humananimalsmall

Various projects, and lack of an internet connection at home, have doomed this blog to be yet another floating digital void. However in my own vague way I’m determined to continue with it; this sense that it may be useful in some way, I’m just not sure how yet. The attached pdf shows one of my latest mini-projects: a poster of my PhD topic at the University of Newcastle. The University is running a research poster competition, with some rather desirable shopping vouchers as prizes, and this is my entry. If I win a prize I’ve promised myself a new pair of trainers.

The child on the poster ended up looking remarkably like my daughter, and I’m reading Patrick O’Brian novels at the moment, which probably explains the Darwinesque and Age of Exploration references. KS describes the twirly bits around the edges as ‘flourishes’ which I thought was a nice term. O’Brian’s historial novels are set during the Napoleonic Wars, focus on naval actions, and my daughter was named after one of the British Navy’s ships: The Sophie.

My PhD research focuses on contemporary art that ‘challenges the species barrier’; that is, it interrogates the line between the human and the non-human animal. I’m particularly interested in art of the Asia Pacific region from about 1990 onwards. And I’m also interested in finding out whether there are any parallel strategies emerging between writers and visual artists working in this area. I’ll talk more about it another time. At the moment I’m considering taking six months out of the PhD program so I can concentrate on other work.

It may be worth listing the projects that are diverting my attention away from studio work just now: I’m trying to get three group exhibitions (Landscape +, Strange Tales, and Year of the Bird) off the ground.  I’m just about to start a major project, co-writing a book for the University, it needs to be finished by early next year. And my daughter is now two years old and at the height of toddler hyperactivity. Every day is a marathon, I collapse into bed most nights at 8 o’clock, very rock n’ roll.

I’m currently working on two distinct bodies of work in the studio: one for Year of the Bird and the other for Strange Tales. The Year of the Bird (YOTB) imagery is based on natural history illustration, with a bit of Hopcroft subversion thrown in for good measure. I’m trying to paint them in a precise, detailed, emphatic way. I’m down to a triple O paintbrush and find myself holding my breath when I’m laying down the paint. It’s a bit like being a surgeon: one quiver of a finger and the whole thing’s stuffed. The bird imagery is sourced from various bird watcher manuals and encyclopedias. I tried to concentrate on Tasmanian native birds, but found that it was difficult to get good enough reference material. As it is I’m using one book on Australian birds and another on New Guinea species. The New Guinea one is particularly well illustrated.

My birds are wearing corsets, high heels or weighed down with jewellery. A wagtail will have its tail bound with ribbon. A puff chested pigeon has breast implants. And a hunting falcon is wearing a kinky  studded leather hood. I plan to have birds swathed in plastic surgery bandages, obese birds, birds with tattoes, shaved birds and birds with big hair. Why? Partly just because I like the imagery, I always imagine whippets wearing corsets (something about the shape of their ribcage) but also because I wanted to question what it means to be female, what we do to ourselves, our notions of beauty, how we control and confine ourselves. A bird, obviously, signifies freedom and beauty. I liked the idea of flipping the imagery around, so that I was doing to birds what women do to themselves, or rather what they experience. I like ordinary expressions like ‘they shoot horses, don’t they? ‘ and ‘they wouldn’t do it to an animal’ and this pretty much summarises my strategy.

Most of these bird paintings are very small, 30cm square at most, with some as small as 10cm long. I’m trying to do less: I tend to overload imagery and feel that each painting has to be stuffed full of colour, meaning and pattern (like the cliche of a writer’s first novel: long on ideas but short on narrative and character development). I’m trying to execute a single image on each canvas, without fiddling, revising, adding, elaborating or exaggerating what I’m trying to achieve. I admire painters like Richard Wastell for his ability to freeze a single image, treat it like a frame from a movie, relying on the image to do its work. At the same time there’s this eternal tension. When I execute a single image, I feel strangely disapointed, like I could or should have done more, that I somehow shortchanged the viewer. Daft really.

The backgrounds of these little paintings are bright and monochrome. At the moment I’m working on a base of vivid pink and one of lime green. A no brainer technical flaw has already asserted itself: I should have mixed extra of the background colour because when it comes time to tidy up the edges of the form, and paint over some errors in the preliminary drafting, I’m going to have to try and match the shade. The green should be quite easy, it was just pigment plus white, but the pink was earthed with a little bit of red/brown and this will be more difficult to replicate.

I’m thinking of painting little birds, finches, in make up colours and title the series ‘How would sir like his finch?’ Avon brochures are my current guilty pleasure (along with historial novels) and I was going to appropriate their mineral make up colours and names. Some of the names are great: Toasted Rose, Island Pearl, Tip Top Taupe. As a writer I get great enjoyment from that kind of descriptive banality. And some of the colours are so far removed from nature that it’s quite intriguing to speculate when and where a women would wear them. A bit like a bird watching enthusiast, I keep an eye out for some of Avon’s more adventurous metallics when I’m out and about.