ZOOPER DOOPER: EMMA BEER

EMMA BEER ZOOPER DOOPER

EMMA BEER

ZOOPER DOOPER

Drill Hall Gallery

Works

5 Paintings on Canvas

31 Paintings on Paper

Essay

45 Different Dream, The Same Colour Blue

—Anja Loughhead

In Conversation

55 Everything Matters

Emma Beer In Conversation

End Matter

71 Acknowledgments

74 Colophon

PAINTINGS ON CANVAS

Synthetic Polymer

borrowing, repeating, responding, undoing, 2021, 183 × 133cm

don't worry about not knowing,

2021, 183 × 133cm

compostion is exploration, 2021, 60 × 50cm

not all beer and skittles, 2021, 140 × 110cm

happy hour, 2021, 140cm × 110cm

say what you mean and not what you say,

2021, 140 × 110cm

number poison, 2021, 183 × 133cm

queer fear, 2021, 140 × 110cm

queer failings, 2021, 60 × 60cm

shame, what of it, 2021, 183 × 133cm

the luxury of not having it written in stone,

2021, 183 × 133cm

unlearning, 2021, 60 × 50cm

even the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, 2021, 140 × 110cm

kill them with kindness, 2021, 120 × 100cm

the good little girl and the bad little girl, 2021, 183 × 133cm

PAINTINGS ON PAPER Gouache

(top) drawing with tape (series), 2019, 35 × 25cm

(this page & facing page bottom) looking for a pathway through the normative (series), 2021, 35 × 25cm

looking for a pathway through the normative (series), 2021, 35 × 25cm

looking for a pathway through the normative (series), 2021, 35 × 25cm

looking for a pathway through the normative (series), 2021, 35 × 25cm

looking for a pathway through the normative (series), 2021, 35 × 25cm looking for a pathway through the normative (series), 2021, 35 × 25cm

looking for a pathway through the normative (series), 2021, 35 × 25cm

drawing with tape (series), 2019, 35 × 25cm

drawing with tape (series), 2019, 35 × 25cm

DIFFERENT DREAM, THE SAME COLOUR BLUE

Anja Loughhead

Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

— Wassily Kandinsky 1

Emma Beer’s studio is sparse and well organised, with a simmering atmosphere of certainty. A familiar smell envelops the room, and it activates a sensory deja-vu that my body clings to with sentimentality before it disappears completely. The odour isn’t pungent, but rather an even waft of something comforting and medicinal. I am provoked by this antiseptic smell, and upon enquiry Beer reaches over to a round container filled with blue liquid. Peering inside, the thin substance moves uncontrollably as Beer slowly rotates its plastic casing. The acrylic paint has been manipulated with a glazing medium, a dash of water and a drop of Dettol. Beer explains that the additive – in conventional painting terms, an impurity – prevents the mixture from ‘going bad’ and stops the glaze medium from setting too quickly in the warmer weather. 2 But it’s the mnemonic associations that I am drawn to. The unforeseen ‘vibrations in the soul’ that colour brings forth and connects with our own biography. Aside from the aroma evoking childhood memories of my mother treating grazed knees and cuts, the translucency of the liquid is comparable to a Zooper Dooper before it is frozen, still fluid, vibrant, and full of childlike wonder. Gazing down at the watery material, my body intuitively flickers through reference points of experiential association. It holds two, seemingly disconnected thoughts simultaneously. The first recalls a vivid memory of jumping on a weathered trampoline. Perspiring, in a dry backyard in regional Victoria (an hour and forty-minute drive from Beer’s hometown of Echuca), with my seven-year-old molars grinding against a freezer-burnt icy pole wrapper. The second is a notorious quote by the postwar American painter Willem de Kooning (1904–97): ‘flesh was the reason why oil painting was invented.’ 3 De Kooning’s words reverberate in my head. In the loaded history of painting, and especially in light of de Kooning’s Woman series, any reference to flesh becomes immediately gendered and brings considerable ideological baggage. I feel the pressure of the male gaze in oil, the weight of voluptuous breasts and the construct of gender expression. That tight space between his desire and her command of societal expectations. Of all the colours, I connect

1 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the spiritual in art, trans M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications, 1977) p. 25

2 Interview with the artist, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country/ Canberra, 11 October 2021

3 Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004) p. 72

with the blue in de Kooning’s Woman V which hovers beyond ‘her’ left shoulder and I want to scratch and claw inside it. Recede into an unknown space, escape that body – it does not serve me – I know myself within that slice of blue. Beer’s substance – watery, translucent acrylic paint – is intentionally the antithesis of ‘oil’ and resists the obvious material correspondence to flesh that de Kooning (and so many others aside) found so alluring. All the same, she works into her medium a common, domestic material that has the primary purpose of preserving or protecting skin. Paint’s material and representational ‘fleshiness’ is confounded: Beer’s medium is fluid, queer, with a combative palette that resists any binary system of gendered categorisation. 4 I recall again my mother’s hands outstretched to console and mend my prepubescent body.

Beer’s work is distinctively without pictorial subject matter. Her primary materials – acrylic paint and canvas – are her focus and they are brandished to explore what, or how little, can constitute a painting. Absent of clear symbols or signifiers, the artist creates space for all-allusive feelings privileging her instinctive manifestation of the object through colour and mark making alone. By working in this manner, the paintings reach toward an experience of affect and sensation whereby:

the truths which intelligence grasps directly in the open light of day have something less profound, less necessary about them than those which life has communicated to us in spite of ourselves in an impression, a material impression because it has reached us through our senses. 5

In her studio, practice takes precedence over sign, language and meaning. Beer is motivated by the unforeseen qualities that garner visual intrigue; a hunt for a sensory tension that emerges through each material impression. Beer’s desire is to produce what she describes as ‘weightlessness’, 6 a ubiquitous form that manages to catch her off guard, as she combines the characteristics of hardedge abstraction and expressionist gestural painting. The attributes

4 I am thinking, for example, of the German painter Franz Marc’s categorisation of blue as holding or signifying male attributes, and yellow as ‘passive and female’.

5 Marcel Proust, quoted by Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1964), p. 161

6 Interview with the artist, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country/ Canberra, 11 October 2021

of these two modes, especially as they developed in North America from the 1940s, embody an optical effortlessness which Beer chases for her own pleasure. The spatial quality of Beer’s paintings remembers and queers a network of Modernist antecedents who share an interest in the optical and sensational possibilities of colour and form in painting. It is developed through what the German-born American painter and teacher Hans Hoffman (1880–1966) described in his classroom demonstrations as the ‘push-and-pull’ effect. Implemented by Hoffman’s former students Joan Mitchell (1925–92) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011), the strategy creates a pictorial unity and the illusion of depth while acknowledging the twodimensional confines of the canvas. Both Mitchell and Frankenthaler privileged their sensory instinct, and with trust in her capability to form an impression Frankenthaler remarked that in the studio ‘there is no thinking per se…. It’s a lost sort of transcendent moment.’ 7

A precursor to and major influence on Abstract

Expressionism, Hoffman’s combination of broad gestural marks and geometric slabs of colour, was indebted to the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872–1944). Mondrian produced paintings that evoke a natural movement on canvas through the intersection of vertical lines and horizontal planes. As the art historian John Milner noted, Mondrian’s reductive compositions from 1917 onwards ‘contrasted a regular, unchanging grid against an irregular subdivision of opposing forces. Regularity was played against irregularity; continuity against change; and universal proportion against specific proportion.’ 8

Beer’s surfaces draw on this principle, but she bends these rules to create a spectrum within Mondrian’s system of opposing qualities. Beginning on the flat, the canvas rests against a table’s surface and masking tape is stretched from left to right, up and down, to build a grid dissection. Unlike Mondrian’s set of predetermined conditions, Beer welcomes the inaccuracy of her perception as the tape never falls perpendicular. The application of colour: Whisper Green, Victoria Pink, Australian Yellow Green, Mars Black becomes a tool to renegotiate the irregularities of the not-quite-geometric proportions. What emerges is a dream-like sequencing of sheer netting and dense blankets draped over windows, within eye view of doorways, to another chamber.

7 Helen Frankenthaler, quoted by John Elderfield, “On Frankenthaler’s Decisions” in “The Heroine Paint” After Frankenthaler (New York: Gasgonian Gallery, 2015) p. 63

8 John Milner, Mondrian (London: Phaidon Press, 2000) p. 141

Her former lecturer at the Australian National University School of Art Vivienne Binns (born 1940) used to antagonise Beer as a student to make clear and immediate the ‘true’ meaning in her works. Viv used to talk about them being veils, some parts are revealed, and some parts aren’t. She would always say “what are you not saying, what are you hiding?!” and I would get quite confronted by that. I don’t necessarily see it like that … I like to think of my work as quite open. 9 —

Beer’s abstraction needn’t be realised or categorised as encrypted references to an object, the body, or politicised acknowledgement of societal structures pertaining to gender. They are not, as seen in the context of Binns’ practice, ‘patterning and surface treatments, which connect historical art movements to domestic or familiar imagery’. 10 Beer creates paintings outside this genealogy, which relate to the decorative and formalised strategies of feminist art practice more broadly. In the artist’s own words ‘the “veils” or the brush strokes reflect the warp and weft of the canvas. It’s a way to bring the material back into the front of the painting.’ 11 This seemingly Modernist approach, as defined by the art critics Clement Greenberg and then Michael Fried, stresses the flatness of the painting as an object which creates ‘a depth or space accessible to eyesight alone’ which ‘subsumes and dissolves’ the pictures surface. 12 Beer is captivated by the optical illusionism of colour and its ability to generate such an effect on the beholder. Standing before the works I dissolve into the image; and of all the colours she uses, I long to be subsumed by the contradictory nature of the colour blue.

The painter and writer Amy Sillman navigates the paradox between colour and meaning in Painting Beyond Itself The Medium in a Post medium Condition (2016) where she states ‘my job and that of the art historian are different – mine is to hold colour and [their’ s

9 Interview with the artist, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country/ Canberra, 11 October 2021

10 Vivienne Binns, Sutton Gallery, accessed 29 November 2021 https://suttongallery.com.au/artists/vivienne-binns/ biography/

11 Interview with the artist, Ngunawal and Ngambri Country/ Canberra, 11 October 2021

12 Michael Fried. Art and Objecthood (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) p. 79

is] to behold it, and this split is as old as the hills’. 13 This statement expresses the distinct positions held by the painter and the historian (or viewer more broadly) in the experience of painting. According to Sillman’s schema, which Beer shares, the artist’s primary concern is the weight of colour; the sensation in the hand and how quickly or slowly it travels across the canvas. The artist is also preoccupied by the vibration of colours as they are paired and applied to the support. Alternatively, the viewer is preoccupied by the value of colour, its historical or contemporaneous system of codified, cultural meanings and associations. The viewer brings these codes, assimilated through the traditions of representation and their own cultural experiences. The viewer is ultimately reactive to the decisions of the painter, as they are visually received, and then rearticulated through their own vocabulary and experience.

Sillman’s recognition that this notion is ‘as old as the hills’ functions as a signpost to Josef Albers’ (1888–1976) teaching manual, Interaction of Color (1963). Here, Albers – known for his expertise in geometric colour abstraction – outlines the technical experience that one must ‘develop – through experience – by trial and error – an eye for color’. To see ‘color action’ and to feel the joy of ‘color relatedness’ through the act of production. The former Bauhaus lecturer’s recommendations exemplify the principles of utilitarianism, whereby the consensus of what is just and right for the viewer, is determined solely by the expertise and satisfaction of the creator. This understanding of the ‘proper’ contract between painter and viewer is also significant in understanding Beer’s formalised studio practice, as she too places practice before theory, for the latter is ‘the conclusion of practice’. 14 The happiness she derives from the creative process and its physical labour is unending. Before the resolution of one painting, another has already begun: the mechanics of painting – feeling colour relatedness – are always in progress. If there is a ‘theoretical conclusion,’ it arrives with the viewer. They apply discourse (that is, those cultural and learned meanings and associations they bring to the encounter) and emotional gratification to the work, emptying themselves out and projecting their social conditioning onto the object’s surface.

13 Amy Sillman, ‘On Color’ in Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016) pp. 103–116

14 Josef Albers. Interaction of Color (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963) p. 1

And this is my experience: feeling my mother’s hands tend to a graze filled with gravel, a hot dry summer day eased by the cooling delight of an icy pole, the weightlessness of a trampoline bounce, all these memories are triggered by Beer’s translucent blue. In her extended prose-poem Bluets (2009), the writer Maggie Nelson has reflected on her longing for the colour blue and the desire to feel or consume it tangibly despite its ineffability:

But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? …. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 15

Colour commands affect. It has the exceptional ability to arouse, or, to torment the beholder. Equally, it can be as fickle for the painter who attempts to control the medium itself. The affinity is so personal yet elusive, for it can never be the same thing twice. Colour is variable, warm, or cold, opaque, or translucent, too runny, or too sticky. There is no single shade of green, purple, yellow or blue. Technically speaking, Beer works with Ritz Blue, Australian Sky Blue, and Phthalo Blue (red shade) – the latter is somewhat of an oxymoron, as it sits on the spectrum as a warmer shade of blue. With each encounter our senses grapple with the intangibility of colour’s weightlessness and the intellect yearns to ground our experience in language. To bring into tangible form, and behold, the spectrum of light interacting in the eye. I associate my own absorption in the colour blue with the openness of sky blue, a deep ocean blue, course denim blue that hugs the upper thigh, royal blue, a blue-collar worker, cornflowers and a wilting delphinium, a robin’s egg, blueberries, twinkling sapphires, lapis lazuli, blue suede shoes, Picasso’s blue period, Yves Klein blue, the Blues. The blue-eyed smile of your child, or lover. I turn on the car to the sound of Alan Vega (1938–2016), singer for the American synth punk duo Suicide. The drum machine

throbs as Vega, wretched with desire, croons:

This is the curse

Yeah, she’s wild in blue

And this is the curse

She’s changing something

Yeah, get it on

Touched by her lips

Touched by her mouth

By design

And fast demand

Gimme, gimme time

Last love

If you only knew

Only knew

She’s so wild in blue

Wild in blue

She’s so wild in blue

Oh, wild in blue 16

In the experience of blue, desire is wild and immeasurable and the anguish breeds melancholia. The yearning is more than the body, it is a carnivorous need to obtain and devour an inaccessible spirit. In his episodic reflection on colour, Chroma (1994), the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942–94) wrote at length on the immateriality of blue. As well as its cultural and historical associations, Chroma provides a rich account of the specificity of Jarman’s own personal relationship with the colour: his recent partial blindness, a complication of HIV/ AIDS, meant that Jarman could only see shades of blue. Blue is the brightest colour, ‘BLUE IS BLUE’ he cries, because blue exists beyond sight, beyond the material body and beyond language:

In the pandemonium of image

I present you with the universal Blue

Blue an open door to soul

An infinite possibility

Becoming tangible. 17

16 Suicide - Wild in Blue lyrics, accessed 19 December 2021, https:// azlyrics.biz/s/suicide-lyrics/suicide-wild-in-blue-lyrics/

17 Derek Jarman, ‘Into the blue’, Chroma: A Book of Colour – June ‘93 (1994; London: Vintage 2019) pp. 81–99, p. 88

15 Maggie Nelson, Bluets (Seattle and New York: Wave Books, 2009) pp. 3–4

Beer’s practice speaks to this transgressive space between materiality and immateriality, of an openness for all possibilities. The works convey the intersections of identities and histories: Albers, Jarman, de Kooning and Frankenthaler, Binns, Mondrian, Sillman and Nelson. Their words are felt, and they pass through in the fluidity of applying paint on canvas. For the premise of Beer’s oeuvre is to navigate and experience the sensation of being a painter: to exist without binary definition, in a world without categorisation. Our duty, as viewer, is simple: to remain open and accessible and let colour stir our individual memories and desires.

EVERYTHING MATTERS Emma Beer In Conversation

Anja Loughhead, Curatorial Assistant, International Art, National Gallery of Australia.

This conversation took place in Canberra on 2 November 2021. Emma Beer’s interlocutors artists Peter Alwast, Joel Arthur, Kirsten Farrell and Dionisia Salas. They were joined by curator Tony Oates.

EB Emma Beer

PA Peter Alwast

JA Joel Arthur

KF Kirsten Farrell

DS Dionisia Salas

TO Tony Oates

PA Is there a format for our discussion today?

KF No, the plan is … that there is no plan.

JA Okay, I have a question. Emma, I’ve seen you do thumbnail sketches and make pencil drawings on paper. To what extent do the drawings predetermine your paintings?

EB The drawings you mention come after I’ve done paintings. They record something I’m happy with—a set of proportions, the way the composition is balanced, that sort of thing. When I’m about to begin a new painting, a drawing can give a general idea of where it might go in terms of its structure. When I’m moving onto a larger scale, when there’s a shift from a smaller to a larger format … essentially that moves you out of your comfort zone. That’s when things can start to go askew. For me painting on a smaller scale seems more ‘natural’— the small paintings seem to present themselves naturally. I can take more risks with them. There aren’t any preconceived ideas about how they’re going to be structured or resolved. But when you move up to a larger format, there’s a greater investment, there’s more uncertainty … it seems that there’s more of a challenge in getting it right.

JA The paintings we’re looking at now were all made around the same time, right? There are resemblances they share. Maybe it’s not exactly the rule of division into thirds, but there’s a similarity in the ratio of the size of the planes and where they occur compositionally. Did you deliberately decide to structure these paintings in a related way, or was it accidental or intuitive?

EB It’s intuitive. In the smaller paintings I discovered that when certain kinds of connection occur—when colours meet at a single point – things can get really exciting. So I took the ‘meeting point’ and applied it to different colour sets.

DS The other night at Joel’s place, I saw one of your earlier paintings— such a nice painting to see. And then today at Vivienne Binns’ place I saw another one of your early paintings, which made me realise that in these new works there is something quite different happening. Maybe it’s the connection of the corners – the pronounced intersection. Also that the ground has become more active—it’s almost become a skin and, as a viewer, you feel like you

can slide in underneath, that there’s a kind of undertow, a deep gesture embedded in the ground. I love how the painting jumps between those hot pinks, cold blues, and the violet – that intense passionfruit colour.

EB Often my paintings are made up of glazes and they appear to be quite loose, so there has always been a reliance on what’s behind, holding it together. I tend to spend a lot of time preparing the surface before the actual painting starts. It was an aim of these recent works to bring the ground forward. When I’m starting a painting I’ll lay down a ground and, when I’m happy with it, I’ll put a structure over the top of it, although often it has seemed to me that I can lose the energy that was exciting me in the first place. In the past the ground would almost always be covered over, but with these new paintings, the intention was to bring the ground forward, to open it out and expose it to the light. I wanted to invert the layers of the painting, so that the structure was nestled behind the ground and the ground constituted the uppermost layer …

TO That’s a new twist in the long conversation you’ve conducted between transparent and opaque colour. Certain of your pigments have a great range and you’ve found many different ways of exploiting them. However, in contrast, looking at one of your earlier paintings, I see an area over there of what looks like the nastiest paint you can find, and you’ve been able to take advantage of that in quite an unexpected way.

EB Yeah, originally I found that colour when I was in my third year at art school. It’s a timber primer that you can get from Bunnings.

KF

What would you call that colour?

EB It’s poorly named ‘flesh pink’. I’ve have switched to using ‘skin tone light’ in the Matisse Structure paint range, it’s more archival. The tone of the colour and quality of the pigment really works for me. It's quite thick and opaque, it's also quite glossy and supports coloured glazes really well … while other, more or less similar primers don’t contribute so much when there are glazes laid on top of them. The energy coming from the ground helps me subvert the traditional methodologies of painting: instead of putting the darks down first, then adding the light tones and opaques, I work in reverse order

so that the light in the painting is generated from behind.

JA You’ve mentioned this before, that you think of colour as weight, colour as light and so forth. In some instances it’s evident, and in some instances not.

EB Yeah, it’s never the same. Painting is about figuring those things out. If I have a glaze over the top of a colour, will the colour continue to operate in the same way, will it achieve a more dynamic relationship with what’s around it?

KF Hearing all of you capital-P painters talking like this makes me wonder … I realise how paint is important to you as a Thing, and paintings are important to you as Things. You’re talking about composition and what it entails, and about the utility of paint …

PA I don’t think that’s the right word: utility. I think logic is a better term. Logic can be considered as a set of rules or procedures, as the sum total of parts, and as the intelligence of decisions. I think reading and thinking in forms, engaging with the organisation of matter, ought to be considered as ways of reasoning.

KF Sure. But Emma, when you’re doing these things with paint and are engaged with those ‘logics’, that is in order to accomplish what?

EB Mmm, there really isn’t an answer to that …

KF So it’s very significant that Emma considers and is conscious of the paint she chooses—she knows the paint, she knows the brand. She knows what it’s going to do, she’s chosen it for a very specific reason …

EB True. To the point where I can pick a structure and pick a colour combination and decide whether or not I want it to be transparent or opaque, put this here and that there and bring it all together … It’s because I like to explore and expose every possibility of the materials, to open them up to unlimited possibilities.

DS And that would explain why your studio has four or five tables laid out, and you’re working across every surface, pushing away in different directions, working on different possibilities simultaneously.

The ‘logic’ Peter mentioned sets up a dynamic relationship in the paintings which we then apprehend in relation to the body, so there’s a rapport that operates internally in each painting, and also works externally in relation to the viewer.

PA Yes, that’s very important to note. Emma, do you think there’s an ideal viewing distance for your work? That’s a question which holds a very important place in the history of abstraction.

EB What was I reading recently? Oh, it was Agnes Martin. She considers that there are three optimal distances for viewing a painting: upfront, middle ground and far away. With her work you read the pencil marks and the texture of the canvas and the consistency of the paint in close-up, but from afar they are all absorbed in a sort of haze. If you take the middle position, what you are able to see is really incredible: just about everything you see in close-up remains legible from the middle distance. If you look at my paintings from far away, you can take in the whole thing, and therefore you might think: ‘Okay, I’ve seen it’. But from up close, there’s all this surface complexity. The aim for me is to conquer the middle ground so that you’re able to appreciate all those things at once, the surface detail plus a strong overall impression.

DS It’s the seams that you’ve left visible that pull you in, I think. Earlier you were talking about the pink tone and how variations in the tone rub up against one another, but I think it’s the seams that make everything quiver. That’s what directs you to the middle ground. They indicate how far away from the painting your body ought to be.

EB For me a painting is a set of juxtapositions. Nothing is ever straightforward, nothing is without ambiguity, nothing exists in its own right, nothing is without consequence. One element can be really flat but it’s interacting with other elements that are not flat; this element can seem opaque but there’s a bit of light penetrating from below; this one’s opaque but glossy, so you feel there’s something exerting pressure beneath the surface. Some things you see, others you sense or guess at, but every action and every perception has to enrich the image.

PA It’s the narrative of making. That’s the story your exhibition will tell.

JA How consciously, how deliberately do you calculate the tensions between the surface and projection and recession—the tension between space and surface—when you’re painting?

PA That’s what I wanted to ask you too. Do you have a plan, or is it about establishing small relationships and letting them evolve?

EB Well, I start out with an overall approach because everything, the entire surface, is treated equally. Then it gradually breaks down. When I start to make those intersections, I feel I'm moving across territories. I will question myself when it starts to get fiddly. When things get overly complicated I need set the painting aside to take a break. The difference between a painting that’s finished and one that’s not, is that everything matters and contributes to the finished painting.

PA Everything matters.

EB Everything. I’m conscious of trying to do something new by taking something old and reinventing it. The fewer the elements there are in a painting, the less effort required to resolve it—or so it seems. So, if you look at a couple of those paintings (composition is exploration, 2021 [p. 8] & unlearning, 2021 [p. 22]) over there, they arrived within three or four attempts, whereas the work over here (say what you mean and not what you say, 2021 [p. 15]) took a much longer time—I had to return to it many times and revise and edit it.

DS As a painter, I find that so satisfying. I want to see the effortlessness—that’s great—and I want to see the struggle. I want a hint of both in every moment …

EB I guess I need to credit people like Ruth Waller and Vivienne Binns. They’re artists who never let a painting rest—they keep going and work hard at it. I would hate people to look at my paintings and feel a sense of exhaustion, to be aware of the effort that went into making them. I would like there to be a balance between effortlessness and struggle, as Dionisia said. Some paintings can seem very heavygoing to me—like when you’re aware that the artist has put in a whole lot of time and effort—there are some Picassos like that, where you’re aware he’s changed course many times over.

DS But I can look at de Kooning and it feels like he knew exactly what to do. Almost as if the painting was the result of muscle memory— and there are other works where it’s like, man, he must have worked at that painting like nobody’s business. Evidence of struggle can be very impressive, it’s satisfying to be a witness to that.

PA I think that signs of struggle get partially erased in good paintings. It can’t just be that.

KF Emma you’ve often said that you have a strong work ethic. You’re a very fast worker in fact. Some of these paintings are done very quickly compared to other artists’ work. You don’t seem to agonise over them. You try out an idea or you take an idea from this one and apply it to the next one. It’s like: ‘right, next’.

PA That’s a really acute observation about Emma’s practice. Emma, you recently made how many paintings in just a few days? That was ridiculous.

DS But that’s not to say you didn’t lie awake at night wondering if you got it right. Right?

KF There’s a tempo there, quick-quick-quick …

EB For me gestural painting—or, as Peter would say, ‘shoulder painting’—is my natural mode.

PA Yes, there’s a fundamental tension between broad gestural strokes and the geometry. It’s bodily, it’s sensory, then … it’s design!

EB Oh I despise that word!

PA But the meaning of ‘design’ can be narrowed down to drawing and composition—the two Renaissance principles. ‘Design’ meant drawing and planning to the Renaissance artists. Painting, they thought, was meant to follow design—to follow a plan worked out in advance. It was only then that colour could come into it.

PA Colour has been feminised through most of the history of painting.

KF Yes it has. Exactly.

EB I guess the only thing that is predetermined in my work is the colour.

KF Which is the opposite of how it’s meant to be.

PA When you say ‘predetermined’ do you mean: ‘I’m going to use those particular colours’?

EB Yes.

PA Really? I had no idea!

EB The colours are predetermined. The only thing that is decided in advance is the colours.

JA God, the rabbit just came out of the hat! So you start with a very tight set of constraints!

PA Oh man, what a revelation! I really like that as a rule!

EB If you said to me: ‘Oh, this just needs a little flush of green’, I would not naturally go there.

JA So the complexity of the application is in inverse proportion to the limited palette.

PA I’m still searching for an explanation here. There’s a painting on Emma’s wall (everlasting, 2020)—I think it’s an earlier work?

EB It’s a year or two old. I did it in 2020.

PA So all the ingredients were decided in advance?

EB No. The black lines came after. I finished the painting and then I added the black lines.

KF Colour always followed the design. You weren’t allowed near colour until you had your drawing straight. But when Emma draws, she starts with colour—it’s another of those inversions that she’s playing with.

DS But if your colours are predetermined, when do you determine them?

EB When I’m on the internet ordering the paints [much laughter] … No, actually it comes from knowing the physical properties of the paints: I know this paint is really chalky; I know with this one I can cancel anything out; I know that this one creates a skin when it dries … It’s their material consistency and it’s the range of effects you can get from them.

KF The paints aren’t ever mixed.

EB That’s correct. I don’t mix colours.

TO You’re really stretching your paints. Sometimes they’re pushed to the limit.

EB Oh yeah! Some of these glazes are only 10 percent pigment to the medium. For example, this is a colour straight out of the tube, and that’s the same pigment thinned down to almost nothing … and that’s the identical colour, though you probably wouldn’t recognise it as such. This painting (queer fear, 2021 [p. 19]) consists of a blue, which is the ground, a violet which is the glaze, and then a yellow, which is an unbleached titanium, and then a warm grey. So there are four colours, though it reads as much more.

JA Are you looking at the landscape by chance …?

EB Yes. This is my ANCA courtyard hellebore painting! [laughter]

JA It’s got the blue and the green and that shimmering earth colour … That’s a crystal-blue-sky kind of chroma. Was that a deliberate choice, going for landscape-related colours when you were buying paints off the shelf?

EB I’m quite drawn to the Australian colours in the Matisse Structure range. So that's ‘Australian Violet’, an ‘Australian Sienna’, which is almost gold, and then this is ‘Gum Leaf Green’.

TO In the painting Peter referred to earlier (everlasting, 2020) there are noticeable shifts in density, in the thickness of the layers of paint, but in the newer work, the surface is leaner and more even, it feels quite taut.

DS Yes, I wanted to ask you about that too. For a long time you were creating veils and what I thought of as clouds—concealing the action, so to speak. The painting went from layers of transparent acrylic to opaque oil color which seemed to mask the painting. But now quite suddenly all of that has gone. How did that happen?

EB It was getting too easy, the play of contrasts between the differences of thickness and opacity. In the most extreme case, if a painting consisted of only one hue plus white, the white glaze and the white impasto would become the polar opposites, they’d be contrasting terms in the process of addition and layering. For a long time all the glazes were white and there was a singular colour behind them. Eventually it seemed to me to be too literal. I thought the structure of the painting was becoming too ‘designed’.

PA I can’t agree with anything you’re saying! [laughter] I think that’s a really good painting, it’s great. The structure of the painting is completely elusive to me—I can’t pin down where things are spatially in the composition. That one is doing it too, but differently. How would you explain the shift in the type of glazing you’re using?

EB The explanation for that would have to be: Ruth Waller! [laughter] Yeah, it’s funny. Ruth Waller would say things early on when I was a student. She advised me to hold back on the colour and focus on the surface and the application—because I had everything going on at once: surface, application, colour … when you lack experience, it isn’t possible to tackle all those things simultaneously. So I pulled back on the colour to focus on the application and mixing on the surface. And then more recently Ruth said: ‘Does it always have to be white? Have you thought about bringing what’s behind forward?’ So that is as good an explanation as I can give. I felt I had more or less perfected the white glaze or the veil or whatever you want to call it. But it had become a sort of ‘default position’. Whenever I’d lose track of a painting, I’d just whack that on and make it work. It was getting too easy.

PA I can’t think of many painters in Australia who are working so creatively and inventively with this kind of acrylic glazing and blocking. The thing that I like most, because I like abstraction that leans into imagery, is this beautiful horizon line in the top two thirds

of the picture (queer fear, 2021 [p. 19]), and the way that one, the top one—the purple—goes across and underneath.

EB But it doesn’t go underneath—it’s on top.

PA Oh, I give up! That horizon … the way it transitions into a very pale— whatever that color is—a very pale cerulean … it’s amazing,

DS It’s the Australian sky, it’s the Canberra weather. [laughter] With those veiled paintings there was a sensuality about them. They make me wonder: ‘Am I looking at the clothes or the skin?’ These newer paintings make it seem, really, that you’ve adopted a different language.

JA The white veiling created uncertainty as to where the planes lie … which made those paintings more like classic field paintings which have a very shallow space. While that language is still present, the structures are now almost architectural. It seems like you’ve become more and more interested in where the planes meet.

TO Joel picked up on the idea of architecture … the best architecture is all about redistributing, modelling, restructuring the light. I see a similarity in the way the painting contains and directs light in its structure …

EB Yeah, but I don’t strive to capture any of that. If it’s more atmospheric you can think of landscape, and if there are hard, determined edges, it can seem architectural. But it’s neither one nor the other really. I don’t think of imposing something like that onto a painting.

Emma Beer is a queer artist who grew up on a sheep farm not far from the Murray River border towns Echuca and Moama. At pre-school children were encouraged to paint and Beer loved to paint just as much as working on the family farm. Even from a very young age Beer knew that going to art school and becoming an artist and teacher was what they wanted to do. This notion was confirmed when Beer saw a Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner exhibition in Venice at the age of 14. From that moment there was no doubt about the kind of artistically energized vocation that Beer would dedicate their life to.

Beer moved from country Victoria to Canberra to study painting at the Australian National University School of Art in 2006 and was an avid student of Ruth Waller, Peter Maloney and Vivienne Binns. Since graduating in 2009, Beer has built a practice and a life that is part method, part love. Beer takes pride in a strong work ethic, focus and determination. Beer’s work operates in the productive tension of two distinct histories of modernist abstraction: hardedged geometric abstraction, counter posed with expressionist painterly gesture and colour field painting. Over the last fifteen years Beer has exhibited nationally and internationally. Works by the artist are held in the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery collection, The Macquarie Group Collection, The Australian National University collection, The Embassy of Spain collection in Australia, and in many private collections in Australia, Singapore, Scotland, England, France, and Spain.

Peter Alwast has held over 17 solo exhibitions and has been shown in group exhibitions at the Tate Modern (London), Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania), the Greater Taipei Biennial, the Australian Centre for Photography (Sydney), GOMA - Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, among others. His work is held in public and private collections in Australia and the United States. Alwast’s practice employs a range of media including painting, video, computer graphics and drawing. He is currently Head of Painting at The School of Art and Design, Australian National University and holds a studio at ANCA Studio Dickson.

Joel Arthur is a Canberra based painter whose work is intersects landscape and still life, abstraction and representation. His work retains a concern for perceptual painting, continually utilising retinal or Op pictorial devices. Arthur is currently a studio artist at ANCA Studio Dickson.

Kirsten Farrell initially trained as a painter at the ANU School of Art and subsequently completed her PhD in visual art practice there in 2016, when her work expanded to include more conceptual, objectbased and performative modes of practice. From 2011-2017 she taught in the Centre for Art History and Theory at ANU. She and Beer married in 2019.

Dionisia Salas uses drawing, painting and printmaking to explore her body’s relationship to labour and familial migration. Since graduating from the ANU School of Art in 2007 she has exhibited regularly in solo, group, curated and artist initiated exhibitions, in university galleries, state-funded art organisations such as

Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS), commercial galleries such as Grantpirrie, Watters Gallery and Sutton Gallery. She currently lives and works on Ngunnawal Country, Canberra, and is an ANCA Studio resident.

Tony Oates is the Curator, Exhibitions at the Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery. He has curated and co-curated numerous survey exhibitions including: Un-titled: Elizabeth Newman (2021); Nicole Ellis: Fabrication (2021); Ham Darroch: Propeller (2020); Steven Harvey: Un-Rendered Room (2019); Peter Maloney: Missing in Action (2018); Liz Coats: Active Seeing (2017); Brian Blanchflower Canopies (2016); and Karl Wiebke Paintings 1994–2012 (2012). He has a reputation for curating energetic thematic exhibitions including Painting Amongst Other Things (2018); Repurpose (2016) and Colour Music (2014).

END MATTER

Acknowledgments

Our first thanks are due to Emma Beer whose generosity, enthusiasm and unrelentingly hard work have made this project possible. The Drill Hall Gallery team became aware of Emma’s exceptional abilities while she was still a student. Subsequently, over the last decade, the ANU Art Collection acquired a number of her paintings.

Reciprocally, Emma’s engagement with the gallery has been of long standing. She is one of our most consistent visitors and her responses to our exhibitions have always been worth hearing. When Emma accepted the invitation to develop a major exhibition for the gallery, it required a great leap of faith on both our sides.

We take enormous pride in the sheer excellence of this new body of work, and in the fact that it is so responsive to the proportions and light of our exhibition spaces. Emma is the first of her generation to present an exhibition of this scale at the Drill Hall Gallery. Her help in coordinating our planning and compiling the information for this publication has been unstinting.

The exhibition and its accompanying publication have been made possible because of the contributions of many: we extend warm thanks to Anja Loughhead, Peter Alwast, Joel Arthur, Kirsten Farrell and Dionisia Salas who have contributed to this publication and shared their insights into Emma’s creative practice.

Special thanks are also due to Andrew Darragh and Ricardo Felipe of SmallTasks who designed this publication, to Graham Maslen and his team at Spitting Image for their colour management, and to David Paterson for his fastidious photographic documentation of the artworks. The Drill Hall Gallery acknowledges the commitment and devotion of our staff to making this project a reality. Thanks to Oscar Capezio, Anne-Marie Jean, Lucy Chetcuti, Joanne Leong, Ben Shingles, and our art installers Riley Beaumont, Pat Lamour and Naomi Xeros.

The ANU Drill Hall Gallery acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people who are the Traditional Custodians of the Canberra region. We pay respect to their Elders, past and present, and extend our respect to all First Nations people of this land, celebrating their enduring connections to Country, knowledge and stories.

Terence Maloon and Tony Oates.

I’d like to sincerely thank Terence Maloon and Tony Oates for believing in me and my practice, for trusting me and encouraging me to show at the Drill Hall Gallery.

I’d like to acknowledge ARTS ACT for their funding and ongoing support for our community.

I pay my respects to the Yorta Yorta peoples and their country, where I was born and grew up.

I acknowledge and celebrate the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, the traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work and pay my respects to all First Nations people. I have so much to learn from your rich culture.

I would like to acknowledge my colleges at the ANU School of Art and Design for their continued support and encouragement. I warmly thank my teachers, Ruth Waller, Vivienne Binns and Peter Maloney.

Wholeheartedly I thank my artist family, Dionisia Salas, Joel Arthur and Peter Alwast for contributing so generously to the round table conversation. It was a very enjoyable evening that I won’t forget. It was truly special. Your friendship contributes to my love for going to the studio.

Thank you, Bryan Foong and Shaune Lakin for graciously participating in Essay Club, being in your company is uplifting and sensitively imaginative and intelligent.

Cara Kirkwood, thanks for your love and friendship and your continuous encouragement and advocacy for me as an artist and person. You’re one of a kind and I love your generosity.

I’d like to thank Anja Loughhead for investing your time in writing about my work. It is a real honour and pleasure to have a curator focus on my paintings with such a conscientious and responsive approach.

Thank you to my family of origin, Wilson, Adrian, Lewis and Bronwyn for your unconditional and loyal love and encouragement. Xabi and Isla Farrell, thank you for your kindness and patience. You teach me so much.

And above all I’d like to acknowledge and thank my darling wife, Kirsten Farrell. Thank you for loving me, supporting me and for your infectious desire to continuously learn.

Emma Beer

Colophon

Published on the occasion of

Emma Beer: Zooper Dooper

Drill Hall Gallery, Feb–April 2022

Curator

Tony Oates

Publication Design

Small Tasks

Photography

David Paterson

Published February 2022

Printed in Australia

Edition of 300

Drill Hall Gallery Publishing

ISBN 978-0-9581560-9-7

© The publishers, artists, authors and photographers. All images have been reproduced with permission of the artists, unless otherwise stated. This work is copyrighted and all rights are reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any process without the prior written permission from the publishers.

DRILL HALL GALLERY