Julie Green

6 June - 4 July     Two drawings 2018/2019  

Julie Green is not big. If you were to meet her you would likely think of her as a petite woman. Who’s eyes begin to sparkle as she describes a life that is anything but small.

From high school in the eastern suburbs to art school with time off in New York to study tap dancing and textile design. The bands, the galleries, on to Europe back to Sydney, finish art school to find a job working for Ray Hughes in his art gallery that simultaneously celebrated artistic endeavor and defied categorization. She went on to work in a bookstore before travelling across Canada’s subarctic tundra with Louis Nowra and Vincent Ward researching Ward’s epic film Map of the Human Heart. Back in Sydney she opened her own gallery, which for her became a meditation on verbal and nonverbal expression. There was an M.A. in art therapy and then in 2000 study at Charlie Sheard’s studio school that “made the bottom fall out of my taste bucket”. Since then she has been working in community art and of course painting and drawing.

Standing in front of Julie’s two drawings, it’s their size and the scale of her marks that is arresting. It’s big and Julie explains, “after 20 years of sero-negative arthritis a new biological drug treatment Humira gave me back my body”. That was a couple of years ago when Trump was in power and Sydney gasped under a blanket of smoke. Julie’s “fucked-up American flag” and heroically defiant tree are swathed in a celebration of mark making that revels in her new found freedom. She explained that she lay on the paper sheets first stretching toe to finger to mark her scale on the drawing. It follows that the arc of her drawn line is the arc of her reach. In this way Julie observes the idea that expressionist art is the physical measure of the artist while a reading of it’s subject is a measure of the observer’s intellect.

It might be a long bow to draw but in an art work there is a marriage between the artist and the viewer. Each arriving at roughly the same spot from different directions. For a moment caught in a single image before departing on divergent paths, each carrying perhaps, for a while at least some echo of their shared meditation. And so it is with Julie’s drawings.

Tony Twigg

Guy Morgan

02 February - 07 March      The Scorpion's Claw Nebula 

Link to artist's website

Guy Morgan’s painting fits the spectre of the universe into SLOT! This ghost of light is the Scorpion’s Claw Nebula, a large constellation near the center of the Milky Way between Libra and Sagittarus, reminding us that this incomprehensible large astronomic fact fits into our mythology of the zodiac.

At the age of 7 Guy Morgan “discovered he was good at art”. By 18 he was enrolled in one of the world's great art schools, London’s St. Martins School of Art where he gave up painting for graphic art. At 25 he was on a plane heading for Australia when he decided to go into advertising.  After 35 years in the Oz-ad-biz and with worn out eyes he started painting with an eyedropper!

Another version is that at St. Martins School of Art Guy became dissatisfied with the direct connection between his hand and the marks he made. After travelling to Australia he enrolled in the Master of Arts program at the Sydney College of the Arts where he began painting with an eyedropper as a way of distancing himself from mark making– then an image of space evolved. 

Like the nebula and Guy’s biography, his painting invites two readings. One as a pretty good illustration of space that carries all the culturally imbedded information we have about the unknowable space it represents.  The second as a spectre of abstract art. A ghost of High Modernism, Jackson Pollock is a well-known example of artists who distanced themselves from the mark making process. Pollock dribbled and flicked paint from his brush; Morgan used an eyedropper, in both cases inviting gravity into the mark making process with the effect of encouraging the paint to behave as paint.  This paint that represents nothing more than itself sits on a surface that is flat. There is no spatial consideration– a fact that Guy observes in a traditionally modernist manner with a narrow line top and bottom, not a pictorial device but a consequence of the selvedge of the canvas. He reminds us again that canvas is a surface, paint is paint and art is fact, as space itself is fact, both known and unknown.

To offer a pun, Guy's painting is indeed nebulous. He switches effortlessly between the opposed belief systems that govern both his subject and the practice of painting.

-Tony Twigg