Artist Profile 32

THE AP TEAM EDITOR Owen Craven artistprofile@nextmedia.com.au ART DIRECTOR Kim Gregory kgregory@nextmedia.com.au EDITORIAL COORDINATOR Lucy Stranger artistprofile@nextmedia.com.au SUB-EDITOR Jamie McIlwraith CONTRIBUTORS JOHN MCDONALD is the art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and film critic for the Australian Financial Review. www.johnmcdonald.net.au ASHLEIGH WADMAN is a South-East Queensland based arts writer, curator and founder and author of www.cultgc.com CAMILLE NOCK is an arts writer. She is a graduate of Art History and Theory from the University of Melbourne. LUCY STRANGER is an arts writer and Art History Honours student at the University of Sydney. She is Editorial Coordinator for Artist Profile magazine. SONIA LEGGE has worked at Watters Gallery and Legge Gallery since 1989. GAVIN WILSON has since 1993 forged a successful career as an independent curator and author. In that…

THIS IS MY final issue as Editor of Artist Profile. After starting with Artist Profile seven years ago and as Editor for the last four years, I am now taking on a new curatorial role with Urban Art Projects. It has been an immense privilege working to help grow this magazine to be Australia’s leading visual arts publication. This success was achieved in part through many innovative projects – On This Island, Not the Way Home, Judgement Calls, and Your Friend the Enemy – of which I am most proud. The other success is due to the unique and intimate stories that have been shared in our interviews and essays. I want to take this opportunity to thank all the artists, contributors and colleagues who have all helped to make…

IT’S NOT OFTEN we are privy to the artist’s world beyond the gallery. We’re usually unable to see beyond the surface of the canvas and contemplate the thoughts and motivations that inspired their practice. However, this isn’t the case with the exhibition, Frida, by Ishiuchi Miyako, which finished recently at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London. Frida Kahlo, an artist who captured the imaginations of generations with her iconic self-portraits, now has her private possessions revealed in Ishiuchi Miyako’s intimate photographic exhibition. Overcoming the boundaries of public and private life, Frida looks at the personal traces left behind by the acclaimed Mexican artist (1907-1954). Locked away for 50 years following Frida’s death in 1954, her personal effects were initially placed in the bathroom by her husband Diego Rivera, who gave…

YOU ARE A YOUNG PAINTER, painting landscapes, it’s a bit … … old and boring? Yeah totally, I think that all the time. What do you have to say about the Australian landscape that hasn’t been said before? I think, lots. I find that with artists my age or around my age, it is important to establish yourself. I always think about this but I never know. I look at artists that I think have had the same love or interest, or have been as curious about landscape painting – Nolan and Albert Tucker are top of the charts for me. I sometimes think that the importance of it, in culture generally, the land never comes first. The land is always abused. I think that I am trying to preserve…

From a young boy filling up handmade sketchbooks in country Victoria, Greg Creek has gone on to do great things for the medium of drawing. At the University of Melbourne he completed a PhD on the topic of Manifesto Drawing: cartooning, political observation and its relationship to art. Creek has shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world and is currently represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne. As a painter and a draughtsman primarily, Creek continues to re-evaluate the world around him and his works provide a platform for alternative voices to be heard. He is installing an exhibition at the Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) that will offer a significant survey of some of his accomplishments. So I would have multiple long tables in the studio with these scrolls…

“It’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is. Cézanne would never have interested me a bit if he had lived and thought like Jacques-Émile Blanche, even if the apple he painted had been ten times as beautiful. What forces our attention is Cézanne’s anxiety – that’s Cézanne’s lesson.” Pablo Picasso PETER GODWIN takes heart from Picasso’s famous line about Cézanne’s anxiety. It seems to justify his own late-blooming career as an artist who only began to exhibit regularly after the age of 50, enjoying instant success. He once explained his reluctance to show his work by saying he wanted it to be like a brick wall. “That wasn’t just ego talking,” he explains. “I was trying to say that I didn’t mind people interpreting the work…