ROB pART II: The Robertson Park Artists' Studio exhibition, 2002.
catalogue essay by Prof. N. Weston
The group of French painters, later to be labelled the Impressionists, started the artist led alternative art world movement in 1874. They banded together to extend their café society wine fed rhetoric and 'plein air' painting habits into the concept of artist run exhibitions. The marginalised, overlooked, confrontational or just out of step artist groupings which followed in the paths of the French open air painters changed rapidly from a trickle of mateship artists, who worked and exhibited together, to what became the mainstream of modernism.
Artists' studios doubling as occasional exhibiting spaces and also teaching spaces were a common feature of European, and even early Australian, modernism. Julian Ashton in Sydney and George Bell in Melbourne were exemplars of professional artists whose commitment to their particular way of seeing the world and of picturing it drew enthusiastic acolyte followings. But nowadays such Master class concepts are quite foreign to the contemporary artist and art student who want to develop their own identity and particular artistic style as soon as possible. This is especially so now that the contemporary art school is often housed, however awkwardly, within the confines of the modern university with all its multi-layered management structures and dare to be different market driven incentives.
One result of the huge social and economic changes within the arts has been to create a proliferation of artist driven initiatives. Sometimes artists, particularly 'emerging artists', group together from the same sense of need for a supportive philosophical environment as did the Impressionists, Dadaists, Expressionists or Heidelberg painters.
Sometimes the development of group activities is primarily the result of economic necessities, of escalating rents, reduced state funding, the increase of eligible applicants and the GST.
There also are many examples of group initiatives that result from the need to use expensive new technologies, as well as disaffection with existing gallery options. In Sydney, one aptly named initiative is a web based exhibiting gallery 'Briefcase', which subverts the tyranny of having to pay studio or gallery rent; another well named concept was a brief lived 2001 'Squatspace'. No prizes for guessing how it occurred.
In addition to needing a place for emerging artists or submerging artists to work or exhibit there also is the drive, felt by many community minded artists, to find and reach out to new audiences.
Perth has not been isolated from these various artistic manoeuvres, some short lived, some with state support, others endowed, as are many artists, with more enthusiasm and talent than business acumen. At a rough count I can think of around seven or eight independent artist shared spaces currently operating in the Perth area.
The Robertson Park Artists' studio in Halvorsen Hall, plumb in the middle of the South lawn of Robertson Park, is a spacious, well lit artists' studio space leased from the town of Vincent by the five artists currently showcasing their work there.
Although in this excellent setting the group is a relatively recent addition to the Western Australian art scene, it actually developed out of an earlier studio group, The Wellman Street group, which was established by a collective of then recent graduate artists in 1992. When that studio lost it's space in March 2000, the Hyde Park Precinct group and the supportive Mayor of Vincent assisted the group in finding a new space, in the ex-City of Perth Band practice space in Halvorsen Hall. The first studio exhibition was held two years ago and was a remarkable success.
The Studio artists for 2002 are Umberto Alfaro, Paul Carstairs, Frances Dennis, Graham Hay and Anne-Maree Pelusey, all of whom share the experience of working in the studios and running special community art classes.
The nature of their individual art practice is by no means a programmatic exercise demonstrating some shared ideological stance. In many respects their shared vision is for a convivial commitment to art making, but the artistic routes which they follow are many and varied. When meeting with the group I asked if there was any sharing of artistic intentions, for I had discerned a religious sensibility in the works of both Umberto Alfaro's Latin American sourced forms and Paul Carstairs carefully constructed ready-mades. Not so they said. Well, what about the relationship between Frances Dennis's extraordinary manikins and Graham Hay's biologically innovative paper clay forms? Their comfortable working relationship was stressed, but no aesthetic inbreeding admitted. Anne-Maree Pelusey's intensely coloured landscapes remained untouched by any hint of artistic border crossing or inter studio borrowing.
And yet, after a 40-year career teaching in schools of art, I know just how pervasive some influences can be in a shared work situation. What really happens is that an energy flow moves around the various members of a group and helps to keep up the level of shared commitment to creative activity.
This energy is often at its most highly charged just before an exhibition. The work, which I saw in the studio, some weeks before the exhibition opened will change and grow, and the artistic ideas of the members of the group will undoubtedly respond to the responses of the others.
The old idea of the ivory tower of art is a myth. Truly, no artistic person is an island.
The influences crowd in: from the art world outside the studio doors, from the street, from dead artists known only through the journals, and even from the inadvertently lying colour reproductions in art books and magazines. Out of this million and more, 'to whom it may concern' messages, creative individuals forge their own artistic identities. These identities are constantly changing.
Umberto Alfaro came from Chile, and this background is referred to in the themes of his papier-mâché sculptures. He doesn't try to escape the Spanish cultural influence; he works with it. He tells me, through his work, about the gold and the blood, the grandeur and the cruelty of the Spanish conquest of South America and why his sculpture of the Conquistadors looks the way it does. As he said, the difference from colonisation by other European nations is tremendous, and a new Latino race was created by conquest.
Frances Dennis has created her own personal race of strange creatures. They are almost cartoon grotesques and remind me of Daumier's small three- dimensional caricature figures of legal identities. They live in clusters of tightly interrelating humanoids and present a tragi-comic view of the world.
Anne-Maree Pelusey's smaller paintings are a reminder that the landscape rarely leaves Australian art for long. The paint brushstrokes have as intensely bright a life as the flashing wing of a speeding home seeking Lorikeet, but they remain earthbound and somehow geologically grounded in a sense of timeless history.
Graham Hay is the most international artistic wanderer of the group. His work has been seen in several major paper and clay exhibitions in Europe, UK, Australia and New Zealand. He has been unremitting in his pursuit of technical control of his chosen three -dimensional mediums. In his recent work he has achieved a cohesiveness of craft and concept, whilst not completely abandoning his earlier ideas. One recurrent theme seems to be an analysis of institutions, and with his work at the Robertson Park Studio collective he is again involved with an institution, albeit an artist run initiative.
I hope that there will be many more opportunities to watch the development of the Robertson Park Artists' studio, as the signs are all good.
Neville Weston
Adjunct Professor
Research Institute for Cultural Heritage
Curtin University of Technology.
To read about the studio click here.
Read other reviews...
Read more reviews...
The Artists would like to especially thank our sponsors
Corporate sponsor
Masterplanners Interiors Pty Ltd
123 Howe Street, Osbourne Park
Phone: 9444 9877
Web: http://www.masterplanners.com.au.
Major Sponsors
Daniels Printing Craftsmen
158 Fitzgerald Street, Perth
Phone: 9227 4888
Web: http://www.danielspc.com.au .
Granny's Pies & Cakes
Unit 5, 41 King Edward Road, Osbourne Park
Phone: 9445 8922
Web: http://www.grannys.com.au .
Rayner and Associates
25 Money Street, Perth
Phone: 9427 8888
Web: http://www.rayner.com.au
The group of French painters, later to be labelled the Impressionists, started the artist led alternative art world movement in 1874. They banded together to extend their café society wine fed rhetoric and 'plein air' painting habits into the concept of artist run exhibitions. The marginalised, overlooked, confrontational or just out of step artist groupings which followed in the paths of the French open air painters changed rapidly from a trickle of mateship artists, who worked and exhibited together, to what became the mainstream of modernism.
Artists' studios doubling as occasional exhibiting spaces and also teaching spaces were a common feature of European, and even early Australian, modernism. Julian Ashton in Sydney and George Bell in Melbourne were exemplars of professional artists whose commitment to their particular way of seeing the world and of picturing it drew enthusiastic acolyte followings. But nowadays such Master class concepts are quite foreign to the contemporary artist and art student who want to develop their own identity and particular artistic style as soon as possible. This is especially so now that the contemporary art school is often housed, however awkwardly, within the confines of the modern university with all its multi-layered management structures and dare to be different market driven incentives.
One result of the huge social and economic changes within the arts has been to create a proliferation of artist driven initiatives. Sometimes artists, particularly 'emerging artists', group together from the same sense of need for a supportive philosophical environment as did the Impressionists, Dadaists, Expressionists or Heidelberg painters.
Sometimes the development of group activities is primarily the result of economic necessities, of escalating rents, reduced state funding, the increase of eligible applicants and the GST.
There also are many examples of group initiatives that result from the need to use expensive new technologies, as well as disaffection with existing gallery options. In Sydney, one aptly named initiative is a web based exhibiting gallery 'Briefcase', which subverts the tyranny of having to pay studio or gallery rent; another well named concept was a brief lived 2001 'Squatspace'. No prizes for guessing how it occurred.
In addition to needing a place for emerging artists or submerging artists to work or exhibit there also is the drive, felt by many community minded artists, to find and reach out to new audiences.
Perth has not been isolated from these various artistic manoeuvres, some short lived, some with state support, others endowed, as are many artists, with more enthusiasm and talent than business acumen. At a rough count I can think of around seven or eight independent artist shared spaces currently operating in the Perth area.
The Robertson Park Artists' studio in Halvorsen Hall, plumb in the middle of the South lawn of Robertson Park, is a spacious, well lit artists' studio space leased from the town of Vincent by the five artists currently showcasing their work there.
Although in this excellent setting the group is a relatively recent addition to the Western Australian art scene, it actually developed out of an earlier studio group, The Wellman Street group, which was established by a collective of then recent graduate artists in 1992. When that studio lost it's space in March 2000, the Hyde Park Precinct group and the supportive Mayor of Vincent assisted the group in finding a new space, in the ex-City of Perth Band practice space in Halvorsen Hall. The first studio exhibition was held two years ago and was a remarkable success.
The Studio artists for 2002 are Umberto Alfaro, Paul Carstairs, Frances Dennis, Graham Hay and Anne-Maree Pelusey, all of whom share the experience of working in the studios and running special community art classes.
The nature of their individual art practice is by no means a programmatic exercise demonstrating some shared ideological stance. In many respects their shared vision is for a convivial commitment to art making, but the artistic routes which they follow are many and varied. When meeting with the group I asked if there was any sharing of artistic intentions, for I had discerned a religious sensibility in the works of both Umberto Alfaro's Latin American sourced forms and Paul Carstairs carefully constructed ready-mades. Not so they said. Well, what about the relationship between Frances Dennis's extraordinary manikins and Graham Hay's biologically innovative paper clay forms? Their comfortable working relationship was stressed, but no aesthetic inbreeding admitted. Anne-Maree Pelusey's intensely coloured landscapes remained untouched by any hint of artistic border crossing or inter studio borrowing.
And yet, after a 40-year career teaching in schools of art, I know just how pervasive some influences can be in a shared work situation. What really happens is that an energy flow moves around the various members of a group and helps to keep up the level of shared commitment to creative activity.
This energy is often at its most highly charged just before an exhibition. The work, which I saw in the studio, some weeks before the exhibition opened will change and grow, and the artistic ideas of the members of the group will undoubtedly respond to the responses of the others.
The old idea of the ivory tower of art is a myth. Truly, no artistic person is an island.
The influences crowd in: from the art world outside the studio doors, from the street, from dead artists known only through the journals, and even from the inadvertently lying colour reproductions in art books and magazines. Out of this million and more, 'to whom it may concern' messages, creative individuals forge their own artistic identities. These identities are constantly changing.
Umberto Alfaro came from Chile, and this background is referred to in the themes of his papier-mâché sculptures. He doesn't try to escape the Spanish cultural influence; he works with it. He tells me, through his work, about the gold and the blood, the grandeur and the cruelty of the Spanish conquest of South America and why his sculpture of the Conquistadors looks the way it does. As he said, the difference from colonisation by other European nations is tremendous, and a new Latino race was created by conquest.
Frances Dennis has created her own personal race of strange creatures. They are almost cartoon grotesques and remind me of Daumier's small three- dimensional caricature figures of legal identities. They live in clusters of tightly interrelating humanoids and present a tragi-comic view of the world.
Anne-Maree Pelusey's smaller paintings are a reminder that the landscape rarely leaves Australian art for long. The paint brushstrokes have as intensely bright a life as the flashing wing of a speeding home seeking Lorikeet, but they remain earthbound and somehow geologically grounded in a sense of timeless history.
Graham Hay is the most international artistic wanderer of the group. His work has been seen in several major paper and clay exhibitions in Europe, UK, Australia and New Zealand. He has been unremitting in his pursuit of technical control of his chosen three -dimensional mediums. In his recent work he has achieved a cohesiveness of craft and concept, whilst not completely abandoning his earlier ideas. One recurrent theme seems to be an analysis of institutions, and with his work at the Robertson Park Studio collective he is again involved with an institution, albeit an artist run initiative.
I hope that there will be many more opportunities to watch the development of the Robertson Park Artists' studio, as the signs are all good.
Neville Weston
Adjunct Professor
Research Institute for Cultural Heritage
Curtin University of Technology.
To read about the studio click here.
Read other reviews...
Read more reviews...
The Artists would like to especially thank our sponsors
Corporate sponsor
Masterplanners Interiors Pty Ltd
123 Howe Street, Osbourne Park
Phone: 9444 9877
Web: http://www.masterplanners.com.au.
Major Sponsors
Daniels Printing Craftsmen
158 Fitzgerald Street, Perth
Phone: 9227 4888
Web: http://www.danielspc.com.au .
Granny's Pies & Cakes
Unit 5, 41 King Edward Road, Osbourne Park
Phone: 9445 8922
Web: http://www.grannys.com.au .
Rayner and Associates
25 Money Street, Perth
Phone: 9427 8888
Web: http://www.rayner.com.au
