ExhibitionS

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Learning the Language of Art

3-24 November 2024

Offical opening Sunday 3 November 1pm

Learn to Paint Art Group

Robyn Curran, Kerrie Giddings, Gayle Gyomar, Leh King Huang, Deidre Jaensch, Fiona Merlin, Claire Milne, Frances Smith, Sharuyn Sturre, Kim Trigg, and Suellen Walker.

This year, the Learn to Paint participants at Cabarita Community Hall, committed to academic studies to help them understand artists' tools, techniques, and practices.

To paint well is hard ––very hard.  A myriad of considerations demand attention seemingly all at once:  colour, light, shadow, drawing, proportion, design, brushwork, texture, edges, harmony, perspective, spatial depth, movement, focus and more.  

Observation of nature alone cannot make a painting.  Artists learn to translate what they see with their eyes and imagination into art. 

Accomplished artists from the past have already confronted and solved these issues in one way or another, so why wouldn’t we want to take advantage of their expertise and learn from them?  It makes great sense to do so, and it is one of the quickest ways to learn the “language” of art.  

Many painters throughout history studied other painters’ works. Through copying and studying techniques of other artists, painters learned their craft. Van Gogh himself did some studies copying the style of Millet, Rembrandt, Delacroix and Daumier. 

Picasso famously stated, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.  

The purpose of copying is not to mimic any one artist or style, but to gather ideas and be inspired by another artist’s work so that you can interpret them into your own. 

Using suitable photographs can also be a good progression point for beginners to learn how to master shapes, colour, light, edges, texture and composition so they can translate these understandings into their own work.

Image: Nora Heysen Quince’s copied by Deidre Jaench.

1 - 28 September 

Offical opening Sunday 1 September 1pm

Elisa Smith

Over the years I have marvelled as the sunlight dances across a room, touching on this and that as it inches its way through the house, throwing light about, adding shimmer and glow to corners of rooms where hidden treasures lie.

The play of light and the depth of shadow has always appealed to me, this is where I am on my track at present, watching for the ‘that’ moment as the sunlight drifts and the shadows darken, delighting in the detail between both.

Hopefully some of this mucking about translates into something that resonates with you too x

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“A lucky few find their path early on in life while the rest of us tend to diverge from it, knowing deep within their hearts and souls that our path is still there, just on the outskirts, but it’s just not our time yet. For many years I traversed roads that were purposeful, bringing depth and wonderful meaning to my world, relishing in the joy that they brought, all the while seeing glimpses of my path just to the side, still waiting, smiling like an old school friend, ‘come visit when you get time’

As life does, it brings you face to face with times that will test you and your ability to cling desperately on. While looking for solace and a place to heal, a way to quite the voices and still the breath, early in 2023 I found myself back of my original track, standing on a levee in the cool autumn afternoon breeze waiting and watching for the right light, camera in hand, revelling in the beauty unfolding before me. It was a moment of such profound peace and happiness that I knew I needed to replicate it daily. 

After having a mini stroke in July this year, today it is more poignant than ever to find myself in those moments. “

Image: Blushing Beauties, 2024

2-29 June

Offical opening Sunday 2 June 12.00pm

Bob Jankowski

The pathway of the journey leading to the work on display before you has been filled with serendipitous surprises and discoveries picked up and studied over the past 50 years.

Like the word COLLAGE itself these pieces have been assembled together out of random and unexpected associations. The element of Chance and attention to detail have always fascinated me – how an innocuous item lying beside a footpath for example, can catch my eye with its potential, motivate me to pick it up, examine it and use it to build and become an integral part within a collection of other disparate parts thereby creating a new entity is a marvelous happening!

These pieces have not been consciously assembled – quite deliberately I have tried to compile these elements as subconsciously as possible. Of course, there’s always an element of manipulation and considered placement. I like to think of that as exercising my design understanding and exploring the visual effect, but here too the notion of “don’t overthink it!” is foremost to the final decision of where and how parts end up. 

And then there’s always that wonderful connection of internal dialogue that occurs in my brain between the handled piece and how it responds to my emotional state or imaginative thinking resulting in unexpected compositions and meanings emerging. The next step for me becomes playusing these components and seeing how they transform into something recognisable for me. As this process evolves the next stage for me becomes mark making.

Although there is no drawing per se, to be seen within this work, the principles and constructs of Drawing are certainly employed within each of these expressions. Discovering the technique of tonal grading through hatching/cross-hatching many years ago, when I began exploring the potential of ink, has afforded me the luxury of adapting this technique to suit my style and predilection of subject matter or theme.

Actively seeking out examples of how this tonal technique was used by artists influential to my development (such as Robert Crumb, Saul Steinberg, Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe and Ronald Searle in caricature, landscape, typography and sketching) has garnered for me a wealth of possibilities to tap into depending on my mood and focus. Combining this mark making technique and handling different types of paper flowed naturally into the field of collage. Looking back over the many experiments and explorations in collage I have carried out, there is a predominance of work made with paper being my material of preference. 

What you have before you are a small selection of images celebrating the visual arrangements using humble materials to become magisterial components of a variorum on collage. I have tapped into an endless supply of ideas and motivations to create freely. The exciting realisation for me is that the possibilities are continually diverse and infinitesimal. I hope you enjoy these musings!

Image: Untitled, 2024. Collage on paper.

3-28 March

Offical opening by Helen Vivian on the 3 March 1pm

domenico de clario

al-Jabr: The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing is an Arabic mathematical treatise, written in Baghdad around 820 CE by the Persian polymath Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī.

It was a landmark achievement in the history of mathematics serving as both the eponymous work and fundamental etymology of the word ‘algebra’ which was later adapted from the Medieval Latin term ‘algebrāica’, from al-Jabr.

The al-Jabr text also introduced the fundamental concepts of reduction and balancing to mathematics and the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, or rather the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides.

It was eventually translated into Latin by Robert of Chester in 1145 AD and was used until the sixteenth century as the principal mathematical textbook employed by European universities.

*

I first came across the term used to describe algebra in my middle years at school.

But even as I struggled with its application (I couldn’t make head or tail of this particular branch of mathematics) I was fascinated by the phrase ‘restoration or re-union of broken parts’, used by its inventor to describe al-Jabr’s function.

Algebra described in this way became, at least in my mind, enmeshed in humanist poetics, and I imagined it as a subject of discussion by white-robed Sufi sages, as they gathered around fountains set amidst groves of exotic fruit and perfumed flowers.

This scenario simply constituted the substance of my daydreams and whilst my fellow students gained a knowledge of algebra I inwardly grappled with al-Khwarizmi’s mysterious description of his discovery.

*

A close family member fell ill in late 2022 and I cared for her in my home in Mildura during most of last year.

Consequently I was able to be in my studio only late at night, and even then all I was capable of doing was simply sit and breathe.

This went on for many months and one evening, as I sat in the studio’s stillness, I became suddenly aware of the chaotic flow of half-realized ideas and projects that lay before me.

From my chair I looked upon a veritable sea of unused materials and useless utensils; dried out tins and tubes of paint, pencils and pens, jumbled stacks of books, faded photographs and piles of documents, catalogues and old letters, all covered by several layers of accumulated red Mallee dust.

In that instant the true nature of this chaotic tide was revealed to me, as I finally accepted the fact that each of its components, large or small, had through my own neglect simply become aspects of unused potential, disconnected from any vision each had originally been a part of, and certainly from any coherent whole. In short, everything in my studio seemed to be now fragmented and broken off from everything else.

In the same instant I came to understand the deeper meaning of algebra, albeit through the filter of my sense of self as an artist who had continually attempted to make sense of disconnection by seeking to reunite the brokenness around and within me. After all wasn’t this what I had been attempting to do during the previous year, as I deeply engaged with the task of restoring the fractured health of a loved one to wholeness?

Sixty years of fascination with algebra’s description now suddenly made sense to me; if algebra constitutes the art of restoring wholeness to what has been fragmented then its guiding principle might also accurately describe the quest many artists undertake through their life-journey. And isn’t attempting to restore wholeness to whatever has been broken the most worthwhile of quests?

As I looked deeper and further into the studio’s archaeology I spied a large number of dusty and battered plywood panels jammed into a corner, long forgotten and their potential neglected.

I walked over and inspected them more closely: on each of their surfaces they bore the evidence of a former existence as the flesh and bones of multitudes of living trees that subsequently had been broken, dismembered and then compressed into plywood panels.

I picked up the panel closest to me and stood it against the wall; I moved my chair very close to it, sat down and examined it, taking in each small detail.

On its surface I could see some of the accumulated evidence of the wounds its origin-body had suffered: saw-marks, gouges, splits and bruises, the stars in its firmament permanently spent, the quintessence of its growing seasons now eternally enfeebled.

As I began to remove some of the dust and grime many previously unnoticed aspects of its dissolution began to appear, not only upon its skin but deeper somehow, within the very heart of the wood.

I then wondered if the dismemberment process might not somehow be reversed, perhaps through restoring lost vitality to each of these shrouds.

And then a subsequent thought arose: might not all these indications of past wounds be in fact the cogent beginning points for a series of philosophical narratives, homaging both al-jabr and its consequent universal poetics? Might they not be the lamps that illuminate the uncertain path to re-unified life?

I placed the panel on my easel, switched off the studio lights and gradually opened my eyes wider and wider into the darkness.

domenico de clario
january 2024

thank you rohan morris and helen vivian; thank you Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī.

Image: 'musica universale (local sound)'. Detail. 2023. 90cm x 90cm. Mixed media on plywood.