TWENTY FOURTEEN
SCOTT LIVESEY GALLERIES
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BERN EMMERICHS Bennelong’s Degloving at the Soirée painted ceramic, fired 90 x 30 cm, each, diptych
A love of painting, of histor y and home, is what drives and motivates me. My theme of Australia’s colonial past has always held a fascination and mysteriousness to me. With its many recorded stories and detailed journals, research of early contact between Indigenous Australians and convict settlers, it is a treasure trove of scenarios and stories that sets my imagination and brushes flying! For me these paintings are my visual diar y, my way of learning and recording knowledge of this complex dark past, in a place we call home. Just as histor y provides us with many layers, my ceramics also consist of many layers, with sometimes up to as many as eight firings. The precious nature of ceramics, acting as my canvas, has always held that diverse and surprise element for me, which I love. Its physical and technical abilities, and the playfulness it provides in its painting application, have always been a challenge. But most of all it’s my tool, my vehicle to transcend stories, that may otherwise be hidden or dismissed. BE 2
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ROBERT DOBLE Haylie 31 Rue Gambon oil, automotive, industrial and house paint on Belgian linen 122 x 122 cm
My fascination of grids really took hold when I lived in New York in 2000 where I painted the first of my Gravity series. For me, they are akin to being plugged into a ver y electric energy field, the jolt of existence with hints of histor y lurking behind. There is a lifeline that runs throughout the world, the point is about extinction and extension. RD 4
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J A M E S S M E AT O N The Wave acr ylic on canvas 168 x 99 cm
It is a strange Thing, that in Sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seene, but Sky and Sea, Men should make Diaries; but in Land-Travaile, wherin so much is to be obser ved, for the most part, they omit it; As if Chance, were fitter to be registred, then Obser vation. Bacon, F. of travaile, Essays XVIII, 1625 6
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BELINDA FOX Waiting Here watercolour and drawing on board 61 x 91 cm
Each board has been developed, sanded back and layered with constant erasure, redefining the overall impact to completion of what may be perceived as a scene, but is that much more, for in essence it amounts to an abstracted experience of social conscience. The synergy or interaction between the images in each work generates a combined effect of deep spiritual meaning greater by far than their component parts. The Honourable Paul M Guest OAM QC 8
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YA N N I F L O R O S In The Beginning charcoal on paper 59 x 54 cm I’ve always been interested in technology, especially the design of things and the way they’re put together. It goes deeper than that, when I view humanity as a whole I have to ask ‘what is it about us that wants to make all this?’ That question affords me the ability to examine not only the ‘why’ but also the final product. From our humble beginnings we’ve demonstrated an amazing ability for progress, we’ve wanted ‘better’ and ‘more’. Technology is only a part of it, but for me and the society we live in today, it’s the part accessible and relatable for ever yone. As we hurtle towards an unknown and uncertain future, technology and the way we use it will become increasingly more important. It has already become so integrated into our lives that I doubt many of us could live without it. As we build more and invent more, are we helping our humanity or are we robbing ourselves of it? YF 10
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STELARC Ear On Arm Suspension Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne, 8 March 2012
The suspensions are experiments in bodily sensation, expressed in different spaces and in diverse situations. They are not actions for interpretation, nor require any explanation. They are not meant to generate any meaning. Rather they are sites of indifference and states of erasure. The body is empty, absent to its own agency and obsolete‌ The performance was both a looping back and a looking forward. Stelarc 12
Cour tesy of Polixeni Papapetrou
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BEN SMITH Griffin Cub oil on board 111 x 98 cm
My paintings are an attempt to combine the beautiful and the unsettling, the humorous and the sincere, the banal and the uncanny. I believe that by combining these disparate elements in art, they strangely reflect my experience of life. BS 14
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C A M I E LY O N S Humming bronze 50 x 60 x 28 cm
My failing body halts the quickness of speed, and the gesture is slowed down further by the bumpy surface and form of the line. Mine is an organic exploration of time and space, the umbilical cord attached to my own histor y slowing, disintegrating, dr ying up, leaving me with a hard cracked line. But it is these imperfections that make us ourselves, the histories and scars that make us unique, and for me that is what makes us strong and enduring‌ CL 16
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J A M E S D AV I S White Lilies oil on canvas 153 x 153 cm
Throughout the whole of Davis’s work there is a distinct humanity. Beneath the masks, in the dark corners of soot-stained cities and in the bright light of his gardens, there is one consistent theme; that of a love of life – of life threatened and life rejoiced, a place where ritual and wreckage, plumage and fecund abundance and strange music, fight for space. A world unto itself. Crawford, A. The Art of James Davis, 2011 18
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PA U L W H I T E White Knight End of Night (Firebird) Looking Forward To pencil on paper 38 x 56 cm
Haunted drawings of abandoned cars, planes and motorbikes are strangely sentimental and act as poignant reminders of big dreams and forgotten experiences. Thoughtlessly abandoned in their desert graveyards, these once mobile vehicles are now silent and alone, emphasised by large areas of negative space in the composition of each picture. Each awaits reclamation by the near-absent landscape, a process of slow disintegration that may take up to several human lifetimes. The quiet beauty of each subject is instilled with an appreciation for society’s rejected and neglected. Wolff, S. The Art Life, 2013 20
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S T E FA N D U N L O P Man With Still Life oil on canvas 153 x 133 cm
I paint with a genuine awareness that the medium has a magnificent and at times clichĂŠd histor y. My paintings work with and respect this tradition, but they also subvert it. They represent how I imagine the ultimate romantic painting could look, and are the result of a melding of traditional and contemporar y genres into single works. In essence, all of my works are an attempt to reinforce the notion that painting is still a possibility in the 21st centur y. SD
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LUKE SCIBERRAS Anzac Cove oil on board 120 x 120 cm
I had immersed myself in yet another magnificent landscape of the Gallipoli Peninsula that had a strong sense of the human condition layered over and through it. Any new landscape involves a ver y steep learning cur ve, but usually that only has painterly implications - light, tone, vegetation, geology, etc. But in this instance of course, there is the vast humanitarian content - the ancient histor y of the place, and most poignantly the emotional residue of the First World War. To be in Turkey, in sight of Greece, near Europe and at once the Middle East, with an Australian histor y at my feet was another reflection, another songline altogether. With ever y body of work I embark on, I realise more and more that it is the human condition that we paint while we see the landscape. Not as much a painting of something but rather a painting about something. LS 24
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MARTINE EMDUR Amphilucent oil on linen 183 x 259 cm
For this painter a body in water alone can signify “surrender, fluidity, calm� and the meeting of two bodies. Anatomy in the picture conveys something more: union, erotic fantasy, tension. This work is highly sense-based. It can make you shiver or melt or feel a ver y human vulnerability in the face of shadows, depths and uncharted perimeters. The sea embraces and engulfs, and Emdur seeks to engage the eye in the same dynamic. She works in light and shadow, but the physical reality of the ocean is always in the foreground. Step into the image and you are immediately in over your head, suspended, weightless, sometimes spellbound. Johnson, A, The Art of Immersion, 2013 26
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DARREN McDONALD Light Fingers With Roy Higgins oil on linen 167 x 152 cm
Darren McDonald’s work seeks to strip the known reality from his subject and present only its character. Australian icons like Ponting, Lionel Rose and John Michael Howson whose figures are thrown at us from ever y form of media, become so familiar that we think we know them intimately. But Darren removes this façade revealing a rawness that is at first uncomfortable but then appealing. We don’t really know these people, no matter how familiar they are, so how do you capture them in a way that is perhaps more real - by capturing their character. Stripped bare of the makeup and the contrived media image Darren’s characters are an alternative view, one that is more cemented in reality than the images in the media. They are poised yet distant, haunting yet engaging. So look at these works not for something familiar but for something unfamiliar. Allow them to push past what is fed to you and find an alternative way of seeing. Paul Johnstone 28
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L I LY M A E M A RT I N Woman on Bed ink on paper 57 x 77 cm
Hyper-realist in style, but with an atmosphere of something far darker and dramatic lurking beneath the surface, Lily Mae Martin’s works simultaneously encompass the beauty and brutality of existence. Rachel Power 30
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TO D D H U N T E R There’s Nothing Natural In My Life With You oil on canvas 188 x 175 cm
His luscious palette presents us with moody evocations of carnal desire and aching embraces. Sometimes, we can discern writhing figures, human forms embedded in these viscous surfaces of impasto paint‌ bodies and pleasure seem to ooze out of ever y painting. King, N. Raucous Rock: the paintings of Todd Hunter, 2010 32
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RON FRANCIS Neighbours oil on canvas 100 x 80 cm
Freud uses the German word unheimlich, which is clearly the opposite of heimlich, or homely, the opposite of what is familiar ; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. But the alchemical magic in Ron Francis’ work is that he manages a distinct balancing act between the heimlich and the unheimlich… Francis’ unique style has touches in common with the American realist Andrew Wyeth and the homely Saturday Evening Post illustrator Norman Rockwell. But while Francis’ style may be realistic in figurative terms, his content is far from it. His peculiar ability to find the oddest vantage point to view his imagined scenes – a view from a window, the height of a pedestrian overlooking a morass of crocodiles, bobbing along on the water level to view a carousing boatload of passengers – all contribute to his ability to seduce and then disorientate the viewer. Crawford, A. An Alternate View, 2009 34
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JULIA RITSON Untitled 0300 oil on linen 26 x 26 cm, each
A scene clarified to its chromatic parts, small and precise. One shape arranges itself in intimacy to the surrounding blocks and columns, speaking louder than its size. That which is so ordered also seems to quietly vibrate, and so to does the eye avoid settling, glancing the form of a flowering boronia before rambling on. It is a patch of earth, it is Nolan’s Dimboola. It is at once visually direct and suggestive – an uncommon thing – the grid that does not define. Joseph Brennan 36
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JOSHUA YELDHAM Troubadour - Morning Bay from an edition of 9 – each unique car ved pigment print on cotton paper 160 x 150 cm
Stand still. Stand still and let them vanish around the bend. Can you feel yourself leaning away from the path? This is your chance to surrender, to breathe and abandon the trail. Slip through the fence and scamper across the rocks. Traverse through blades of grass. Open your arms. Awaken your senses and creative knowledge will find you, and you will understand why movement feeds your imagination. JY 38
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CHRISTINE WHITE Meta, I oil on canvas 178 x 143 cm
I wanted to paint a waterfall. My intention was to paint the water as if it is rising rather than falling, and while I was working with water, my brush pulled downwards, in lines and colour, almost without my control. This was the beginning of an obsession maybe. Allowing myself two or three marked vertical lines on each canvas. All other lines are painted by intuition, free-hand. The lines develop from different places on the canvas, at different stages while working. The figurative element of the painting I sketch roughly as the stripes develop. There is a continuing correspondence between lines and subject; it is a ver y intuitive progress. CW 40
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VIPOO SRIVILASA Trust In Human’s Hear t cobalt pigment on porcelain 40 x 20 x 14 cm
A Thai born, Melbourne-based artist, Vipoo Srivilasa works predominantly in ceramics, exploring the cultures of his native home Thailand and his adoptive home Australia. His work is a playful blend of historical figurative and decorative art practices with a healthy dose of contemporar y culture. Using blue and white colour, he creates complex narratives through highly decorated images applied to the surfaces of ceramic forms. His work requires an intimacy in which the key elements of the drama are often found in unusual places within the forms themselves.
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JASON BENJAMIN Go Get Her oil on handmade paper 50 x 50 cm
Ever y blade of grass Ever y passing cloud Ever y bloom can’t last So hold her now JB 44
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M AT T R . M A R T I N Woven Skin within Pale Light oil on board 135 x 86 cm
For me, painting is the endless pursuit of capturing a moment of beauty in a single image of unknown space and time, to evoke emotion in its viewers. MRM 46
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COLIN PENNOCK Immigrant’s Tapestr y oil on linen 183 x 183 cm
The energy which is contained within in each mark is almost about frustration and containment as well as fulfillment, so it all lives in the same place...Things of harmony and things of disconnect. Peace and mayhem living in the same landscape. CP 48
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SPECIAL THANKS Jason Benjamin James Davis Robert Doble Stefan Dunlop Martine Emdur Bern Emmerichs Yanni Floros Belinda Fox Ron Francis Todd Hunter Camie Lyons Lily Mae Martin Matt R. Martin Darren McDonald Colin Pennock Julia Ritson Luke Sciberras James Smeaton Ben Smith Vipoo Srivilasa Stelarc Christine White Paul White Joshua Yeldham ____________
For artist biographies please refer to: www.scottliveseygalleries.com
Susie Bowie Fairleigh McLaren Rachel Schenberg Jessica Williams
SCOTT LIVESEY GALLERIES
909a high street I armadale vic 3143 I tel: +61 3 9824 7770 info@scottliveseygalleries.com I www.scottliveseygalleries.com
Catalogue compiled by: Scott Livesey & Sophie Foley ISBN 978-0-9806402-9-8 Š Copyright 2014
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