Brett Whiteley - Big orange (sunset) 1974

Thanks to ArtNewsBlog for this one!

Though well-known for his art of collisions and oppositions, Brett Whiteley was admired above all perhaps for the relaxed elegance he seemed capable of bringing at will into his imagery. The essence of this elegance, the main focus of the current exhibition, is his curved line related to a deep fascination for the aesthetics of Eastern and Asian cultures.

As with many of his contemporaries in the 1960s, he felt an impact from those cultures that shaped at once a personal philosophy and an artistic methodology. He travelled extensively throughout Asia, including India in 1965, Bali in 1978, 1980 and 1989, and Japan during the last few years of his life.

He also focused on certain European artists who had, like himself, become enamoured with non-Western influences, such as Matisse, especially the French master’s spatial ideas sourced from North Africa and Persia. The results were uniquely Whiteley’s but, at the same time, a homage to those whom he regarded as predecessors, in particular in the tradition of calligraphy.

In Whiteley’s best drawing in this tradition, be it on paper or canvas, the unifying quality is an assured fluidity, extending from the media of brush and ink, through watercolour to oil paint. Indeed many of the works here may be witnessed as his attempt to capture a lyrical, Zen-like immediacy uninhibited by processes of thought, as he declared in a notebook of the 1970s:

Calligraphy’s biggest struggle
Is not with ink…
It’s that memory is action
Minus think!

His Lavender Bay paintings in the 1970s, such as Big orange (sunset), are saturated with colour articulated with gestural lines and elemental shapes suggesting boats and landforms suspended in late afternoon light. The horizon, which has disappeared into the top edge, allows the eye to become absorbed into a dreamy floating world. One of his last works, Autumn (near Bathurst) – Japanese Autumn 1987-88, brings all these elements together in the contemporary language of ink, charcoal, paint and collage, but its conception is born out of the act of drawing, as he said in the film Difficult pleasure:

…the attraction of drawing is that there is an immediacy and freshness… not so much that it’s simple, or reduced… it’s just brief, beautifully brief. {Read More…}

http://www.brettwhiteley.org

gordonfraserfinearts.com

Gordon Fraser / untitled / 2008 / watercolour, pastel, guache on paper / 44 x 30 inches (2 Panels) / gordonfraserfinearts.com

Khaled Al-Saai / The Sea: Poem by Mahmoud Darwish / watercolour, aquarell on paper / 2006 / Kashya Hildebrand

Al Saai works in an astonishing range of styles, from decorous classical modes, which he often uses for quotations from poetry, to radically inventive compositions, in which lettering is fragmented into fantastical, almost pictorial compositions. The breathtaking beauty of his work makes it immediately accessible to all.

The Thulth style of calligraphy is the strongest of the Arabic calligraphy styes, created during the Abbasid period in the 9th century in Baghdad.  Most of the letters in this style are the shape of a triangle at the top and the vowels are added as decoration.

The Diwany Jalii and the Thulth styles are the most decorative. They are influenced by three Islamic schools of calligraphy (Arabic, Persian and Ottoman).  Diwany evolved during the Ottoman Era (1670 to 1700). {Read More…}

Sheetal Ghattani /Untitled / Watercolour on paper / 36 x 36 inches / Bodhi Art

What sets Gattani’s works apart are her philosophy and attitude towards painting. Her manipulation of the medium, watercolour on paper is to mediate through colours without them suggesting any referential reality. Encountering her abstractions leaves one puzzled since they are large areas of colour, which defy definition in terms of specificity, for instance, red or mauve. In the delicacy of soft textures lie the subtexts in her canvases, which gradually settle upon one’s sensibility and one begins reading into them, forms that bring forth the character of her otherwise placid works. Her abstractions do not beckon but gently whisper, and once that whisper becomes audible it translates into a communion, wherein one is compelled to respond. In evoking these gentle persuasive responses from the viewer lies the success of her abstract compositions. Sheetal’s process of creation largely conditions the nature and character of her works. She predominantly employs black paper on which she brushes layers of paint washes, completely in communion with her materials and tools. With her contemplative wide stroked gestures, Sheetal builds up layers of paint that in the end leave an impression of her self. And this form of abstraction is clarified by Sheetal, who says, “Abstraction is in its deepest sense, based on realism, as in reality — reality of the present moment, free from any thoughts, memory conditioning. Only that pure present moment exists. So painting is a `time-manifested’ process and I become only a means.”

A silent journey through her most recent show titled Silent Soliquyoy, Bodhi Art, Singapore (2007) may freeze the viewer to one description namely ‘similar.’ Yet her similarity is built into the very idea of difference and this difference is the basis of her ‘magical moments’ and ‘inspirational relationships’. This is where Sheetal strikes at the heart of the matter, reconceptualizing her ‘moments’ according to the quality of light and poetic play with materials through an active imagination that enables her to create similarly different works that offers varying significations

The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

www.bodhiart.in

David Antonides / Transcoded / Watercolour on Paper / 49.75 x 38.5 inches / www.davidantonides.com

I’ve had the opportunity to work in the studio with David on a number of occasions and have learned a lot by watching him work.

Water for me is a medium which intermediates the tangible with emotion and spirit. It flows between my intention and its own laws of nature and serendipity – its a collaboration of sorts. I explore the contrast between the subtlety of complex colour transitions and the strength of dense, robust marks. Watercolour can make a strong statement and be monumental. It can have weight and gravity. [Read more...]

I posted the above drawing to a drawing forum on artreview.com and received a number of replies from the impassioned defense, to the legitimate questioning, to the ridiculous dismissal/panning by the court jester who’s now out rummaging through his kids nursery school art projects in the hopes of getting rich. I then posted the following reply. [see the whole conversation here...]

Byron, Alaleh and Jonathan all raise some interesting questions, establishment vs. anti-establishment, abstraction vs. realism, illustration, decoration, basically the stuff we as artists (an the non-artists critics) have been tangling with for the last 150 years! I started to jot down some notes and realized I have a lot to say about all of them. At this point I will have to sidebar those discussions to a different forum so as not to take away from the art being shown here. That being said, given that this is “Show and Tell” I will offer a few comments. For the purpose of the discussion I will try to separate formal questions from questions of content, but in reality in the process of drawing, the concerns interpenetrate and cannot be separated. First, in terms of content, this painting is about desire, pretty straight forward establishment content going back hundreds/thousands of years, so to byron’s point I do not view this piece as anti-establishment. It is a question/conversation/meditation I have been engaged with for about six months and it offers one viewpoint among many. The brief history is that this project began as 5 minute poses in the studio with a clothed model, who happens to be a dancer, over a two week period back in october. The initial studio sketches were executed in watercolour and I have carried on this work in oil, watercolour, collage, and prismacolor pencils, using both the sketches and memory of some poses as inspiration. This is one example.

Now to the more formal issues:
1) Mark making – I have used gestural marks and scribbles to convey the energy and excitement of desire, which often can feel uncontrollable and overwhelming when it is being experience.

2) colour – the dominant colour of the piece is red, chosen first off because the model has red hair and there was red fabric hanging on the wall behind where the model was posing. I then pushed and changed the hue, layering different reds (which unfortunately can’t be seen so well on the computer screen) in order to develop a sense of the warmth, heat, and excitement of desire. The red moves very quickly toward the viewer and allows me to pull the background right to the surface, compressing the space of whole composition. Secondarily, the two blue planes sandwich and squeeze the red plane, creating a dynamic tension and opening up the space of the composition.

3) composition – the compositional structure is very simple, built on a tilted plane, stolen from the italian masters such as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, etc., to provide a dynamic structure to both house and convey energy and excitement. It helps create the movement and space in the drawing.