Saturday, April 20, 2013

More Transit

I comment that while the work might be painted well enough there is an aspect to it that is freakish and I wonder how many people would want it on their walls?
"Well that is always a problem" she says.
It just comes out automatically when I say what is the point then?
"The point is the desire to express things that drive women in their transit through this life, silent, non monetary forms of acheivement, like constancy, story and, myth telling, fury, overcoming disappointment, sadness, bravery, illness, awareness of everything existing all at once, motherhood, dancing."
Dancing?
"Yes, I think that's the shallow reason why I married a gay man, because he liked taking drugs and dancing too. Great dance music, great clubs, but that was all a while ago."
And now?
"Now, I've been grazing on such a lot of different ideas, ways of being, for so long that I'm a stange rag bag of tatty Christmas decorations. My idea of a day out is to go to the reading room of the British Library and order up books on anything I'm interested in. It's a pretty wild education.
Outdoors I'm on a long mission to visit the rock art sites across the top of Australia, paintings with a different sensibility in each area, painted for different reasons. there is a lot to be learned from these galleries, the Bradshaw group depicts joyful, leaping people, often without weapons and some obviously women/goddess figures. They are indicators of  a wonderful, now almost unknown part of us as modern humans, they had the time to depict themselves, to know who they were. There are still people painting in these far away places, thousands and thousands of years later. It's a great privilege to have been there and met some of them."
What are the drivers for you now?
"Well, I can't be bothered with show.
What really drives me is curiosity, the unknown, latterly the freedom to download what is in my mind, no matter what. It's something you do alone, an absolute comittment to expressing the life force in paint, good or bad."
I'm supposed to ask who's influenced you now?
"The painting influences are easy, Stanley Spencer who lived now far from here, the early American landscape painters, Gaughin, Rousseau, anybody doing paradise lost, found or mislaid."

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