Painting, More Painting: A show more about power than paint

Photo of inside of Painting more Painting exhibition

The curators at ACCA need to get out more. Painting, more painting, purportedly an overview of contemporary Australian painting, constructs a narrative not about painting but about power in our publicly funded galleries.

This curatorial high priesthood has put together their version of the canon, and it’s a very narrow one. The unrepresentative swill (with thanks to P. Keating) exhibited in Painting, more painting is the result. Predictably, like the joke about Catholics in heaven, the conceptualists are pretending that there is no one else here. This narrative hegemony amounts to a concealment of the real status of painting – tantamount to government censorship.

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No Fries with That: Why Conceptual Art Was Never Any Fun

Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-79 Catalogue image
Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-79 Catalogue image
Catalogue Image, Conceptual Art In Britian
This article was first published in the September 2016 issue of  The Jackdaw

 It hailed facts all day long so very hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely-ruled cyphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away…. Charles Dickens, Hard Times.

Perhaps you have noticed the prudish distaste that conceptual art has for any form of pleasurable aesthetic experience. It’s acceptable to be improved by a work of art or to be informed, but one should try not to enjoy the experience. Above all, one must not ask for that infamous quality that can mislead us all – beauty. Conceptual Art In Britain 1964-1979 at the Tate Britain until 29thAugust offers an opportunity to revisit this intensely puritanical movement.

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Clarice Beckett Exhibition Review

Clarice Beckett

Clarice Beckett: The Ordinary Instant
2 July to 11 September,

The Gallery, Bayside Arts and Cultural Centre, Brighton

 Clarice-Beckett-Sunset-Presskit

Beckett’s lyrical soft focus paintings are associated with the tonal school of Max Meldrum and his obsession with contrasting shapes and pattern. This exhibition of over fifty works by Beckett (1887–1935) is shown in the context of seven contemporary women painters responding to her work:  Lynne Boyd, Michelle Hamer, Kristin Headlam, Pia Murphy, Saffron Newey, Victoria Reichelt and Camilla Tadich.

Meldrum didn’t believe in drawing – his teleological view of art allowed him to believe he had discovered a new ‘science of appearances’ which superceded line drawing. Beckett adopted his views on

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Sargent, Sisley and painting in the snow

 

Alexandra Sasse painting at Falls Creek 2016
Alexandra Sasse painting at Falls Creek 2016

Painting in the snow; what is the colour of white?

 

I am painting in oil, a great medium for the brilliance of the colours of the snow and sky, although John Singer Sargent made watercolour look like the only way to approach it. This is Mountain Fire,  (1903, John Singer Sargent, Brooklyn Museum)

'Mountain Fire' John Singer Sargent. Brooklyn Museum
‘Mountain Fire’ John Singer Sargent. 1903 Brooklyn Museum

Sargent’s fluid, semi abstract approach almost suggests automatism – that kind of painting that celebrates the subconscious mind and which was popular after Freud and Jung’s theories became widely known. But leveraging the unconscious mastery of a medium

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The Madrid Report

Watercolour painting of Plaza de Cibeles by Alexandra Sasse
‘Plaza de Cibeles, Madrid’ Alexandra Sasse. Watercolour 2016

What would make you drop everything? Last month I booked a ticket on Saturday and got on a  23 hour flight on Tuesday in a rush to see the MADRID REALIST exhibition in Spain. How uncommon to see contemporary paintings that are unafraid of either beauty or realism.

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