no beginning, no end...

So now I've actually got around to writing this because school is done for the year...Yes, I will continue to go there until i am barred from the place-I still have plenty of work i can go on with until that time... Obviously the big news is finishing my paintings for Painting 8, they spoke to me the other Monday night and told me that they were done- Nina B. and I who was working late with me sat back and looked at them as you see them in the picture below and certainly I was amazed to see them all together. I presented them to lecturers and students on Wednesday morning and they seemed to be well received- one lecturer who had taught me in first and second year commented that with a lot of abstract painting you can often walk straight past and not be affected, however, she said that with my paintings, they demand your attention and pull you in to look closer. This is of course what I have been wanting to hear in regard to my work forever...

I guess I should also give a little background to these- the official title of them is The Three Jewels and left to right you have Sangha, Dharma and Buddha. Each time I have talked about these i have started with the disclaimer that it wasn't my intention to create religious paintings- more my response to the ideas presented. The Three Jewels is the name given to the three central ideas considered as the foundation of Buddhism. The first, Sangha, is the name for the community that one enters by becoming Buddhist, the second, Dharma is the teaching that one lives their life by when becoming Buddhist and thirdly, the Buddha, which is more about the idea of the Buddha nature or the potential of anyone to reach enlightenment and to become a Buddha. I originally started studying these ideas because in my previous works, i had explored the idea of desire being the root cause of all suffering, therefore if you eliminate desire, you eliminate suffering. This was all well and good but I still had a lot of questions and so, went looking for answers. To a degree, the paintings are my answers and are my responses to these ideas.

I spent alot of time getting caught up in Buddhist ideas- form is emptiness, emptiness is form and also looking at artists like Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross, Mark Rothko's so called Seagram Murals- as well as Ian Fairweather- particularily The Drunken Buddha paintings, which to be honest, inspired alot of the technique...Brett Whiteley just because his attitude and approach I relate to so very much- There ius a documentary from the late eighties called Difficult Pleasures, which is basically an hour and a bit of Whiteley discussing the majority of his works to camera... I also managed to find time to go to Sydney for the Australian stencil art prize- My painting Atlas II was included in the finalists but unfortunately didn't win- this year...so next year when they have the World Stencil Art Prize, I'll have to bust out some new, next level stuff to get my name on that trophy...

me and my painting at the Chrissie Cotter Gallery in Camperdown, Sydney...