Please join us for drinks with Simon from 6pm on Saturday, May 26.

Click here to RSVP for the Opening Night.

What strikes one first about Simon Collins’ works is the utter confidence of his painterly approach. It is a quality that has earned him considerable attention with the inclusion of paintings into some of the nation’s most prestigious art prizes. This new series again expresses the importance a sense of place has for him. Both surface and human document, each painting presents a small ‘slice of life’ momentarily glimpsed among the streets and parks of suburban Sydney. Collins depicts ordinary, everyday activities “that are not so different from any one else’s – stuff that has an impact, positive or negative.” Subjects include his place of residence under a flight path, family outings and the “mundane but beautiful” traffic images he encounters during daily work travel.

Artists interpret their responses to the world as they experience it, and those responses are very much conditioned by interior states of being. Collins’ works act as a kind of mediation between coexisting realities. Alluding to the title of this body of work, which also enigmatically names the painting of a grinning, ornate skull, Collins shrugs, “Up? Well the word comes into my head all the time, it’s like a mantra in my brain. As much as one looks up, life is never a hundred per cent rosy and sometimes looking within is unavoidable. The works relate to the duality idea – things being usually measured in degrees of good and bad, intriguing yet unremarkable, beautiful yet fucked up.”

At almost every level, existence seems to be composed of binary pairs or opposites. While acknowledging this pattern in nature, Collins sees the value of embracing the whole as an organic unity. He tells of how he felt when the planes started flying very low over his house after extensions to the Sydney Airport runway were completed. “There’s a love/hate thing going on with them. I hate them coming in for all the obvious reasons, but they are immensely intriguing to watch on a nice sunny afternoon in the backyard. I’m in awe of these machines and what they do, so my paintings of planes are a juxtaposition of negative versus beauty.”

Collins understands well the correspondence between feeling, form and technique. Although the material world appears dense and solid, we now understand it to be a vibratory energy field. Collins’ epiphany-like pictures evince that force with fluid gestures, flickering light and abundant texture. The dynamism of the works derives from the directness of his execution. “I like to paint the whole canvas at once as each area is a relevant part of the puzzle,” he explains. “I’m never sure how the painting is going to work when starting out, the painting itself dictates – it tells you as you go. My aim is to let the medium carry me in a way that imparts the experience I’ve drawn upon… to take the viewer to that place, abstracted and embellished as it may be.”

Alive with energy and movement, exaltation and shadow, Collins’ paintings prompt us to be cognizant of those fleeting, elusive instants that elevate the quality of our day to day lives. “I consider a work successful if it reveals even a tiny bit of poetry or beauty that may not have been recognised in an otherwise unremarkable day. I’m trying to look at the positives, looking up so to speak, not only where the planes fly.”

View the Exhibition Works  |  View Simon Collins CV

The exhibition is showing at Anthea Polson Art, Mariners Cove, Seaworld Drive, Main Beach 4217 (next to Marina Mirage) from May 26 – June 9.

Full details HERE

Full details here

Full details HERE

Opening Night Photos
Cate Maddy 

Another large crowd for the opening of Cate Maddy’s first solo exhibition with us, which was held in conjunction with a preview of Samantha Everton’s survey exhibition for the Queensland Festival of Photography 4.  The exhibitions were opened by Robyn Sweaney.  More photos here.
View Exhibition  |  Press Release

Full Article Here

Cate Maddy ‘Best Imitation.’

View Exhibition  |  Media Release

Please join us for drinks with Cate from 6pm on Saturday, April 7.

Click here to RSVP for the Opening Night.

“I can do my best imitation / of a garden at midnight / I can do my best imitation / of the land / the bits and pieces the fragrant / things hanging green moss / slow moving rivers / still billabongs and foxes / that should not be there / I can do my best imitation / of things that have been broken / and been put back together / ragged and ravaged by storms and life / I can do my best imitation of myself / living with nature / but these things are not true / or real / they are just my best imitation.” Cate Maddy 2012

Melbourne-based Cate Maddy creates beautiful artificial worlds to assuage her longing for nature and a feeling of disconnectedness from it. “I choose to work from the reality of my life in the city,” says Maddy. “The works aim to create a dialogue between silences and spaces – landscapes of shapes and shadows which hint at many different meanings. My paintings are as if scraped off the cities’ walls, rubbed as in the grafittied lane ways and coloured by technology. They are synthetic hybrids, a tangle of storms and the bits that grow out of the cracks in the pavement – all exaggerated to create my best imitation of the great Australian landscape tradition.”

In accordance with the maxim that an artist must be witness to his or her own experience, Maddy’s landscapes have naught to do with sweeping plains, wooded hills or pastoral vistas. Instead, her bright-hued canvases manifest an acceptance of place and urban reality. They offer a window into another order of perception – the poetic linking of landscape and human existence. Here we may discover beauty in the most unlikely locales.

Rich with metaphorical resonances, Maddy’s works describe an abstracted, indomitable Nature. Opaque, petaloid motifs and translucent balls appear to hover over rain-washed surfaces; simple shapes that suggest rather than represent. There is a sense of airy space among the shadow play of silhouetted weeds, twisting branches and seedpods dangling. It seems as if dormant potentiality and delight have been rekindled in Maddy’s dancing visual fields.

Hers is an art predicated on process, the continuum of daily living, contemplation and the organic logic of design. Modulating between density and transparency, addition and subtraction, between what is seen and what has been obscured, Maddy conjures an exceptionally elegant harmony.

Commenting on her creative processes, Maddy explains, “I collect colour combinations like other people collect trinkets. I like my markings to be ‘once removed’ from the original, source imagery which I render in a less defined, yet persuasive way. A form may look like a splash of paint, a biomorph or a tree branch, but it is in fact a hand-painted ‘trace’. The use of certain materials reflects my city culture of spray paint and posca pens. When the work is alive and has a voice of its own, I stop. The finished piece is always a surprise.”

Despite the exuberant colours and continual interplay of visual relationships, these are essentially quiet works of great delicacy and aesthetic joy. Maddy’s paintings induce the kind of silent reverie that one might experience when immersed in the energies of wild, natural places. They affirm Paul Klee’s famous tenet, “Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible”. Functioning as a meditation that enables us to “dwell poetically” despite situation and circumstance, Maddy’s Best Imitation is unquestionably successful!

Cate Maddy’s prodigious talent gained early recognition in the award of a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Distinction from RMIT, as well as the RMIT & Siemen’s Travel Scholarship that she utilized to visit New York.

JACQUELINE HOUGHTON

The exhibition is showing at Anthea Polson Art, Shops 18-20 Mariners Cove, Seaworld Drive Main Beach QLD 4217 (next to Marina Mirage) from April 7 to April 26, 2012.

View Exhibition Works Here.

]]> http://antheapolsonart.com.au/blog/index.php/2012/04/03/you-are-invited-6/feed/ 0 http://antheapolsonart.com.au/blog/index.php/2012/03/30/opening-night-with-damien-kamholtz/ http://antheapolsonart.com.au/blog/index.php/2012/03/30/opening-night-with-damien-kamholtz/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 07:45:49 +0000 JRP http://antheapolsonart.com.au/blog/?p=3674 Continue reading →]]> Opening Night Photos
Damien Kamholtz
Remember This
March 24.

Damien drew a very large crowd. The exhibition was opened by Associate Professor, Dr Janet McDonald, Head of School of Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland.   More photos here.
View Exhibition  |  Press Release