More Voidscape works in progress.
Transparency of image interaction.
After making a short film with soundscape earlier in the year, I am now looking to translate a couple stills into paintings. Documentation of process.
I feel a process is emerging.
The first small study concentrated on blocking in areas with charcole in a loose way, underpainting in complementaries then final layer with body added to the paint.
To translate a work into a larger format, I found the muscle memory of the composition stronger.
“This work is taken from 2023, a day painting at Katrine, outside Toodyay, WA. Behind the farm stay a hill of golden wheat was being harvested over the days, imprinting the landscape with lines. A November sun blurred the vision by day but at dusk the mauves combined with a softer yellow. I wanted to work in a freer fashion after again working with stencils on the project before. This work focused on colour, line and texture as I tried a new paint thickener.
As summer melts into autumn, I am back in the studio.
Last summer I spent many hours in the shade of a cape lilac tree watching a harvester mark a field while staying at Katrine, near Toodyay. As the shadows lengthened in the golden hour, I watched as the harvester lines and hillside changed into a painting in my mind.
In this first study, charcoal defined the composition before underpainting in purple and gold. Juicier paint applied for final layer.
Study is a very small work which will be translated into a larger canvas with more space for the eye to get lost in.
Through developing a project from begining to end, the ASHS students decided to record the sound bytes of their school lives. Setting them loose with a letter giving permission to use their phones to record, they scattered and returned to me with sounds I would never have though of!
A school clock ticking, the canteen microwave, drinking out of the water fountain and pumping up the balls in phys ed. They also recorded interviews with their peers from a set of questions developed by the students for both present and past students.
I got to edit the sound bytes into a whole and pair with the archive images.
Truely it was so much fun working with their ideas….. check it out!
Around the third contact class with the particpating Albany Senior High School students of the Cretaive Pathways Project, we possed a couple of really big questions to the group What project? What do we need to consider?
Explaining that the resources we have and the time available to deliver of the project are major challenges, we asked for the students to think creatively about the content of their final exhibition.
This image from the exhibition currently on show at the Vancouver Arts Centre, is a great example. The group identified that a loud ticking clock was important to the “My Room” section. We discussed finding the right clock which had a loud enough tick tock, we thought through the logistics of adding a speaker with a recording of a clock or how we could add a microphone to the clock to amplify the sound in the space. All were difficult to achieve with the limited resources and time.
This is the elegant and effective solution, which is the students own work.
When the young students ask what slang words the past students of ASHS used, I went straight to the Alumni Facebook group and did they deliver!
The confused faces about the word “Munted”
Since July I have been meeting with a bunch of Albany Senior High School students to mentor them through a creative process. What a blast!
In the recognitation that the Arts when added to STEM (science, techology, enginerring and maths) educational subjects, expands understanding through creativity, the students have directed the development of the project from conception through to the resulting exhibition.
We had our moments of quiet and moments of inspiring interaction. In the end they really pushed through and came up with very insightful responses and collaborated to elevate ideas.
Change, a simple word.
Hidden within is the excitement, fear and growth that make up a lived experience of school. The participating students of this project, a collaboration between the Vancouver Arts Centre and Albany Senior High School, through mentorship, identified coping with change as a marker for good mental health.
The students set out to know the challenges and opportunities of the students that have attended Albany Senior High School over its long history. And to talk about their generation’s experiences.
“Oh my Days” is the resulting exhibition.
This week the City of Albany launched a publication “Albany Landmarks and Laneways”, which features some of the murals produced in 2016 for the PUBLIC program coordinated by FORM.
I have a story that if I don’t tell, might never be told.
Along with the mural artists that FORM engaged for the project, The City of Albany also engaged a number of local artists to produce ephemeral (not permanent) artworks.
I was selected as one of them, proposing to paste dried leaves onto a number of buildings, the Post Office, Pubic library and the Albany Advertiser. I worked for weeks collecting, drying and preparing leaves into patterns ready to paste to the walls.
At the start of the project as all mural artists arrived in Albany, we met at the Vancouver Arts Centre for a welcome and official launch of the project. I got to meet many creative and interesting people that night, memorably Stormie Mills. We got talking about the work we do and he asked what creative work I had planned for PUBLIC. Explaining the restrictions the local artists had, I told him of my dried leaf creative solution and how I had recognised leaves naturally gluing themselves to paths and buildings in autumn.
Our conversation ended and we moved off to talk to others at the gathering.
Some time later Stormie found me again and asked if I would like to collaborate on the mural he planned to do. Of course I said yes!
Stormie had talked to a friend from FORM after our first conversation, telling him what I was doing. That began a conversation about the novel by Richard Brautigan “So the wind wont blow it all away”.
As creative ideas will do, the novel, my dried leaves and Stormie’s idea for the mural formed into one.
He asked if I would be willing to add my leaves to his character, a pile in his open palms and blowing away along the wall. I was told to bring my leaves and we would work it out.
Next day after installing my work around York Street, I met Stormie in the ally way of his mural with my book of dried pressed leaves. I was a bit nervous!
We chatted, passers by interrupted to shake his hand, until the lift was ready then up into the air we went, Stormie in charge of the controls.
All of my other leaf paste ups had been achieved with thick water based wall paper glue but Stormie had a tin of Boncrete to make it more permanent.
Into the hand of his character I glued a number of leaves, then some of my best specimens were trailed away along the wall.
Then it was done, I was on the ground and off home.
Over time the leaves slowly succumbed to the weather and fell away. Now the open palms of his character hold nothing.
I made new works using the same inspiration as paper paste ups and installed under Stormie’s mural over the years since. These have also worn away, leaving no trace.
To me this is significant and is a perfect representation of the sentiments of “So the wind won’t blow it all away”, which I have since read and loved.
The image used in the publication “Albany Landmarks and Laneways” shows the mural as intended, leaves and all.
Stormie understood the significance of collaborating with a local artist. Generous and encouraging, he said my leaves would at least be there, even in spirit, longer than the ephemeral works. He was right.
“I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there… I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy-tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity… Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then…”
Each chapter of the novel begins with the words “so the wind won’t blow it all away…Dust…American…Dust”.
Nat Rad Artist + Artsworker 