Here’s another energetic work by Kevin Meagher, from his recent show at Callan Park Gallery; a work dripping with death, time and transformation. From the Kali entry in Wikipedia:
The figure of Kali conveys death, destruction, and the consuming aspects of reality. As such, she is also a “forbidden thing”, or even death itself. In the Pancatattva ritual, the sadhaka boldly seeks to confront Kali, and thereby assimilates and transforms her into a vehicle of salvation.
Kevin Meagher
Blood Kali Change
Meagher’s work is, for me, a Yantra, a refined instrument of analysis, a conception of how Blood becomes Kevin becomes Blood, how Jesus / Kali /Venus / Mars is the facilitator for a deep and necessary internal reorganisation that must take place: a matter of life and death for the artist. Or it’s something else! Something so mysterious that we’re returned finally to the work itself as carrier of archetypal content that has no other means of exposition.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Kevin Meagher,
Outsiders
In May, Callan Park Gallery hosted an energetic exhibition of ceramics and works on paper by Kevin Meagher, an Outsider who’s been hospitalised for some time and who has developed his practice through the Pioneer Clubhouse in Balgowlah. He’s also taken an Artist in Residence role at Macquarie Hospital in North Ryde.
Kevin’s work is brimming with mythological and spiritual associations – and there is a real experience here of someone struggling to find where he fits into the vast staggering schemes of Norse, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Christian and Egyptian myth. And the inquiry is conducted with an urgency that conveys its importance to him, and sucks the viewer in to his worlds.
(Left, Neal Hawke, and right, Ben and Tim at War.)
For me, Kevin is involved in the classic “Who Am I?” question, with a fury and commitedness brought on by obviously distressing and bewildering personal states. I love his disregard for artistic style, and also for his daring iconoclasm – I’ll post some more of his intriguing works over the next few weeks.
(Works on paper in the top image are Shiva the Bee, Jewel Tree and Super Bella; ceramics are Ra Uranus, Iris Mary, Dianna Venus, Neptune Lir and Ganga Ocean. )
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Callan Park Gallery,
Kevin Meagher,
Outsiders
Here’s the entry from my Outsider Art calender for June – and having enjoyed the work just about every day this month I can attest to its power and, somewhat surprisingly to me, its sense of serenity.
Paraphrasing from the calendar notes: “Eddie Arning grew up on his father’s farm in Germania, Texas. Bouts of depression and anger eventually culminated in an attack on his strict Lutheran mother. His hospitalisation for dementia praecox lasted for about 30 years. He was encouraged to draw by nursing staff. He was finally asked to leave his nursing home and went to live with his widowed sister, however, he never drew again.”
Eddie Arning
Woman with White Dog
Cray-Pas on paper, 63 x 48 cm (approx)
Tagged as:
Eddie Arning,
Outsiders
Another work in the recent exhibition at Callan Park of a selection from Pearls of Arts Project Australia, a collection of works by Arts Project Australia (APA) artists that the collector, Stuart Purves, is giving to STOARC. This one’s an energetic pastel by Leo Cussen.
Quoting from the recent Home Sweet Home exhibition blurb (National Gallery of Australia):
It is has been remarked that Cussen has a deep fascination with aspects of popular culture including the ‘Dr Who’ character from the television series of the same name and has produced a strong series of works based on this theme: ‘His work has an obsessive quality resulting from repeated use of words or phrases or in his intensive use of media. ’
I love the energetic text and the insistent working of the windows in this piece. I wanna know what’s in that tardis!
Leo Cussen
Untitled (Dr Who’s Tardis),2005
Pastel on paper, 56 x38cm
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Leo Cussen,
Outsiders
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
Tagged as:
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.
Tagged as:
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
