Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 142 i Artist's Palette

WORK Endurance art has rarely been so pretty. In association with Head On Photo Festival, Stills is proud to present one of the most exciting new contributors to Asian-Pacific video art, Thai-Australian Kawita Vatanajyankur, and her arresting new video series Work (2015). In an uncanny restaging of a fresh fruit market, Vatanajyankur uses the tools and tasks of its workers to undertake physical experiments that playfully, and often painfully, test her body’s limits. From weighing bananas to balancing watermelons, the videos present an array of luminous yellows, citrus greens and bubblegum pinks. In them, the artist’s graphic visual language is one of consumption and desire, speaking to a world of instant gratification and flattened complexity. This heightened superficiality, however, lures you in only to confound your expectations. The videos offer…

STEP ONE For a street scene such as this one, I start with a relatively simple but accurate drawing using a grid as a guide. I overlay a gridded, clear acrylic sheet onto the image on the laptop and can then draw lines along awnings or window sills on the screen etc. to find a vanishing point. I keep this point in mind through the whole painting process. Here I have made a few compositional alterations. I have dragged one car back to fill a space in the intersection and slightly overemphasised the size of the tram. STEP TWO I start to map in the darks using the #6 short flat. My dark mixes are Ultramarine with Burnt Sienna or Viridian with Crimson or Cadmium Red. I have opted for…

STEP ONE I decided not to include as many blossoms as in my photo. Instead of a dark blue sky I opted for a light tint, merging by wet wash with a pale green. This was done after first drawing in the main features with care. I liked the gnarled appearance of branches and used several colours to suggest this. STEP TWO The frilly “collar” of a tui can be tricky with either negative painting or white strokes on black. So I decided to put some curled strokes on the paper with a latex masking fluid. I have found it wise not to use your best brushes for this. STEP THREE The black of the bird is painted over the gum marks, and when the paint is also dry these…

Art has always had a hold of me. I always had a brush and some paint nearby while growing up. I found pastels in the mid-1990s in a small art group in Sarina, Queensland. I was hooked. The beauty of not having to wash the brushes and clean the palette was a godsend with small children in the house. Pastels were quick to paint with and you could put them down and pick them up anytime. Working full time for many years I was grateful to be able to give up my day job as an administration manager and follow the call of a full time artist in 2009. Beginning with teaching a few small classes, I now have regular classes and also have the privilege to teach throughout Australia…

The most treasured possession I had as a little girl was a yellow tin box of paints. The dazzling colours were wonderful and there was even silver and gold to choose from. My first award was at Swan Hill, in grade four when I won a class painting competition and my entry was on display for a month. Earlier recommendation came from a first grade teacher who told my parents that “her paintings are very advanced for her age”. I started painting classes in early 1980s when I joined Rachel Adler’s Studio 70 in Maroubra, NSW, using oil paints. A number of years later I was to move on to mainly using acrylics which suited me much better as they dry quickly, and the fact that brushes can be cleaned…

I have always been a keen observer of the natural and man-made world. I loved drawing as a child but did not start oil painting until age twenty in a night class in an art supply shop. My chosen career then was structural drafting, and painting was of course a hobby. I travelled the outback extensively in 1989 and 1991 but never painted for I was just as keen a photographer. In 1993 I then turned to a university degree in geology, for it was always a passion of mine to understand the physical processes of the Earth and how it came to be as we see it today. It was a career that got me back to the bush where I enjoyed being, and painting took a place on…

Composition is so important and worth planning for. I love using Fibonacci’s designs to place each rock or crest of a wave. But to simplify the composition you can always use the golden rule of thirds. STEP ONE Watercolour underpainting – I mix all of my colours first, having a brush for each colour. I test them to check their tone before I start, and then I wash in all the tonal areas of the paper covering all of the page. STEP TWO Beginning in the background I pastel the sky and back waves, using a lot of subtle, low intensity colours so that it drops into the distance. The warmth in the sky tells the story that it is very early morning. STEP THREE Keeping the next set of…

I am a retired pharmacist with interests in painting, photography, chess, tennis, badminton, lay preaching, music et cetera. Married with two adult daughters and two grandsons, I have been interested in photography since I was given a 127 Brownie camera by my mother, when I was nine, and have been photographing ever since. As for painting, I did an hour a week in the fifth form. At the same time, my best friend was drawing such magnificent horses I thought, “I could never match that!” So I did no more painting for several decades. Much later I developed an interest in filming and made animated films (puppets) and documentaries. In 1984 one award I received was in Australia’s “Ten Best on Eight” for a movie: “More New Zealand Birds”. I…

STEP ONE Using a 4B pencil, I did a detailed drawing of the main subject on the canvas. I then used a mix of black and white to create shades of grey to establish the main tonal variations (a ‘Grisaille’ - term for executing entirely in monochrome or near-monochrome). STEP TWO I continued using greys and blocked in the background, then worked on the facial tones and the light coming through the hat onto the face, as well as working on the hat and shirts. I also developed the eyes and eye areas in more detail. STEP THREE I lightened the background as it was drawing the eye away too much from the main subject, and lightened some of the dark areas and worked more on developing the skin tones…

GODS, HEROES AND CLOWNS: PERFORMANCE AND NARRATIVE IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN ART For centuries past, the many countries, ethnic groups and religions of South and Southeast Asia have enjoyed rich storytelling traditions, using lavishly illustrated storyteller’s cloths to recite the great Hindu epics and animated puppet shows to portray the exploits of local folk heroes and mythical kings. A new NGV exhibition titled ‘Gods, Heroes and Clowns: Performance and Narrative in South and Southeast Asian Art’ will explore these stories, their performance, and ongoing role within contemporary society. More than 50 rarely seen works from India, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia and Cambodia will be showcased, including storyteller’s cloths, ceremonial hangings, puppets, sculptures, paintings and masks, which are used in rural villages, royal courts, temples and modern urban settings. Many of…