ARTS ZINE JULY 2022 by Robyn Werkhoven

s t u d i o

L A

arts zine

issue 47 July 2022

P R I M I T I V E

S E I G A R

seigar.wordpress.com popsonality.blogspot.com

PAGE 74

LORIBELLE SPIROVSKI http://loribellespirovski.com/

Homme 109, Acrylic and oil on linen, Loribelle Spirovski 2018.

U K R A I N E

E O

R G E G I T

T O E

page 36

www.gittoes.com

SIMONE DARCY

http://www.simonedarcy.net/

STUDIO LA PRIMITIVE

MAD MOMENTS ERIC & ROBYN WERKHOVEN MONIQUE WERKHOVEN

21 OCTOBER - 6 NOVEMBER 2022

ART SYSTEMS WICKHAM GALLERY

www.studiolaprimitive.net

slp studio la primitive CONTRIBUTORS Loribelle Spirovski

Helene Leane

George Gittoes

Barbara Nanshe

Hellen Rose

Art Systems Wickham Gallery

Simone Darcy

Timeless Textiles

Margot Broug

Newcastle Potters Gallery

Paul O’Brien

Dungog by Design

Lorraine Fildes

Port Stephens Community Arts

SEIGAR

Centre

Brad Evans

Studio La Primitive

Reese North Peter J Brown Eric Werkhoven Robyn Werkhoven Wall Graffiti, Ukraine. Photo courtesy of George Gittoes 2022.

INDEX

D I

Editorial …………

Robyn Werkhoven

Studio La Primitive ……

E & R Werkhoven

Feature Artist ………..

Loribelle Spirovski

12 - 31

Poetry ………………..

Brad Evans

32 - 35

Feature Artist …………

George Gittoes

36 - 71

Poetry …………………

Eric Werkhoven

72 - 73

Feature Article ………..

Bronwyn Oliver

Lorraine Fildes

74 - 89

Poetry …………………

Reese North

90 - 93

Feature Artist ……………

Simone Darcy

94 - 111

Poetry …………………… Peter J Brown

112 - 113

Featured Artist ………….

114 - 135

Featured Artist ………….. Paul O’Brien

136 - 153

Feature Artist ……………

154 - 171

Essay ……………………. Peter J Brown

172 - 181

ART NEWS……………….

182 - 213

I E

FRONT COVER :

Margot Broug

SEIGAR

Memories of Santa Ana, Oil and Acrylic on Canvas Loribelle Spirovski 2018.

EDITORIAL Greetings to ARTS ZINE readers.

Lorraine Fildes, our resident travel photographer and writer

July Arts Zine includes a selection of brilliant and flamboyant Australian and

features Bronwyn Oliver and her incredible sculptures.

international contemporary artists, photographers and writers.

International Spanish artist and photographer SEIGAR includes a

We are featuring the accomplished and highly praised contemporary

series of photos Tales of The Volcano of La Palma .

figurative artist Loribelle Spirovski. “Her work spans traditional portraiture, surrealism and pop art that marries dark and light themes in a single experimental practice”. (Nanda Hobbs Gallery). Internationally renowned artists and film makers George Gittoes and Hellen Rose include their latest selection of

writing and excerpts from

Newcastle poet and writer Peter J Brown includes another essay “The Essential Leonard Cohen.” Don’t miss out reading new works by resident poets Brad Evans, Reese North, Peter J Brown, and Eric Werkhoven.

dispatches and photographs direct from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Highlighting the Victory Exhibition – Art of Resistance, Irpin, Ukraine.

ART NEWS and information on forthcoming art exhibitions.

Submissions welcomed, we would love to have your words Australian Photo-media artist Simone Darcy. “Darcy often uses performance

and art works in future editions in 2022.

strategies within the still image, along with darkroom experimental processes to give visual form to the intangible and the invisible”. Newcastle artist and poet Margot Broug writes about “My Art Practice as

Deadline for articles 15th August for SEPTEMBER issue 48, 2022.

Emerging Awareness”.

Email: werkhovenr@bigpond.com

Talented Newcastle artist Paul O’Brien has been involved in the arts for over fifty years. O’Brien’s areas of interest include seascapes, local

Regards - your editor Robyn Werkhoven

Newcastle and Cooks Hill urban landscapes and portraiture of people and pets.

The publisher will not accept responsibility or any liability for the correctness of information or opinions expressed in the publication. Copyright © 2021 Studio La Primitive. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced , in whole or in part, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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Shoosh - God is Listening Acrylic on canvas, H90 x W 60cm.

www.studiolaprimitive.net

S T U D I O

L A P R I M I T I V E

E&R Werkhoven.

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LORIBELLE SPIROVSKI

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LORIBELLE SPIROVSKI Loribelle Spirovski is an accomplished visual artist who was born 1990 in Manila, Philippines and presently lives in Sydney, Australia graduating from the College of Fine Arts at the University of NSW, in 2012 with a degree in Art Education. “Her painting practise works in the interstices between the human figure and space, movement and stillness. Working in a number of simultaneous styles, her work spans traditional portraiture, surrealism and pop art that marries dark and light themes in a single experimental practice. With nods to historical figures such as de Chirico, Dali and Bacon, Spirovski paints a fragmented world, reflecting the anxieties defining the present age while never relinquishing a sense of hope for the future.” – Nanda Hobbs Gallery. https://nandahobbs.com/ Spirovski’ work has been selected as Finalist in many major Art Awards and Winner of the Manning Naked & Nude Prize, Manning River Art

Gallery, 2021 and Winner of Bluethumb Art Prize 2021. Finalist, 2019: Finalist, Archibald Prize, Finalist in The Blake Prize, Casula Powerhouse Art Centre 2022. Page 12 : Post-Internet Painting #4, Oil, acrylic and enamel on linen, Loribelle Spirovski 2020. Right : Pilipinas, Oil and acrylic on linen, H200 x W121cm. Loribelle Spirovski 2022.

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The Cameraman Oil and acrylic on linen H122 x W122cm. Featured in Limitato capsule collection 2021 Loribelle Spirovski 2020.

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LORIBELLE SPIROVSKI - INTERVIEW When I was six or seven, a cousin gave me a picture. It was a drawing of Belle and the Beast from the Disney film. I watched him draw it. I can replay it still, rewinding and fast-forwarding the abstract line of graphite as it curved and overlapped. It was magic. And had I not witnessed it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have known that drawings, or any of the

rich visual material that I consumed in books, on TV, on the walls of the churches of my childhood, came from human beings.

I learnt the words 'art' and 'artist' once I emigrated to Australia. They were born on the lips of my year-four teacher, Mrs Hughes, who gave me the nickname, 'Belvedere' and was the first red-haired person I'd ever seen. One day, she called me

this word 'artist' and used the other word, 'art' to describe a drawing that I'd made of a boy on a bicycle. Above it, she affixed a gold sticker that seemed to complete the piece. I blue tacked it on my bedroom wall, where it kept me company through my budding insomnia, remaining there until it gradually fell apart, nicked, and stained by the chaos of childhood.

I created what I think of as my earliest work in my teens; a single large scrapbook, layered over many years, the initial

sketches hidden under more advanced renderings, so that by the end, it was impossible to keep closed, and the layers of each page became like the rings of a tree. I think I've always approached art like this and is why my paintings often resemble collages. I'm among the last of the generation who still have long memories of an analogue world. I remember that transitional decade and our collective surprise at the suddenness of the internet's grip on our lives. Every day, I wrestle with the question of how and why I (or anyone) should paint at a time when there are more effective and relevant mediums for storytelling? Issue 47 - July 2022

But paint's allure - from the first time I caught the odour of linseed oil at the art gallery of New South Wales, aged eleven, standing at the foot of Luminais's harrowing 'The Sons of Clovis II' - was a mixture of fear and fascination. Paint had a carnal smell, a fleshy texture, and seemed to possess something like a soul. After years of learning how to work with paint, I've come to see how individual pieces grow out of the ones that preceded it (both personally and historically) and always, I'm driven by the capacity of paint, to render both the sublime and the playful.

Right : Meg and Amos and Art Oil on plaster on canvas H214 x W138cm . Finalist, Archibald Prize 2019 Loribelle Spirovski.

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Because the formal part of my art education was brief and focussed more on conceptual rather than technical aspects of artmaking, my painting practice has, from the beginning, been very experimental. Twenty-first century painters are faced with a crisis of freedom; with all the styles and approaches available, how do you choose just one? Painters who go through an academic route are taught of the centrality of drawing, but I came to painting through colour. The skeleton of line that underpins the mass only comes to me later in the painting process, after I've already come to terms with light and

shadow. In my single semester of life drawing at university, I learned how unforgiving paper could be, how drawing relied on a steady hand and a confident eye, so I gravitated away from the medium and was always more attracted to the ample, infinitely more forgiving medium of paint. But as it turns out, painting has taught me a lot about drawing, and over the years, I've returned to it, 'drawing' with paint in my more linear works, and working on paper, though rarely sharing them with the public.

This dialogue between painting and drawing has underscored a lot of what inspires me; the external flesh vs the internal skeletal structure; the visible vs the hidden. I'm a collector of images, fragments, quotes, and my smartphone has become a library of the scraps and ephemera that I come across in life and online. When students ask me about overcoming blocks, I describe my practice of cataloguing and rearranging photographs and screenshots on my phone. I'll have folders named 'Lucian', 'Francis', 'Egon' and 'Paula', after some of my favourite artists. Other folders, 'Angles', 'Figures', 'Colour-studies', 'Storytelling' and 'Bodies' are ever-changing and ever-growing. I'll return to them after a month or so, discarding those that no longer serve me, and re-categorise the ones that still pose a challenge. I'll emerge after hours of this, practically blind, questioning what, if anything, is left for me to say with my work. But somehow, there always is, and that interstice of space is the me-shaped void I try to imagine to when I face the blank canvas.

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Challenges always come. Nothing prepares you for the dreadful experience of showing your portfolio to galleries - a soulcrushing process now seemingly made redundant by Instagram - or the necessary evil of art competitions, which, other than 'toughening' your skin, teaches you very little of what art is, and reveals a great deal about human nature and the

currents

which become mobilised within institutions of art. COVID-19, for all the instability and change that it's unleashed on the world, was not as big of a challenge for me to overcome artistically, as the injury I'd developed in my right arm over the course of the pandemic. Thoracic outlet syndrome causes numbness, pain, tingling, and besides loss of sleep, I lost, for a long time, the ability to paint with my right hand. It lingers still, and I've learned to work with my left hand, creating self-portraits—all that this hand seems to want to paint. I never liked doing self-portraits, feeling that I could never really capture what I looked like. But these come close. Just before the worst of the pain, I was able to complete a body of work

which will be exhibited this June at Nanda Hobbs gallery in Chippendale. It is a meditation on my childhood growing up in the Philippines and will include a few pieces created with that other artist, my left hand.

Thinking over the almost-decade of my career, I've achieved a lot of the things that I would have once put on a list of 'things that make a successful artist': my work has been exhibited in galleries around the world, selected as a finalist in prizes like

the Archibald, I have won two art prizes and have collaborated on a fashion line, been printed on a billboard, and worked with extraordinary musicians for their album covers. My art is on bottles of wine. It's cool to think of my younger self and the experiences she'll have just by doing what she loves. The messages that I've received over the years, from strangers who have been touched by something I've created, have been an indescribable gift.

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But, when I really try to pinpoint the moments that I feel genuine pride for, the image that comes is often of a hand, or a strand of hair, or an eye, painted well, with just the right balance between the will of my mind and the force of the medium. I can sink right back into that moment, recalling with perfect clarity the instant it came out of me. Always, it feels like I'd been inhabited by the ghost of chance, or some other elusive

substance. Afterwards, when I step back from the canvas, I'll understand the mechanics without really comprehending how the magic came to be there. Because after all this time, it is still that. Magic. - Loribelle Spirovski © 2022.

Right : Vers la Flamme, Oil on canvas, H120 x W90cm. Finalist in the Gosford Art Prize . Loribelle Spirovski 2016.

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G A L L E R Y

O R I B E L L E S P I R

O V S K I Issue 47 - July 2022

Page 20 : Homme 56 2017 used on the cover of my husband Simon Tedeschi’s book, ‘Fugitive’. Loribelle Spirovski 2017.

Left : Moving House Oil on linen, W85 x H110cm. Winner of the Naked and Nude art prize, 2021. Loribelle Spirovski 2021.

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Homme 280 Oil, W122 x H152 x D3cm.

This piece was recreated as a rug in collaboration with Art in Rug. Loribelle Spirovski 2021.

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Pareidolia H66 x W66 inches. Oil, acrylic, charcoal, spray paint on canvas. Loribelle Spirovski 2017.

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The Red Admiral Butterfly Oil on wood panel H60.5 x W45cm. Loribelle Spirovski 2021.

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Self portrait with non-dominant hand Oil on wood panel H61 x W46cm. Loribelle Spirovski 2022.

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Mirror into Mirror Oil on wood panel H75 x W55cm. Winner of the Bluethumb art prize 2021. Loreibelle Spirovski.

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He who hears Oil and acrylic on canvas W76 x H101cm. Featured on cover of ‘Limelight’ magazine 2018. Loribelle Spirovski.

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Lior ( musician) Oil on plaster on canvas H122 x W92cm . Loribelle Spirovski 2019.

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John Bell at home Oil and acrylic on canvas H166 x W110 cm. Finalist, Archibald Prize 2017 Loribelle Spirovski.

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A Foreign Father and a Child in the Dark 15 June — 2 July 2022 https://nandahobbs.com/

Page 30 : Left panel - A Foreign Father Right panel - A Child in the Dark, (Featured in show with Nanda Hobbs) Panel 1 & 2 : Oil and acrylic on linen, H200 x W121cm. Finalist Blake Art Prize 2022.

Right : Sabong 4 Oil on wood panel H60.5 x W45cm. Featured in show with Nanda Hobbs 2022. Loribelle Spirovski 2022.

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B R A D

Rite of passage

you began to lose weight and lost interest - playing in the backyard,

On the left hand side

becoming so thin you passed easily

as you come into town

between the bars of the fence

there’s a vet on a corner

meant to contain you.

who can save lives or put them down.

Treatment followed at the vet where he injected a liquid into your mouth and we waited…

We got you when you were very young.

E V A N S

until finally, At night

one bright day

we heard your whimpering

I saw you squat feebly

and my mother placed a clock

and watched the worms slide

beside your bed to ease the absence of your mum.

out of you like possessed spaghetti

We later found you Lying down on the cold, tiled

into sunlight

floor of the laundry.

stretching her jeans let go of mine... she was a tall lady who liked to stretch her jeans.

I watched her fly backwards & slam into the door of a cupboard.

After removing them from the washing machine, she would

YOU PRATT! she yelled at me

offer me one end

& I watched her slide

& then we’d pull together. slide To restore them to their original length

down

the pulling had to be done in unison into a state of grumpiness. but on one occasion feeling a little bored I was I lulled her into a false

never invited

sense of security to stretch her jeans & just as she pulled

again.

from her end

B R A D E V A N S

Luscious fruits

His passions nourish in sundown seasons,

Midnight’s chimes sound the keys of a freeman

each day he thinks a better way to spend -

while the scrape of a chain holds no bend

an acknowledgement of his own demons.

his passions nourish in sundown seasons.

To ignore his lusts will bring high treason

Luscious fruits are what he is seekin’

each workday seems a day that never ends,

pale, busty, a milf with an open end

his passions nourish in sundown seasons.

why pare it down to a gooseflesh reason?

He looks for things considered as heathen

Her steps move to a bed she is reachin’

what others may seek, for him, do not trend

each night she thinks of better ways to spend

why pare it down to a gooseflesh reason?

his passions nourish in sundown seasons an acknowledgement of his own demons.

the crossroads Brad is now 50

Perhaps I'll find another use for him

And he feels it.

train him to distinguish dirty-dirt from clean dirt.

50 pirouettes around the sun

Perhaps a medusa will take me by surprise

50 laces have come undone.

and slap my face for groping her tit,

He no longer points to the stars,

mistaken my baboon's curiosity

he dips just below the horizon.

for a pig, turn me into stone,

(One can only guess

and dump me at the crossroads:

where he'll be pointing next.)

A herma to guide the lost & weary.

GEORGE GITTOES - UKRAINE Issue 47 - July 2022

L O V E I N W A R Borodyanka, 250 X 120. Acrylic on canvas. Completed at Borodyanka outside the ruined apartments. Russian Interior, 150 X 120cm. Acrylic on canvas. Completed in the open air on location at Bucha beside destroyed

Russian Tanks. Issue 47 - July 2022

George Gittoes - Ukraine 2022.

George Gittoes is a celebrated Australian artist, an internationally acclaimed film producer, director and writer. Gittoes’ work has consistently expressed his social, political and humanitarian concern and the effects of injustice and conflict. He produces poignant, rare images of the aftermath of terror, shock and death on the edge of human experience. Since 1986 he has travelled to many war torn areas, an eyewitness to the battles and killing-fields of including the Philippines, Somalia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Bougainville, and South Africa. In recent years his work has especially focused on the Middle East, with recurring visits to Israel and Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan and recently the troubled areas of South Chicago USA., and at present the Ukraine.

In May ARTS ZINE issue we included a feature on renown artists and film makers George Gittoes and Hellen Rose as they left in March for the Ukraine to fight for freedom alongside Ukrainian artists against the Russian invasion. Hellen and George had no idea what was ahead of them…. “but, the importance of artists and creators to stand up against the worst in human barbarity has never been more necessary.” “Back in March, we were told not to cross the border from Poland by Australian consular authorities – that it would be at our own risk, and it was totally against their wishes”. They have been three months in Ukraine witnessing the horrendous aftermath and ongoing assault by the Russian army. During this time Hellen and George have forged great friendships and respect from the Ukrainian people, artists, and poets. Issue 47 - July 2022

Now after three months they are returning to Australia, but their departure didn’t run smooth. “There have been new wave of attacks with missiles. Some missiles hit Kyiv overnight. Our train exit was a nightmare - making us both fatigued and stressed. Things seemed to be going okay until we heard sirens and explosions from our end carriage. Our train was hit by some fragments of a missile - not a big hit, partly disabling it and the overhead wires (electric train) on the lines destroyed. We spent a hot day - 12 hours until the train moved and we thought it was getting to Poland but it stopped unable to work anymore. We all had to get out. We had more stuff than the two of us could carry and the army wanted us to go to a road about a kilometre away. My roll of canvas is as heavy as me ... like a fallen tree log. We were lucky an old friend was super kind. He got to us by a miracle and we are now in Poland after the 4 hour drive down to Krakow from the border. The other 500 passengers would still be doing it tough out on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.”

The following pages include a selection of writing and excerpts from George Gittoes’ dispatches and photographs direct from the Ukraine. Russian invasion - Ukraine 2022. Photography : Kate Parunova, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose.

Issue 47 - July 2022

Russian invasion - Ukraine 2022. Photography : Kate Parunova, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose.

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Russian invasion - Ukraine 2022. Photography : Kate Parunova, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose.

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Russian invasion - Ukraine 2022. Photography : Kate Parunova, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose.

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Bridge of Death Irpin, one of three paintings, 3 meter x 185 on canvas. George Gittoes 2022. Issue 47 - July 2022

BRIDGE OF DEATH - IRPIN There were many cars on the bridge hoping to escape to Kyiv when the front of the bridge was blown to prevent Russian tanks entering the city. The Russians massacred those in the cars, mainly families with children.

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ART CAR

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ART CAR - George Gittoes It has been a long time since I have experienced something as damaging as the Kibeho Massacre in Rwanda but the Bridge of Death at Irpin comes close. Like with the work I did about Rwanda I knew I had to create at least one major work about the bridge. The cars were removed and placed in a

long rusting and tangled pile near the road out. My painting combines studies of the wrecks in the pile with the sketches I made on the Bridge. I have gone back over and again to draw them, but it was not until my most recent time there that I noticed a car which had been hand painted. I thought ‘Whoever did this had to be an artist.’ The car seemed to beckon me to sit inside it. I did not have to go through a door to do this as the whole of the back of the car had been blown away. My friend, Kate, said “So, now you are sitting in cars with the remains of dead people.” There was a terrible smell emanating from the car. I felt embarrassed and made a defensive reply “This is not the smell of death; it is just rotting garbage.” I have smelt the smell of death too many times. The smell of death in the cars at the bridge was overpoweringly human decay. The difference was subtle but this I was sure this was not the same odour. I sent photos of the painted car to friends and finding the story and fate of the owner of the car became a mission for my Ukrainian Poet friend Viktor Solodchuk. Victor’s quest struck a very sensitive cord with his wide circle of artist friends. The car was identified within days and soon I found myself waiting with Kate, in a café to meet the owner, Serhiy. The good news was that he was alive but if there was someone else in the car they could not have survived. Serhiy is 28 ultra fit, handsome and had all the characteristic moves of resulting from Special Forces training.

He sat across from me, next to Kate and his eyes were investigating me the way an experienced detective would a suspect. I found myself gazing down at a remarkable graphic on his back T Shirt of a hand grenade that had been sliced open with its blood-filled interior dripping into a bowl – with a section of the blood forming a peace sign. Serhiy pulled up his sleeve aggressively thinking I was wanting to see the rest of a tattoo of a knife with snake and skull symbols. I smiled and said – “No I am looking at the graphic on your T Shirt and thinking it is probably designed be the artist we visited yesterday.

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It was not long, however, before he figured out that he and I were kindred spirits in that we had both seen too much death, me in my long life and he in his short life.

We talked about our mental scars and showed one another our physical scars from war wounds. He had joined the

army and fought in Donbas region for 5 years before this new Russian Invasion. He said, I saw our army do bad things in Donbas but nothing as bad as what the Russians do – it is an insult to animals to compare them to animals. What they have done to children …..” Having decided I was OK and after leafing through some books with my art and photos from the many wars I have lived through, he decided to tell me the story of the car. He had pictures of it on his phone. In its first incarnation it was all metallic blues and silvers with very professional

looking artwork featuring an angry bear on the front bonnet. This is a classic vintage car like a Holden Monaro, and he belongs to a club of fellow owners of the same model. He kept changing the paint job and at one point it was many different tones of red with very subtle designs. Its last design was very painterly like a Basquiat canvas – loose and free. Serhiy said, modestly, “ I decided to paint it myself without help from a spray shop.” I asked Serhiy if he saw himself as an artist and he tightened up. I could imagine him not wanting to admit to ‘artistic’ sensibilities in front of his army buddies and not wanting it to get out. He squirmed in his seat and eventually agreed there is a creative spirit in everyone seeking to get out and this could possibly, also, be the case with him.

We told him how we would like to include the car in our House of Art show, and he fished in his wallet and found the plastic ownership, registration card and gave it to Kate. The car is now ours. He promised to be at the House of Art Show on 21 st but, of course, will remain anonymous. Then we got the story of the car. His father borrowed the car to go to their family home in Irpin to rescue their cat. All the family had found sanctuary in Kyiv but they were worried about the cat. His father parked the car outside in the street and was feeding the hungry cat and had just placed a saucer with milk under its nose when he heard a Russian plane and looked out the window. The low flying plane was zeroing in on

the Red Cross building across the road. The missiles it fired destroyed the car. His father said he felt lucky because if he had not decided to wait for the cat to drink the milk, they would have both been in the car when the missile struck.

Serhiy’s car had joined the other wrecked cars from the Bridge of Death at Irpin but unlike them there is no tragedy of dead families and children attached to it. My fear that I would learn that an artist and loved ones had been killed in the ‘Art Car’ was , thankfully , groundless. - George Gittoes © 2022. Issue 47 - July 2022

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VIKTOR SOLODCHUK Victor Solodchuk is a Ukrainian poet, writer, screenwriter and translator, born in 1971 in Odessa. He is author of poems, stories, and a sci-fi novel «Совпалыч», which was included in the short list of “Russkaya Premia”. He collaborated on the documentary “Native Ashes” with Alisa Pavlovska in 2021. “I am doing a collaborative work in public with my friend Viktor Solodchuk. Viktor is a poet and novelist of great fame in Ukraine. He has written a poem about the barbarity of the Russian Army to match my drawing 'Azog the Defiler. A huge day today doing the 'Z the Defiler' word and graphic piece in a central square in Odessa.

It went well. It is good to be out among

people doing work which defies the insanity of the destruction of this beautiful city.”

Issue 47 - July 2022

Russian invasion - Ukraine 2022. Photography : Kate Parunova, George Gittoes, Hellen Rose.

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KANDINSKY - George Gittoes May 2022. When I was out painting ‘Z the Defiler’ as an action in the Greek Square, Odessa, with poet, Viktor Solodchuk we were visited by a highly esteemed art teacher, Igor Nosok. Igor has taught here for 50 years and is loved by all the Odessan artists I have met.

I had overheard Igor mentioning Kandinsky to Hellen. (Hellen shoots and directs our filming solo, when I am unable to hold one of the cameras.) Hearing the name Kandinsky got my attention and I turned away from my drawing. Kandinsky had a huge influence on my development as an artist. I walked over to Igor, rested my arm on his shoulder and said, “I studied Kandinsky at University and read his book ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’. He and other Russian artists were very important to me when I was young.” I was quickly made to realized I had put my foot in my mouth by saying “Russian Artists”. I was instantly chastised by Maria Galina (a famous Science Fiction writer who was translating for Hellen) “No not Russian Artists but Ukraine from Odessa”. Odessans are proud to own Kandinsky and from what Maria and Igor then told me, the cultural identity of contemporary Odessan art needs to claim Kandinsky as Odessan and Ukrainian. I found this very confusing. I have always seen Kandinsky as uniquely Russian and now I was being told this is wrong, that he is Ukrainian. I know Kandinsky’s life story as well as I know that of Van Gogh or Gauguin. He was born in Moscow in 1866 but his family, who were merchants, moved to Odessa where he spent his childhood from the age of 6 to 13. He was a student at the Grekov Odessa Art School. He did not initially see himself being an artist. He left Odessa and went to the University of Moscow to study Law and Economics. He taught law in Moscow. He did not start painting until he left Russia for Munich at the age of 30, studying art there. The first world war had him return to Moscow in 1914 where he was influential in developing a new kind of Revolutionary Art, but his spiritual ideas did not fit with Communist realism, so he returned to Germany in 1920 and taught at the Bauhaus from 1922-33. When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis, who labelled his art as decadent, he left for France for the war years, becoming a French Citizen and died there in 1944.

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Yesterday, we drove to the shopping mall which was bombed a few nights ago, on 9 th May. On our way Viktor excitedly pointed out of the car window “That is Kandinsky’s Art School, if you like we can stop and go inside?” I could have thought that Kandinsky had taught art there, but I knew he did not. It may have been the school he went to as a junior student before leaving for Moscow to study law, but he never taught art in Odessa. I would have liked to see inside the school but knew the afternoon light was going and we would not have time to film the bombed buildings if we made this stop.

Once we arrived at the huge Rivera and COSY shopping Mall, I felt like I had been transported back to the kind of devastation I had seen in Irpin where a similar COSY mall had been destroyed. Rows of burnt shopping trollies and blackened buildings with pieces of clothing caught on twisted metal and moving in the breeze like ghosts. I picked up a piece of melted aluminium shaped like an eagle or angel and offered it to Viktor but his face twisted as he looked at it and he said “No, throw it away, I cannot touch it.” Earlier he had explained that when he was in Moscow, many Avant - guard Russian artists were into destruction as a style of art “They destroyed many things, it was like a prediction of what they are now doing to Ukraine.”

I did one year at Sydney University before travelling to New York where I decided to give up University studies and become an artist. Like Kandinsky, I was initially interested in studying law as I had enjoyed being first speaker in our high school debating team. For the first time, Sydney University offered a unit in Fine Art History under the Internationally acclaimed Art Historian Professor Bernard Smith. Bernard, who had been affiliated with the Australian Communist party, recruited a young firebrand lecturer Terry Smith. Terry promoted leftist communist ideas and was a devout atheist like his fellow Lecturer Donald Brooke. It did not impress Terry that I chose to do a paper on Kandinsky and

his theoretical book ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’. We were expected to give a short talk on our papers to the full student group, but my talk turned into a debate and heated clash with Terry. I expounded on Kandinsky’s mystical beliefs and linked them to my own. In colloquial terms ‘Terry spat the dummy’ and lampooned my every word mercilessly. It was that conflict that made me feel uncomfortable with continuing at university. Kandinsky was at the heart of my decision to become an artist. To the disappointment of my parents, I gave up any idea of following a safe career in law.

Issue 47 - July 2022

When Hellen and I arrived in Odessa, our next-door neighbour, George, explained to us that half the population of Odessa had been Pro Russian before the war and elected a Pro Russian Mayor. This support had dropped to only 10% after people have witnessed the murders and destruction the Russians have done in Irpin , Bucha and Mariupol. In Kyiv, where most people do not speak Russian, only speak Ukraine, there was no sense of support for Russia. Everyone remembered the high price they had paid for freedom during the Euromaidan 2013-4 protests where many had died to maintain independence from Russia. We encountered no sympathy for Russia at all in Kyiv. Was Kandinsky Russian or Odessan Ukrainian? This question has no logical answer – Kandinsky was born in Moscow but spent seven years of his childhood in Odessa. My friend the poet Viktor Solodchuk was born in Odessa but spent ten years in Moscow. Viktor started writing at six but he tells me that he found his voice as a writer in Moscow with his first novel Sovpalich (Synchronicity). Viktor, now, describes Russians as Orcs and Putin as the embodiment of evil. Viktor’s twenty four year-old son, Mark, is in the army and could be fighting the Russians at the frontline of this war any day. Mark is prepared to die for Ukraine to retain its independence from Russia. This Odessa conundrum has a personal link to when at eighteen I decided to take the road suggested Kandinsky’s ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ and plot a mystical course rather than be converted to the Marxist views of Terry Smith and Donald Brooke.

I had two books with many illustrations of my art on a table for people to check out while I painted with Viktor. I watched as Igor Nosok, the teacher who loved the ideas of Kandinsky , flipped through it and I wondered at what I have become. I embraced Kandinsky fully at eighteen and could not wait to see originals of his work from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in her spiral museum (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) in New York. My work reflects the horrors of all the wars I have witnessed humanity enduring against evil. It is figurative and has none of the musical beauty of a Kandinsky abstract. Kandinsky lived through the First World War, the Russian Revolutionary years, the rise of Nazism in Germany and the Second World War but this is not reflected in his art. Here I am, in his childhood Odessa, a place of beaches, sunshine and magnificent architecture, painting about Russian Orcs destroying peace and beauty and lead by an incomprehensibly evil villain. It feels like living through World War Three. In a few weeks I am planning to have an exhibition of the work I have created in Ukraine at what remains of the destroyed House of Culture in Irpin. I would like to be hanging works as beautiful as Kandinsky’s abstract, butterfly wings, paintings but the works I have created are as disturbing as the building they are being hung in. That is the other contradiction Odessa and Kandinsky have troubled me with – I am saying it is important to create in the face of destruction and I believe that is what I am doing, and I am still a mystic, but I doubt whether Kandinsky would approve of what I will be showing in Irpin. Issue 47 - July 2022

I have never been in a community that uses the word mystical or mysticism as much as here in Odessa.

I am

leaving Odessa today with the feeling that what defines the people here as Ukrainian, rather than Russian, is mystical. There is no other way of explaining it. In the fight against the marshalled forces of Putin’s darkness the people of Odessa are with the forces of Light. The news today is that the Ukraine army has pushed back the Russian Army from Kharkiv, something that seemed very unlikely a week ago.

(Note:

I was, also, doing a unit of philosophy and been

disappointed to find the focus was on Materialist concepts and refusing to accept that we have souls as well as flesh

and brains.) - George Gittoes May 2022.

Issue 47 - July 2022

MIKHAILO DEYAK “Mikhailo Deyak He is an abstract painter and sculptor who is very famous both in Ukraine and Europe. His work is in front of the Kyiv Opera House and by accident , these sculptures resemble the crushed structures which have been made from the impact of Russian bombs and fire - only Mikhailo's are chrome plated or surfaced with reflective paint. His sculptures in front of the Opera House were only installed six months ago - that is three months before the war started.”

Mikhailo Deyak was born in 1984 Ukraine. Deyak represents the younger generation of contemporary Ukrainian artists. He works at the intersection of neo-expressionism and minimalism, experiments with materials by using glass and metal, and masterfully applies all painting techniques.

Deyak has shown in several prestigious venues around the world and his works are in the collections of the National Arts Museum of Ukraine and owned by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine.

Issue 47 - July 2022

STEPHEN DUPONT “It was wonderful to meet up with Stephen Dupont in Kyiv last week. Stephen is an old friend of thirty years and the best war

photographer I have met. His photos in the company of Marsoud in Afghanistan are classics and a unique window into a reality no other photographer gained access to. Sadly we only had a few hours together over drinks and a meal but got some of his classic shots.”

Stephen Dupont is an Australian artist who works with photography and documentary film. Stephen is recognised around the world for his concerned photography on the human condition, war and climate. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into the people, culture and communities that are fast disappearing from our world.

www.stephendupont.com

Issue 47 - July 2022

IRPIN HOUSE OF ART - George Gittoes I have spent a lot of time at Borodyanka - now the focus is on Irpin and the show we are planning to do at the destroyed HOUSE OF ART. Now we are able to get inside the real work begins.

More than anything this is a war to preserve Ukraine culture. The Russians targeted the House of Art and similar places of culture wherever they have been . Taras Shevchenko has become the symbol of what they are fighting for . It was strange that the only item in the building that had not been burnt of damaged was his cut out . It was like having him with us there today. I have just returned from Irpin where Kate and I spent the day in the House of Art with Taras Shevchenko . Previously it was not possible to enter as the Russians had fully booby trapped every space inside but it has now been cleared. It seemed that it was locked up but the front doors were only held closed by some stone slabs.

Everything has been burned except a standing cut out of Shevchenko .He was dressed in trendy modern cloths with sneakers and shoulder bracers. This poet is the symbol of Ukraine independence. In his lifetime in the 1800s he was jailed for seeking independence for Ukraine. He is more to Ukrainians than Shakespeare is to the English. I stood him in various places in the guttered space to let him see, in a symbolic sense , what had been done here. A grand piano was burnt to the ground. When I ran my fingers across the strings there was no sound. Music had been silenced. There was a ballet rehearsal room with exercise rails and mirrors. I heard a sound like a child but it was a pigeon nesting on rows of lockers. Some of their doors were open and inside there were tiny dancing shoes. Everywhere there were burnt frames which had held paintings .Nothing of their subjects or authors were discernible. Beautiful antique ceramics and porcelain were jumbled together and fractured in the piles of white and grey ash.

Issue 47 - July 2022

I had thought it could be possible to show paintings and drawings inside these spaces. But with the broken glass and the floors burnt away and what remains of the ceilings threatening to collapse the hazards are too many, making it too risky for a group to enter. Too dangerous for an audience to safely participate. We are going to have to use the outside. The exterior walls are all pocked with bullet and shrapnel holes over a soft blue paint colour. I can see the art wrapping around the building and the performances going at the classical front entrance.

Issue 47 - July 2022

Through the Looking Glass. It is the third painting in the Victory set of three shown at the House of Art on 21st June. It is on a 3m x 186 canvas but the actual image is 2.5 m x 185 as George put blue and yellow flag strips on either side of all three for this show. They will work for the locals as a gesture of support for Ukraine. Issue 47 - July 2022

LOOKING GLASS George Gittoes - June 2022 I was about 12 years old and out on a Sunday picnic in the Royal National Park with my Parents and Grandparents. Nana set out the picnic next to a river because she knew I would be entertained by catching yabbies. I would put a piece of rotten meat on a string and coax them in to a shrimp net, dragging them slowly along with the meat I their two big front claws. I was doing this when I heard a splash. Some bushwalker had left a camera on the branch of a tree, possibly while they went for a swim and forgotten it. I dived in after it and ran excitedly over to show everyone. It was a Zeiz. Dad took it to a camera shop and was assured they had repaired the water damage and it was OK for me to use. This was my first camera. It kept breaking down due to the water, but dad kept getting it fixed and I kept using it. I would take slides and the whole family and friends would be treated to a regular slide show, usually, documenting our trips to places like

Canberra. I even took abstract art photos that no one understood the purpose of but seemed to enjoy – things like the textures on the bark of trees. I would post my exposed films off to Kodak and they would return in our letter box in a yellow plastic container. I took this camera with me to the US in 1968 but it broke down, almost immediately. One of my big regrets was that I was too tight fisted to replace it. That important period of my life meeting Andy Warhol, dinners with Clement Greenberg and all the times I spent with Joe Delaney drawing at the Art Students League and sketching portraits in Washington Square Park would have been captured on film. When I returned to Australia in 1969 my dad bought me a new Asahi Pentax camera with a ‘through the lens viewfinder’ SLR. Later adding an

enlarger which enabled me to set up a dark room. A professional photographer, Ian Dodd, lived around the corner. Ian showed me the basics a of printing and developing. I would wander the streets of Sydney and especially Kings Cross and take shots of people being themselves. No one I knew thought photography was an art form like Painting and Drawing. It was a revelation meeting Greg Weight through Martin Sharp, in the early days, before the Yellow House became the Yellow House. I remember sharing a thick wad of my black and white photos with Greg and feeling I had found a companion artist photographer who really ‘got it’.

Issue 47 - July 2022

So many wars later and thousands of photos behind me I am in Ukraine. But photography is not what it was. Everyone here is a photographer with a camera in their phone capable of capturing incredibly high-quality images and immediately sending them to friends or posting on social media. It is rare that I photograph anything that has not already been captured on someone’s phone. Many of these images and videos shot by ‘amateurs’ are used by world news in place of the work of professional freelance photojournalists and videographers. Inaccessible situations, like inside the siege of the steel works at Mariupol have reached the world via phones.

When I set up my canvas to paint in war ravaged places, like Borodyanka and Bucha, locals, passing by, stop to take photos with their phones and invariable ask if they can pose with me for selfies. I have to expect to be interrupted, constantly. When cops and army vehicles pull up it is not to ask me what I am doing or to see my passport and press credentials it is to get selfies and shoot social media videos. In the debris of what was once the beautiful garden, of a classy restaurant in Borodyanka, there is a classical sculpture of a Greek Goddess standing on a column. She is the only item that is undamaged or scarred by a bullets or shrapnel.

She holds a shallow cup in her left hand

and is looking into it. The sculptor was not aware that he had captured the exact way people of this century stand transfixed starring into the

screens of their mobile phones. In my drawing I replicated her viewing the destroyed buildings and cars which surround her as if she is looking into a phone and not a cup. This became my metaphor for the way the world has viewed the news of this war on their phones. But it is not just those outside of Ukraine, but everyone here has been glued to their phones for news, as well. When a bomb exploded near to where we were staying in Odessa the neighbours all came outside holding their phones. While we all heard the explosion and could smell and see the fires it had ignited there were people closer, filming it on their phones and live streaming. And we could check the reports of early arriving news crews.

I replicated the statue three times for my painting and am calling it ‘Through the Looking Glass.’ This is a looking glass war made more real and immediate and frightening on small handheld screen becoming inseparable for those here, from the panorama of destruction that surrounds us. I do not use a phone camera and continue to lug my heavy SLR digital cameras wherever I go. Often when I see what others have shot on their phones, I recognise their images as better than what I have captured with all my years of experience. That is how it all started and lead to the many.

Drawing Through the Looking Glass and the destroyed park. George Gittoes 2022. Issue 47 - July 2022

Issue 47 - July 2022

VICTORY - ART OF RESISTENCE EXHIBITION “The four day VICTORY exhibition at the House of Art in Irpin exceeded our expectations in every way. There were over ninety works on display including six Ukraine Artists along with my paintings and Hellen's Installation. We also had eight brilliant photographs by Stephen Dupont. The feature artist from Ukraine was Victoria with twenty four works on display plus the three meter collaborative piece which we created there, merging our styles. Wonderful public attendance and feedback, especially by the locals who are already designing a new building, on the site, for the arts”. - George Gittoes june 2022.

Issue 47 - July 2022

Excerpt - House of Art Exhibition

“My feature work for the people of Irpin (the survivors) will be my 'Bridge of Death' painting . I will still be painting it at the site of the car graveyard on Monday 20th.

At the entrance there will be a large photo of Hellen's performance in full costume. The visitors will not be able to go inside as it is too hazardous and I doubt the authorities would allow it. The lady Mayor of Irpin will attend the show .

Tomorrow Victoria and I will be working together in the House of Art , finishing pieces for the show. It is like working on art in the ruins of the Twin Towers. It is an act of artistic defiance against those barbarians who destroy culture and are doing a good job of destroying our world.”

Issue 47 - July 2022

“These last weeks have been totally focused on the Irpin show. Hellen’s

performance

piece

ran

over

two

days

and

the

collaborations inside with Victoria another 3 days . I worked at the site of the car graveyard finishing the bridge painting and took it

back to the House of Art for the final stage.

I met Alex when I was painting the dead Russian at Bucha . He offered to help and turned out to be amazing. He was there for the Hellen filming and Victoria. On the 21st there was a hurricane strength wind and rain storm. I was lifted up in the air when carrying one of the canvases. It broke into a dozen pieces and Alex offered to fix it overnight. When we arrived the next morning he was screwing it together with a very professional repair. Hellen devised an installation which , also, involved Alex. He found some iron mesh that worked as a kind of ladder so Hellen could manipulate her long piece of cloth and flowers out of a high window.” - George Gittoes June 2022.

Issue 47 - July 2022

HELLEN ROSE Singer and performer. Awarded BVA Hons, M Teach, Grad Cert Arts and NSW Premier's Award 2014. Manager /Co founder

The

Yellow

House

Jalalabad,

Afghanistan.

Rose is Co Producer and Music Director at Gittoes Films Pty. Ltd. George Gittoes and Hellen Rose make documentary films,

often in and about war zones. Their latest film White Light

deals with the gun

violence that's

rampant in the

Englewood neighbourhood of South Side Chicago, USA. Hellen Rose’s short film "Haunted Burqa," has been selected as a semi finalist for Best Short in the Berlin International Art Film Festival 2022 and the Indie Short Fest, Los Angeles International Film Festival 2022.

www.hellenrose.com

Issue 47 - July 2022

GEORGE GITTOES George Gittoes is a celebrated Australian artist, an internationally acclaimed film producer, director and writer. Gittoes’ work has consistently expressed his social, political and humanitarian concern and the effects of injustice and conflict

"I believe there is a role for contemporary art to challenge, rather than entertain. My work is confronting humanity with the darker side of itself." As an artist Gittoes has received critical acclaim including the Blake Prize for Religious Art (Twice) and Wynn Prize. He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of NSW. His films have won many International Awards and in 2015 he was bestowed the Sydney Peace Prize, in

recognition of his life’s work in

contributing to the peace-making process.

Issue 47 - July 2022

A WELL OF ASPIRATIONS Eric Werkhoven

Stand still for a while, I think I lost you in the dark alleys. Where it is up to ourselves to do what makes it worthwhile, to narrow it down to a few dozen words. Surround ourselves with beautiful objects.

Now, it is true they are covered in dust, something has departed, while I can still see them. I am not the one to ask what it means.

Issue 47 - July 2022

What shines more brightly is that otherness, we have been collecting fragments that glitter, words to empower and illustrate our humanness. The unravelling essence of putting it together, painstakingly joyful, to reassemble and reassure we are still the same person, you’d love to dearly meet again. The exact words I have to scribble over, because the big lights are shining somewhere else, reinvented, reinvigorated into greater aspirations of ourselves. As in marking areas in a landscape. - Eric Werkhoven © 2022. Issue 47 - July 2022

BRONWYN OLIVER L O R R A I N E F

I L D E

S Issue 47 - July 2022

Bronwyn Oliver - sculptor extraordinaire Lorraine Fildes This year I saw a magnificent sculpture exhibition of Bronwyn Oliver’s work at the S H Ervin Gallery in Sydney. Also this year a superb documentary on Bronwyn’s life and work was shown by the ABC. You may still be able to view this documentary on iView. Bronwyn is one of Australia’s leading sculptors. Bronwyn had the rarest of all skills - she was able to combine beauty with an innovative style. Bronwyn Oliver (1959-2006) was raised in rural NSW. She was an outstanding student and wished to further her studies in art. She attended the College of Fine Arts in Sydney (known as Alexander Mackie when she attended it) where she was accidentally allocated to the sculpture section and not painting as she had requested. This was a lucky error for her as she soon realized that sculpture was her forte. After completing her studies in Sydney she then travelled to the UK to study at London’s Chelsea School of Art. She was a highly successful student and became the recipient of many international artist residencies and awards. Bronwyn finally settled in Sydney. Bronwyn lived for her art. She worked with strict discipline and commitment and largely in isolation and on her own terms. Bronwyn shunned the social side of the art world. Making art was the driving force in her life and she spent up to fourteen hours a day in her studio. She had a disciplined daily regime which began with a jog before dawn. For nineteen years she combined her art practice with teaching at Sydney’s Cranbrook Preparatory School. She is known to have thrived on the energy and creativity of the five to eight year old students to whom she taught art.

Issue 47 - July 2022

Bronwyn used paper, cane and fibreglass to create her early works. However, she found "fibreglass hazardous and paper too impermanent", and for most of her career she worked in metal. Ideas were often first sketched by Bronwyn, before she moved to construction in three dimensions. For large works she created maquettes, sometimes in plasticine, or copper wire or wood or a combination of a variety of materials. The major pieces were created at Crawfords Casting foundry in Enfield in Sydney's inner western suburbs. The foundry would fabricate the elements of the sculptures, but Bronwyn would train the foundry staff and supervise their work. Bronwyn would produce the more delicate works in her studio. Many were created by crafting and joining wire to create abstract forms. These were built around moulds, twisting the metal into place with pliers, before severing it with wire cutters. Joints were usually soldered or brazed. Friends observed the injuries and marks she carried as a result of working with such unforgiving material. In her later career, most of her pieces were for public and private commissions. The metals used for these creations varied: the monumental 16.5-metre-high sculpture in the Sydney Hilton was fabricated in aluminium, as was the Brisbane sculpture Big Feathers. However most, such as Palm, Magnolia and Globe, were crafted in copper. Following you will find photos of all the sculptures mentioned except for “Big Feathers” as this sculpture has been removed for essential repairs. There is an extraordinary refinement to Bronwyn’s work. She combined an obsessive drive with skilled technical ability to produce works of great beauty. Bronwyn’s work is inspired by nature but rather than mimicking or abstracting nature, her works suggest a profound interest in the timeless forms of geometry occurring in the natural world. Bronwyn's sculptures are admired for their tactile nature, aesthetics, and the technical skills demonstrated. Between 1986 and her death in 2006, Bronwyn presented 18 solo exhibitions and from the early 1980s participated in numerous group exhibitions in Australia, Asia and Europe. Her works are held in many private collections around the world and in most major Australian art gallery collections. The public commissions that she completed means that we have access to her work 365 days of the year. Issue 47 - July 2022

Globe

was the winning entry in the University of New South Wales Sculpture Commission Competition, 2001. It is a

hollow sphere made of brazed copper rods in an organic filigree-like pattern and set within a bronze cup with four short feet. It is located on the University's main walkway and when I visited the University this year 2022 the sculpture was still on display in the university’s main walkway.

Globe Bronwyn Oliver, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002.

Close-up of fine filigree work forming Globe. Issue 47 - July 2022

VINE Vine, a 16.5 metre high sculpture was installed as part of the $400 million refurbishment of the Sydney Hilton. Taking twelve months to create and requiring a budget of up to half million dollars, the work was completed in 2005. The sculpture was fabricated from 380 kilograms of aluminium, and assembled by a team of eight Croatian welders. A writer reviewing Vine in the Sydney Hilton admired how it "curls like a fairy tale beanstalk up towards the ceiling as though empowered by the sunlight streaming in from a large open space adjacent". Vine was still in the foyer of the Hilton Hotel in 2022 when I took these photos.

Issue 47 - July 2022

EYRIE

Are the three large pebble like structures new sculptures to be hatched out of the Eyrie? This major public sculpture in Adelaide, was adapted from Home of a Curling Bird (1988), which consisted of a long spiral basket in which two eggs were only faintly visible. Issue 47 - July 2022

Bronwyn Oliver was commissioned to create a sculpture situated on the back face of the Hyatt Hotel, Adelaide. Oliver named the work Eyrie in reference to the birds in their nests in the park nearby, and the hotel as a high-rise place of rest. When I visited Adelaide this year May 2022 the Hyatt had now become the Intercontinental Hotel. The sculpture was still situated in the same position.

Installation views - Eyrie, 1993 - Copper, bronze - 500 x 200 x 50 cm. Issue 47 - July 2022

On this page and the next page are two beautiful copper wire sculptures which were commissioned by the Royal Botanic Garden of Sydney from Bronwyn Oliver in 1999.

P A L M

This large scale sculpture which is nestled beneath a palm tree could be thought of as an abstracted unfolding palm frond.

Close-up of the Palm - photo taken in 2022 Issue 47 - July 2022

Following are nine sculptures that were exhibited at S. H . Ervin Gallery in 2022

B R

O N W Y

N O L I

V E R

CEDILLA

2002

Brazed copper, (Slow Burn Collection).

FLEX

1993

Copper, (Macquarie University Art Collection) Issue 47 - July 2022

LABRINTH V

Left :

Labrinth V 1992, Patinated copper, (Collection of Geoff Cousins).

Above : Close-up of Labrinth V showing incredible intricacy of the work.

Issue 47 - July 2022

ROSE

Left : Rose 2006, Copper, (Private Collection). This is believed to be the last work that Bronwyn made. Above : Close-up of Rose showing incredible intricacy of the

work. Issue 47 - July 2022

LOOP

Loop 1995

Copper (Private Collection).

Above : Close-up of Loop showing incredible intricacy of the work.

Issue 47 - July 2022

A K

U R A Sakura 2006 Copper (Private Collection)

Issue 47 - July 2022

B R O N W Y N O L

S I R E N

V E R

Siren 1985 Paper, fibreglass, cane and paint (Private Collection). Issue 47 - July 2022

Left : Siren 1985 Paper, fibreglass, cane and paint (Private Collection).

Issue 47 - July 2022

THE QUICKNESS OF THE HAND

R E

Evening hawkers display their wares. Gypsy women in coloured skirts and braided hair swirl to the click of castanets

and the clink of coin.

A dark eyed man strums a steel string and sings a lament that speaks of his yearning for home

in a foreign land,

and a love he left behind.

An African woman

into a silver setting,

T H

AS GOOD AS IT GETS

‘You must have a vision!’ yells a wild haired evangelist from the steps of the George Street Cinemas.

A street artist chalks his vision onto the boot marked pavement: a Lunar Park Big Dipper packed with starry eyed families

with carnival faces painted the colours of clowns. On the show ground a smiling boy buries his delight into a ball of Fairy Floss, and a Rose Bay woman in mink licks a melting ice-cream.

BECOMING WATER

(Inspired by Fiona Hooper’s painting, High Plateau Autumn)

The river

falling

S E

a black storm from the sky, swirling down snow-capped mountains to embroider a tapestry in the soft canvas of the land

N O

its autumn mood was bleak and blue when once I asked its cold face

to embrace me with a blissful kiss

I felt its passion course through my veins

calling me

calling me:

‘Let go of earth come, drift away through the tributaries of my dreams.’

OMEN Swarms of bats … glide through the light of a blood moon

thunder hammers

clouds break

a curlew shrieks as it sinks into mist

SIMONE DARCY Issue 47 - July 2022

SIMONE DARCY Australian Photo-media artist Simone Darcy presently lives in Melbourne. Previously worked as Photo-media artist and lecturer in Fine Arts at The University of Newcastle, NSW.

“Darcy often uses performance strategies within the still image, along with darkroom experimental processes to give visual form to the intangible and the invisible”. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and received many prestigious awards, including most recently the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize, Muswellbrook Arts Centre 2022, and Ilford CCP Photo Salon. CCP Melbourne 2022. Darcy has taken part in Art Residences: 2022 Metropolitan Fukujusou Residency, Kyoto. Japan. 2022 All That We Are Residency, Tasmania.

2019 Studio Kura Residency, Japan. 2015 Neslit Artist Residency. Iceland.

Page 94 : Paddock Satin Glam, Original image: Silver Gelatin Print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Archival Inkjet Print 150 x 120 cm. Simone Darcy 2022. Right : Gold Unitard & Piss Fountain , Original image: Silver Gelatin Print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Archival Inkjet Print 150 x 120 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

Issue 47 - July 2022

Push/Pull #1, Unique Silver Gelatin Print. 50.8 x 40.5 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

Issue 47 - July 2022

SIMONE DARCY - INTERVIEW Where did you grow up and education? I was born in Bedgerabong, Central West NSW. I moved to Sydney the day after I finished my HSC. It was the early 90’s, I was living in Newtown and studying Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. At SCA I was shown how to expand and experiment with analogue processes within the darkroom by some of the best at this time. Having small kids and being drawn to the ocean and the beauty of the surrounding landscape we moved Newcastle, here I finished my last year of Honours at The University of Newcastle. For the last 15 years I’ve been teaching photography, working at The University of Newcastle, Newcastle Art School. What attracted you to the world of Art? It was a form of escapism when I was a teen, especially growing up in small rural farming community where sport was pretty much what was on offer. The plan was always to move to Sydney and study art. Being introduced to the darkrooms at SCA sealed the deal, there was always something fun going on in the grounds at Rozelle to get involved in and motivate you make something.

Describe your work? I think it’s my Gemini nature, I have two modes of operating. I use performance strategies within the still image exploring ideas of the female body on the edge of the landscape. Secondly, my focus is on photographic materiality using darkroom experimental processes that include camera less techniques. Issue 47 - July 2022

Why do you choose this material / medium to work with? My work is mostly photo-based, the camera though is just one tool I use. I love the slowed-down process of making work in the darkroom. I can also make camera less work anywhere. On a recent trip back home, I set up a mini darkroom in the back of my car so I could work across a number of locations, immerse the

photographic paper into the murky water and work into the night.

What is the philosophy behind your work? Alternate realities, playing with opposing forces and lines of tension.

Do you have a set method / routine of working? I always start my day by getting up early and walking around the Newcastle coastline or a yoga class. In the darkroom I like to work alone with music, my work thrives in solitude and stillness.

How important is drawing as an element to your artwork? In the last few years, drawing has been a major part of my camera less work. Using the chemigram process and drawing straight onto photographic paper.

Issue 47 - July 2022

Push/Pull #2, Unique Silver Gelatin Print. 50.8 x 40.5 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

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What inspires your work / creations? Ideas of chance and uncertainty in experimenting and combining darkroom techniques. Life - I often draw from personal histories. In recent work, this focus has been on the clash of culture and the landscape growing up. I love to unpack this in my work, often in abstract form that also hints at ideas around how memories are often shifting and reforming. Nature - Making work that is abstracted and experimental interpretations of the landscape, that responds to its beauty and decay. I like to weave this into my work as a second skin or in the form of a shelter/armour. Motherhood - At present, I’m interested in ideas around who has the right to tell your stories, this focus comes from my mother and sister’s stories of being given away at birth and not knowing one's history. I’m trying to unpack the emotional and psychological impacts of this being played out and passed on while at the same time exploring the possibilities of chance and uncertainty, the ‘shit happens’ factor. What are some of your favourite artworks and artists? Everything by Louise Bourgeois. I love work of Pipilotti Rist, Sally Smart, Tracey Emin, Claire Lambe and Anne Ferran.

Any particular style or period that appeals? The Bauhaus; 80’s everything

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Grounded Sequence, Photo Object - Silver Gelatin Prints, Wood, Darkroom Glass . Simone Darcy 2022.

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Name your greatest achievement, exhibitions? To date, probably my artist residency at Nes Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland. The resulting work was shown the following year at Reykjavík Museum of Photography and Verge Gallery Sydney. Looking back now the best part of my time in Iceland was the road trip around the island with my sons Jasper and Oaka, camping in some amazing places, my daughter was off on a surfing adventure in Indonesia. The embrace of mother/artist has always had a strong presence within my work and definitely was present in this project .

How has the COVID 19 Virus affected your art practise? It slowed things down and brought me back to the darkroom. I was able to set up a space at home and focus on creating new experimental work. I had fallen out of love with photography for a while before 2020, I think this came from spending too much time using digital tools and

sitting

behind a computer. Field Energy , Photo Object - Silver Gelatin Prints, Wood,

Darkroom Glass. Simone Darcy 2022.

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What are you working on at present? A series of chemigrams titled Punk Nature, work that I begin making at Gum Swamp and Red Bend River, Forbes. This work will be shown in group show at Duck Rabbit Gallery Sydney later this year

Also, some large silver gelatin photograms created on the floor in the darkroom. This work is a bit of fun and will take shape in the project space at Cement Fondu Gallery, Sydney in September

What do you hope viewers of your artworks will feel and take with them?

The art of the process. A recognition of the familiar and the strange, what they may personally unpack from the work .

Base Grounding, Unique Silver Gelatin Print. 50.8 x 40.5 cm.

Simone Darcy 2022.

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Page 104 : River, Mud & Silver Studded Boots, Original image: Silver Gelatin Print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Archival Inkjet Print 150 x 120 cm.

Selected in the Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and will be shown at Muswellbrook Arts Centre from the 9 July. Simone Darcy 2022.

Left : Blue Moon Swim at Red Bend, Transparency in Lightbox 90 x 71.5 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

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Purple Shadow Mud Party Original image: Silver Gelatin Print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Archival Inkjet Print 150 x 120 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

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Honey Rubber at The Weir Original image: Silver Gelatin Print, 50.8 x 61 cm. Archival Inkjet Print 150 x 120 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

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Push/Pull #4, Unique Silver Gelatin Print. 50.8 x 40.5 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

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Photo Object - Silver Gelatin Prints, Wood, Darkroom Glass. Simone Darcy 2022. Issue 47 - July 2022

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Leather Back Seat

Shag, Original image: Silver Gelatin Print, W50.8 x H61 cm. Archival Inkjet Print H150 x W120 cm. Simone Darcy 2022.

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http://www.simonedarcy.net/

Right : Portrait Simone Darcy, courtesy of artist.

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P E T E R

Wishing Four families combine at Mermaid Flats to

Walk the beach, under the radiant moon. We gather within reach of each other, warm as peach, while the clouds scud across the sky’s blue ruin. And Sue says, “Look, there’s a witch, riding a dolphin”, and brother, looking up I swear it’s true.

B R O W N

Down beach ward the children run, eleven all told, toward the glimpse of endless sea rolling cold blue. Walking, Emma catches a pure white crab, which crawls in a friendly fashion, hitching a ride. We walk for a while and she points out her wishing star,

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We roll down sand hills, distantly illumined by the lights of Nelson Bay, which twinkle like love on the tide, and I feel within the sense of surreal films, Led Zeppelin, and a kind of Neolithic loving pride. As we return, she shows me an angel, riding above the moon, And this is true, I swear, as true as tune. Her wishes all come true, she says, as if Fate served her

clear-cut cold as old prophetic rune. Her wishes, may they come as full and light as rolling down a dune, may they be bright as diamonds, and may they all come soon. My Neri and my Liam, I see them dancing in the water, the blue of wonder, the night all still and glassy as forests after thunder, and Wendy, who’s a Princess, with a mind so keen and bright, standing still and tall in the quiet lunar light. - Peter J Brown © 2022. Issue 47 - July 2022

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MARGOT BROUG

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MARGOT BROUG “Margot Broug is an artist and poet living in Newcastle NSW. Her studio of nearly 5 years is at the artists’ hub The Creator Incubator, Islington, NSW. Margot was born in The Netherlands and spent a lot of her childhood years travelling with her family. She lived in Indonesia and in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne before returning to The Netherlands at 8 years old. She worked and studied in Paris for a year after high school. On returning to The Netherlands she lived in Amsterdam and started studying to be a French teacher. At 22 though, she dropped this study to return to Australia, following love. She married an Australian, had two children and lived in the Dandenongs for 18 years. In 2009 she moved up to Newcastle with her family. It is here in Newcastle that she finally found her home and became a

citizen. With children grown up and married life behind her, she has been able to make some big changes in her life. Up until last year Margot ran her own Holistic Counselling & Body-Oriented Psychotherapy Practice. Now, after years of building up momentum, she has made the leap to give her Art Practice her full focus”.

In 2022 Broug was published in Anthology of Poems: Beyond Alienation Hatred and Terror: Compatriots with Love and

Living-Kind . In recent years Broug has exhibited in many group shows and her forthcoming solo exhibition ‘Clarity in Play’ 8 - 17 July 2022 will be held at Art Systems Wickham, Newcastle NSW.

Page 114 : Margot Broug in her studio. Photo courtesy of artist. Issue 47 - July 2022

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Four Ways of Wanting and Not Getting, W76 x H61cm. Figure1 in article, Margot Broug 2017.

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My Art Practice as Emerging Awareness The Gift I have noticed in my art practice that there is a subconscious impetus at play when painting over an old painting, or when starting a painting with a detailed under-painting. The layering created by this represents the different layers of insight coming up from the subconscious. In painting or drawing this is brought into my awareness, in the form of the imagery. Sometimes this happens with a painting

that has been painted a long time ago. However, as I have come to recognise this process, now, more often, I know that a painting will need to start with a different painting, and that, however beautiful I might feel it to be, letting go and painting over it is a necessary step. I was thinking of the painting I had painted over; a painting done in 2017: ‘Four Ways Of Wanting And Not Getting’. (Fig.1, page 86). I painted over it and came to the painting: ‘The

The Gift, W76 x H61cm. Figure 2 in article, Margot Broug 2022.

Gift’ (Right : Fig.2) which was finished earlier this

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The painting ‘Four ways of wanting and not getting’, shows the way we seek what we need and want from others in love and happiness. We seek this externally in ways that often don’t give us lasting results and even cause a lot of pain and upheaval. In Figure 1 the first figure on the left is the ‘Inner Wounded Child’, reaching for those who are bigger, to get what it wants and needs. In this acting out of past conditioning, the self stays small and cannot grow, stuck in a developmental phase. The pattern of never getting from others and life what is needed to fill the lack, keeps repeating itself. And even then, they might not see any other way to act. The next figure in Figure 1 is the ‘Victim’. They feel disempowered and vulnerable; life is happening to them. They have no control or agency to change, as they look to others to change to meet their needs. They might however, feel a of power to affect others by reactive angry or emotional outbursts. The third figure in Figure 1 is the ‘Intellectualiser’ who has a tendency for living completely in their head and disconnected from their body. They are the over-thinkers and over-analysers. They are comfortable with rules and definitions to make sense of their world and find it hard to feel, or to relate to their feelings or those of others. The fourth figure in Figure 1 is the ‘Spiritualiser’. A bit like the ‘Intellectualiser’, but more in a spiritual way. IE Hoping to strike a bargain with Life or God, by being good and spiritually minded, they might have a strong focus on spiritual ideals and

philosophies. This can sometimes come at the cost of being grounded or being aligned with their own particular

goodness, morality and intuition. They might be very disciplined in their practice, leaving little room for self-listening and over-ride their body’s messages. Obviously these four are not people in their totality. They are behavioural and feeling aspects of people shaped by their past, wherein there is a painful disconnection from self that is sought externally. We might all have any of these four in us to differing degrees. Issue 47 - July 2022

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The very practical reason I chose to paint over this painting was that I needed an extra canvas for the show at Art-Systems Wickham in July 2022.. And because I paint intuitively, I didn’t choose this painting to paint over, with the aim of resolving my ‘wanting and not getting’ pattern. All that was engineered by the creative process itself. Those types of happy happenstances happen at a different level to the physical reality we live.

Just as it so happens that on this particular day it all fell into place…. after writing the following poem only a few days ago (May 2022): See right : Figure 3 in article.

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I can't see 2, Figure 4 in article.

I can't see 3, Figure 5 in article.

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I can't see 4, Figure 6 in article.

I can't see 5, Figure 7 in article.

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I can't see 6, Figure 8 in article. Issue 47 - July 2022

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The drawing in Figure 4, was made on the same morning as the poem. I edited this drawing to go with different parts of the poem, only realising that when I took ‘the encumbrance’ away digitally (Fig. 6), it looked like my painting ‘The Gift’ (Fig 2). I love that I can always trust the creative process!! It knows what it’s doing, it knows me in my totality!! The lines in Figure 3: ‘too much encumbrance – of the messy mindless kind, too much sadness – by heart-hurt defined’ speaks to the emotional shaping I mentioned, when describing our futile striving for what we want and can’t get in the Figure 1. Painting. In painting ‘The Gift’ (it only got its name towards the end at which point, I was starting to have an inkling of what it was about) awareness comes that I am The Gift; in my own life. Just as we all are The Gift, in our own life. We are the gift to ourselves first and then shine that gift-awareness of self out into life for others and the world. To know myself as ‘The Gift’, I have to accept the gift that I am, and to allow myself to stand, as I am, in the light of the Sun; The Life Giver. I have to be able to see myself and others correctly. I have to be able to attend to all Wanting-Not-Getting parts of me, and compassionately soothe, validate and console them and divest them of the encumbrance of their perceptions of lack, unworthiness, aloneness etc.

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Icaress – The Labyrinth Bird Another painting that raised my awareness was ‘Icaress – The Labyrinth Bird’ Like the

Gift, this will also be at my exhibition.

Icaress – The Labyrinth Bird has flown too close to the sun Its heat too hot and of any resolution of desire there’s none Her Labyrinthine thought world creates her rapacious for what’s sweet Her movement away from heat-too-hot now offers her the open containment in which sweetness she will finally meet 2022.

‘Icaress – The Labyrinth Bird’, H76 x W76cm. Oil on canvas , Margot Broug 2021.

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Like with the two paintings discussed before, sometimes it can take a while for the meaning of a painting to dawn on me. And even then, a painting can have a different meaning for someone else. I finished this painting mid last year (2021) and had it shelved in plastic. At the time I titled it ‘Icaress - The

Labyrinth Bird’, without any thought as to why. I took it out for an open studio event at The Creator Incubator and so hadn’t looked at it for a while. However, in looking at it an accompanying poem came with it. See page 94 - which brought the following understanding: We often try so hard to find sweetness in our lives, through addiction, overachieving, effort, striving etc.

And we risk ‘burning’ out with these efforts and compulsions, habits and cravings. It is then we are forced to let go and if we are lucky we then learn top let go – willingly. The forced letting go is painful, because we have held on so tight to the possibility of the sweetness we crave and can’t reach and hold with any consistency. The letting go that is done willingly comes from a wise and rational sense that the old way doesn’t work

and is therefore not worth pursuing. This is conscious surrender. The open containment into which we then fall, is the stark opposite of the constriction of the need to control and fill lack. The fear of wanting and not getting.

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Play As I divest myself of the encumbrances that have impeded my creative expression and welcome the expansion of my art practice, I have enough works for my upcoming Solo Exhibition at Art Systems Wickham; 8th -17th July 2022. It is called Clarity in Play. In my Art Practice as in my everyday life, Play is an important word. It stands for an attitude to life and others that is characterised by curiosity, openness, trust, light heartedness, humour and spontaneity. I learned this attitude experientially, joyfully and communally through InterPlay. As it says on the InterPlay FB page: ‘InterPlay is devoted to fun. It teaches the language and ethic of play in a deep and powerful way.’ InterPlay is an embodied and social creativity. Through InterPlay I learned to trust the wisdom of my body individually and as part of the ‘communal body’ (trusting others), though improvisation with voice, movement and story. It taught me that life is creative and the body a bottomless well of creative expression. So, when I paint or draw I seldom have a preconceived idea or image; I improvise. Through

InterPlay I have learned to drop the judgement that can inhibit, and the preconceptions of ideas that can narrow what emerges. It is exciting and fun to me to see what comes out. The body of works on display at Art Systems Wickham this month will be the product of enjoyment, trust and curiosity.

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Abstract Tree 2 Oil on board H30 x W30cm. Margot Broug 2019.

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Natural Structures, Oil on canvas, H51 xW76cm. Margot Broug 2021. Issue 47 - July 2022

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Snake Dream, Oil on Canvas, H61 x W152cm. Margot Broug 2021. Issue 47 - July 2022

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The Things Between Us, Oil on canvas, H101 x W152cm. Margot Broug 2022. Issue 47 - July 2022

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What it Takes to Express A Soul, oil on canvas, H76 x W101cm. Margot Broug 2021. Issue 47 - July 2022

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The oil paintings added for this article will be on display at the exhibition.

Also included here are some of my black and white line drawings. Again, I draw this as an improvisation, without preconceived ideas, images or outcome. Sometimes a line of text or even a poem turns up as well. Once the shapes are on the paper, I trace over them again to give them more definition. What I really enjoy about this process is making the line less than perfect, uneven; what I like to think of as the line’s idiosyncrasy. Mistakes are validated by being welcomed and emphasised with my pen. What’s more, I have discovered is that sometimes the addition of a circle here and there in an abstract drawing, takes it into the figurative and gives it the tension of relationship, without necessarily denoting individuals.

Page 133 : Pen drawing, Size: A4, Margot Broug 2022.

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Tree with Unfurling Roots, Pen drawing, Size: A4, Margot Broug 2022.

Abstract, Pen drawing, Size: A4, Margot Broug 2022.

Pen drawing, Size: A4, Margot Broug 2022.

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As with an improvised dance, our self emerges in time and space though creativity; each moment utterly new. For me this is what the line is; reality as it unfolds and creates dynamics, relationships and

situations.

This

reality

pre-definition;

experienced before it is seen. Once it has been seen, interpreted and named it is already past. In the past: last year, I was lucky to be part of a joint exhibition at Curve Gallery, Newcastle, for a Poetry

Night. For this show I created over 40 of these line drawings and did a live ‘Still-Line’ mural. Like poetry, I feel that my drawings speak to a pre- or non intellectual part of our understanding. A part of us

Pen drawing, Size: A4, Margot Broug 2022.

Clarity in Play at Art Systems Wickham 8 -17 July.

that understands according to our sensing aware-

Opening on Friday 8th July at 6pm.

ness: curiosity at play!

Contact: margotbroug@gmail.com or 0418 992 166

My Solo Exhibition ‘Clarity in Play’ however, is still in the future! I look forward to seeing your there.

www.margotbrougart.com.au Instagram: @margotshopiabroug

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PAUL O’BRIEN

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PAUL O’BRIEN Newcastle artist Paul O’Brien has been involved in the arts for over fifty years. He was a member of the Newcastle Printmakers Workshop for thirty five years. O’Brien’s areas of interest include seascapes, local Newcastle and Cooks Hill urban landscapes and portraiture of people and pets. Artist Statement: “These works are my response to what some may call the mundane aspects of living in my hometown of Newcastle. All of these works reflect the images that I see around me every day, which I

endeavoured to convey to the viewer, a visual richness that I perceive. Beauty is there to be found in the play of light on the texture of an old wall, or the gnarled roots of a fig tree. Magnificence in the play of sunlight on a textured old footpath made golden by a brilliant sunrise, or the light dancing on the surface of the harbour. To me depth & beauty are found within subtleties.”

Page 136 : Spring Morning, Nobbys Beach Oil on Canvas, W120 x H80cm. Paul O’Brien.

Right : Shore Break Oil On Canvas, H1m. X W60cm. Paul O’Brien.

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Preggio Umbria, Oil on Canvas, H30 x W40cm. Private collection. Paul O’Brien.

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PAUL O’BRIEN - INTERVIEW I was raised in a working-class home in a Housing Commission suburb of Wallsend. My mother worked at the BHP, and my father worked for the Railways, & Maritime Services Board. I have two brothers and a sister. I am the second eldest. There was no real family interest in art. However, it was always my passion. I was always drawing and later painting. In my youth I have played Rugby League at the highest level then attainable. I was a front row forward. A tough position in a tough game. I left school at age 15 to commence an apprenticeship as a bricklayer. I worked in both the Steel & Building Industries. I later left the trade and trained as a Psychiatric Nurse, I then did my General Nurse & Retardation Nurse Certificates. Some years later I attained a Bachelor Degree in Nursing from Newcastle University. I have retired but still work as a

Casual Registered Nurse with Hunter New England Health fifty one years later.

Art has always been a passion. I have always drawn & painted. I try to paint that which shows the beauty in the things & people that I see every day. True beauty for me, is to be found in the subtle, minutia of things. Not in the grand gestures. I am happy to take on any subject. I enjoy the process.

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The My studio works are done from gridded reference material. Photos & drawings. I have recently completed several very detailed battle scenes. These were commissions that required extensive references & took months to complete.

In my work I see enough suffering. I feel no need to paint the painful side of life. I also feel no need to inflict my internal life on others. I see this pain all to clearly every day. I consider much of the focus on personnel anxiety & the negative side of

life that I observed in the Art world of the 70’s to be a sign of neurosis, self-indulgence & immaturity. We now live in a world where we can sit in our lounge rooms & watch the tragedy of war play out in almost real time. How can a painted image compete with the image of a “smart “bomb snuff out a human life in the comfort of our lounge room? Even Picasso’s Guernica now seem vapid to me. I prefer to paint the everyday sweetness of life in a realist technique. I have been with many people who are dying. I have worked in Palliative Care in the home. It is the so-called mundane things of daily life that people hold to be precious.

This is what I try to focus on in my self-directed works. Commissions are a whole different animal entirely. I enjoy the very act of painting regardless of the subject matter. I have been a shift worker most of my life. I have never had a set routine. I paint when I can, and were ever I can. I enjoy getting out in the open & doing small en plein air works. I try to set a time limit of one to two hours for these studies. This I fine to be most enjoyable. I use a small grid frame & gridded paper for fast referencing of the scene. These en plein air works off- sets my more time intensive studio works. These studio works can take me weeks or months to complete. They often entail numerous layers of glazing. I am lucky that I seem to always have a commission on the go. I do portraits, pet portraits, sea scapes, landscapes and historical subjects. I enjoy them all.

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The Fall Of Constantinople, Oil on canvas, W80 x H60cm. Private collection. Paul O’Brien.

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I mostly obtain my commissions through word of mouth. That being said I now have a web site. https://paul-obrien-art.com/ This is also the title of my Instagram site. I also have exhibited works in the Cooks Hill Gallery. I have other works in the catalogue of this gallery. I was recently a

finalist in

the Inaugural Lake Macquarie Art Prize. My preferred minimum is oil on canvas or board. My artistic influences have been many. I like the American realists. Particularly the Ashcan school & Andrew Wyeth. I also enjoyed printmaking when time allows but this has become difficult due to an increase in my commissions. I find that I can only work on one major painting at a time. I now live in the inner-City suburb of Cooks Hill. I have been married for 44 years to my wife Wendy & I have grown 2 sons & 2 dogs.

I have always lived in Newcastle & find that I do not have

to move very far from home to find inspiration .

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Ziggy and Rossie, Oil on Canvas, H25 x W30cm. Paul O’Brien.

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Page 144 : Looking South, Oil On Canvas, H40 x W30cm. Paul O’Brien. Above : Looking North Across the City, Oil on Canvas, H60x W80cm. Paul O’Brien.

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Backwash Oil On Canvas H40 x W30cm. Paul O’Brien.

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The Dog Beach Newcastle Harbour Oil On Canvas H100 x W75 cm. Paul O’Brien.

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Darby Dog Oil On Canvas H40 x W40cm. Paul O’Brien.

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Mason Oil on Canvas H40 x W40cm. Paul O’Brien.

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Bruce Street Pen & Ink on paper W21 x W30cm . Paul O’Brien.

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The Dancer Pen & Ink on paper Paul O’Brien.

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Portrait of Isaac Butterfield Oil On Canvas H100 x W50cm. Paul O’Brien.

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https://paul-obrien-art.com/

Isaac Butterfield picking up his portrait with Paul O’Brien. Photograph courtesy of Paul O’Brien.

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TALES OF THE VOLCANO OF LA PALMA

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Tales of The Volcano of La Palma - Seigar This series was taken in 2021 during two short trips to La Palma, the Canary Islands, also known as La Isla Bonita like the song by Madonna. I feel this island is my hometown, the place I belong to. With mixed feelings, these images became my testimony of the volcano, its immensity, and its effects. I love La Palma, I remember my summers on the beach and camping at the national park, so many memories with my family and friends. I think it's the place I have felt calmer in my life. Thanks my island, this is my little tribute to your last big episode.

Biography: Seigar is a passionate travel, street, social-documentary, conceptual, and pop visual artist based in Tenerife, Spain. He feels obsessed with the pop culture that he shows in his works. He has explored photography, video art, writing, and collage. He writes for some media. His main inspirations are traveling and people. His aim as an artist is to tell tales with his camera, creating a continuous storyline from his trips and encounters. He is a philologist and works as a secondary school teacher. He is a self-taught visual artist, though he has done a two years course in advanced photography and one in cinema and television. He has participated in several international exhibitions, festivals, and cultural events. His works have been featured in numerous publications worldwide. His last interests are documenting identity and spreading the message of the Latin phrase: Carpe Diem. Recently, he received the Rafael Ramos García International Photography Award. He shares art and culture in his blog: Pop Sonality. Issue 47 - July 2022

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P H O T O G R A P H Y

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Webpage: seigar.wordpress.com Instagram: instagram.com/jseigar Galleries: flickr.com/photos/theblueheartbeat/albums Blog: popsonality.blogspot.com

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THE ESSENTIAL LEONARD COHEN

- Peter J. Brown

Dedication: My friend Alex Read gave me a copy of The

Essential Leonard Cohen for my birthday a few months ago.

also regaled me with his DVDs of Leonard when I have

Leonard with Michael Collins, too, on the way to various

Since then I have been listening to it frequently. Reese North stayed with him during recent Christmases. I have listened to activist and cultural events.

I propose to write about the last three quarters of the album.

I am omitting the first few songs because I have treated them at length elsewhere. This leaves me free to deal with

Cohen’s middle and later work. I have not heard the later

I am writing these musical essays to provide some idea of

friends. My writing generally serves the same purpose as

albums in their entirety, but I am not concerned about this. what goes on in my mind. I write mainly for my children and photography does for many people. I leave this to posterity.

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I am running the Cohen CD now. In a few tracks it will come to “The Partisan”, which I know well from listening to Songs of Love and Hate many years ago with Alan Coleman, a friend from my hippie times. What do I have to say about “The

Partisan”, then? Obviously it reflects the

heroism of those small bands of men and women who have fought tyranny in the twentieth century. The Anarchists of the Spanish Civil War come to mind, as do the partisans of the French Maquis during WWII. Cohen nods to them with the French chorus in the background of the song, the only words of which I can discern are “Mais je n’ai pas peur” (but I am not afraid). They were brave. The song is dramatic: “When I

came across the border I was cautioned to surrender”. This reminds me of Xanana Gusmao and the Fretilin guerrillas who were so successful against the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. They were real heroes, who saved their country when nothing else could, because no one else would.

Cohen describes how “I took my gun and vanished”. As I say, it is dramatic. It also dwells on that sense of Naming which is part of the

Neoplatonism which pervades Cohen’s work: “I have changed my name so often, I have lost my wife and children”. So it is tragic, too. But he finds one consolation: “I’ve many friends”. He invites his reader to venture “into this furnace…. You whom I cannot betray”. Perhaps it is a trifle over-sentimental, but if I could write that well I would. “An old woman gave us shelter, kept us hidden in the garret, then the soldiers came. She died without a whisper”. He says this to celebrate the courage of civilians who also resisted tyranny. “Oh the wind the wind is blowing through the graves the wind is blowing. Then we’ll come from the shadows”. So many people have died for freedom.

My CD has progressed to “Bird On A Wire”, another offering from Songs of Love and Hate which emphasises Cohen’s struggle: “I have tried in my own way to be free”. But he undergoes some peculiar metamorphoses in his journey: “like a worm on a hook, like a knight in some old-fashioned book”. It reminds me of fishing and of Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, a book I read when I was a child. It emphasises the nobility of Cohen’s struggle, the old-fashioned chivalry. I wonder will I pass this on to my grand-children. Would Isabelle and Charlotte read Ivanhoe? Would Arthur and Wilbur? I do not know. I am reminded of Network, where someone says that “only 3% of people read these days”. Reading is something I value. I see the literate 3% as the elite of our society, who can communicate properly through the written word, rather than through the memes and icons of television and computers. I value the capacity to emote, which in my life comes from identifying with the heroes of prose and poetry.

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It is not for nothing that Cohen swears “by this song, and by all that I have done wrong”. The song is the gift of the spirit, the regret is the gift of conscience. Not least of all this, for me, is that “I have saved all my ribbons for thee”. These would be the ribbons of tournaments, but the “thee” is amplified into the love I feel for my closest family, my partners, my children and my grandchildren. I recognise, like Cohen, that there have been times when I was “unkind”. I think everyone has them. Cohen invites those to whom he addresses this song to forgive him, and I would do the same. Those I have loved I have been true to. For myself, I have felt the urgency of trying “In my own way to be free”. I have felt the love that is never untrue. Yet, obviously, there is the feeling that “I have torn everyone who reached out for me”. It comes from the selfishness of the adopted child, and the confusion. These days the culture is so replete with beggars, and shady women in doorways. When I first heard this song I had no idea that our society could sink so low. “Famous Blue Raincoat” is very downbeat. It always reminds me of my friend Alex, and of the impression I must have made on Geoff Quick and the others at Watkins St Bondi Junction back in 1973, when I came in and out of their lives. It is over-stated and melancholy, but that is Cohen’s unique greatness: “You treated my woman to a flake of your light, and when she came back she was nobody’s wife”. Yet I was there “with the rose in your teeth, one more thin gypsy thief”. But you cannot beat Cohen for sincerity”: And thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes,

I thought it was there for good so I never tried.”

I do not propose to say much about “Chelsea Hotel”. It is a bit R-rated. But it does document the hollowness of the entertainment industry, the world of “the workers in song”, for whom “that was called love.” But it would be nice to be “famous, your heart…. A legend”. It would be nice to be the ugly exception to those whose predilection is for “handsome men”. Always in Cohen there is that dialectic of need and rejection, worthiness and shame, and of course, memory and forgetfulness: “That’s all, I don’t think of you that often”. “No one knows where the night is going”. Cohen describes a wedding which could be something out of Cavafy or the New Testament (the Wedding at Cana) or something from Medieval Jewish philosophy that is forgotten by all but Orthodox Jews. Let me add my interpretation: the Wedding is the space and place the individual soul has on Earth. We are all Wedding Guests at the ceremony of the mystical Union of the Soul with God. We are all unique – there are “the open-hearted many and the broken-hearted few” transformed into “the broken-hearted many and the open-hearted few” The Wine of the Spirit flows, and the night of the wedding-feast passes, and so we are all left with our individual joy and suffering. This song leads into the work of Cohen’s maturity. Blessed are the broken-hearted and the humble. Issue 47 - July 2022

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In “Hallelujah” Cohen speaks of the musical ability of King David, and of his skill in battle. Cohen replies to some criticism of himself that “You say I took the Name in vain, but I don’t even know the Name, and even if I did what’s it to you?” The Name is the Tetragrammaton, the Yod He Vau He, “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”, sacred to the Jews. Cohen stands in defence of his own private reading of theology, and his own Jewishness, of which he is obviously very proud; and of his own skill as a musician, to discern what David could do, and of the martial spirit of his people. In “If It Be Your Will” Cohen surrenders to the Will of God, which is amor fati or the love and resignation to Fate, a metaphor for the resignation to the life-cycle which I personally feel these days – again the meditations of a person in the last decades of his life, if not the last months what with this Coronavirus and all. Cohen surrenders to the thought that he may speak no more, or speak aloud his praise of God’s Will. He speaks of a “broken hill”, which is again the idea of individual broken-ness that occurs in Christian and presumably Jewish praxis – the idea that we become humble before the Grandeur of God an the inevitability of suffering – hence the “hearts in Hell” that Cohen speaks of: the World as a Vale of Tears. In “Go Back To The World” Cohen celebrates the idea of being a child to a dead mother and father on a calm night in which the urge arises to

go back from dreams to the World. Cohen emphasises that you cannot trust politicians, which he would like to think is untrue, but it tries not do to lie to the young, like the son and the daughter who climbed out of the amniotic fluid of the water into Being. There is room in the dream for love, too, which is “yours for a song” Vespers ring while Cohen contemplates going to a bar, a scene which occurs in a number of his songs. “I’m Your Man” advertises Cohen’s versatility as a lover. Love is one of his major themes. He laments the moon-driven bestial nature of human sexuality, and the humour of the conventions of sexual relations, as well as the gravitas of parenting and partnering: “a father to your child” or “walk with me a while” like to the corner in “So Long, Marianne”. “Everybody Knows” is a scathing condemnation of capitalist and militarist society, where truth is the first casualty of war – “the good guys lost” – but the Americans are the universal good guys of their own mythos and they lost in Vietnam. Cohen looks at sexuality again, in the polygamous nature of human beings: “everybody knows you’ve been discrete but there were so many people you had to meet without your clothes”. His scorn takes in cocaine: “everybody knows that you live forever when you’ve done a line or two”, an elite addiction paid for by the labour of Old Black Joe. We are subject to measurement even of our sexuality: “a meter on your bed”. We are all Christlike: from Calvary downhill the Sacred

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In Disc 2 of The Essential Leonard Cohen, Cohen treats a foretaste of “the end of love” and finally the actual end. He deals with Freudian themes and nabic (prophetic) utterances about the fate of Democracy in America. “There Ain’t No Cure For Love” deals with love as “a habit” (as in drugs) and declares that there is no cure for it. It leads to the Freudian connotations of the Vienna song where there are “ten pretty women” and “a shoulder where Death comes to cry”, “a lobby with nine hundred windows…. A place where the doves go to die…. A piece that was torn from the morning, and it hangs in the gallery of frost” and other Freudian allusions: “There’s a concert hall in Vienna where your mouth had a thousand reviews, there’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking, they’ve been sentenced to death by the blues”. Cohen wishes to dance there with someone, carrying his “cheap violin” and his cross, symbols of the trade he plies as a poet, person of religion, and musician. Elsewhere he refers to a “burning violin”, expressive of the sizzling feel his music sometimes has (in “Dance Me to Your Beauty”). He wishes to dance “to the end of love” or to a Wedding, like something out of Cavafy. “First We Take Manhattan” is a revolutionary manifesto where Cohen is “guided by the beauty of our weapons” and by “a signal in the heavens” to take control of the centres of decadence, Manhattan and Berlin. “The Future” tells of his “secret life”, prefiguring “In My Secret Life”. It is a nabic utterance in which “the Blizzard of the World” has overturned “the order of the Soul”. The song calls for repentance and describes the Future as “murder”: “There’ll be the breaking of the Ancient Western Code…. You’ll see your woman hanging upside down, her features covered by her falling gown, and all your lousy little poets comin’ round trying to sound like Charlie Manson”. Ultimately, Cohen declares that the choice for him is Christ or Hiroshima. According to Cohen, Democracy is coming to America (it is not already there!) “from the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay”. He invites America to “Sail on Mighty Ship of State to the Shores of Need past the Reefs of Greed through the Squalls of Hate”.

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“Waiting For the Miracle to Come” suggests a Kafkaesque or Beckettish waiting for something that never came. It is a miracle of the transformation of self and/or society. It leads into “My Secret Life”, where Cohen comes to a recognition of what needs to change within him. Cohen comments: “I can’t seem to loosen my grip on the past”. I have the same problem facing the future. . Elsewhere he writes: “Do not dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be”. “In My Secret Life” reflects Gorky’s The Spy:

In the evening, during those hours when he sat almost alone in the large room and recalled the impressions of the day, everything seemed superfluous and unreal; everything was unintelligible, a hindrance to people, and caused them perplexity and vexation. All seemed to know that they out to live quietly, without malice, but for some reason no one wanted to tell the others the secret of a different life.

No one trusted his neighbour, everybody lied, and made others lie The irritation caused by this system of life was clearly apparent. All complained about its burdensomness, each looked upon the other as upon a dangerous enemy, and dissatisfaction in life waged war with mistrust, cutting the soul in two. (Gorky, p. 89).

Cohen is his own accuser, but yet he is still a man of conscience, and he would die for the truth: “Look through the papers, makes you want to cry, no one cares if the people live or die”. He castigates the Dealer who would have you believe that it is “either black or white” and thanks God that it is not that simple in the secret life of his own soul. His soul, his self, runs “a thousand kisses deep”, where he deals with the “invincible defeat” or the “perfect offering” (like a perfect body) of Christ; and “confined to sex we pressed against the limits of the sea”.

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“Alexandra Leaving” borrows from a poem of Cavafy’s, “The God Abandons Antony”. It describes the God of Love preparing to depart, “Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder” like a trophy. This is how I felt seeing Neri and her family at Dutchies a few months ago. Not that love was gone, but that those I most loved were out of my life: Neri, Liam and Crystal, and my grandkids, all gone to different parts of the world. That is the main reason I wrote this essay, to describe this crisis in my life, and the moods that led up to it. I am old now, and the Coronavirus could take me. Either way, I will inevitably die in a decade or two. I want my children to be prepared for that, and to feel the mood as I feel it:

As someone long prepared for the occasion In full command of every plan you wrecked Do not choose a coward’s explanation That hides behind the cause and the effect

As someone long prepared for this to happen Go calmly to the window, drink it in…. Your first commitment tangible again.

It reminds me of the idealism of youth, and the substantial preparation I have made for my demise.

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Finally, I wish to speak of “Love Itself Was Gone”: The light came through the window Straight from the sun above And so inside my little room There played the rays of love In strains of light I clearly saw The light you seldom see Out of which the Nameless makes A Name for one like me

O busy in the sunlight The flecks did float and dance And I was tumbled up with them In formless circumstance. My strongest feeling, apart from this mysticism, which I have shared since I was a child, is that I wish to add here and there one more minim to this coda to my creative life: I’ll try to sat a little more Love went on and one Until it found an open door And love itself was gone Issue 47 - July 2022

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As I say, it is not that feelings of love have gone, but that those I love are scattered. It reminds me of that last time at Dutchies. Wendy hoisting Wilbur on her shoulder and taking him into the sea, as the Autumn cool came in, and I showed my age, sitting on the beach, that quiet old grandad. As Chaucer says in the Clerk’s Tale:

Still in the flower of your youth’s delight Age creeps upon you, silent as a stone. Death menaces all ages and he smites The high and low, the known and the unknown; We see for certain, are obliged to own That we must die, but we are ignorant all Of when the hour’s to come, the blow to fall. (Chaucer, p. 342).

I do not mean to bring you down, or for this to be burdensome. I have come to see death as a liberation, certainly nothing to fear after a full life, even if I have lost my hope of Heaven. I have loved all of you surpassingly well, and I am satisfied. Above all, I love you.

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LEONARD COHEN Leonard Cohen was a Canadian who became a highly respected and influential singer-songwriter, poet and novelist. His work explored religion, politics, isolation, depression, sexuality, loss, death, and romantic relationships. Cohen pursued a career as a poet and novelist during the 1950s and early 1960s, and did not begin a music career until 1967 at the age of 33. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen 1967. He died in Los Angeles USA in 2016.

PETER J. BROWN Newcastle poet Peter Brown is a retired school teacher with a Masters degrees in Australian and American literature. Brown has travelled widely around large parts of Australia, Bali and New Zealand. He enjoys painting and walking. Brown’s poetry was published extensively in Kangaroo and New England Review during the eighties and in Poetry at the Pub (Newcastle) anthologies during the last thirty years.

With over seventy poems in PATP publications. Work in Visions From the Valley, edited by Donald Moore, and in Brew, the PATP thirty-year anthology.

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NEWS Issue 47 - July 2022

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Pamela Griffith

Art and Nature

24 June – 5 July 2022

Broadhurst Gallery, Hazelhurst Arts Centre

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Pamela Griffith - Art and Nature Southern Sydney painter and printmaker Pamela Griffith has traversed Australia to observe living creatures in their natural habitat, creating works that celebrate this continent’s flora, fauna and diverse eco-systems. This survey exhibition presents landscapes of southern Sydney and the Illawarra as well as a broad sweep of Australian subject matter in a diverse range of mediums.

Pamela Griffith is a highly recognised printmaker. In recent years she has focussed on painting, working across many mediums including drawing, watercolour, gouache, oil and acrylic works on canvas. Based in southern Sydney, Griffith works from two specially designed studios at her residence. Her print studio comprises a chemical preparation room and technical equipment including presses. Her painting studio is designed for perfect light which is important to a painter who often paints plein air. Griffith trained as an art teacher and taught in secondary schools, colleges of advanced education, technical colleges, art societies and privately throughout her career. From 1978 she operated the Griffith Studio and Graphic Workshop and many Australian artists made prints under her direction as master printer. She has published over 400 editions of her own etchings and lithographs and produced over 300 editions for other artists. Griffith has held over 100 solo exhibitions throughout Australia and overseas including those at Hazelhurst Arts Centre in 2011, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in 2017 and Wollongong Art Gallery in 2020. She has represented Australia

internationally on numerous occasions and has work in public and private collections throughout the world. Griffith was a founding member of the Southern Printmakers Association. Page 184 : Image (l-r): Pamela Griffith Governor Game Lookout 2019, acrylic on canvas, Darter Pair, 2015, oil on canvas.

Broadhurst Gallery, Hazelhurst Arts Centre

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PORT STEPHEN’S COMMUNITY ARTS CENTER

PORT STEPHENS COMMUNITY ARTS CENTRE : Shoal Bay Road, Nelson Bay, NSW. HRS: Mon - Sat Shoal Bay Road, 10am - 4 pm Sun 10 - 1pm.

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Port Stephens Community Arts Centre The Gallery at the Arts Centre contains unique handmade items such as jewellery, pottery, knitted goods, cards, bonsai, fusion, patchwork, embroidery, spinning & weaving, woodwork & mosaics all items make interesting gifts. Garden Café operates on Saturdays only 10am – 2.30pm, menu of beverages, cakes, scones and savoury muffins will be served. Admission is free. Browse PSCAC’s large Gallery. Find us at Cultural Close, off Shoal Bay Road in Nelson Bay. Gallery OPEN to the public 10-4 pm Monday to Saturday. Close at 1pm on Sundays.

Until 12 July Fire and Ice and Spinners and Weavers. 13 July – 23 August : Portraiture, Abstract Expressions as well as Plein Air Painter 24 August – 4 October : Natural Environment and Fabulous Fakes Visit : https://artscentrenelsonbay.org.au/ Issue 47 - July 2022

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S Y L V I A H E

A T H Magnolia, framed pastel W85 x H65 cm. Sylvia Heath. Issue 47 - July 2022

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Port Stephens Community Arts Centre Featured Artist Sylvia Heath I started my working career as a visual merchandiser, working as a window dresser in the UK. Then in 1970, with my husband David and our two children, I emigrated to South Africa. Here I continued as a freelance window dresser for many years, till I joined David’s employment agency, running the office. At the same time, I had great fun producing stage Revues for Rotary for many years, thereby raising quite a lot of money for local charities. I was involved with everything from acting, to helping with costume design to create one-off costumes, and a myriad of other tasks involved in putting a season together. Doing this for 14 years has left me with many happy memories of those times. I didn’t think about painting till at the age of 55 my sister Kate, a beautiful artist in her own right, said “you’ve tried everything else, have a go at painting.” I started painting in South. Africa in 1999 in water colour then moved onto oils and pastels, I have had quite a few commissions over the years for wildlife paintings and won 1st prize in the wildlife category at The Cape Art Society in Simons Town. I also won several prizes at the Kirsten Bosh Art show. I moved to Australia in 2017 to Corlette after spending 46years in South Africa. What a joy it is to be part of Port Stephens Community Art Centre. I paint in most mediums, but particularly enjoy working with pastels. I love painting wildlife and flowers. These elements are what inspire and delight me! - Sylvia Heath © 2022.

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Pelicans, Acrylic, W60 x H50cm. Sylvia Heath. Issue 47 - July 2022

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S Y L V I A H E

A T H Lion, Framed pastel W45 x H50cm. Sylvia Heath.

Giraffe, Acrylic H75 x W30cm. Sylvia Heath. Issue 47 - July 2022

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D I A N E

B A I L

L I E

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Port Stephens Community Arts Centre Featured Artist Diane Baillie Diane has been painting since 1990 and was a member of Liverpool Art Society for several years. She also did life drawing

at the Powerhouse Gallery at Casula and is largely self-taught. Diane has gained many tips from various workshops she has attended. Since moving to Nelson Bay on Retirement Diane has been painting on a regular basis with the Monday Painting Group at Port Stephens Community Arts Centre. After spending a month in Japan, Dianne’s love of Oriental Arts has been rekindled. She works mostly n watercolours and

pen. Diane gives an aged finish to her works with the use of black tea. Diane has sold hundreds of her Oriental Works.

Diane is Featured Artist at Port Stephens Community Arts Centre from 13 July – 23 August 2022.

Visit : https://artscentrenelsonbay.org.au/

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I B

T B A C K

2022 CALENDAR June 17 - July 3 Bending the Rules. Athena Group

O July 29 – Aug 14

Small Mementos: Our hunter valley Hunter Valley artist

G A L L

July 8 - 24 Feast: trendy tableware Newcastle Studio Potters Inc.

August 19 - September 4

3 Alchemists

Patricia Luck, Janette Bickley

& Helen Jackson

R I E

57 Bull Street Cooks Hill NSW

Hours: Fri Sat Sun 11am - 5pm

www.newcastlepotters.org

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G 57 Bull Street Cooks Hill NSW

Hours: Fri Sat Sun 11am - 5pm

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S T U D I O

STUDIO LA PRIMITIVE ARTS ZINE PREVIOUS ISSUES

A Arts Zine was established in 2013 by artists Eric and Robyn Werkhoven, now with a fast growing

P R I M I T I V E

audience, nationally

and internationally. Their extensive mailing list includes many galleries, art collectors and art lovers. The Zine is free, with no advertising from sponsors. “It is just something we want to do for the Arts, which has been our lifelong passion.” We have featured many national and international artists, photographers and writers including - Wendy Sharpe, George Gittoes, Matthew Couper, Seigar, Kathrin Longhurst, Nigel Milsom, Marcus Callum, James Drinkwater and Kim Leutwyler and many more. In 2017 it was selected by the NSW State Library to be preserved as a digital publication of lasting cultural value for long-term access by the Australian community. CLICK ON COVER TO VIEW ISSUE.

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