Show pony

Sometimes OTN readers send us the strangest images (thanks P) like this classic entry for our artists pose series. You can read about the artist, Kehinde Wiley here

Spider man

You always knew when it was a letter from Tony Fomison. That spindly handwriting crawling across the envelope like a chemically enhanced spider had unmistakable obsession steeped in a self consciously fashioned retro style. Fomison’s writing was as much a part of him as the hand that crafted the words and it appeared everywhere; on his letterbox (warning visitors to either make an appointment or leave him alone), on the bottom of his paintings carefully detailing the dates of various stages and iterations and of course in the many notebooks he kept over the years.
 
In a terrific small exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery (down the back of the ground floor contemporary galleries) you can get a first-hand taste of Fomison’s personality. This is because it includes a vitrine displaying some of the archival material that is now in the Gallery’s collection along with the careful selection of paintings. It really is great to see the artworks alongside this source material including a couple of journals and items that were crucial to Fomison process and thinking. 

All up it’s like taking a sidewards peep into the studio, a work space that was always cluttered with magazines, books, torn out illustrations and notes and more notes. And how about those notebooks and those lists …  and all that crazy spindly writing.
 
Image: top, Tony Fomison in his Gunson Street studio in 1978. Bottom a detail from one of Fomison’s note books on view at the Auckland Art Gallery


Other OTN posts on Tony Fomison:
The missing Senator
Fomison lookalike
Looking like Fomison

Waterskiing

"Does the person who makes the hubcaps or whatever they're called these days point at a passing Mercedes  SLK or whatever it's called, saying, 'I did that?' No. So why should assistants claim possession for their work? It's a job…. We're not here to mentor them. They're here to work for us."

UK artist Jake Chapman (of the Chapman brothers) talking about studio assistants in the Guardian

Pic of the crop

Back in the late seventies and early eighties we went round the country in our holiday breaks interviewing artists for the book Contemporary New Zealand painters. The photographs had already been taken by Marti Friedlander who had been committed to recording NZ artists for many, many years but we also took the odd pic ourselves. And it’s something we’ve kept up over the years. 

Rather than have our photos lying around in files we’re now going to make them available to anyone who wants to use them. Just add our credit line and we can follow up with bigger files if anyone wants them in the future. We’ll get in touch with the artists first of course and eventually put as many as we can up on Flickr. In the meantime we’ll give you a taste from time to time.

These first two shots were taken in Toss Woollaston’s Riwaka studio in 1980. Our son Pippin was about eight months old and was put to work cleaning studio floors while we talked with the artists.

Image: M. T. Woollaston 1980. Photo: Jim Barr and Mary Barr

Potted history

With the Creative NZ cake being cut into thinner and thinner slices it's easy to forget how important some of those slices have been. We saw a solid demonstration when we visited John Parker a few weeks ago. He was in the midst of a firing for his next exhibition and as we stood around the kiln John mentioned that he had been firing his work in it for 23 years almost to the day. He has had two arts council grants. With the first he bought a wheel and with the second of $14,000 in 1990 this electric kiln. Thousands of pots later it's still going strong.

You can check out who received grants from the latest CNZ round by going here at 5 pm. The fact that we know this is thanks to CNZ now pre announcing when grants will be made public.

Adze break

While you might have thought Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the rest would quickly become central to making art, it's taking longer than you might expect. Video followed the same stuttering path until becoming a standard part of the repertoire. The rule seems to be that change takes longer than you expect and when it does come, it happens faster than you could imagine. But it is happening. Take sculptor Joe Sheehan. His work often references analogue communication (Carousel projectors, old TVs, cassette tapes) but he found a recent inspiration for a major work via eBay.

Browsing "remote controls" he found a collection for sale. And we're not talking a couple of old TV channel choosers but 700 remote controls with a photo of a small sample of the Motherload. “They were laid out like artefacts. I still don’t know why I didn’t buy them.” But later Sheehan did snap up a collection of 400 and used their shapes, buttons and markings to carve works in stone that hovered between remote controls and adzes. “The first one I made was pure adze with lots of buttons so the whole project became getting the right side of wrong.” Sheehan titled the first set of these carved ‘artefacts’ The quick and the dead.

Images: Top, Joe Sheehan’s work space. Bottom left, the remote control collection and right, the beginnings of new work. Sheehan paints the stone before carving it to make the drawing visible while he carves.

Photo op

“I am painting the one picture all the time. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter is, I am trying to perfect the one thing I was meant to do, to perfect it to my satisfaction. It is an unattainable thing, but you have it there right in front of you, all the time. And when you get close you don’t turn away, even if it makes your life and your acceptance as an artist harder.”   
Gordon Walters talking to Keith Stewart in the December 1994 issue of Quote Unquote. 

Image: (JB&MB) taken in Gordon Walters’s Christchurch studio 1979