Chris Casali

Blue Note    1 January – 4 February 2023

 More on the artist

This isn’t what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT.

She broke the news gently in an email – “I was in two minds…what to show …. I have been developing new work alongside my watercolours and thought to show a painting …Like most of my work it's abstract with hints to the land…Is it a problem…I've never shown work like this before… Hmmmm just not sure that's all and thought to write.”

Not being sure might be the prevailing state of mind for an artist. If so, becoming sure would be their aim and working out what they can be sure of would be what they do. In conversation Chris described it as her process, that is how she goes about making a painting. “It’s a slow revelation of detail that causes the work to be always giving and not predictable” is how she put it.

There are romantic edges to Chris’s process. She described travelling with friends through the Australian desert, of making paintings on the ground and drying them in the branches of trees. But mainly it happens for Chris in her studio. A room, like most other studios, more or less empty and away from most other things where a kind of meditation begins. One thing leads to another, which often enough seems to be an act of desperation. Because like a caged animal, artists will try anything, take any risk to realise their work, in a bid for freedom that remains nothing more than a half-glimpsed possibility.

And so it might be with Chris’s painting. A single sweeping gesture poured over a deftly crafted canvas that hints at details drawn in the landscape. Is this a rock pool with a crest of foam left as the tide recedes?  Or a kind of Xray of the desert she recently visited? A landscape perversely sculpted by water – driven by the same gravity that dictates the flows and splashes of Chris’s paint, applied in hope of realising sureness. It is however, whatever you see it as.

But how does Chris see it? – exactly as you see it here. Not the step before, or the step after that she might have taken next – it is this step that she is sure of. The watercolour on paper that became an acrylic painting on canvas that replaced her planed exhibit in a process, where possibilities are examined without predigest, is of course exactly what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT. This is the summation of her process.

Tony Twigg

                                                                                                                            

Jan Fieldsend

23 October - 26 November     Flower Painting  

Jan hesitated to give Flower Painting as the title of her show. But she was quick to declare – “Imagine a world without flowers”. Her joyous description of flowers took her back to a childhood in rural New Zealand to memories of cut lawns, buttercups and harvest festival floral arrangements set up in her father’s church. Then she confided, precisely these flowers are weeds, collected – set up in a vase – as the starting point for paintings that celebrate the lightness of marks offered spontaneously in praise of accidents. She feels that her paintings reveal themselves slowly as they progress to a certain “rightness” that would be the perfect accident.

These “accidents” are only the beginning of Jan’s work. Her paintings are set within an architecture of paper that billows to the floor in a seeming reference to Chinese scroll painting. This complex tradition enshrines a spontaneous mark at one with the natural world in a structure that is more book than picture frame. Such pictures are temporal; they are to be appreciated from time to time, like a movie as opposed to being a permanent decoration on a wall as a painting might be.

Half-jokingly I asked if Jan had given us The Holy Trinity, the father the son and the holy ghost - but yes, this is the Church of the Holy Trinity and an observation of the Ellerslie Presbyterian Church of Jan’s childhood in New Zealand. An austere church where elaborate decoration is rejected in favour of a spiritual insight held in  the mind, by nothing more than the plainness of a vase of flowers? Jan went on to describe our aesthetic as a kind of religion and wondered if religion 

might be a copy of that aesthetic.

For Jan there is a truth in the materials of her painting and the accidents of their creation. It touches the imagined architecture of faith with nothing more than a vase of weeds. An offering that passes - that, delightfully can be thrown out when it has died while her works linger with a spirituality that is as light as it is profound.

Tony Twigg

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

Rochelle Summerfield

30 August - 26 September      Doomed Innocent 

Link to artist's website

Rochelle Summerfield’s work, Doomed Innocent evokes images of fish suffocating in billabongs along the lower Darling River at the height of the last drought, about 18 months ago when appalling scenes of fish carnage were broadcast on TV and YouTube. Since then we have lived through bushfires, floods and a pandemic in a sequence of events worthy of Dorothea Mackellar’s love poem to our land - My Country.

“I love a sunburnt country …

Of droughts and flooding rains…

Her beauty and her terror

The wide brown land for me!”

Mackellar might be speaking to those fish of the Darling and the Menindee Lakes in her next stanza –

“A stark white ring-barked forest

All tragic to the moon”

That blistering monument of dead trees was left by the great-grand-fathers of the cotton farmers upstream on the Darling who have rendered ‘the wide brown land” - green, with irrigation, with water, monetised by government, stored in private lakes of plundered Australian treasure and fenced off from the fish swimming under - 

“Her pitiless blue sky

When sick at heart, around us

We see the cattle die –“

 

The sheer quantity of fish squandered along the Darling River underlines the fallacy of corporate agriculture, the cotton farmers of Cubbie Station for example who seek to harness the landscape into a mechanised mono-culture that ignores the bio-dynamic necessity of a diverse ecology. Or as Mackellar put it –

               “An opal-hearted country,

A wilful, lavish land

All you who have not loved her

You will not understand –“

And conversely, all you who have loved her will understand Summerfield’s painting, all too clearly.

Tony Twigg