working all over the place

 Is it all over the place? Or is there method in my madness? The rosette is done, the back has roughed out braces on it, the neck is roughed out the belly braces are split and ready to fit, the sides are bent and waiting quietly in the mold- resting, and watching the chaos unfold around them. Above, the neck has it's groove cut for the truss rod.

Above, the bandsaw is used to rough cut the taper on the neck. Below, not guitar bits at all, but part of an explanation for my work methods.

It is a painting from the late nineteenth Century by Paul Cezanne. In the early '70's this painter was a powerful influence on me at a time when I was also reading early ecologists talking about the relationship of everything to everything else. As I recall, this was referred to at the time as the first law of ecology.

As a painter, Cezanne attempted to reconstruct nature in such a way as to bring everything into harmony with its context- and that normally was a rectangular picture plane. So everything on that plane had a role to play, and nothing existed in isolation. A colour here would relate to a colur there, and a gesture or angle here would be answered somewhere else that was suitable. But one of his central messages was to 'advance the whole canvas simultaneously'.  In other words, don't begin at the start, begin everywhere so that the whole system can be realized together, and each part can be considered consciously and unconsciously as a component of the whole. The idea was that this would bring unity (physically, and in any other context of meaning).

analysis and synthesis

I loved this concept of unity, and I generally work this way still. First analysing the parts, then synthesising them through the craft and the ideas that it is able to carry. Fragment (to understand it) then combine harmoniously (to make it).

If there is ever a chance that we can make things that are really well considered and true  expressions of a set of clear, related ideas, then this is how, as a master of nothing in particular, I try to achieve it. Of course none of this will guarantee good craft or sound technique or even worthwhile ideas, but it is at least considered.

boat people can make us proud

Anh Do escaped an unstable and dangerous Vietnam in an unlikely boat after the withdrawal of Australian troops, wrapped in the arms of his mother. He is now a lawyer, but is best known as a stand up comedian. He recently won an important literary award for his book 'The Luckiest Refugee", details can be found here. I listen to his voice, and I sense the values that he seems to have developed, even in the absence of an easy childhood and he makes me feel a little bit of pride in being Australian. I only tell you this because I haven't felt this way often in the last fifteen years. There was a warmth in being an Aussie that has been partly subsumed recently by a shallow edge of materialistic and anti-intellectual self-interest.

Margaret Olley passed away to-day. She was an artistic institution here, not only as a painter for most of her eighty-eight years, or as a patron, mentor, and subject of many famous paintings, but as an on-going presence representing the artists artist- the type unaffected by fashion or trend, simply content to delight in the texture and colour and sensual delight of the painted image. Say her name and I smell turpentine and linseed oil, I think of domestic clutter and light falling across a kitchen table. I remember Cezanne and Matisse and Bonnard, and I'm reminded of the gritty surface of canvas, the scumbled brush and crinkly tubes with lids not quite on: the interior landscape of a perceptive mind both bound and liberated by the familiarity of ordinariness and the domestic space.

sit down boogie

A painting from about 1982, guache on paper. One of the last times I took paint and brush to make an image rather than just to colour something. In paintings at the time, I loved the picture plane, the flatness of the paper and the way that lines and colours hint at space, or can be made to contradict it. So, quite apart from the subject matter here (which I won't go into) we have some areas of red 'pushing' towards us off the picture plane and away from the blues and greens and greys, but the white drawing across the top undermines this illusion and creates a tension in front of the image, then surrounds other shapes and pushes them forward. Spatial ambiguity. Love it. Click pic to enlarge.