The Finkelstein Files: A Few of My Favourite Things!!!

In the last post for the year, 2017 has been a rollercoaster ride for many.

I for one, am looking forward to a complete summer break with my favourite little peeps, my twin 8 year old’s.

 It’s all about having fun and being in the moment, taking our time, and few plans except soaking up the much-needed sunshine and feeling the sand between our toes in between bouts of body surfing.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Thierry B Fine Art‘s valued clientele for their ongoing support throughout 2017.

We’d also like to thank our behind-the scenes-colleagues who logistically make it all possible to keep up the pace, as one of Australia’s busiest commercial art galleries.

Here are a few of my favourite things below!!!

 

As we countdown the last 6 days until we close the gallery for our break, our gallery hours include Monday – Saturday 11am – 5pm & Sunday 12pm – 5pm or by appointment. Re-opening the 15th January, if you are in town come by and check out our new stockroom full of beautiful paintings.

Have a happy holiday with your loved ones of near and far, and return next year in good health, ready for an even bigger and better 2018!!

Lots of love, Thierry & Vicki

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The Finkelstein Files: The Art of Michelle Breton

Caravonesque,  Mixed Media on Italian Canvas, 183 x 183cm.

Michelle Breton’s ouevre relates to deep inward feelings rather than appealing to the intellect –  a visceral expression of motifs. Organic is form and matter, the works are resolved instinctively and intuitively. Filled with movement and chaos and control, Breton is a master of the abstract landscape.

“There comes a point in the painting when it reveals itself to me, and it’s at that moment I seem to know what it wants to be and what I need to do. Before that I’m it’s slave, making marks, throwing paint and even sometimes  eliminating everything,then taking stock of what has occurred and launching back in to it, allowing anything to happen. This process can take days, weeks or even months. We work together then it releases, I let go and voila! It’s a relationship that can be tumultuous at times, but it’s a dance that I never tire of, it is my joy and I couldn’t live without it, it’s my passion and my love.”

Thierry B has a strong relationship with artist Michelle Breton, showcasing her paintings for the past decade, both in High St, Prahran and now in the new purpose-built space at 473 Malvern Rd, South Yarra. We have just received a new collection of canvases into the stockroom which are available to view.

Apres Midi D’uns Founa, Mixed Media on Italian Canvas, 152 x 137cm.

Eclipse Telegraph 23, Mixed Media on Italian Canvas, 183 x 152cm.

Octobre A Ceret, Mixed Media on Italian Canvas, 152 x 137cm.

Presque Perdu, Mixed Media on Italian Canvas, 183 x 152cm.

Coming Home, Mixed Media on Italian Canvas, 91 x 91cm.

Chant Du Midi, Mixed Media on Italian Canvas, 152 x 137cm.

 

The paintings are currently available at Thierry B Fine Art, 473 Malvern Rd, South Yarra.

Gallery hours: Monday – Saturday 11am – 5pm, Sunday 12pm – 5pm or by appointment.

Thierry B: 0413 675 466 or Vicki: 0404 861 438.

ENQUIRE NOW

Vicki xx

The Finkelstein Files: Thresholds of Perception

Melbournian artist Camille Hannah wants to challenge you. She wants to make you wonder about the contrasts between painting, photography and sculpture, and blur the lines between tradition and modernity. Hannah works on perspex, painting luscious strokes of oils onto the back of convex domed circles, using handmade brushes – a skill she picked up during an artist residency in China. Her palettes are moody and sumptuous, the rich colours reminiscent of a Caravaggio.

Hannah’s works are 3-dimensional and painted on convex supports. As a material object they embody a spatiality that also challenges the distinction between painting and photography, painting and sculpture. As with her previous work, scale probes the limits of the visible with baroque play and the viewer must penetrate a space that represents the body- a foreign body – in order to see the image within.

If painting circular pictures is problematic, spare a thought for artists who attempt to also paint on convex glass or perspex. It’s a punishingly tricky prospect, and so it’s doubly amazing that  oil on convex Perspex abstracts – manages to pull it off. In essence, Hannah’s final paintings are evidence of the reverse of her process, the gestural paint strokes, details and other ‘foreground’ features are the first laid down, while the backgrounds and other effects are the last.

Her works aim to address the viewer at the threshold of vision and touch. As seeing relies on a plurality of sense organs, there is a visual correlation that compels perception to fleetingly pass through the sense of touch. This discrepancy between visual and tactile perception becomes a frontier area of sensation. There is a bodily presence in a wavering relation of moving outward and drawing back, identification and distancing. By inciting the viewer to move – the visual field of the works aim to be the space that envelops the viewer.

Where space comes forward: the threshold of two and three dimensional representation of the flat image and the image-in-space and the concomitant compulsion to incorporate becomes an easily – crossed threshold of perception – an opening toward a dialectic between the interior and exterior, and the centre and its edges. These paintings are labyrinthine: the folds and curves aim to engage the body at the threshold of seduction and recoil, an interactivity that can never be construed on the basis of stillness. In this respect they strive to hold the viewer in a temporality by way of a ‘spatial stickiness’.

Michel Lawrence from Inside Art interviews Camille Hannah about her work and practice here

See Camille’s AUSiMED artwork here.

The Finkelstein Files: The Sublime Ms.Shaw

Artist Kate Shaw has an enduring fascination with interplanetary colonisation and what it might mean. Through a series of vibrant, psychedelic landscapes, she suggests these yearnings are a complicated combination of hope for new beginnings and a sense of hopelessness about a planet we seem certain we’ll lose.

“My practice re-interprets notions of what constitutes landscape painting, both within an art historical context and a contemporary social context. The paintings deal with the tensions and dichotomies in both the depiction of the natural world and our relationship with it. I am currently exploring the sublime in nature whilst imbuing a sense of toxicity and artificiality in this depiction. The intention is to reflect upon the contradiction between our inherent connection to the natural world and continual distancing from it. My paintings aim to convey ideas of nature, alchemy and creation by operating on one level as a landscape another as abstraction.”

In Kate Shaw’s work what we see, and what in fact are facing, are two distinctly different things. A viewer may immediately recognise a glacier, an alpine ridge, a snow-capped mountain, but we are equally witnessing a montage of abstract chemical reactions.

In a Rorsach test a patient is gently encouraged to make sense out of abstractions, to see a rabbit in a black and white ink-blot. In experimental pursuits in the 1960s patients were administered a healthy dose of LSD to respond to these monochromatic abstractions. It’s not hard to imagine the poten- tial hallucinogenic blast of such a process. The Surrealists were also enamoured of such shifting notions of reality, utilising their technique of ‘de- calcomania’ in order to find subconscious form in abstract materials.

Shaw’s work has a similar interaction with the viewer, the patterns we recognise through her deft manipulation of coloured chemicals leads us into a world we immediately recognise, even if that world is pure fantasy.

This realm of signs becoming synonymous with what may be dubbed the ‘real world’ was best ar- ticulated by Roland Barthes in his exploration of semiotics. Signs and perception become blurred, the same way a swoosh on a sneaker now clearly reads as the word Nike. In Shaw’s work the notion of ‘landscape as product’, as an inevitably read sign amidst abstraction, blurs reality.

What makes adroit patrons think Kate Shaw’s works are worth acquiring? That’s in the eye of each beholder, but I’m enthused because her paintings, and now videos, signify the spirit of the emerging Earth observations (EO) movement, where space imaging and sensing technologies are ubiquitously deployed to monitor and manage environments. (The goal of climate scientists is to build a global ‘autopiloting’ system to answer Buckminster Fuller’s 1968 call for ‘an operating manual for Spaceship Earth’.)

See Kate’s AUSiMED art work here

The Finkelstein Files: Artist Craig Waddell

AUSiMED‘s major 2015 fundraiser has lasooed a slew of 25 of Australia’s most collectible artists for auction event like no other at Mossgreen in Melbourne on Monday 7th September. One prolific painter, has gifted a key work from his latest collection. Guest at Belle magazine’s artist dinner in Brisbane this month, Craig Waddell wooed invitees with his work and life as a painter.

His art is dangerously intrusive – it holds the kind of perfection, artistic gestures, and tactility that gets right in side your noggin, has a good feel around, and leaves without so much as a goodbye kiss. From birds, to flowers, to the most perfect strawberry glazed donut in the world, his art presents a world we know, in a dimension that’s far more intuitive.

“I have a love affair with paint and painting and this passion runs through all the various subject matters and forms I tackle. I love the physical act of almost wrestling with paint and canvas, applying paint in an explosive way. Maybe this stems from my sporting background: I played first grade cricket from a young age, and this physical performance on the field, mirrors the physicality I bring to my painting.”

Sensual and tactile, Craig Waddell’s work celebrates both the sublime and the imperfect. Laying down paint, wet into wet, observing while intuitive colour and gesture build and change, he destroys, renews and resurrects images from everyday life.

Watch Craig wax on about working life as a painter HERE.

A close attunement to the natural world began during childhood on his family farm. Whether painting a rooster as a riff on contemporary portraiture, or a protea as an evocation of love, he is confident journeying through colour choices, compositional risks, scraping back and starting fresh, ultimately building several layers of paint to finish the work. The results, he says, are the product of his fundamental interest in paint – through his immersion in the “field of activity” that is the canvas. Waddell’s earthy, emotional honesty provides a refreshing take on masculine use of paint without fear of beauty.

Pedigree: No stranger to world of awards and residencies, Waddell has held solo exhibitions in Sydney, Hong Kong, Paris and Thailand. He completed his Masters degree at the Chiang Mai University, Thailand and his Bachelor degree at the National Art School, Sydney. Waddell has completed residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris and is a previous recipient of the Marten Bequest Traveling Scholarship, undertaking studies at Chiang Mai University, Thailand. In 2010 he was awarded the Mossman Prize and he has been a finalist in the Archibald Prize, Wynne Prize, Blake Prize, Dobell Prize and Sulman Prize.

Craig is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne, click here to see his AUSiMED art work