Artist TOM CARMENT has been mistaken for a fisherman, a parking officer and a tree while painting, but there's no confusing the city in which he works.
When you've lived in a city for a long time, it becomes signposted with memories - a street corner where you had a certain conversation, a house whose exterior you painted, a picnic spot.
I feel a compulsion to depict these places, my surroundings, the way I see them. But at times it's hard to keep a fresh vision of that which is most familiar.
Although I use two small rooms at home to store papers and pictures, my real studio is kept in two backpacks.
The larger one is for oil paints and holds a plywood box I've made for my wooden palette. For small oils I work on wooden panels, often scavenged from the drawer sides of old wardrobes and, for larger oils, I stretch primed linen.
The smaller backpack, which travels with me nearly all the time, carries my drawing and watercolour gear.
Like this, I can adapt to my mode of travel: foot, bicycle or car and, within minutes, set up to attempt a picture of something that catches my eye. Occasionally I paint on two card tables pushed together, but most of the time I sit or squat on the ground with my gear spread out beside me. By sitting fairly still and low to the ground, things start to happen around me. Out in the bush, goannas wander past and birds land suddenly at the edge of my palette. Once, in Centennial Park, a dog rushed up and lifted its leg on my back.
In February this year, outside Whyalla, a redback spider bit me behind the ear.
Occasionally people think I'm doing something else, not painting. When I used to paint from a rowboat, fishermen in tinnies would drop their anchors nearby. They could see me, bent over in my boat and assume I was gutting my catch, having found a good spot.
One evening last year, on the corner of Cleveland and Elizabeth streets, I was standing between the parked cars, the best spot to draw the three-storey boarding house above Abdul's Restaurant. A thickset man rushed up to me, shouting and waving his arms: ''Stop! I'll move it!'' He thought I was writing up a parking ticket.
For two months this year I couldn't paint, my right arm in a sling after my bike hit a hole and I smashed my shoulder on the road down to Nielsen Park. I was going there to do another watercolour of people in the pool of shade under a banksia.
After that I had to slow down, accept my temporary disability. I went for long walks, sorted my papers and rediscovered the local library. I realised the world wouldn't fall apart if I didn't paint every day, even though I missed doing it.
People stood up for me in the bus.
I returned to art slowly by filling three pads with line drawings. A few weeks later I chiselled the dry blobs of oil paint off my palette and squeezed out new ones, wet and shining. With enthusiasm, I put my gear into a backpack with extra shoulder pads and returned to the cliffs and beaches of the eastern seaboard of the city. In the winter light I painted apartments crowded like lemmings at the precipice, winter seas, Coogee in the rain. And I thought that perhaps, by slowing down, by having dawdled around Sydney with almost no purpose, I was able to see it anew.
This is an edited extract from the exhibition catalogue, Places I've Been, New Paintings and Drawings 2009-2011. The exhibition is at Damien Minton Gallery, Redfern, until September 24.
Source : http://www.smh.com.au/
0 komentar:
Post a Comment