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How to Regulate your Mood as a Creative Person

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Mood dice by User “Intgr”, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

I have come across countless stories of very successful people—from actors to athletes—who’ve said they struggle with mental health issues. And I have wondered why it is so easy for some who seemingly “have it all”—fame, professional accomplishments, material wealth, a safe and luxurious house, a support network—to sink into depression. This whole phenomenon of prolonged low mood has been examined from several perspectives—as one will find in the brilliant book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (2001) by prolific American writer and Columbia professor Andrew Solomon.

Various causes have been identified (tragic events in one’s life, poverty, psychological and physical abuse, one’s environment, isolation from others, etc.), but the subject continues to remain elusive. Often there can be nothing massively wrong or unfortunate in your life and you might still find yourself curling up in foetal position, feeling as though all vitality has been sucked out of you, and that you will be in that state for days, maybe months.

Sometimes, of course, to treat your mental health, you do need therapy and medication. But if you are not clinically depressed, what is the most important thing that you can do by yourself to make sure your mood doesn’t fall for extended periods? For me, the helpful answer to this question comes from the “evolutionary” approach to depression.

If we examine the brain of Homo sapiens from the viewpoint of a hundred thousand years, we will discover that for more than ninety thousand years, it existed within a hunter-gatherer framework. Civilisation is recent, and modern life as we know it—with its click-of-a-button comforts—is not even a century old. The biggest change between our lifestyle and that of our ancestors is that we no longer have to worry about survival on a daily basis. We are stable and secure in our homes, we do not have to kill lions and snakes.

But our brains are still used to those older rhythms, to seeking everyday highs of the hunt in the middle of danger. In his book The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic (2014), psychologist Jonathan Rottenberg, a professor at the University of Southern Florida, makes the point: “Moods, high and low, evolved to compel us to more efficiently pursue rewards. While this worked for our ancestors, our modern environment—in which daily survival is no longer a sole focus—makes it all too easy for low mood to slide into severe, long-lasting depression.” So instead of crests and troughs, what we get now is slope and flatline.

Our hunter-gatherer brains no longer get the thrill of everyday highs and easily drown in protracted melancholy. (Credit: Pixabay)

Because the problem behind low mood lies in daily routine, the solution also exists within our everyday to-do lists. We must be constantly accomplishing something no matter how tiny, pushing ourselves forward. A one-time victory, even when it is as colossal as an Oscar award or Olympic medal, cannot guarantee continued feelings of bliss.

In his book Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry (2019), American physician Randolph Nesse writes that “…mood is influenced most not by success or failure but by rate of progress toward a goal…Baseline mood is remarkably stable for most people, and variations reflect mainly the rate of progress toward a goal.” That is why some highly illustrious figures can also turn gloomy in the aftermath of a huge win. The novelty of elation erodes because soon their brain will get accustomed to the state and will enquire, “yes, but now what next?”

So you must always have some project you are working on. The moment you finish one, you must begin a new one. And you must establish a mechanism of measurement, have targets in place. That way, as soon as the mood falls, it can be perked up through action.

Never be without a goal you can make daily progress towards if you care about your mental health. (Credit Pixabay)

I have found this insight very useful in my entrepreneurial life. Of late, I have made a rule that I must fill my spreadsheet with new contacts and send marketing emails every single day, instead of delivering them in batches twice a month. Introducing myself to strangers daily, even if just 5 or 10 in number, has been giving me a thrill and keeping those periods of inexplicable, unreasonable low mood away. The thought that I’m consistently taking steps, making small progress towards the bigger goal of advancing my career makes me less irritable and more positive.

A lot of creative people tend to not live a life of strict routine but might operate fervently in spells. This is because they have no control over their ideas. They never know when inspiration may strike. They can spend huge chunks of time shut off from the world, just thinking, scribbling, waiting for light-bulb moments. And while periods of pure concentration and contemplation are necessary, extended absence of quantifiable action can seriously damage one’s sense of wellbeing.

Let’s say if you are a painter planning an exhibition in the coming year on a particular theme—maybe something political—how can you use the vehicle of your project as a daily mood regulator? You can devise a strategy that might sound like this:

  • Read two articles per day, one on a good thing done by a government, another on a bad thing done by a government
  • Every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, talk to somebody about what they’d want their government to do differently
  • Every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, talk to somebody about what they appreciate about their government
  • On Saturdays and Sundays, research something historical—about a benevolent emperor or ruthless dictator

Record your findings in a spreadsheet, track your efforts. After you have finished all your paintings based on your reflections, rest but do not be idle for too long. Choose a new theme and start over again.

Written by Tulika Bahadur.

Albrecht Durer and selfies

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Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait

Who are you, and what are you doing here? You, there in the mirror, there in the lens of your phone: What do you see? asks Lawrence Farago in the opening paragraph of an essay in the New York Times about self-portraits and Albrecht Dürer.

Selfies are everywhere. The Google arts and Culture page estimates that about 93 million selfies are taken and uploaded onto social media every day. Social platforms like Instagram were specifically designed for the iPhone in 2010. Selfies are the major means of self-expression in our times. Few realise that selfies have art royalty in its bloodlines in the form of Albrecht Dürer, who lived from 1471 to 1528.

Dürer was a genius, one of the most remarkable artists of all times. He is regarded as the father of self-portraits. Prior to Dürer, self-portraits were rare. Dürer changed that. He was obsessed with his image and painted numerous self-portraits. For artists like Dürer, self-portraits were a means of self- expression. Think of self-portraits by artists as diverse as Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, to mention but a few. Today, with the advent of the selfie, self-portraits are everywhere. They are the major means of self-expression.

Farago’s questions about portraits are similar to those asked by the foremost cultural critic of our times, the late John Berger. In his book Portraits, Berger writes pithy essays about 74 artists. Berger, looking at the same self-portraits of Dürer as Farago had, asks why people seek images that depict them? His first response is that any person who has a portrait painted about them, seeks to produce evidence that they lived. It is a voluntary existential act with a particular look that is unique to the subject of the portrait.

As always, Berger digs deeper and suggests that the appearance and look of the subject has a duality. First, it is an image of a particular person. Secondly the image interrogates the looker of the portrait, and asks what the looker thinks about the image. Any journalist will tell you that any story is about the “w’s”, “what, when, who and why”. The person who created the image (selfie included) asks the same question and seeks to answer the question by means of how the subject is presented in an image.

Selfies say a lot of things. They tell stories or can poke fun at us. I once saw a selfie where the maker of the image stands in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. The caption of the image says one of these faces are worth $860 million dollars.

Farago who is no media hack, studied art history at Yale and won the acclaimed Rabkin Prize in 2018 for art criticism, is rather cynical about selfies. He writes “In the eyes of us poor moderns, it seems self-evident that a picture can capture who you are. That your posed image, your face and your clothing, express something essential about your personality. It’s the myth on which every selfie stands”.

Farago argues that Dürer is the principal perpetrator of the myth upon which selfies stands. In this respect he looks at Dürer’s self-portrait painted in Munich in 1500. It is a magnificent painting. More so because flat mirrors did not exist at the time. Farago writes that the detail in the portrait evokes divine inspiration. Just look at Dürer’s hair in the image. Dark and light intertwined, displaying immense skill. Study the eyes and ask whether you see a window in them. Dürer’s gaze is intense, so much so that it troubles lookers. One person even damaged those eyes by poking needles into them. Farago also writes that the myth about self-portraits, is not innate but manufactured. He sees arrogance in the portrait but also believes that it is the best portrait ever.

Berger in turn regarded Dürer as the first one man, avant-garde. Dürer did his first self-portrait, a drawing, when he was 13 years old. His talent, even at that age, was remarkable. Like Farago, Berger sees the divine in Dürer’s self-portrait of Munich 1500.

Albrecht Dürer, Self-portrait at 13

Berger wrote that Dürer’s self-portraits were theatrical in the sense that they conveyed something more than what he actually was. In the Munich portrait, Berger suggests that Dürer presented himself as deity. It is not blasphemous because the artist was a devout and practicing Christian. Berger’s suggests that the divine is an awareness of the artist and of his creativity. At the very same time Dürer was aware that he was living in a world of suffering and that his magnificent creativity was impotent to do anything about human suffering.

Both critics conclude that self-portraits are designed to represent the ego in a flattering manner. In that sense the artist, whether it is the hand holding a telephone for a selfie, or a brush loaded with paint, is misrepresenting the self. Upon looking at the Dürer self-portrait two things stand out. One is that Dürer was truly a magnificent artist. His ability to do detail is genius. He was concerned with portraying himself exactly as he was. The missing part is, despite the self-portraits, we do not know who and what Dürer was like. That question hangs in the air, just like with most selfies.


Written by Luisa Blignaut.

The Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii

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Interior of the Villa of the Mysteries by User “Raffaele pagani”, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Looking into ancient Greek and Roman visual art, I recently discovered a curious location that is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the comune of Pompei, near Naples, in the Campania region of southern Italy. Situated on the outskirts of the ancient city of Pompeii, the Villa dei Misteri or “the Villa of the Mysteries” was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, excavated around 1909 and restored between 2013 and 2015.

The villa is famous for one particular room—containing dazzling red frescoes that show a religious ceremony. Ancient Rome is known for its murals or wall paintings. This form of art has a long history in the Mediterranean, where the Minoans, a pre-Greek people of the Aegean islands, regularly used it as early as the mid-second millennium BC.

Exterior of the Villa of the Mysteries by User “ElfQrin”, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The frescoes in the villa, dated to 70-60 BC, are believed to depict a rite associated with a “mystery cult” of Dionysus or Bacchus—the god of wine, fertility, theatre, madness and ecstasy. Greco-Roman mystery cults were religious schools reserved for initiates known as “mystai”. The details of membership were not revealed to outside parties.

In the red paintings, we most likely have a bride who is being initiated into the Dionysian/Bacchic Mysteries in preparation for marriage, her elaborate costume being a wedding dress. We cannot know the exact meaning of the paintings. There have been several interpretations.

Frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries by User “Shakko”, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Scenes 1, 2 and 3

In the first scene, a boy—standing before a priestess—reads from the scroll. The initiate enters in purplish apparel. She is also shown leaving in darker, slightly different clothes, now with a wreath and a tray of sacramental food.

In the second scene, the initiate, the priestess and an assistant weave a basket. On the right, Silenus plays a lyre. (Silenus is a folkloric figure of the forest who is a man with some features of the horse; he is a companion of Bacchus.)

In the third scene, two more characters appear: a satyr (drunken, male nature spirit) plays panpipes and a nymph (minor female nature deity) suckles a goat. The initiate is in a dramatic pose. She is probably in the process of establishing a close connection with nature, leaving the human world to immerse herself more in her animal side. This psychological shift is needed for regeneration and rebirth in ancient rituals. The initiate is absent from the next two scenes—which means she has undergone “katabasis”, which is a kind of journey or descent. From the country to the coast or down into the underworld.

Scenes 4, 5 and 6

In the fourth scene, Silenus holds a bowl. One satyr looks into that bowl. Another holds a mask (resembling Silenus). This is a strange and intriguing tableau. The bowl could be a vessel of divination, giving a vision of the future—possibly of death. Maybe the death of innocence and childhood that the initiate must submit herself to.

Next, in a damaged part of the fresco, we can see Dionysus leaning onto his mother Semele. In scene six, the initiate appears. She is wearing a cap now and has a staff, signs that she has reached a new stage in the initiation ritual. She is reaching for a long object covered with purple cloth, placed in a basket (perhaps a phallic symbol or a signpost of some sort indicating a new discovery). On the right is a winged figure—Aidos, the Greek goddess of shame, modesty, respect and humility.

Scenes 7, 8 and 9

In the seventh scene, the initiate kneels before the priestess. A female figure whips her, another one dances. It is as though this is some kind of final test of strength, and a cause for celebration is at hand.

Eight and ninth scenes show completion. The initiate is in new clothes, an assistant behind her. Cupid shows her a mirror. Then, she is enthroned, Cupid again by her side.

The logic behind mystery cults is interesting. In a book titled The Greco-Roman World of the New Testament Era (2009), historian James S. Jeffers writes: “The state religions of the Greeks and Romans proved unsatisfying for some. Those who longed for a sense of salvation, and for a more personal connection with a deity, often looked for them in the mystery religions.”

The appeal of these frescoes lies in the very fact of their being beyond full comprehension. They attract the viewer with their sense of secrecy. They also engage as they exhibit a timeless human impulse—to achieve a kind of maturity, an elevation of the spirit, a connection with the divine in some form.

Written by Tulika Bahadur.

Eva Hesse, No Title 1963

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In the early 1990’s, while working in a part time job with the installation team at the NGV, an artwork by Eva Hesse, No Title 1963, struck me as being a successful echo of some of my own struggling artistic preoccupations. It was unlike anything I had encountered before. Or rather, it has elements of things I had encountered before but scrambled together in a way I hadn’t seen, at least in the flesh. The explosion of new unbridled painting in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, a lot of which can now seem dated and ego driven, had ended in a suspicion within the curatorial circles of the International and Melbourne art worlds of painting as a viable way to move forward. However with this explosion, the seeds had been sown.

Also at the time a small book of the work of the German artist Martin Kippenberger caught my eye in the NGV bookshop and I was instantly intrigued with this work that also scrambled styles, in a more brutal way than Hesse but with absurd humour and pointed intent. It seemed to be a way forward and at this time the Hesse picture, for me, joined the dots back in time to an idea of multiplicity and possibilities rather than the notion that an artist must choose a single branch in the great arc of art history.

Martin Kippenberger, Untitled (Krieg böse), 1991
© The Estate of Martin Kippenberger. Courtesy the Estate and Hauser & Wirth. https://ocula.com/artists/martin-kippenberger/

Eva Hesse’s No title 1963, gives me the feeling that the artist has decisively chosen to not choose and has preferred to combine the orthodoxies of the day – gestural abstraction and hard edge colour field. Both in danger of becoming clichés and each burdened with their tribes of patriots. Hesse could see, possibly subconsciously, that to break this binary would open again the doors of perception. She brought a voice of Dadaism into the mid-century and as a female artist in New York’s heavily competitive male dominated art scene there was a desperate need for new voices to challenge this status quo.

No title 1963 is painted with oil on canvas, The texture of the ground and paint surface is fresh and directly worked- almost like a large work on paper. To achieve this fresh aliveness demands sure direction and confidence, remarkable here as Hesse was apparently quite unsure of her painting abilities and became more renowned for her sculpture- a form less reliant on the sensitivity of touch in the moment of making that comes to the fore in this painting.

Eva Hesse, No title. (1963), oil on canvas,  183.2 × 152.8 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
© The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth 
https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/5356/

On close observation the gestural expanse is composed of rectangles of hand’s width sized marks resembling a scrawling handwriting in greys, ochres, whites and one rectangle in the lower right mainly in blues that pulls the eye down in a cascade from top to bottom. Squinting at the painting, similar to the Sansom painting I discussed last time, the stabbing black chunks punch holes in the surface and give tension and spatial definition to the murkier indistinct scrawling blather. With easy humour that challenges abstract expressionism’s claims to the sublime this dynamic gives articulation to something inchoate and absurd. The one element that completes and adds greater complexity to the chromatic and spatial world is the pinkish brushstroke running from top right to midway. This is echoed with a similar angled white line tucking behind a gestural moment and delving into a dark aperture. Directing this play of forces is the massive intrusion of hard edge wedges of industrial lemon yellow, white and warm ultramarine and cooler teal blues painted toughly yet with give at the top of the canvas. This is a wonderful play on one of the cornerstones of creating space in Western painting- the misty background of a Titian or the Mona Lisa cut over with a more sharply defined figure – here unsettled and topsy turvy.

Despite the vast history of artists pulling the language apart, the state of repose, or at least coherence, seems to be one of the most sought after qualities in art. It’s still really surprising to me that in No title 1963, the hot struggle to resolve the inconsistencies yet keep them living and breathing relaxes into such a natural repose. Contributing powerfully to this resolve is the way the division between the flat wedges and the looser paint below is essentially flat- the primacy of the surface, as the ruling critic of the day Clement Greenberg expounded, is insistent but sneakily there’s a blackish zone that appears to slip behind and under the leading edge of the white triangle.

Eva Hesse No title, 1964 Collage, gouache, watercolour, coloured pencil, and graphite on construction paper
45.9 x 32.4 cm,
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Hauser & Wirth
https://ocula.com/artists/eva-hesse/artworks/

In writing about this work I’m surprised how I feel like I’m writing about a painting concerns of my own, however it’s now almost 60 years since Hesse painted it and realise it’s more productive to think about connections and shared ideas and sensations than the delusion of originality. Hesse was a great originator about how the grotesque, awkward and absurd, both visually and psychologically, can be incorporated into a materially rich art. Surrealism, Dadaism, Automatic drawing and writing, the idea of the unconscious and more had come before her but she managed in her short life to bring threads of the play of these forces into an agreement with the demands of the highly tuned modernist mid-century New York art world. She proved that the idea of a single way forward is mere convenience amidst the flux and flow of our contemporary lives.

Written by David Palliser.

Windows and Portals: Looking Beyond 2020

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A portal in a dark forest. (Credit: Pixabay)

2020, as we all know, has been a particularly strange year for those associated with the arts. While some have struggled and withdrawn themselves, being unable to process the situation, others have identified opportunities and announced innovative projects.

As the year passed by, I saw an explosion of paintings on quarantine life—toilet rolls, sanitisers, accumulated food and drink in tins, packets, bottles, jars. There has been a lot of straightforward “representational” art, artists just documenting what has been around them/everyone during the lockdown. But there was another kind of creative expression that caught my attention more—a “metaphorical” one involving a passage, a separation…but also an opening—the possibility of a new vision and state of affairs, maybe a whole different world. The literary and visual poetry of portals, windows, doors.

In April, I read an article in the Financial Times by Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy (https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca) who saw the pandemic as a “portal”. I’d like to quote that paragraph:

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Later, I encountered two artworks shared, not inadvertently, by Jack Shainman Gallery (New York City) on Instagram that touched upon similar themes—a painting, “The School (Door)” by Ottawa-born Montreal-based artist Pierre Dorion and a painting-sculpture titled “The Universe is on the Inside” by Germany-born New York-based artist Leslie Wayne. Both are simple and meditative.

The School (Door) by Pierre Dorion (Fair Use)

In Dorion’s minimal painting, mostly white and grey, the door is big and heavy-looking. It is tightly shut, and the viewer gets no intimation of what might lie behind it. Danger? Wonder? We do not know. The only certainty is that of division. And there is a suggestion that one might have to make a real effort to reach the other side. The title of the artwork is fitting, given all the realisation and learning that we have undergone during the pandemic.

The Universe is on the Inside by Leslie Wayne (Fair Use)

Wayne’s painting-sculpture captures the spirit of the time in other ways. The window refers to the manner in which we are living at home—seeing the world of chaos and unpredictability from a distance with a limited view. Interestingly, the title of the artwork runs opposite to the form of the artwork itself. The latter projects outwards into the cosmos, yet the former goes inwards into human soul. The universe is on the inside…does this mean we have everything we need at the moment within ourselves already? Could it imply that, ultimately, we will be rescued not by some external force but by the disciplining of our own willpower?

The artwork makes its appreciator travel in two directions simultaneously. Whatever is out—the good or the bad—it seems to communicate, comes from whatever is in. The terrifying physicality of the pandemic has been a result, in the end, of humankind’s interior thought processes and choices. And the external world that we will see outside the window tomorrow, too, will depend on our internal order or disorder today.

Temporally now we are before another passage, opening and threshold. The new year—2021. And it is difficult to imagine the course of events that will unfold. Allergic reactions to vaccines, mutated strains of the virus, new hotspots—the drama goes on. A big question mark still hovers over our social lives, our professional lives. In this phase of continued uncertainty, may we take a moment to meditate upon the divisions explored by the artworks above—between here and there, between us and the world—and arrive at our own precious existential answers.

Written by Tulika Bahadur.

Gareth Sansom – A Forensic Possibility 2010

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Gareth Sansom A forensic possibility, 2010; Oil, enamel and collaged digital photographs on linen; 183 x 244 cm; enquire
Gareth Sanson, A forensic possibility, 2010
Source: Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

From the dense and wonderful Gareth Sansom survey exhibition at the NGV in 2017, A Forensic Possibility was one of my favourite works. Gary is a friend, mentor, and adventurous spirit that I have had the pleasure and agony of knowing since I started post-grad studies at the VCA in 1983. For me this painting shows a coming together of Gary’s searching intelligence, wit, appropriation of worlds and styles, craziness, fluent painterly technique combining a huge vocabulary of ways of putting paint down and an encyclopaedic sense of the history of painting.

A Forensic Possibility is spatially multidimensional with all its excavations pushing constantly back up to the surface. If you half close your eyes it appears almost black and white with a few blue and orange blobs and a hard zap of yellow at the top. The purple vertical smeary triangle thing harmonises the yellows with the inky dark blues. One sensation is always challenged by something mocking or at odds with it, such as the intentionally clumsy naïve drawing on viscous white threatened by the ultra sharp shards around the perimeter in their corporate yellows and array of flat office greys . The sharp white fractures, themselves a pure white abyss, on the far left lean with superiority into the brick red smear with its decidedly hand drawn rectangles that then echo the clunky steps in cool blues- a rhythmic metamorphosis with sensations of sharp control , badly lit stairwells and fleshy paint.

Highly focused, odd and intense, wrong handed with intent- what more could you want? Perhaps the loopy sausage stairs traversing the canvas, up or down who knows? So much pleasure from not knowing. It is essential to realise that Gary uses the “casual” but this is not a casual painting. The elements gain drama and the essential tension through their interdependency. The bigger truth is that paintings can contain anything, high and low. The artist strives to establish relationships between the parts. This is where the art seems to seep in.

Image: Gareth Sansom: Transformer exhibition at NGV in 2017
Source: Broadsheet

In the flesh much of the paint is luscious, physical, energised to a variety of pitches. This picture enjoys its own wild ride. Compared to many other pictures of Gary’s this resists a central focus- my eye can wander at will. Apart from the steps there is no definite image to hold onto. I love the list of things I initially thought was an absurd shopping list but apparently derives from a film’s murder victim’s forensic report. Each word in the wonky stack forms a clear and simple image with a tactile resonance in the viewer’s mind. Paradoxically the painting has almost no definite visual images….unless we look down at the bottom section and discover small collaged photos of the artist caught seemingly in the throes of some mad existential play. Nice to note the perfect match of the masked figure with arm resting on the edge of the modernist square complete with soulful drips in the right bottom corner. The switch of languages is deft and exciting.

This painting is an accumulation of things found in the process of making. It is not possible to plan such an adventure. The paint and possibilities of space, image and colour lead the way and the artist follows. Light is the great activating force. The putting down of elements in turn creates the picture’s own appetite for development or elimination and then finding another way. I see Gary opening and descending one trapdoor then finding another. The painting establishes its own desires, the artist must submit.

Windows, gaps, apertures, perimeters, an accumulation of lushly painted grammar never getting to one point but many. Time is elongated and materialised into the picture. The clues keep appearing yet an answer is very happily not revealed. For me, Gary’s lifelong passion for cinema seems to come to a palpable moment in this picture, especially with the pitch black surround- the painting like a bright white burst onto the cinema screen before the celluloid jams and melts in the projector -the audience collectively catch an image, of what they don’t know, in the dazzle.

Written by David Palliser.

The art of Luisa Blignaut

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After Anaesthetic

Driven by a freight train of a mind, Luisa Blignaut’s acrylic paintings frequently and impulsively veer off track into unexpected, fertile territories.

The painting After Anaesthetic describes the minutes after Luisa woke from surgery and looked out of the Box Hill hospital window towards the Dandenong Ranges. Below is the city, with geometrically abstracted buildings. Luisa paints her reflection in the window where the rolling mountains and hills stop for the self portrait which is itself a geometric construction and traced by rainbows. Luisa has described this experience of waking and then slipping away again to wake again in another room.

“It was a rainy day and I saw a rainbow when I opened my eyes. I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, I was in another room, remembering the rainbow.“

The hills musically echo the rainbow, as if Luisa has recognised herself somewhere within them, somehow, in the rainbow also. A part of these elements but aware of self as constructed, geometric, like the buildings. This seems to be a description of a slipping in and out consciousness, from apparent void into self. To be both separate from things and a part of all things, a sense of the tentative and the universal, of being in-between. The in-between of things characterises much of Luisa’s work.

Bark Blues

Luisa has a deep love for contemporary classical music, experimental music and jazz. She finds joy, meaning and integrity in improvised and experimental music. She frequently parallels natural textures and patterns with musical ones. In Bark Blues, subtle tones and textures correspond as much with music as with the bark of the trees, the title being a play on both texture and rhythm. Music and the improvisation of blues and jazz give the best insight into Luisa’s working process. Luisa has said that she “thinks all the time when painting, whilst thinking nothing at all at the same time“. Of all Luisa’s quotable quotes, this is my favourite. She also describes this as a “conversation between cognition and intuition displayed on a canvas with paint and brush. Brush strokes explore, discover and react. The resulting paintings are spontaneous and improvised.” Bark Blues describes Luisa’s way of thinking and working in a wonderful mixture of spontaneity, musicality and visual revelry.

The painting Polyrhythms uses the landscape to describe a musical composition which combines contrasting rhythms. As with Bark Blues we are seeing the two elements, visual and musical simultaneously. Each element of the landscape – sky, sea, beach, coast and even the poles have their own rhythm which simultaneously contrasts and seemingly harmonise with each other. Luisa has created the visual equivalent of a complex musical technique.

Polyrhythms

European Bee Eater, Thorns and Namaqua Spring all directly reference Luisa’s South Africa. Luisa was a frequent bird watcher and walker. Each of these images translates Luisa’s memories into a play of colour, form and space across the canvas using direct spontaneous brush marks. Thorns, uses the native vegetation to create a patterned abstraction as a homage to South Africa. Likewise, the intensity of colour in Namaqua Spring is extremely subjective, referencing an intense personal connection to a place where Luisa frequently found solace during turbulent years.

European Bee Eater
Thorns

Namaqua Spring

Hay Fever Near Coober Pedy, references Luisa’s experience of driving across Australia’s Nullarbor Plain whilst suffering hay-fever. It is as intense in colour as Namaqua Spring but more topographical in its structure, appearing to describe a spatial vastness.

Hay Fever Near Coober Pedy

The work, Maybe somewhere else, has a blue band of light at the centre which splits the composition top to bottom as if universal and all encompassing. The warm orange and reds surround the cooler blue. What is, Maybe somewhere else? Perhaps, for moment there is a pause here, a reflection of what lies outside the immediate and the material. As painting it contains an integration of all the elements discussed so far, organic, memory, visual and musical, but then asks a very seemingly simple question, what else and where?

Maybe somewhere else

As with After Anaesthetic, the painting Conversation combines the human face with natural elements, in this instance the textures of the bark of a tree. The eyes double as knots in woodgrain, and the simplified rhythmic forms also seem to reference music. This is a painting which knows no constraints. Is it a portrait or portraits? Yes. Is it comical? Yes, and also dry. Wry? Yes, but not cynical. It is biographical but altruistically, in that it is generous to the self and others. It appears to describe a moment of frustration without being mocking, drawing out the comical elements of the situation. The works brilliance is in bringing tree bark, the face(s) and social interaction together successfully into an expressive artwork.

Conversation

A series of paintings which Luisa entitles wth the word Bifurcation use the same simultaneous integration/separation of elements we have seen elsewhere in Luisa’s work. These abstract paintings, limited to two colours/tones play two fields against each other. Which colour is the top layer? We can’t quite tell because they shift and refuse to be grasped. Bifurcation means the division of on element into two. These two fields are both one whole organism which refuses to allow distinction of its parts and also, two elements. The apparent simplicity of these works hides a tactical resistance to being defined.

Scattered Bifurcation

Luisa’s works often combine elements of landscape and abstraction; rich memories from her original South Africa, and of Australia combining with her extensive musical knowledge. They form intuitive contingencies to hold together elements which become deeply biographical images. The works feed off a great depth of experience which is channelled through spontaneous painting decisions, making them appear disarmingly simple. Yet they contain complex strategies that are intriguing in their visual and conceptual structure.

Written by Marco Corsini.

Outside of place, a reflection on the work of Margaret Dunn

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Margaret Dunn

Margaret Dunn’s paintings build environments, often domestic and exotic at the same time, often modern and ancient also. These environments seem to be in flux, suggesting that while we exist in this time and place, it’s in the transience and conflicting aspects of our experience that we have the possibility of greater perspectives.

Margaret Dunn
Margaret Dunn

A Rothko like painting on a wall with glass of wine in the foreground. Perhaps we are in a New York apartment. Out of a window we see both a cityscape and the ruins of an arch. There is no consistent spatial correlation between the elements, rather this is a narrative about the conflict between the apparent permanence of our moment in time and its inevitable decline. Permanence, represented by the city with its great crowning victory of culture, the painting. While these are all celebrated in the moment, with wine, it is all contrasted against the ultimate decline apparent in the ruins which sounds a clarion call.

Margaret Dunn

We look out from the ruins of a building. An unusually large carrot leans precariously, humorously, in the distance. Dunn has mentioned that the carrot represents Trump leaning against a missile. There is a precarious fragility to this moment both through the imminent threat and through the decay, an awareness that it all can, and is ending. However a tree in blossom anchors us back in the moment and points to a natural and logical hope. The hope of new growth and of a future. Yes, all is transient but not without meaning or hope. Perhaps a fine balance contains the tension between transience and hope. Perhaps it is all one.

Margaret Dunn
Margaret Dunn

A complex weave of of staircases and buildings envelopes us. Are we destined to remain enmeshed in the the confusion of our built environments, our ideas and our culture? Are we trapped in this one moment as if it was our definitive and confused place? It’s in the confusion and the clash of the present with its myriad of experiences and possibility that we occasionally see windows and doors to other places that are beyond our present experience. There is a hint that as with the seascape that provides a stable and reassuring horizon in the distance, there is an opportunity for us to go beyond the limitations of ourselves, of our times, and that there is a reliable, consistent place there. 

Margaret Dunn

A building crumbles and its structure merges back into an abstract background. The transient and decaying building gives way to a new form of diagonals and planes. The building is limited but it flows out into an infinite rhythm of abstraction. All is in flux, flowing from the temporal to the infinite, with both existing simultaneously.  

Margaret Dunn

The camel rests in the desert, not in the tent which meets an immediate need for shelter, not in the tombs of great cultures and not within power, represented by the turret. Rather, the camel rests alone, beneath a limitless sky with the moon as its companion. The camel is not limited to this time and place, because it avoids entrapment, rather it has available to it, the infinity of the sky and of the desert plain.

Written by Marco Corsini.

Margaret Dunn attends Studio Art classes with Marco Corsini.

Frida Kahlo’s Rich and Expansive Understanding of Reality

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Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) by Frida Kahlo,
Harry Ransom Center, Austin, Texas, US (Fair Use)

There is a quote by Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) that I find very interesting: “They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” The truthful depiction of “reality”—as we normally understand it—in the arts is simply known as Realism. It is a factual representation of the world, one that is free of phenomena that might seem unbelievable or fantastical or supernatural, a reflection of things that exist, of things as they are, as they are seen, heard and felt.

Realism, if you search it out in Google Images, will yield results showing peasants in fields, city-dwellers in cafés, fruits on a table, a family at supper. Lots of brown, yellow, some green. Historically, the movement began in France in the 1840s (around the 1848 “February” Revolution). Fairly enough, it was a reaction to the emotionalism and exoticism of the Romantic period. Realism sought to portray every social class, ordinary life and labour during a time of rapid industrialisation with accuracy, eschewing depictions that were idealised or artificial, and confronting aspects of existence that were uncomfortable or harsh.

A typical Realist scene—The Gleaners (1857) by Jean-François Millet, Wikipedia

On the other end of Realism is Surrealism—having grown out of “Dada” experiments in Switzerland following World War I that revolted against the logic of modern society and capitalism and embraced nonsense. Surrealism, as we know, is a style that merges dream and reality, the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious, and, as a result, breaks through predictability and patterns. Its strange juxtapositions unsettle our sense of order and expectation.

A good example of Surrealism—The Elephant Celebes (1921) by Max Ernst, Wikipedia

When I look at Frida Kahlo’s work, it seems as an enterprise, that it could be placed between Realism and Surrealism (perhaps Magic Realism is the best term—as some have described it?). She draws inspiration from the events of her own life but her art clearly isn’t all stark and factual, which means we cannot straightaway call her a Realist. Also, it isn’t jarring and beyond reason, so we cannot consider her an outright Surrealist—her paintings retain a certain dreaminess, embellishment, strangeness and otherworldliness but her intention isn’t to create an effect of surprise or shock. Rather, it is an invitation to a deeper immersion in her complex and multi-layered being.

Kahlo is in the middle of extremes. The Realist side of her openly acknowledges the human condition with its travails and tragedies. Having struggled through polio in childhood, a severe road accident, a tumultuous marriage (to artist Diego Rivera) and childlessness, she exhibits her suffering before the world without shame. For example, in The Broken Column, her injured spine becomes an Ionic column.

The Broken Column (1944) by Frida Kahlo, Museo Dolores Olmedo, Xochimilco, Mexico City, Mexico (Fair Use)

On the other hand, her Surrealist side celebrates the human ability to indulge in reveries and hallucinations, and emancipate herself, albeit temporarily, from the weight of life through the sheer thrill of imagination and creativity. In What the Water Gave Me, we find a mysterious association of flora and fauna, a volcano, a dress, images of Kahlo’s German father and Mestizo mother, a modern skyscraper, references to torture, erotic encounters, death and dance. The entire theatre is acted out in a bathtub wherein the artist lies submerged.

What the Water Gave Me (1938) by Frida Kahlo, private collection of Daniel Filipacchi, Paris (Fair Use)

In her visuals, Kahlo revealed a two-fold reality—of the body and the mind. She presented the sensuality, fragility and stamina of her outward physical presence (which was objectively available to everybody) alongside the wild, wide-ranging, sometimes confused, activity of her hidden inward dimension. And she deemed this latter invisible, intangible, volatile domain as true and important as the former (who on earth considers the meaningful thoughts he/she thinks daily under the shower as fake or false or unreal?). In Kahlo’s context, I remember a powerful question asked by Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007): “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

Kahlo is enduringly popular in a very special way, I think, because she gave us a reality that was more expansive than the most faithful and exact instances of Realism. That movement showed us peasants toiling in the fields and that alone, it stopped before attempting to explore the drama of their internal faculties. Also, Kahlo’s reality, despite its bits of wild fantasy, had a concrete form and personality that made it more immediately accessible to the viewer than a lot of Surrealism with its bewildering amorphousness. She successfully demonstrated these lines of Neil Gaiman: “Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”

Written by Tulika Bahadur.

Lucio Fontana’s “Infinite Dimension”

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Concetto spaziale, Attese by Lucio Fontana, ca. 1965 (Fair Use)

A modern artist whom I find very intriguing for philosophical reasons is the Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist Lucio Fontana (1899-1968). Fontana was the founder of “spatialism”, a movement that he began in Milan in 1947, by way of which he ambitiously sought to synthesise colour, sound, space, movement and time into an innovative variety of art. The ideas of the project were based on his Manifiesto blanco (White Manifesto), a text that he had published a year earlier in Buenos Aires. He intended to abandon traditional forms—like the easel painting—and adopt techniques such as neon lighting and the television. Of late, there has been a great interest in his work on the auction circuit, with one piece of his, Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio (1964), being sold for  $29,173,000 at Christie’s New York in November of 2015.

In 1949-50, Fontana began to punch holes (buchi) and cut slashes with razors (tagli) through his canvases. Although they looked spontaneous, they were well-planned, and resembled the “zips” in the abstract expressionist paintings of Barnett Newman (1905-1970).

Spatial Concept ‘Waiting’ by Lucio Fontana, 1960 (Fair Use)

Multiple interpretations are available of this bold and somewhat baffling artistic act. In an essay for Tate, Philip Shaw, a professor at the University of Leicester, applies a Freudian approach and sees the cuts as representative of female sexuality, the obscure object of desire. The lens of the Second World War is particularly common. In a book titled Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962, Los Angeles-based curator Paul Schimmel situates Fontana’s work within the context of the social and political climate of the postwar period—especially the crisis of humanity resulting from the atomic bomb. As a response, several “international artists,” he points out, “ripped, cut, burned, or affixed objects to the traditionally two-dimensional canvas.” Fontana’s enterprise had been significantly influenced by a Milan that bore the scars of Allied bombings, in which many buildings and monuments had been destroyed.

Concetto Spaziale by Lucio Fontana, 1964-65 (Fair Use)

But in Fontana’s own words, he was alluding to something far greater than just sexuality or war. Through his holes and slashes, he evoked the sublime—that quality in aesthetics felt at encounter with grand things, that is suggestive of awe and terror, both pain and pleasure. He is known to have announced, “I have created an infinite dimension”. He maintained that his experiments were constructive rather than destructive and that his aim was to rupture the surface and enable the viewer to perceive the stuff that lay behind.

Fontana mysteriously said, “I do not want to make a painting; I want to open up space, create a new dimension, tie in the cosmos, as it endlessly expands beyond the confining plane of the picture.” The region behind the picture was an entire plane of being. The artist was playing with the viewer’s understanding of the universe itself. The holes and slashes would either project inwards or outwards, which meant that this new space would either creep in forcefully to an existing domain or it would be reached out to from an existing domain. I cannot help but connect Fontana’s experiments to the wider modern/post-modern worldview of materialism—the position that produces these basic ideas in different guises—matter is the ultimate reality, the spiritual or the supernatural is non-existent, the immaterial mind is an illusion, what you cannot see or hold or measure cannot be true.

Fontana’s ruptured canvases, read within the framework of materialism, suggest a certain suffocation and urgency, a yearning to break free from the prison of a closed, lonely, dreary and insufficiently meaningful universe. They powerfully give expression to the human desire for a taste of transcendence, for “the unknown”, that might still persist after all the calculations have been made, the research papers have been published, experiments have been conducted and surveys have been taken in an arrogantly “scientistic” society.

Written by Tulika Bahadur.