This set of images by Robert Kinmot has been in my queue for posting since about last September. Quite a bit’s happened since then – we’ve moved out of our apartment, had it renovated, and moved back in, a process much bigger and more disruptive than expected. There have been a total of six moves – including house sittings and two sub-lets in a difficult Sydney rental market fueled by the hot summer and high traveler numbers.
Back to the images – they’re more powerful now than when I first saw them on the SFMOMA site. I know there’s a whole conceptualist backdrop to Kinmont’s work, but looking at these images now, coming back home (literally), I’m drawn at a more emotional level to Kinmont’s own homecoming – his return to art making after a 30 year break. These are poignant images from 1969. They remind me also of dusty roads around Rotorua New Zealand (where I grew up) – riding the Raleigh Sports on unmade roads through dark bush.
Then there’s the real home, the nondual ground, the sublime emptiness; the way the photographer’s eye relaxes into the natural humility and accepting lack of these dependable dust-brushed ways. Very beautiful.
Robert Kinmot
My Favorite Dirt Roads, 1969
Check out also Kinmot’s unpublished notes on the SFMOMA site, which add another level of story, an autobiographical richness, to this work.
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Robert Kinmont
There was quite a text theme in the “APA People” selection for the Callan Park show I visited recently (see also the previous post). I found this both playful and energetic. Here’s a work by Julian Martin, born 1963 and started at the APA studio in 1990. He’s now represented in a number of private collections. He works with simple graphic shapes, like this superb letter N.
Julian Martin
Untitled (letter N)
pastel on paper
65 x 50 cm
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Callan Park Gallery,
Julian Martin,
Outsiders
Callan Park Gallery is currently showing a selection of the Pearls of Arts Project Australia, which is a collection of works by Arts Project Australia (APA) artists that the collector, Stuart Purves, is giving to STOARC. There are about 200 works in the collection, created by people with an intellectual disability who have been associated with APA. Stuart started collecting the works in 1998, recognising in them something very special.
I loved the text-oriented works in the show, and here are two examples by Scott Ferguson, who was born in 1963 and has been attending the APA studio in Melbourne since 1995. There’s a whimsical freedom about these pieces, a lack of self-consciousness that makes them, for me, very distinct from graffiti, with it’s usual insistence on identity.
Scott Ferguson
Untitled (white text on black)
14.5 x 24.5 cm
Scott Ferguson
Untitled (figures and text)
16 x 50.5 cm
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Scott Ferguson
Outsider art often grows on me slowly. I enjoy this fact, and wonder if it’s about at the distance in mindset involved – between the artist’s and mine. These dolls are examples of pieces that have been growing on me recently. They appeared in last year’s exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection at the Callan Park Gallery.
There’s information on Val Sutherland at the NZ Self-taught and Visionary site. And a nice piece in Art News New Zealand:
Working in a world of their own, with their own personal motivations, many outsider artists express surprise when others recognise the quality of their work. Interest in her work certainly surprised Val Sutherland, a mother, grandmother and care-giver whose doll making caught the eye of Australian collector Peter Fay … who visited Masterton’s King Street Artworks in 1998. Sutherland was a helper and participant in some King Street Artworks workshop activities.
Loving the vulnerability and innocence of her doll characters, Fay bought all of them. And Sutherland’s reaction? She thought he must have been totally crazy! Now, eight years later, interest in her work has grown with exhibitions in Australia, including a 2005/2006 solo exhibition touring to Wollongong City Gallery and Campbelltown Arts Centre in New South Wales.
These are works that quietly state their innocence, make no fuss, have their own integrity and conform to their own rules (like how the limbs are connected with buttons). No nonsense creatures – I like that.
Tagged as:
Outsiders,
Val Sutherland
Here’s another lovely image from the 2010 Outsider Art calendar that was a present from my friend Ardsley. This one, Sanford Darling’s Lagoon, is for the month of February. (You can see January’s image here.)
My guess this work is one of the many images he painted on his house in the 1960s. (You can read an enthusiastic 1971 Time magazine article on the man and his enterprise here.) It’s obviously a lagoon form, and also for me an ocular form.
That the space within the eye is largely empty is appealing to me – an open field within which the world can be envisioned. And that elements of the landscape are also shown within the eye has a tantalising connection to Advaita – the world arising within the perceiver.
Sanford Darling
Lagoon
Latex on composition board, 125 x 125 cm (approx)
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Outsiders,
Sanford Darling
The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.
Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).
I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):
“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”
Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.
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Callan Park Gallery,
James Hillman,
Jose dos Santos,
Outsiders
A new exhibition at Cunningham Dax is due to open next week in Melbourne, and I regret not being able to get there for it. According to the flyer:
Avoiding the Void features works from the Cunningham Dax Collection which reflect and engage with existential ideas and concerns. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the insightful ways in which the creators of these works have grappled with difficult questions that are ordinarily avoided.
Joan Rodriquez
Isolation
Charcoal and Conte on paper
There are also public talks on the topic of Existentialism, a topic around which psychotherapy has gravitated for some time, and through the writings of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinnelli and Victor Frankl (to name some of my personal favourites) has been greatly enriched.
(As an aside, I see that Spinelli will be visiting Sydney in November this year, an event not to be missed for those existentially inclined.)
It’s maybe a little presumptive to comment on the title of the exhibition, not having seen the exhibition itself, but I wonder about “avoiding”: is this what the artists are considered to be doing or not doing? In my experience, it’s the latter (the not avoiding), the via negativa of many spiritual traditions, that is the only way through, or in.
Tagged as:
Joan Rodriquez,
Outsiders,
Psychotherapy
I have been enjoying this William Hawkins image during January, during a time of upheaval and a move to a temporary location, due to our upcoming renovation.
(We’re now on the eleventh floor of an apartment block in Woollahra, from which we survey the Russian Consulate, and the AFP (Australian Federal Police) car that’s often idling in front – its sole occupant, I imagine, grateful for his air conditioning chewing on the muggy Sydney heat.)
The image is from a calendar of Outsider art given to me by my good friend Ardslie. I’ll post an image each month from this beautiful production; the images too good to last just a month each!
Willima Hawkins
Untitled (Rearing Stud Horse)
Enamel on Masonite, 122 x 144 cm (approx)
Hawkins was born in rural Kentucky in 1985 but it wasn’t until the 1970s that he started painting in the style of this work, a style for which he became well known. His rural background and long years of manual labour informed much of his work. This man knew about animals (Two Dark Horses is also great; more at the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists.)
Tagged as:
Outsiders,
William Hawkins
Here’s Jauk Kera Putih (the white monkey) from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets, Ubud. It’s good to come back to these images from last year’s Bali trip – the figures seem to inhabit a pantheon equally as rich, psychically, as the more familiar (to me, anyway) Western (i.e. the Greek). He’s another very expressive dude.
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Masks
Iam finally interested in blogging again, after being unwell and at the same time preparing for a renovation that Karima and I are having done to our apartment. It’s been a strange period, everything taking its normal but exhausting course at the level of day to day activities, yet below the surface taking a very different, solitary course, one of hyperthyroidism (caused, it appears, by a mercury detox that was insufficiently monitored by the doctor).
The phenomenology of hyperthyroidism was for me centred on the heart, the thoughts being whether that heart could be trusted, what it wanted of me when, thumping hard, it woke me at 1:30 am each morning. Although I felt heat, at a deeper level I experienced icy chill, an existential heart, a cold stranger that seemed completely unconcerned for my sleep and for my well-being in general. I learned something of this stranger: as James Hillman says, sickness can be a vital way for the soul to learn.
Some quotations from Hillman (A Blue Fire, p262 – 263) come alive, seem appropriate not only to my recent experiences, but to psychotherapeutic endeavours in general:
The descent to the underworld can be distinguished from the night sea journey of the hero in many ways. We have already noticed the main distinction: the hero returns from the night sea journey in better shape for the tasks of life, whereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no “return”. The night sea journey is further marked by building interior heat (tapas), whereas the nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness.
Therapeutic analysis remains incomplete if it is satisfied with bringing balm to burning problems. It still has to venture into the frozen depths that have so fascinated poets and explorers and that in depth psychology are the areas of our archetypal crystallizations, the immovable depressions and the mutisms of catatonia…
Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This is a psychic place of dread and a terror so deep that it comes in uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the tostell [animal trancing] reflex. A killer lives in the ice…
We may recall here that the Styx is a river of icy hatred that protects the underworld and is holy and eternal as are the god’s oaths that they swear by that frigid river…
The icy chasm of Christianism’s shadow is a realm of radical importance that cannot be reached with Christianism’s bleeding heart. An archetypal approach to this zone follows the homeopathic maxim: like cures like. The nekyia into hell’s ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself…
The heart has a coldness, a place of reserve like the refrigerator that preserves, holds, protects, isolates, suspends animation and circulation, an alchemical congelation of substance. The cruelty and mean despising are the surroundings of a private sense of ultimate deepening. Maybe in my ice is my fairy-tale princess, whom ego psychology wants to kiss into life; but maybe she is otherwise engaged in her frigid stillness, deepening toward the Ninth Circle, below everything moving; a detachment and stability reminding of the cold body of death…
What occurs to me is that there’s an “art” of psyche-making, an art that’s an ongoing way to live with what is given us (rather than limiting art to what is depicted or presented in form); which gives a deepening to life, a recognition of certain shades that haunt our homes.
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James Hillman,
Psychotherapy
