Paint 2022 Relationships and Limitations Cash Brown | Penny Burnett | Jane Giblin | Amber KorolukStephenson | Michael Nay | Sue Nettlefold | Tania Price | Meg Walch | Alex Wanders | Julie Williams
[ acknowledgments ] Paint 2022—Relationships and Limitations was assisted by Poimena Gallery, Launceston Grammar School and the Creative Support Small Grants Fund, Arts Tasmania, Department of State Growth. I would like to thank Paul Snell, Director of Poimena Gallery for the opportunity to create this exhibition and Louise Middleton for all her assistance with the exhibition and installation. I would not have attempted such an ambitious project without the invaluable support and mentorship of Maria Kunda, who has challenged and skilfully expanded my understanding of curatorial practice. Thankyou Maria. Above all I would like to acknowledge the amazing generosity and commitment of the artists, Cash Brown, Jane Giblin, Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, Michael Nay, Sue Nettlefold, Tania Price, Meg Walch, Alex Wanders and Julie Williams who have all enthusiastically embraced this project with no guarantee of funding yet have all produced new work, a testament to relationships and limitations. I’m indebted, and honoured by your support.
Exhibition Curator Catalogue Essay Exhibition Biographies Catalogue and Poster Design Cover image Photography
Penny Burnett Maria Kunda Penny Burnett Penny Burnett and Louise Middleton Penny Burnett ChromaCorona chart 64 (detail) Louise Midddleton and Lisa Garland
‘Augustine once wrote that he knew what time was – until he was asked to define it. The same might be said of colour. Colour, like time, is our constant companion. It’s with us from the moment we open our eyes in the morning to the moment we close them at night... We spend so much of our lives experiencing these apparitions that we rarely pause to understand them. Most of us know what red or blue look like, just as we know what a minute or hour feels like. But we are much less confident when it comes to explain them. If you are completely honest with yourself, do you really know what colour is?’ James Fox, The World According to Colour
Previous page and current (installation view) ChromaCorona | Chart 64 | Penny Burnett Image credit: Louise Middleton
the proposition Paint 2022—Relationships and Limitations, is an exploration of the expressive languages of colour, and colour’s relational qualities. The linchpin of the exhibition is a colour chart book, which was birthed in 2020 in response to the first Covid-19 lockdown. I began then to paint colour charts into an old ledger and christened it ChromaCorona. I asked several artists, predominantly painters, all of whom have personally influenced me over the years, to explore the premise of ‘relationships and limitations’ by selecting pigments from two consecutive pages of ChromaCorona, and create new work. The cross-pollination and dialogues created from this painterly limitation promises to expand both practitioner and audiences’ appreciation of colour. Penny Burnett May 2022
the context Late March early April 2020, I found myself in the unfamiliar space of not having an imminent project to focus my attention on. I was in Covid-19 lockdown with no work and no foreseeable opportunities for future work and, to be brutally honest, no motivation to hustle for work. Time had stalled. I had an opportunity to be still. In this stillness with no pressing agenda, I decided to focus on a key discipline: painting colour charts. I decided to use a really old ledger, a register of correspondence, which I acquired from Maitland’s Historic Society when I was retracing our family history with my uncle a few years ago. It seemed like a poetic way to regroup in these indeterminate times. ChromaCorona is a simple tonal colour mix between two pigments, seven squares across and six down. A colour straight out of the tube is placed on the top left square, and a second colour on the top right square. They are mixed gradually across the top row, with the aim of making the central row the tipping point, where the mixed colour no longer identifying with either original hue. The rows underneath are the tonal shifts that are made by the addition of increased amounts of titanium white. The sequential logic of the book is that one pigment is carried over to the next page, thus creating consecutive charts. The ‘rule’ is that two corresponding pages contain only three pigments plus white. This logic became the determining factor, the cornerstone, of this exhibition. Fast forward I was invited to curate Poimena’s 2022 paint show. Before thinking, I said yes. This is how Paint 2022—Relationships and Limitations began to take shape. Being acutely aware of the relational nature of colour—that a colour reads differently depending on what it is positioned next to, and that an individual’s perception of colour is unique, I thought what a wonderful opportunity to extend my studio project to a larger conversation. In some ways this is a very basic and unsophisticated premise for an exhibition. Limitations is a loaded word. Obviously, in the context of this project one limitation is a reduced palette, but I would like highlight the murkier limitations of insecurity and comparison, which haunt most of us. A group show unintentionally lends itself to comparison, the brutal reality of the art world where art prizes blatantly promote this practice. As a green curator, with mentor Maria Kunda, we were privy to some wonderful transparent conversations with the artist, discussing their practice and approach to this project. I came away from these conversations both elated and a touch deflated. Elated and inspired, because every artist has generously risen to the challenge producing amazing work. Conversely, I came away deflated, privately comparing my own painting practice to theirs - a self-indulgent error that has sabotaged many. Paintings are risky, they are made out of resilience and passion. There are no shortcuts, it’s a lifelong pursuit, and requires refined focus, mixing colour charts has reinforced that, reminding me that I will always be a student, never the master. And like unrequited love, it can become an obsession. My opening quote was about the similarities of colour and time, and our inability to explain it. I’m thrilled to have been able to share my obsession with these amazing painters and friends. So it is with great delight that I introduce to artists of Paint 2022—Relationship and Limitation and their colour chart choices.
cash brown
As an artist, curator and conservator, Cash Brown has a wealth of knowledge of the alchemy and historical application of paint. I first met Cash in our undergrad years at the National Art School and was enamoured by her playfulness and humour, combined with exceptional technical skill and rigor. Cash is an artist who uses paint to give voice to matters that have not had one. She highlights the inequality of female representation and remuneration within the arts—issues that have come to be at the forefront of the National Gallery of Australia’s recent Know My Name exhibitions. When I reconnected with Cash to invite her to participate in this project, she hadn’t made new work since the start of the Covid pandemic. Particularly exciting about Cash’s response to the proposition was that she kept her focus entirely on the core parameters of the project: painted colour. By choosing Chart 66 and 67, she has utilised the tried-and-true basics of the colour wheel, yellow, red and blue, but the hues are more nuanced than straight primaries. Cadmium Yellow Deep is warm and opaque; Ultramarine Blue sits on the cusp of warm and cool temperatures, and is semi-opaque, and Quinacridone Magenta is luminous, versatile and transparent. Armed with these three pigments, Cash has elected a classical art school exercise in transcribing the work of an old master. Artemisia Gentilleschi occasionally made variations of the same composition with different colour. Similarly, Cash thrusts herself back into the sheer pleasure of painting, with five versions of Corsica and the Satyr, and playfully shows off the possibilities of colour mixing and application at its best.
Cash Brown’s art practice is rooted in appropriation. She borrows images and re-engineers them into critical yet playful comments on contemporary firstworld life as experienced by a white middle-aged woman. She has exhibited widely, and has been highly commended in the Doug Moran Portraiture Prize (2007), and a finalist in The Sulman, Portia Geach, Mosman, and the Waterhouse prizes, to mention a few. She is represented by Robin Gibson Gallery, Darlinghurst Sydney.
jane giblin Jane Giblin and her work have an aura of driven intensity and gestural restlessness, a searching for something just beyond. Where most look forward, Giblin looks through—through memories and past moments blurrily captured on old negatives, to find meaning in the present. Predominantly a drawer, the tonal colour chart challenge was intensified by the absence of pure black as a mark-making option. This obstacle was overcome by taking Prussian Blue into its darkest depths. Rather than mixing and placing, Giblin scratches, pushes and wipes pigments into a swirling potion of congealed broths suspended in medium and Gum Arabic. Some with the viscosity of ink and others with wildness of sea foam after a southern storm, the tension intensifying where these fluids collide. She dances between control and anarchy with the pigments deciding on their own the transitional nature of tone. This is all intensified by the sheet lightning energy of Cobalt Turquoise Green shimmering in an instant of resisting all blending and standing defiantly alone on the surface as a single voice to resonate with the layers of pigment embedded in the overwhelmingly loaded cold-pressed paper support. Image credit | Matt Osborne | OIStudios
Jane Giblin recently developed a large family project, I Shed My Skin, A Furneaux Islands Story, a collection of 91 figurative works including black and white photography, ink and pigment works on paper and lithography. In collaboration with author Pete Hay, the result is large, illustrated book documenting the project: its fifty-plus participants, and some of their history. Jane is represented by Penny Contemporary, Hobart and Janet Clayton Gallery, Sydney.
amber koroluk-stephenson
Amber Koroluk-Stephenson never wastes an opportunity. Her complex compositions are loaded with themes and reoccurring motifs that correlate and prophesy her next body of work. In response to this invitation to engage with a stripped-back exploration of colour’s relationships and limitations, Amber has referred back to a breakup series, for which she worked swiftly and systematically to simplify each painting to one or two elements, in a healing process of consideration and letting go. Building on that series, with the benefit of hindsight and experience, Amber uses the constraints of time and limited palette as an opportunity to explore gender associations. These are not new concerns, but they intensified after a residency at Patterdale, Glover’s colonial house where, John Glover’s bedroom was painted pink and his wife Sara Glover’s, in blue. This cross-over of expectation sparked a curiosity about the gendered assumptions associated with red and blue, so Amber has chosen Cerulean Blue Hue, Rose Madder and Vermillion Hue, Chart 46 and 47. In essence, she has two vibrant reds and a playful blue to work with, and a limitation to the pictorial dimension due to a lack of complementary contrast. The interaction of the two reds pushes the intensity and potential haze to the extremes. The options of pulling the pigments down into the palest of pastels or emphasising their undiluted vibrancies with transparent glazes will be dictated by the final choice of imagery on which Amber hangs this chromatic shapeshifting palette.
Amber KorolukStephenson’s visual practice draws on the intersections between natural and built environments to explore complexities surrounding Australian identity and landscape, structures of facade, and paradoxes of taming or staging the landscape. She is currently undertaking an MFA by Research (Painting), at UNSW, Sydney. Amber has held numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her work has been selected for major Australian prizes including The Churchie National Emerging Artist Prize, Tidal National Art Award, Redlands Art Award, Albany Art Prize, Portia Geach Memorial Award, Ravenswood Art Prize and Glover Prize. She has received several grants and awards for her practice, including an Australia Council ArtStart Grant, NAVA Australian Artists’ Grant and Arts Tasmania ArtsBridge and Individuals Grants, and has undertaken several studio residencies including Contemporary Art Tasmania, Glover Country, Deddington, and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
michael nay
Michael Nay chose complex pigments, Phthalo Turquoise, Chinese Red and Dutch Brown, Chart 28 and 29, only to discover that the greens mixed were inadequate to neutralise. Notably, the mixes between Dutch Brown and Phthalo Turquoise are particularly reminiscent of Australian modernists palette – misty modern, flirting with colour but pulling it back to tone. This is poignant because location and memory act as a unifying launch-pad for all Nay’s work, but from that point of departure the free fall of collapsing and conjunctions within and of pictorial space begins, a fine line between jarring and jamming, to the cusp of corruption: sensory overload. Michael utilises collage as an image construction device, and when this is transposed into oil painting there is a weightiness brought by the materiality that demands homage and respect. This is not a simple trick of image transposition but a painterly passage of promises suspended. The final images, although loaded with iconography and clues, don’t need to be unpacked or decoded: they operate as explosions of joy between a painter and the possibilities of paint and permit a ride wild of cultural associations for the viewer.
Image credit | Louise Middleton
Michael Nay’s practice draws from experiences spent travelling and studying across Australia, and reflections on themes such as landscape, social and personal histories. Through large-scale works, Michael explores the relationships between these elements, using paint to express feelings about cultural dislocation and national identity. Michael often translates collage-based compositions to represent ideas around childhood and the fragmentation of memory, positioning unremarkable, yet nostalgic objects into remembered spaces. Michael’s doctoral project re-envisioned the master narrative of Anzac through a painterly investigation of memory and memorialising of the Great War at the Australian War Memorial.
sue nettlefold
Sue Nettlefold is a very studious artist and often sets parameters and limitations in her approach to making. She has worked with limited palettes for a long time, so the exhibition proposition takes her to familiar territory. As an artist preoccupied with composition and tonality, the exhibition has presented an opportunity to focus on the colour side of the equation. Her starting points are recycled pieces of Masonite and plywood that she already had in her studio. Environment and sustainability are key concerns underpinning her practice. Sue has chosen Chart 36, Phthalo Green and Neon Orange, intensifying the challenge by using just two colours. It was the orange that first appealed to Sue as it was reminiscent of salmon orange, a colour she used symbolically in her master’s project as a protest to the environmental terrorism of the salmon industry on Tasmania’s east coast. In discussing the impact of the pandemic, Sue acknowledged her appreciation of the slowing down of process, giving her more permission to take time to sit and look, to allow her work to tell her the next move. A confidence in ‘seeing’ is embedded in Sue’s process and composition, pictorial space and its illusive nature being key. In the work aptly titled, No.36 Sue has pulled off some sort of depth illusionism, an interesting trompe-l'œil effect in an abstract image. It simultaneously is folded and flat, holding our awareness to the picture plane and the boundedness of the rectangle, while still complying with the limitation of only two colours.
Sue Nettlefold is a community-based artist who focuses on the social, geographical and connective aspects of landscape on the East Coast of Tasmania. She is also the founder and administrator of the Spring Bay Studio and Gallery, which is a popular communitybased art studio and gallery at the Spring Bay marina. Sue holds a BFA (honours) and MFAD, and has recently held a solo exhibition exploring the connections between conscious and subconscious landscapes at the Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Place, Hobart.
tania Tania Price chose Charts 53 and 54, Cerulean Blue Hue, Burnt Sienna and Cinnabar Green Deep. Her price choice threw out its own challenges. The art supply store informed her there is no Cinnabar Green Deep, only Cinnabar Green. The Deep version I had purchased on a residency in Jeju, South Korea, and was a Korean brand: ‘Shinhan Professional’ (note to self, when you find a pigment that you love when overseas, buy several tubes). I passed my supply to Tania to keep the integrity of the project. Tania works with photo grabs from her newsfeed. Her choice of charts was driven by a search for colours that best suited a haunting image for which she had had been looking for an opportunity to paint. This image was dominated by Burnt Sienna and white, with flashes of green and blue. For Tania, the limitation of colour denied her a lot of her usual decisions in the making process, forcing her to work harder in mixing to achieve the tonal and temperature shifts the composition demanded. The three pigments ultimately delivered a connection and overall unity within the colour field, while white, as the dominate player in the composition, is powerfully activated by the pop of artificial, almost toxic green on the horizon line—that elusive Cinnabar Green Deep. The Cerulean Blue becomes a universal calling card in contemporising this image, being a feature of the all-too-familiar Covid masks and blue-belted hazard suits. Most arresting in this work is the movement expressed by the individual brush marks. The marks deliver a deliberate disconnection and departure from the original photograph. The colour limitation necessitated a simplification that has intensified the image, forcing an assertive reduction of superfluous detail, thereby heightening the materiality of paint and gesture in the essentialising of form. This tension between dissolving figuration and leaning on abstraction for affect is a feature Tania’s practice that is developing in surety and accomplishment
Tania Price demonstrates what painting can bring to our understanding of major social and political issues that most of us experience only indirectly, primarily through the news media. Tania’s doctoral thesis Breaching Borders, was an investigation into painting the news. Tania based her work on images selected from largely fleeting digital media, and depicted events and issues relating to migration changed in nature and perception. In doing so, Tania examined how the traditional medium of painting might still have a role in our apprehension of what happens in the world. Tania’s doctoral project examined how painting photographs of news events of global significance can help close the physical and psychological gap between the passive media consumer and the circumstances of others. She was a finalist in the 2021 National City Art Prize and in the 2022
Meg J. Walch is the consummate professional studio artist and it’s no secret I deeply admire her work and the person she is, so I was thrilled to be able to involve her as in this project. Before we had arrived for our interview and to look at her progress, she had prepared clear responses for the questions I had flagged and I have relied on her written words here.
meg walch
Meg said she said yes to making work for the show, ‘because I love colour and I never stop learning about it. Colour is contingent on context—it is relational and highly complex. Colour is nuanced and non-verbal and it can tell other kinds of stories: Colour is content.’ Meg chose Chart 37 Tasman Blue, Neon Orange: and Chart 38 Tasman Blue and Quinacridone Magenta, looking for complementaries and colours that could create natural/artificial relationships. Tasman Blue (Art Spectrum) is manufactured and named to render natural phenomenon like sea and air. Neon Orange (Langridge) suits the rendering of an artificial glow. Quinacridone Magenta within the Tasman Blue chart acts to warm things up, and in relation to the other two colours, it makes things a lot more complicated. Meg decided to limit form in order to focus on colour relationships, adding Chart 38 Quinacridone Magenta, she says, ‘To honour my first epiphany in relation to chroma. In 1996, I had a revelation while gazing out to sea from Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A thick belt of smog hung heavy on the horizon. This deep orange blended with sky blue to form a dirty gradient. From that point on I began mixing oil colours wet-into-wet, observing colour edge collisions, to see what happens when chromatic opposites and harmonies meet to generate new, nuanced and often neutralized colours. Colour mixing is an act of contamination to create diversity. It is transformation through encounter. In my mind colour mixing is an analogue for cross-cultural interchanges.’
Meg J. Walch is a Tasmanian artist whose painting blends figuration and abstraction, synthesising particular pictorial traditions of Western Europe and South East Asia. She is a graduate of the University of Tasmania’s School of Art and has a Masters from the San Francisco Art Institute, USA. She is a Samstag Scholar and an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Space Program, USA. Her practice has developed through spending extended periods of time living and working overseas. Meg has undertaken residencies in Taipei, Tokyo. Korea and Thailand. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and Australia, including Wilderness, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2010, Kindle and Swag - The Samstag Effect, curated by Ross Wolfe, University of South Australia Art Museum, 2004, Artists to Artists, Ace Gallery, New York, 2002, and Primavera 2000, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Meg completed a PhD at the University of Tasmania in 2017.
alex wanders
Alex Wanders was well versed in limitation within his compositions and palette, and accepted the challenge to choose a palette he had not worked with before. This uncharted territory embraces powder baby pastels in Charts 75 and 76: Brilliant Blue, Magenta and Yellow. The first test was to find the equivalent in acrylic. This was resolved by finding the same pigment codes (PB15.3—Phthalo blue, PV19— Quinacridone red, and PY35—Cadmium yellow light), and then re-mixing the colour charts with Titanium White ensuring that the colour value didn’t dry darker than the original oils: a tricky feat considering acyclic paints by nature dry two shades darker than their wet form. These considered and technical challenges were embraced graciously, and with the same attention to detail that Alex applies to the preparatory model making and photography that precede the work on canvas. Here he modelled two examples of iconic Hobart modernist architecture, local touchstones for his fond memories as a young boy. These shimmering shallow depth works glisten in there seeming simplicity, yet underpinning each work is the reverence of light. There is a mediative stillness about them that I can’t help but make associations with time and colour, indeed these works could be perceived as symbolic homages to the light of dawn and dusk.
Alex Wanders has juggled his painting practice while being a full-time educator most of his life. He recently retired from teaching and is focusing on painting. Alex was awarded the UTAS Rosamond McCulloch & Lloyd Rees Studio Residency, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. He was on the 2016 Dean’s Honour Roll for the Faculty of Arts, and received the Murray Todd Prize for greatest proficiency in a Faculty of Arts Honours. Alex also was the 2017 Winner, Clarence Open Art Exhibition, The Barn and Schoolhouse Gallery, Clarence, Tas. Alex’s work is held in the following collections: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Tasmania Hobart and Launceston Campus, Devonport Gallery and Arts Centre, The Derwent Collection, The Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board, The Department of Education and the Arts Tasmania, The Chandler Coventry Collection, Sydney, Artbank and The Clarence City Council Collection.
julie williams
Julie Williams approached this project through symbolism. The proposition of reflecting on colour through relationships and limitations resonated with her strongly as the Covid lockdowns meant missing the final farewell to her father in the UK and the welcoming of two new granddaughters in Sydney. Her selection was definitive, Charts 6 and 7, with Dioxazine Violet, Diarylide Yellow and Indigo, as they transported her to Hill End, her spiritual home. The association of place was linked with the explosive yellow of wattle in bloom and the depthless reflective shimmer of the Australian raven. The familiarity of indigo has been a constant companion in every country she has sojourned. Overlapping cultural and personal narratives strengthen the raven’s significance to Julie as the mythology of numerous cultures deify the intelligence, playfulness, and loyalty of this majestic bird. It was important to Julie to work intuitively, not drawing from source imagery but allowing the image to emerge from flickers of memory and feeling. Julie told me the image came quickly, finding the form through thin washes, clearly intensified because of the transparency of all three pigments. Consequently, she has opted to focus on the colours in their pure form; simply adding the titanium white to give the yellow some weight, adding an impasto contrast with the wattle in the foreground. From this point, several transparent layers were built up to strengthen the ghostly figure of the Corvid (Australian raven). There is an ambiguity to this form, which signals the resistance of the dreamlike symbol to being fixed, either physically or metaphorically. Image credit | Steven Cavanagh
Julie Williams was born in the UK, spent her early 20s in France, then migrated to Sydney, Australia in 1980. Here she built a career as a professional artist having attended the National Art School. In 2014 Julie moved to Asia and lived and practiced in Singapore for five years. She travelled widely through Southeast Asia and spent a large amount of time painting and drawing in Jogjakarta on the Island of Java, Indonesia. Julie studied Asian Art at National Art School and has had an abiding interest in cross-cultural influences. She owns a home and studio in Hill End, NSW, where she continues to investigate the Chinese history in that historic gold rush town. Whilst living in Singapore, her conceptual, contemporary works with historical references found a new direction through developing a print practice at the Singapore Tyler Print Institute. Williams’ work is held in Bathurst Regional Gallery Collection, as well as numerous private collections. She is represented by Jayes Gallery, Molong, NSW and Michael Reid, Murrurundi, NSW.
Light’s suffering and joy
In the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, Penny Burnett began to post photos on Instagram of pages from a book of painted colour charts. Penny ruled up her grids, seven squares across, six down, onto the pages of a large old ledger book, and she began filling the charts using the tubes of paint that she’d stocked in her studio. She christened her colour chart project ChromaCorona. A novice might imagine the technical exercise of applying increments of in a colour chart to be based on measurement. However you would be wrong to assume the midpoint of equilibrium— the sweet spot in the marriage of the two pigments in the centre square of the top row— is accomplished merely by mixing equal volumes of the two paints. As Penny says, ‘It’s never 50:50.’ Pigments in paint are not equal in strength. The ‘measurement’ is done not by volume but by eye.
Once I think I’ve got it, it's a matter of pushing past that point in order to confirm that yes, that was the point of balance. I have to lose it in order to find that I had it. That’s my process: pushing past the limit to find the ‘true’ balance. And once I’ve done that, I’ve often used a lot of paint! There is an effort of perception in the fine judgements that are required to calibrate the adjustments. Though they are ‘technical exercises’ the colour charts have a visceral quality and a signature that is deeply human: impossibly finessed, they are also endearingly irregular. The paint is worked, by hand and by eye. I have to work the palette knife hard. There's surprising physicality in the mixing. That physicality occurs more on the palette than on the canvas or the page. Energy is expended on the palette. There's a noise, click, click, click of the palette knife hitting the palette. The process reminds me of kneading dough, as I’m turning the paint over and onto itself to mix it. The paint in these charts has life force. Together in the book, the pages inform each other and are forming a corpus. In 2020 Meg Walch and I made a pilgrimage to see the book. The esoteric ledger of colour charts seemed to brim with possibilities. Not long before the outbreak of the pandemic, I had entered a phase of studying Jung—after a lifetime of repudiating his work. Jung’s Red Book was a response to his inner turmoil, and more than that: he understood his project as a self-experiment that confronted the mythic and symbolic structures that shaped his own subconscious and the pathologies of his times— the late 1930s. On encountering Penny’s colour chart book, I understood it as an exercise in dealing with prima materia, in the alchemical sense: a return to, or deep descent into, fundamental matter. I saw this not simply in terms of the technical labour of working with pigments but also as a concerted devotional act to dig around under the foundations of artistic practice during confusing times. As such, I saw it as a project that resonated well beyond Penny’s individual circumstance. It's fitting that the book is a ledger, because it seems represents some sort of reckoning. It seemed to be a beckoning toward future action (much as Jung’s Red Book was).
the exhibition an open-ended way. Partly that was simply strategic advice for an unfunded project, but from a loftier motivation I felt Instinctively that the ongoing ChromaCorona book could open onto to an exhibition with a focus on introspection, self-experimentation and at least a pinch of transcendence, and these aspirations really fall into a realm of unmanageability.
What is more, Penny knew from the outset that some of the artists could plan to devote a good amount of studio time to developing their work,
while
others
could
not
as
their
contributions would be part of a juggling act of other work and life commitments. A key limiting factor is time. Therefore some of the works will be quite ambitious and highly resolved (we have seen some that certainly
The
exhibition
title,
Relationships
and
are), while others may be provisional.
Limitations relates to the invitation Penny set out for the artists she approached, and the reasons she had for selecting artists. Her proposition was for each artist to select two consecutive leaves from her book, and work with a restricted palette of only three colours, plus white, but to paint how and what they wished. At once, this is a very prescriptive set of conditions, but it’s also an extremely openended curatorial premise. At one time or another, Penny has studied with each of the contributors. With some of them friendships stretch back decades, to undergraduate days at the National Art School, and so the show was a means of reunion, to revive consolidate
working
friendships
and
between
artists. Marcel Duchamp famously said, ‘I don't believe in art, I believe in artists,’ and decades ago,
Without a freight budget, Julie Williams decided the scale of her canvas was dictated by what she
could
fit
in
an
overhead
luggage
compartment. Penny set up a private Facebook group which all the artists were able to engage with, and she and I made
studio visits to all the Tasmanian artists and had Zoom sessions with Cash Brown and Julie Williams, who live interstate. Over a few weeks we have spoken to the nine artists about their choice of colour charts and approach to the exhibition, and we’ve seen works in various stages of progress. Part way through the sequence of conversations, when I had only just begun to collate some of the recorded material we were collecting, it struck me that a commonality for the exhibition is that all the artists have elected to use at least one shade of blue. But that changed when Sue Nettlefold decided not to use blue, and to limit her palette to just one chart. A good part of our conversation with Julie Williams was about blue: the fact that she’d selected, Indigo as it linked to the themes of her previous work. Derived from raw indigo plants (Indigofera tinctoria) and used as a fabric dye, indigo was a highly valuable colonial commodity. (Julie also selected Dioxazine Violet and Diarylide Yellow). Julie developed and interest in fabric and dye during a hiatus in her painting practice. She recounted that when she moved to Singapore about 10 years ago, she couldn’t enjoy painting with oils; linseed oil had no viscosity and the paint was far too molten in the heat to do what she required of it, and she didn’t enjoy using acrylic in the heat either. Over the six or so years she spent in Singapore, Julie visited Indonesia numerous times and enjoyed Yogyakarta, and so began a love affair with batik, and she took up screen printing. Through her Indonesian-Australian artist friend Jumaadi, Julie met the Indonesian batik
artisan,
Mbah
Bariah.
In
her
eighties, Mbah Bariah has been working in batik all of her life. Julie began working with her, silk screen printing on top of Mbah Bariah’s old and discarded batiks. On her return to Sydney four years ago, Julie
exhibited
these
layered,
richly
patterned works which are constructed screen-printing an architectural gate form —a
kind of modernist grille superimposed onto a batik substrate. The apparent formal abstraction of these works is also a consideration of the rich and crosscultural symbolic elements of the fabric, which
tells
its
incorporating
own
Dutch
stories
and
of
Japanese
figurative elements as successive waves of imperialism and migration shifted the lexicon of motifs in the batik. At first sight, Julie’s painterly response to the exhibition brief would seem remote from her previous body of work. She has painted a raven as a tribute to the friendly, mischievous pair of birds that play on the veranda at her studio residence at Hill End, NSW. Julie said an image came to mind spontaneously the moment she chose her colour charts: a raven in a wattle. Penny commented that it is much more figurative than what Julie has been producing, and here Julie
hesitated
distinction Julie Williams Dialogue In Three Colours, 2022 35 x 46 cm, oil on canvas
somewhat
between
over
figuration
the and
abstraction, saying that previously she has worked with bird forms taken from cloth, referencing colonialism, and that this raven is not accurately observed, but a symbolic figure from her mind’s
ill-defined project. At once this raven is an attempt to form a personal symbol in a peripatetic life, while also obliquely referencing some of the dark, secret stories of settlement and exploitation of early immigrants that are part of a largely untold history of Hill End, where Julie spends much of her time. Our conversation takes us, full circle, back to the palette: the deep dark signification of the indigo as a colonial substance, and the dual symbolism of the raven, a playful bird with a powerful shadow. One of the first artists Penny approached to participate in the exhibition was Tania Price, who she came to know when they were both undertaking their doctoral projects at the Tasmanian School of Art, just a few years ago. A career journalist, Tania paints from press photographs that she selects from her news feed. When Penny rang her last year to invite her to be a part of the exhibition, like Julie, Tania spontaneously thought of an image. She said, I had an image I liked mainly because of the effect of the reflection. A large part of it, I figured, could be painted with Burnt Sienna. I thought Penny was bound to have a chart with Burnt Sienna, and indeed, it appeared in one of her early ones. I chose the other colours: Cerulean Blue—pretty standard, and a Cinnabar Green Deep. There is an often-quoted phrase from Goethe, who wrote, ‘Colours are light's suffering and joy.’ It’s a peculiar statement. Could he have meant that light itself experiences suffering and joy? Of all the works in the show, Tania’s painting most explicitly addresses a current sense of crisis—unsurprisingly, as her source material is the news. However, if not outright catastrophe, running through much of the work, there is disquiet or psychological unrest. It’s beyond question that humans associate colours with emotion. Goethe was a relatively early proponent of the idea that our perception of colour is both physiological and psychological. There have been many attempts to theorise and even codify symbolic and emotional registers for colour, however I would argue that associations of colour and emotion are unfixed. Perhaps Tania’s use of colour in this painting provides a good case in point. In his day, Goethe’s book Theory of Colours was somewhat badly received as a treatise on the phenomenon of human colour perception. But, despite its title, arguably it could be considered as an important anti-theory, as Goethe deals with colour as a visual— but not only visual—subjective experience.
Yet the idea of colour symbolism is remarkably stubborn, and it’s very easy to find opinions about the symbolism of colours. On the symbolic meaning of Cerulean, a random Google search yielded me the following description: ‘Sky blue is imprinted in our psyches as a retiring, quiescent color (sic). Surrounding yourself with cerulean blue could bring on a certain peace because it reminds you of time spent outdoors, on a beach, near the water – associations with restful, peaceful, relaxing times.’ In Tania’s painting Cerulean signals a sense of generalised emergency. She has used Cerulean Blue to depict the now-ubiquitous disposable blue face masks that we are sending to landfill. The same blue is picked up in the sky and reflected in the water. Members of procession of coffin bearers stride along a muddy river bank, dressed in what we now all refer to as ‘PPE’, personal protective suits and masks. The Cinnabar Green Deep appears as a shape in the distance, a built structure in the landscape, a water tank perhaps, and the arresting patch of bright colour is somewhat toxic. The confines of the limited palette give this painting a particular tension and precision. Perhaps Tania has captured the poignancy of this historical moment Tania Price A final stroke of white, 2022 137 x 122cm, oil on canvas
by seizing on something that might in future be recalled in the collective memory as ‘COVID blue’.
Jane Giblin’s work, The Fury, has something apocalyptic about it too. Her practice is mainly drawing and working with ink. The challenge that Penny’s invitation posed for Jane is that she decided to avoid using black. Jane says, ‘I replaced it with Prussian blue, one of my favourite colours regardless. it's one that I use a lot. I enjoy Prussian blue because of the way it behaves on the paper surface. I can use it in its darkest form, or I can grab a rag and shove it into the paper and it comes to life.’ In this work, the Prussian blue is fully dramatised against Cadmium Yellow Deep. In describing her working process, Jane portrays it as a dance, a fluid wrestling match, between her intention and sense of control, and risky happenstance. Using rags to blot and push, she shoves the liquid-suspended pigment across the expansive surface area of oversized paper, permitting it to be absorbed, or not, keeping it in motion, in dialogue between the paper substrate, until she permits the ink reach a settling point. The demonic creature in the image, which to me looks part-dog part-dragon, was sourced from a blurry photographic negative of a horse, from a collection of Jane’s great grandmother’s photographs taken on Flinders Island in the 1920s and 30s. Photographed in motion with its nostrils flaring and its hooves not touching the ground, the horse is like a spectre to the woman. The woman is Jane’s daughter Nina, rendered from two photographs taken by Jane seconds apart, at a time in Nina’s life when, Jane says, ‘she was learning when to be angry and how to be angry.’ Jane has portrayed her girl in a
Jane Giblin The Fury, 2022 three pigments, 150 x 114cm, on Arches satine Image credit: OIStudios by Mitch Osborne
Amber Koroluk-Stephenson took an approach to Cerulean blue through a gendered reading of colour: I undertook a residency at Glover country in 2020 and afterwards I started thinking about the relationships of colour and gender because John Glover’s room was pink and Sarah Glover's room was blue, and I noticed that it threw me, even though shouldn't have. That made me think about are assumptions and expectations around pink and blue now being gendered colours, and that was a large part of my decision-making in picking the red and blue palette for this show. With concurrent exhibition commitments, Amber accepted the invitation to be part of Penny’s project because coincidentally she had begun to work with a more restricted palette than she was used to and was considering the interplay between human relationships and the formal limitations that can be imposed on painting. With these serendipitous crossovers, she opted to work with an especially severely restricted palette, comprising Cerulean blue and two reds—a translucent pinkish red, Rose Madder, and Vermilion (Hue), a warm red. Her plan was to work on some small canvases with minimal underpainting. Amber characterises herself as an avowed ‘maximalist’ in her usual approach to content and colour. Her work is usually characterised by a surface tension accomplished through underpainting and a controlled approach to brush work, layering and glazing. On our studio visit, Penny and I were confronted with a space that gave full evidence of maximalism in motion, there were numerous canvases on the go, and many primed canvases stacked in wait. There is a highly constructed, stagey, confected quality to Amber’s pictures, which are loaded with domestic tropes: gloves, wooden toys, tiles, striped wallpaper. These are worked up from patchy, scratchier underpaintings which have a facility, robustness and lithe charm of their own, which made possibility of Amber contributing some provisional, looser works to the present show a tantalising possibility. We speculated aloud about how taking an expediently looser approach to approaching the canvas may alter the pictorial outcomes.
Amber Koroluk-Stephenson Swimming in Smoke and Mashing up the Turf, 2022 41 x 51cm each, oil on canvas Image credit | Louise Middleton
Sue Nettlefold talked to Penny and me about the energy in the confidence of just letting things happen. Sue chose to work with a palette very like one she has used before, using Phthalo Green, Neon Orange and, originally, Tasman Blue. Two abstracted green and orange compositions hung on the gallery wall, and these were reclamations of discarded parts of a series Sue had earlier made about the salmon industry. This logic of stopping and starting, rejecting overturning, reprising and recycling drove our conversation. I asked Sue what led to resolution of her compositions. Parts of them start to work. I find that I get to a certain point and I'm stuck, so I have to walk away and leave it for a day or so. I come back and sit with it for couple of hours and look, because it appears. Seeing happens over time. The visual solution comes at you; it's as if the work tells you, ‘this is what's needed now.’ That’s how it works for me anyhow. It’s almost like the drawing is in the paper before you even start, you’ve just got to find it; it’s that weird. When asked about the tension between chance and deliberation in her work, Sue spoke about allowing herself to freely Sue Nettlefold, Tuning Fork, 2022 50 x 87cm, oil on panel
make mistakes, saying that there is very little
that
cannot
be
corrected
or
rescued. Furthermore, she said she aims to break with the sort of conditioning
made a set of highly refined collages, by gluing together sections of discarded paper-based works, then turning them face down before cutting them to size, in order to surprise herself. I’m strongly reminded here of Brian Eno’s set of cards entitled Oblique Strategies, subtitled, ‘Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas.’ Some examples are ‘Use an old idea’ and, ‘Honour thy error as a hidden intention’, and ‘Work at a Different Speed’. Another tactic Sue named is disruption. She described her starting point for the work she would devise for Penny’s project, first taking some pieces of Masonite board she had in her garage, remnants of earlier works, cutting out a shape and painting across it so that it resembled a landscape. Sue described how she would likely proceed, by going back and making another cut-out shape, and possibly disrupting it, by say turning it upside down: ‘That's what I do. I get a certain distance in the work and then I disrupt it so that I don't get overconfident and try to bring it to a premature finishing point.’ In his psychology Jung defined what he called ‘the transcendent function’* Sue’s non-rational strategies, as processes of coming to terms with material dilemmas open onto possibilities for transcendent functioning, in the Jungian sense of overcoming material limitations, and reconciling opposites. A performative collage process also underlies Michael Nay’s approach to painting on canvas. _______________________________ *CJ Jung, Collected Works, 9i, 524.
Sue Nettlefold, No:36, 2022 40 x 50cm, oil on canvas
Penny, Michael and I drank wine in his studio in front of a large prepared canvas, primed in acrylic to match one of the colours on Chart 29: Phthalo Turquoise and Chinese Red. Michael’s third colour is Dutch Brown. On the upper corner of the canvas Michael had swatched some test squares of his colours and the three of us regard the complex range of violets and mauves on the chart, where the Phthalo Turquoise and Chinese Red merge and white has been added. We also contemplate the A4 sized collage that Michael had made by splicing together a photograph of landscape at Tinderbox, South of Hobart, and a grainy picture of a band. Michael explains Tinderbox for him is a place with positive, energising qualities like ‘Ley lines’, and the band image is Sarah McLeod in The Super Jesus, performing Vertigo: it is taken from Recovery, a tv show that was on ABC on Saturday mornings in the 90s. There’s a slippery feeling in the relationship between the spliced parts of the image, and Michael explains his intention is to create a sense of vertigo; of tumbling. The collage is not just a preliminary or static part of the process. Michael talked about rehearsing the collage a few times over the course of making a painting, to ‘crack open the picture’, by shifting the scale and relationships of the pictorial elements as he goes. In part, the palette he has chosen replicates aspects of some earlier work, and I remark on the fact that chart 28 is reminiscent of colours of modernist Australian landscape painting and Michael agrees, promptly citing the restricted palette and tonalist work of Max Meldrum. Part of the pull of the Chinese red of chart 29 for Michael was the lure of transparency: he explained he would not usually begin a painting with a transparent colour as an early consideration: I would never walk into an art shop and walk away with a Chinese Red and Dutch Brown. Transparent colours would be something I would wait to see if I needed as specialist colours at the end of doing a painting. But in choosing from Penny’s colour charts, I thought I would like to be prodded into a place where I would be keeping my head above water, and survive. There are beautiful illusory spaces that you can find with transparencies in an intimate moment of examining a painting, so I am really looking forward to trying for that. My strategy will be to paint it whiter, and then to come back with transparencies and paint it into its tone. That will use the full potential of the paint towards the latter stages Working with transparency was Alex Wanders’ focus too, and a preoccupation of Cash Brown’s. Before Alex embarked on his image making, Alex and Penny did some investigative
Michael Nay The Things the Sea Gives up, No.3, 2022 178 x 119cm, oil on canvas
paint. To transpose the colours Alex had chosen from Penny’s charts 75 and 76 (Brilliant Blue, Brilliant Magenta and Brilliant Yellow), Penny made enquiries of the Langridge paint company, about the pigments used in their oil paints, so Alex to use equivalent pigments in his acrylics. Alex explains to me that ‘brilliant’ simply means that titanium white has been added to the pigment, and he took care to mix his colours to the same pale pastel hues as Penny’s chart. As he is used to working with a much greater tonal range, the tonal restriction posed a challenge, and the result is two dappled, shimmering paintings that depict two Hobart landmarks. I started with the Cat and Fiddle Arcade painting, with really no idea how I was going to handle the colour. I was informed by the colour scheme that I always use: I always paint with a yellow, a red and a blue, but it's a cerulean blue, a red oxide and a yellow ochre. So with the Cat and Fiddle work, I leant on the way that I normally paint. With the Roundabout painting however, I wanted to work differently, but I had no real concept of how to. I just started by putting colours down and trying things out, and painting over, and washing over, and scrubbing back and just letting the colours assert themselves. Normally I would be sure of how the colours would behave, but not in this case. It was really fun, and a real challenge. As particular areas began to work really well, I started to build on those. I literally had to find my way. As somebody accustomed to confidently placing paint, it was a different experience. I remark that the Cat and Fiddle painting is a little bit flesh-toned, and Penny observes that the figurative elements—the face of the monumental cat and the mannequins, are a departure for Alex. He responded that he has a strong memory of visiting the Cat and Fiddle Arcade with his mother, and the painting is a memorial to her as well as the place as it was during his childhood, and he agrees that he has painted it as a feminised space. As I grew up in Hobart too, these are poignant works for me, and they tap into a particular bygone local aesthetic and sensibility of the seventies. I make a sad joke about
Alex Wanders Arcade, 2022 sixties107and x 107cm, acrylic on canvas
the passing of ‘Hobart Moderne’. A beautiful attribute of both paintings is the subdued reflections. I ask Alex about them and he says it’s a device he started to use when he reduced his pictorial elements to such a highly simplified state that he felt there needed to be a compensatory element to hold a viewer’s attention. The compensatory element in the paintings is more than a formal device though. It operates at a psychological level to connect me to past times and defunct values. There is an element of history painting running through Alex’s works and those of Tania, Michael, and also Cash Brown’s. Cash works according to an appropriation principle, replicating historical works. As a painting conservator her deep engagement with the materiality of oil paint is forensic. In charts 66 and 67, Cash has chosen a particularly vivid palette and I ask her if her has worked with those colours before. She said she has, and that she has a particular fondness for the Quinacridone Magenta, for its transparency. The magenta I have used particularly with emerald green, to make really nice transparent blacks, certainly with the last body of work that I made, which was appropriating elements of 17th century Italian and Dutch paintings made by women. To pump up the colour in those I used magenta, as a glaze. Our conversation with Cash is conducted via Zoom, in Michael Nay’s studio. By the time we talk to Cash, Penny and I have been interviewing artists all day, and have settled down with wine and snacks at Michael’s coffee table. The conversation with Cash flows around her interest in the golden era of Dutch 17th painting, in all its exuberance, and the feminist concerns that have carried through several of her celebrated bodies of work over recent years. We talk about her series of work that conflates Alex Wanders Modern Times, 2022 107 x 107cm, acrylic on canvas
women’s self-portraits with still life and memento mori genre painting, how she sought to address with these the misattribution of women’s effort and talent historically.
I am keen to hear not just about the physical properties of the paints that Cash has chosen to work with, but also the cultural and symbolic associations that these paints might carry for her, and especially because of the particular brilliance and audacity of this palette seems to so be linked to the exuberance she so enjoys in the works by the golden age Dutch masters. I press Cash quite hard on this, possibly emboldened by the wine. I ask, ‘What licence do you take as a painter? Or, if it’s a better question, what license does painting give you in your life? Does it give you an access to the kind of exuberance that you're talking about that clearly is of very high value to you? A curator once described my work as having joie de vivre which I thought was very interesting because I actually find painting terrifying. I find it really hard to start something. The directness, and looseness, the exuberance and joie de vivre—all things that I admire in other artists’ works, I probably feel I don't have. Sometimes when I get into a zone with it, it can happen, and then the trouble is as soon as you notice it, it’s gone. It's absolutely elusive. I think that in my own practise what I want to be able to do is what I perceive Frans Hals as being able to do: just get in there and be able to look and put. Just paint and enjoy myself and know when to stop. I take another risk. I say that the colours Cash has chosen are meaty and visceral, and somehow sexualised in a feminine way. Penny interjects that Cash is an expert painter of female genitalia, and quickly Cash shows us a work which appropriates Courbet’s Origin of the World. Cash says, ‘It’s got glitter on it it’s called Glamour Puss. It’s got the cadmium and the magenta and Cash Brown Corsica and the Satyr (after Artemisia Gentilleschi circa1635) my hunch that there is something QMUBCYD, 2022 Polytych of 5 panels, 20 x 25.5cm each specifically feminine way about Cash’s Oil on poplar panel
the blue.’ I feel vindicated in deeply rambunctious in a palette choice, which moves
away from stories of oppression, in favour of a focus on pure forms of feminine desire and agency.
Meg Walch undertook two quite large canvases, and presented them to us as a failure and a success. The success was presented to us in its complete form, the only finished work we’d witnessed in our studio visits. The ‘failure’ was a continuation of a quirky series that Meg has been doing that depicts flying saucers in landscapes. It’s looking unfinished and abandoned when she shows it to us, and we tell her it’s salvageable. The painting depicts Los Angeles, where Meg studied in the 1990s. Meg laughs as she tells us about her misadventure. As a poor workman blames their tools, I chose Tasman Blue, and it is buttery and it has no grunt. I couldn’t make a dark value to create volume and contrast. It even got a strange bloom through it, which happens when your medium has too much fat in it. So I only had that and the orange, two fairly light values, to create contrast: that’s why it’s quite powdery, pastelly and icky. So then I made it crash land, because I thought yep, it’s a failure, I’m going to crash. I took it off the stretcher and I nearly painted over it, and then I thought more about looking at the smog out to the horizon [in Los Angeles] where the dirty orange meets the sky blue, which was for me my first epiphany with colour mixing. I remember the exact moment. From then on, I started blending wet paint into wet. That’s my project in its pure form. For me, Penny’s experimentation with the charts, the pixilation, and the light that shimmers through—I don’t think you can get better than that when working with colour, and I find form to be secondary. So [for the second canvas] I resorted to getting rid of the form and just doing colour mixing and looking at what happens at the edges. Meg Walch TB.NO.QM, 2022 122 x 137cm, oil on canvas
In Meg’s second canvas, bands of colour blur into each other in a series of remarkable transpositions.
I considered colour mixing as contamination. Any time you mix, you can achieve a harmony or a neutral, but it’s still contaminating the other colour; that’s what you are doing. So for me that’s where it’s at. So I love this abstract one. For me it sung. So that’s the Tasman Blue, Quinacridone Magenta and Neon Orange. Penny interrogated Meg on the process. She asks, did you underpaint? Meg says, ‘No. It’s all wet in wet.’ Did you use white? Meg says, ‘Yes’, and she points to areas where white has been a vehicle. We all ogle the abstract painting. It does sing. It radiates playfulness, energy, and pure joy. *
*
*
ChromaCorona is an unfinished project, with many empty pages remaining in the ledger, awaiting yet more colour charts. It presents a portal into other possible collaborative forays and an open invitation for future painters to take leaves from Penny’s book.
Maria Kunda May 2022
[ exhibition dates ] Poimena Gallery, Launceston Grammar School Button Street, Mowbray Heights, Tasmania 7248 p 03 6336 6039 3rd June – 7th July—open weekdays school hours 2nd June 2022—5:30pm Opening 3rd June 2022—10am Symposium RANT Arts Exhibition Space 45-47 Stewart Street, Devonport. TAS 7310 (03) 6331 8232 2nd – 23rd December 2022 Wednesdays Thursday and Fridays 10am to 4pm
