stanley Jones. The series was published and exhibited by the artist at Marlborough in 2003. All works in the suite are reproduced and individually discussed in T.G.Rosenthal's Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work, Thames & Hudson, London, 2003. (Extracts from the book were used in preparation of this essay). © Eugene Barilo
von Reisberg, 2006
 Oil on linen, 23 carat gold leaf on wood, 100 x 240 cm Collection of the Artist © Courtesy of the Artist
Jim Thalassoudis - Hesperian " But there's no such thing
as a black cloud", a lady was heard to remark while looking
at a recent painting by Jim Thalassoudis. Jim Thalassoudis' paintings result from this intense observation of the sky and its minute changes in hue and colour. His works force you to raise your eyes above the street with its incessant traffic and loud neon signs, to where the sunset glimmers against the Victorian domes of town halls and railway stations, and where, the slender tips of cypresses and pines brush the clouds subtly changing their tints of yellows, pinks, blues and purples. You can be sure to see what the artist captures - every colour of the city atmosphere often sharply nuanced by urban pollution. The genesis of these works dates back to the late 1980s when the artist became interested in the interplay of image and sculpture in Gothic and Byzantine altarpieces, and particularly in the way their frames imitated the architecture of the building. This led to a series of works that echoed Byzantine icons in their heavily sculpted and bejewelled oklads. Secular imagery, however, replaced the religious. Trees, towers, domes and clouds were encased in gilded, sculpted frames of the artist's own making - often infused with design elements inspired by the images within; these ranged from elegant Edwardian architecture, through the angularity of 1930s Art Deco skyscrapers, to the idiosyncratic geometry of freeway sound barriers. The result, whether free-standing or mountable as a wall piece, with its blending of painting and sculpture and its utilisation of varying, often conflicting, artistic styles, was always in keeping with Thalassoudis' post-modern idiom. As the series progressed, the paintings freed themselves from their monumental frames - the two literally separating to hang side by side to co-exist as elegant pairs. These self-contained land and skyscapes would hang beside their gilt or graphite panels (often arranged in multiples as a frieze) which in turn echoed the mood and atmosphere of the painting; they could be read as a minimalist wall sculptures or, if you will, a constructivist black square in 3D. The current exhibition continues Thalassoudis' painting / sculpture exploration. The diptychs and polyptychs are now increasingly replaced by more varied combinations where the artist's sculpted frames do not necessarily surround a painting in a traditional way, but are rather interspersed within it or, in some instances, are completely surrounded by it. In his works on paper, these sculpted objects morph into elegant phantom squares of gold leaf or graphite, and float beside his exquisitely painted glimpses of the sky, with coloured clouds floating by, or, in some instances, anchored by a glistening spire or a towering tree-top. The execution is so fine as to induce the eye into believing that we are looking at the latest production of a new-fangled printing technique rather than a painterly creation of the human hand. The leit-motif of this exhibition still remains the Hesperian: defined by the Greeks as "of the evening, western", the word alludes to that mystic land in mythology - to the west, beyond the Arcadian mountains - where the sun rested after its daily journey in a garden where beautiful nymphs, the Hesperides, guarded the fruit of the sacred apple trees. But the artist keeps a firm grip on the pulse of everyday reality. "Looking west at evening", Thalassoudis says, "you do not find Arcadia What you may find is seductive beauty in a sunset tarnished by pollution. The grass is not greener elsewhere, no matter how beautiful the vista is." "The seduction of momentary beauty in an evening sky is an elusive thing, but here it is frozen in paint on canvas. The gilding alludes to perfection, timelessness and preciousness; however, it is worn and tarnished. In these paintings, even the gold has aged like human skin" This touring exhibition
is a collaborative project between the artist, the Cowwarr Art
Space in Gippsland, the Penny School Gallery, Maldon, and the
Charles Nodrum Gallery in Melbourne. It will give art lovers
in Victoria a chance to admire and acquire work by this gifted
South Australian painter. Each exhibition will be subtly different
to best suit each venue in turn.  Photographed by Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, 2003 © Courtesy of BvR Arts Management Geoffrey Goldie - Family of Man Geoffrey Goldie (b. 1921, Port Fairy, Victoria) pursued his early impulse to draw first with encouragement from his family and later by drawing portraits of his fellow soldiers during the Second World War, when the 19-year-old budding artist was posted to Western Australia, Darwin and New Guinea. After the war, Goldie moved to Melbourne, where he studied at the noted George Bell School. He has exhibited regularly since the 1950s and held numerous solo shows predominantly in Melbourne and Adelaide. In 1993, Goldie was given a retrospective exhibition at the Westpac Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre. The current exhibition, The Family of Man, focuses on Goldie's mature period. It reflects the artist's striving to extend his vision beyond its Australian subject matter in a painterly search that has taken him on frequent and exotic travels - India, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Japan being among his most recurrent destinations. The artist's genial and productive collaboration with the Indian classical dancer Chandrabhanu has resulted in his work being further influenced by Oriental aesthetics. He became the principal stage artist and costume designer for Chandrabhanu's performances, including those at the Malaysian National Dance Company in 1977, The Open Stage from 1977 to 1985, The Bharatam Dance Company at the George Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, from 1985 to 1995, and most recently at the Alexander Theatre, Monash University, in 2003. Goldie's artistic explorations and diverse experiences have culminated in a unique and inimitable oeuvre. An underlying formalist geometry (mainly from Bell) is overlaid with tersely expressive figures (principally from Schiele), contrasted with a more freely painted abstraction as ground and further enriched with the decorative patterns and jubilant élan of his stage sets and costume designs. The resulting vision encompasses the multifarious Oriental influences - the artist's lifelong passion - and celebrates the human form with frank and open sensuality. © Eugene Barilo
von Reisberg, 2004  Oil on canvas, 71 x 91.5 cm Collection of the Artist © Courtesy of the Artist Michael Kelly Driving through the bush to Michael Kelly's studio in Dunmoochin, I realised how inextricable his surroundings are from his paintings. Sites previously seen only in his works were suddenly appearing left and right: the faded blue patch of an abandoned car on the edge of a river bed, or the white arch of the doorway in front of charred remains of the entrance to Clifton Pugh's old studio. Michael Kelly is predominantly an urban painter. His move to the bush in 1999 heralded a brief interlude in his oeuvre, as he set out to depict the new landscape around him - albeit punctured by what the artist calls "the forgotten and abandoned aspects of the urban environment" - a rusting car, a towering chimney, a blown-out tyre The city, however, beckoned, and continues to draw the artist back. Michael Kelly is a member of the 'Friday Painters', a small group of artists that includes Rick Amor, Philip Davey and Mary Hammond among others. Every Friday they meet for outdoor painting and sketching trips - moving around Melbourne with their easels and painting boxes until they find a new area, subject or site which inspires them to action. The group has become almost an institution and achieved enough recognition to merit an extensive exhibition currently on view at the Geelong Art Gallery. Direct contact with the landscape subject is a strong tradition in Western art - and continues to play an essential role in Michael Kelly's painting. "Whilst most of my works are produced - or at least finished in the studio, I have painted en plein air since 1985. It has been this practice which has given me sensitivity to the variations in light and atmosphere, caused by the changing times of day, season and weather which ultimately determine the mood and key of work." Yet in spite of a preference for the more desolate areas of the urban environment - the edges of freeways, abandoned buildings, run-down industrial sites - the paintings themselves pick up visual realities often overlooked, with swiftly painted highlights firing up vermilions of sunset skies or cooling down shimmering silvers of twilight clouds. Looking at Michael Kelly's paintings is akin to capturing and freezing a passing moment, preserving forever unexpected glimpses of the ever changing urban landscape - be it in historic, atmospheric, or artistic terms. They form a memory of places and visions that may have altered by the time the artist has folded up his easel. They will almost certainly alter again before our own eyes, yet not in his paintings which will continue to evoke and revive their fleeting presence.
 Oil on linen, 61 x 111.5 cm Collection of the Artist © Courtesy of the Artist
David Warren David Warren (b.1945, Melbourne), painter, teacher and graphic artist (lithography and photogravure), received popular acclaim early in his career, and exhibited since the 1960s at such prestigious venues as Gallery A and Powell Street Graphics in Melbourne, and Holdsworth Galleries in Sydney. He taught painting and graphics in Victoria and Tasmania, and in the early 1980s worked and studied in the United States. He was the winner of the Perth International Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Western Australia (1970), and has been a finalist in the Warrnambool Print Prize, the Kedumba Drawing Award & the Dobell Prize for Drawing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The artist currently lives and works in Melbourne and exhibits regularly in Melbourne, Sydney & Brisbane. His works have entered the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Warrnambool Art Gallery, the City of Bendigo, Gippsland Art Gallery, the Artbank, PRATT Graphics Collection (New York) and private collections in Australia and overseas. Current exhibition gathers a representative selection of his recent works. Warren's male and female nudes are poised in a state of dreamy fragile sensuality. Their averted gaze does not confront the viewer, allowing space for reflection and contemplation. The limited colour palette of the background and dramatically lit foregrounds focuses attention on delicate skin tones of the models and rich textures of the draperies. Warren's landscapes, inspired by the Victorian coastline, take the viewer on a journey that stretches from East Gippsland, around the Mornington Peninsula, and along the Great Ocean Road. Executed in the same precise and observant style, his breathtaking expanses of land and sea are imbued with a peculiar intangible atmosphere, haunted with premonition of human presence. © Eugene Barilo
von Reisberg, 2002  Mixed media on canvas, 31 x 41 cm © Estate of Elwyn Lynn Elwyn Lynn Elwyn Lynn had the distinction of achieving national prominence in virtually all the diverse areas of his interests: artist, curator, critic and editor. His contribution to any one of these fields would have brought him to prominence1. But first and foremost he was an artist who built and consolidated his position as the major texture painter of his generation. From 1958 till the end of his life he held more than 50 solo exhibitions, participated in more than 150 group shows, received numerous art awards, and his works are represented in all National and State galleries, many regional, university and private collections in Australia and overseas. Born in 1917 at Canowindra and settling in Junee from 1919, Lynn's childhood was spent in rural New South Wales, and his early experience of Australian terrain and its landscape as "vision of land that is as silent and as monumental as the landscapes of Russell Drysdale, impoverished earth's crust, whose furrows and maculations testify to ancient suffering, and embody presentiments of further dreadful upheavals" reverberated throughout his oeuvre2. It was, however, the encounter with the works of contemporary Spanish texture painters - most notably Antoni Tàpies - at the 1958 Venice Biennale that heralded his departure from his early tachiste and neo-expressionist work, and set the tone for his mature work in its search for pictorial expression of the Australian terrain. Lynn's heavy textures were created by mixing polyvinyl acetate (PVA) with sand, cement or plaster, after which it was left to dry in the sun or near a radiator. With the upper level drying and hardening first, its skin could be cut, sliced, poked, prodded and distressed, pushed into folds and corrugations3. In the 1980s, however, no longer able to carry heavy buckets of sand or cement, he started to look for new ways "of keeping the surface alive" and discovered the natural physical metamorphosis of quick-drying acrylic resin. When brushed over a base layer of slow-drying PVA and left in the sun, this would crack and pull itself apart revealing the underlying colour; his dexterity in manipulating this new material resulted in the appearance of rich complex textures which could reveal several colours beneath its crackled surface. To this he attached rocks, timber, twine-covered rolls and other objets trouvés to further increase the textural complexity of his works and establish the ambiguity of the picture plane. We see Lynn of the 1960s as primarily a landscape painter but he had long been concerned with Susanne Langer's theoretical writing - specifically her 1953 Feeling & Form, which he reviewed for the CAS Broadsheet - and her belief in art's ability to "symbolically represent emotional qualities, atmosphere and literary characteristics". His interest in potency of symbolism and the metaphorical use he made of the cross, the mandala, the arch and the portal, further enriched his iconographic language. And where the meaning of the work is not immediately accessible, he often uses titles as cues to focus and guide the viewer. With his retirement from the Power Institute in 1983, his painting took on renewed energy with greater risks being taken in composition and structure, together with a broadening interest in politics, history and literature as subject matter for art. Nancy Borlase's statement from 1971 remained particularly apt: "The durability of the work of Elwyn Lynn must surely reside in his ability to continually renew his work within the context of changing developments, without any change of direction"4. Unlike many artists whose late works tend to be pale repetitions of their early work, the 80s and 90s paintings show no lack of inspiration. His enduring interest in both the theory and the practice of art, and his openness in all that was new are the chief qualities that will ensure his legacy will endure. © Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, 2002
Footnotes:
 Pencil on paper, 50 x 70 cm Private Collection © Courtesy of the Artist
Massimo Speroni - Images
of Desire at Charles Nodrum Gallery This is the first exhibition of works by Massimo Speroni in Australia. His sensuous and idyllic nudes have won acclaim and admiration in his native Italy, and have found a faithful burgeoning following among Australian collectors. Massimo - or Max to his friends - comes from Milan, internationally renowned for its artistic & architectural treasures and recognised as a fashion Mecca of the world. Upon his arrival in Australia, Max, 27, artist and graphic designer, went through a variety of experiences to make his ends meet - barman, waiter, courier, dancer, model, cleaner... jack of all trades. Art comes naturally to him. Speroni continuously drew portraits and other works for his friends and family in Italy. This trend continued in Australia as he gave his works as presents. These were soon noticed, and, word by mouth, Max received his first commissions and numerous requests and encouragements for his first Australian one-man-show. At a first glance a visitor to his exhibition can be forgiven for assuming that the beautiful images on the walls are counterparts to sport ads or athletic magazine pin-ups. The perfect bodies with rippling musculature, alone or in pairs, waxed and buffed, encircle the gallery walls like later day statues from an ancient Roman arena. Max makes no apologies for this effect, as he is health and fashion conscious, watches his diet and works out strenuously. As with any artist, his works are a projection and extension of himself. Perfection is not a dirty word. There is another side to his works. Male form is arguably the hardest one to draw. Max, however, achieves it with a seeming lightness and effortlessness, which evidences his ability and masterfulness as a professional draughtsman. Exquisitely drawn in pencil and chalk on coloured textured paper, the figures in fact are but outlines of bodies, delicate shadows and careful highlights are used to chisel the musculature. But the works are not as much an emphasis on the powerful physical male as it is on the emotional male. Words like languid, erotic, sensuous, sensual and sexual spring to mind as you move along. Massimo does not concede to a particular source of influence on his art, no single artist is cited as having had a profound effect on his oeuvre. However, the unmistakable presence of Italian masters is his works is evident, even if it is but on the artist's unconscious level. Max has been surrounded since childhood by the splendid treasures that this northern Italian city has to offer its visitors. Museums, streets and squares are scattered with ancient Roman monuments, where an image of the perfect male nude was of pivotal significance in depicting gods, emperors and heroes. The interest in human body was revived during the Italian Renaissance, and the academic study of a male nude was transcribed into the art curriculum with such force of conviction by Italian artists, notably Leonardo da Vinci and the Carracci Brothers, that it has changed little to this day. Best pupils of the European art academies were rewarded with lengthy sojourns to Italy, where they continued to study and copy with inspiration the many male forms on offer - statues, frescoes, paintings, architectural decorations and willing models - abundantly available in this artistically bejewelled South of Europe. Speroni's nudes recall and pay homage to the late Hellenistic sculpture and luscious male nudes of the late Renaissance and the Baroque period. The musculature in his drawings is flexed, tensed and exaggerated, bodies curve and entwine, and the emphasis is laid on erogenous zones. However, the artist does not strive in his drawings for religious exultation, or ecstatic thrill of pain so emphatically pursued by his predecessors. His drawings rather suggest the fragility in human emotions and in masculine intimacy. Disturb them, and these beautiful bodies will fall to pieces, vanish from view, blown away from the delicately drawn surface. There is also a certain amount of voyeurism attached to these works. Most of them are concentrated on torsos, shoulders, backs and buttocks. Heads are rarely seen. When they are, they look inwards, the eyes usually closed. The viewer never feels confronted, being able to see without being seen, to admire without being questioned, to desire without a feeling of guilt. This exhibition is a part of the rich visual arts programme of the Melbourne's Gay & Lesbian Midsumma Festival, adding a touch of exotique to its multifaceted diversity. It is on view at Charles Nodrum Gallery, 267 Church Street, Richmond, until Sunday, 4th February 2001. © Eugene Barilo
von Reisberg, 2001  PVA on board, 122 x 244 cm Private Collection © Estate of Peter Upward
Peter Upward: The Subject
of Art Peter Upward was considered the purest of abstract gestural painters working in Australia in the early 1960s. Born in Melbourne in 1932, he studied at the Julian Ashton School in Sydney under John Passmore. His first exhibition of abstract paintings was held in 1959 at the Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne and was followed by a show at Max Hutchinson's Gallery A, where he was closely associated with Clement Meadmore. In a foreword to this exhibition in 1960, Upward entered the then-vigorous debate concerning figurative and abstract art. Of his own work he wrote: I see no grand subjective designs in nature, in the human situation Today, the Subject of Art is Art I can only express myself freely and pay homage to my tradition in a style unencumbered by allusions to the world outside the painting. It is not by accident or obedience to fashion that my pictures do not contain calculated references to nature. Sensitivity is misused and cheapened when it masquerades as an instrument for probing existence and unifying the disparate. However, his work was clearly at odds with both aspects of Melbourne art at the time. The Antipodeans, who had just published their manifesto, would have perceived Upward as the epitome of those 'tachistes, action painters', for whom they held such antipathy. Nor was he closely attuned to the more formal, emblematic abstraction of French, Kemp, Johnson and Crawford. So in 1960, he moved to Sydney, where he set up studio in Potts Point near Olsen, Rapotec, Rose and Hessing. Here was a livelier urban atmosphere and a more congenial climate for abstract expressionism. He held two critically acclaimed exhibitions before again moving, this time to London in 1962. His work was quickly seen to be exemplary of its type. John Olsen noted in 1961: "It offends those who think a painting must be representative With Upward's paintings, it is impossible to look at them without thinking of a man working, acting and moving behind them." And in 1964, Daniel Thomas added in response to the exhibition of paintings sent from London to Rudy Komon's: "No one could fail to sense the physical movement, the hand behind the brush or preferably the art behind the brush, or the whole body. It offers the same abstract human pleasure as athletics or classical dance The works are about themselves. Their meandering lush lines are not seismographs of his emotions, but are homages to their own self-sufficiency." Robert Hughes considered Upward closer to the principles of abstract expressionism than his contemporaries, such as Rapotec, whose paintings 'have many figurative overtones': Upward's flat white tablets are merely a neutral ground in which the black gesture happens. There is no painted relationship between sign and surface and, though the space has an Oriental infinity, no illusion of a third dimension arises from it. The paintings neither imply nor illustrate ideas When his brush strikes the hardboard, Upward is on his own in the middle of a self-made arena. The painting becomes a form of limited meditation. Proportionately, then, Upward plays a harder gamble than Hessing or Rapotec: his aesthetic strips his sensibility to be quick: he knows the meaning of Auden's line, 'a poem should not mean but be.' Upward's early work was also compared to that of the American, Franz Kline. Despite a resemblance, the basic nature of their respective work was quite different. Most importantly, Upward's inspiration is Oriental, not American. In her 1976 exhibition catalogue, Jackie Menzies wrote: In Upward's work, there is a debt to Zen in the act of splashing paint on quickly and freely, an act practised by Zen artists to convey suddenness, the inspirational flash of Zen enlightenment. As with Zen ink painting, it is the depth of blacks, the rhythm of line, the relationship to the white space, which determine the expressiveness and the effectiveness of each work Upward was the only Australian Abstract Expressionist to work in a calligraphic vein. In the early 1960s when he was doing these works, other Australian Abstract Expressionists were still making some reference to the landscape. The artist stayed in London through the 1960s, exhibiting in England and on the Continent. Links were forged with the influential English interior designer David Hicks, who purchased a number of his works. Upward kept in touch with his Australian public through his friend and business manager Horst Liepolt and exhibitions at the Rudy Komon Gallery. His paintings also featured in prominent Sydney buildings designed by the architect Harry Seidler, an avid early collector of his works. While in London, his work underwent a significant change. Colour had made a limited appearance in Upward's art throughout the 1960s, but came emphatically to the fore in the later part of the decade. The causes seem fairly involved. Upward was always interested in the ideas of his times and to his passion for jazz were added an interest astrology, the Cabbala, social change and drugs (he experimented with LSD) - all of which appear to have played their part. Contemporary critics described his colours as psychedelic, but he referred to them as "tropical". Menzies wrote: "In the late 1960s Upward explored the possibilities of Occult Symbolism and moved away from gestural painting. At that time he was particularly concerned with the Symbolic Cabbalistic use of colour. When he decided to return to gestural painting, colour was incorporated. Until then, Upward had avoided colour in his calligraphic paintings as he felt it introduced too many complications" Upward returned to Sydney in 1971 and continued experimenting with form, colour and media. He moved away from the rectangular to the circular canvas and from pva to epoxy resin, which was poured on to the canvas and was not touched by hand or brush. The results were unique. Jessica Lane reported in 1973: 'the newest Upwards with their vibrant circular surfaces that glow with colour are far cry from those heavy black brush strokes which dominated his early works'. In an interview with Sandra Hall later that year, Upward further explained his move to the circular canvas: "I got very pissed off with the idea of corners. I'd been decorating a house and I always seemed to end up in a bloody corner." He bought some circular stretchers and immediately took to the new format. "After that everything sort of fell in placeIt is a much more natural shape for me to work in." Music - and especially jazz - continued to play an important role behind the artist's inspiration. "I paint with musical impulse, the same impulse as musicians when they improvise. My paintings are a series of chords and notes." In the late 1970s, Peter Upward focussed on drawing and printmaking. Teaching commitments led to a lower output than previously and a renewed interest in the human figure. Rare examples of this period are included in the present exhibition. The artist died suddenly from a heart attack in 1983 at the age of 51. John Olsen, who had been a lifelong friend since their student days, wrote in 1984: "To those of us who knew him, Peter Upward was a man of charm, wit and style. He refused to be bored and everything about him was based on spontaneity and improvisation. When he believed he had said all he had to say, he simply remarked, 'I've made my contribution, why torture the muse? We must not turn champagne into vinegar'." © Eugene Barilo
von Reisberg, 2000  Oil on canvas, 122 x 214 cm Private Collection © Courtesy of the Artist
Kristin Headlam: Public Park Melbourne's public parks have recently become a pilgrimage destination for wedding photographers as a detour between the church ceremony and the forthcoming reception. Laid put in a formal European tradition and frequently featuring an historic building, the gardens easily lend themselves to the romantic nature of wedding photography. The parties and couples are loosely posed in groups reminiscent of Watteau-esque fêtes galantes and outdoor conversation pieces by Gainsborough and Devis. The very pageantry of the event is a subconscious homage to the fairy tale wedding of the Princess of Wales. The resulting image is often one of nostalgia for (and pertinence to) a distant aristocratic past, for both the garden layout and wedding dresses stem from 19th-century designs suited to the tastes of a wealthy aristocratic elite. Kristin Headlam's paintings do not strive to present formal wedding portraits but snapshots of the groups caught off-guard at informal moments. The reality pierces through an idyllic escapism of wedding photography, as the artist points to incongruities of the scene and invites viewers to question and discuss the traditional and the accepted. Headlam points out what the voyeuristic eye of a camera extracts most of all - the aesthetic and social anachronism of a wedding picture as an institution. She explores the roles played by the participants in this pageant and delves into the subconscious meaning of their part in the ritual. Her paintings are not recorded statements but open-ended questions of visual experiences. Why does the bride appear so detached, mysterious, cold and unattainable, like an iceberg floating on the waves of voluminous skirts and clouds of tulle? Why do the bridesmaids shift the sexual focus onto themselves by the tactile sensuality of exposed shoulders and plunging necklines? Why is the groom rarely to be seen next to the bride outside the formal picture, and why is his gleaming leer at once triumphant and predatory? And why does the main erotic chemistry of the occasion take place not between the bride and the groom, but between the bride and the wedding photographer? The current exhibition in itself is curiously, in a way, a marriage of the artist's two predominant genres - landscape and portraiture. The figures are drawn with a high degree of individual characterisation and psychological penetration. The garden landscapes, though now more fully lit and peopled, retain the mysterious and erotic appeal of the earlier series. Headlam draws parallels between the artifice of life and the artifice of nature. The traditional wedding photograph is compared to the layout of public parks - both strive for a high degree of informality, checked by human control. The nature's beauty - whether the gothic austerity of tree trunks or the rococo lusciousness of exuberant flowerbeds - complements flamboyant outfits of the wedding party. Its majestic silence creates a perfect backdrop for the characters of this play. © Eugene Barilo
von Reisberg, 1999 |