Showcase Review: Shift

What can I say, my head is full, and needs to me milked – so crammed with concepts and crazy ideas, about what is art, what is an art career, and what the history of a single artist life in a complex world might look like.

Cycling backward, towards Lewis Carroll, and then reverberating through the troller’s mind catching glimpses of paradigms and eons. Icons floating and emerging spontaneously and then resting, dissolving from their iconic status.It’s not all about pretty pictures: it’s more like, wheels within wheels, and tumbling statues into the abyss, resurrecting into new forms, new thinking: a shift – a total quantum leap.
I have read the manuscript, and heard the sacred words, but find I am left alone to conquer my own thoughts and reconcile the incoming through my portals.

Chicken Fox, shy but sly, always looking, always finding, her eye is delicious and her mouth viscous. How can one keep up with a thinking artist, whose work emerges on flat panels from millions of words, scraped and sanded, washed away like the changing sands. Then deep penetration, Ernst like, excitement builds but slowly – spontaneity sets in as the chicken becomes a fox and the image arises almost without thought and so the dialogue begins.

I had an idea, a keen idea, I almost laughed out loud as my hands adroitly shifted space and time – little objects tumbling down the worm hole and remerging as if tossed back out by a mad hatter. I can do it, I really can do it, I can really do it well – how does it not break, this golden cord that stretches between objects and myself. Duchamp's mystic creatures, the clashing of the found and the ageless, death and life, solid and rusty like rock and old chromed metal, all told in a whimsical and confident tale.

I searched for my name, on what I thought was the sacred cow, only to discover that only the famous are allowed on a dead but living beast. I thought of the harlot who rides the beast in revelation, when worlds collide, and all is revealed, when the secrets of hearts are laid bare and the riches of the world are trampled under foot like magazines of despair written to justify anything but confess.

Then, I wandered back through time, to what I thought was an innocent time, but the writing was on the wall. I became a rabbit and leaped for joy, but the future the only future, emerged from the future of past writings, and spontaneously combusted in my head – I am no longer bound, but see promise in being a failure and jettison the life, I thought I owned and impart it’s trust to another – a sacrificial love.

 

Shift:  an art experience. by LM Noonan and HEW Che Fong at the Sunshine Coast University Gallery  -

1-27 February 2010.

More photos and commentary can be found on the …failed painter.

“to those who have ears let them hear”

my survey entry

The south west survey is an annual exhibition that is normally run on a bring in your piccy and pay an entry fee; they have a selection panel and hang what they feel is the best of the bunch and someone wins a cash prize.
This year they have done it differently - the gallery has appointed Brown Art, an art consultant business to curate the show. Pippa and David are Brown Art; they have toured the southwest, visiting artists' studios, or whatever workspace they have, and selected the artists rather than the art. Each selected artist then cracks out a work specifically for the show. This is my effort; its 1800 x 1200 mixed media on mdf. There is no prize for the show and if I haven't been deselected at the last fence, i should get a $250 appearance fee.
Yesterday i fell off my mountain bike (twice) and broke my collarbone, so, i am typing one handed and have just gone off doing capital letters. hurts like billy-o.

I don’t like it when people look at me that way.

I have almost finished NASA #10 – the great and long series of Caspar David Howard – the little white ghost of the art nether world. So here is a shot from the unfinished end of town – that’s the rough end of the studio.

This one has only taken a week so far – 5 minutes here, 20 minutes there and very few little worries. I suppose there is a point where I will have to think of the ultimate way of showing them. If I can do one a week (dreaming) then in 20 weeks I should be done – hmmm, maybe I should try and do two at once (nightmaring). I need a big white wall in a populated area, or thirty T-shirts and then write a paper on the joys of art as told by a small man in a Hardware uniform.

Here is a close up – it’s starting to energise a bit now and loose some of it’s simple cartoon feel. The little astro-priests need a final solution to finish them off. 

One day I might paint some work that has some sort of practical function – i.e. is sellable or reasonable enough to put on a wall – problem is I lack ambition in the business side of things and prefer to plod along on my own terms.

I found another snake yesterday, this time only a few metres from my studio. Fortunately it was so small it could fit in the palm of my hand. But, from small things, big things grow, so I better finish my renovations and plug the holes.

This is a really tiny snake, about as thick as my little finger at it’s biggest.

I went to a great art opening today – LAWRENCE DAWS, “The Promised Land”. He was one of the painters that inspired me as a  teenager, before and during my art college years. He was also the specially invited judge in my final year of my painting major – about 28 years ago. He had many of the qualities that I aspired too in an artist: symbolism, technique, mysticism, biblical references, the poetic, and  the ability to emphasize and imbue an object or subject way beyond it’s normal reckoning. At 82 he is still a great painter and mentor: much can be learnt from his art and career.

Also, I bumped into quite a few other artists, who sometimes come out of the woodwork to take a little peek and pick up a few crumbs – aren’t we a cute little species. Some of the artists I had not seen for quite a few years and had an opportunity to catch up and trade web stuff.

Well, off to another show on Thursday, which should be a hoot. Loretta (The Failed Painter) and her partner Hew Chee Fong have a joint show at the Local University entitled “Shift” – can’t wait.

Hey, I might use this part of NASA #9 as inspiration for a future Squarescape painting – that’s as soon as I finish the current one.

Face me or facsimile.

I am just starting to think about an artists talk that I will be presenting in a few weeks at Redcliffe Regional Gallery. The associated exhibition is entitled ‘How Artists see People” : so I thought I would focus on faces.

I am considering compiling a whole series of face pictures from the last 30 years of my artwork – if one can call it that. Just the faces only, compared and then discussed, bringing in references to other artists and so called art movements – whatever that means.

Generally I think of an artwork as whole thing and consider every part playing of another part. But, just isolating the faces, especially as mock Polaroids, does bring to light some interesting stuff.

Already, I have noticed a sense of character difference between the faces. Some artists, paint and draw like illustrators – they are great draughtsman but there figures are without soul. Other artists are all over the countryside stylistically and far less formal in their approach, but there figure work is full of life and expression.

Looking back over my drawings and paintings is something a self interested artist like myself does on a regular basis. This should prove to be not only an interesting and fun exercise,  but also illuminate another way of looking at myself and other people, Yada, Yada, Yada.