Using history & colour to point...

Using the bright colours seemed affirmed after visiting Shane Cotton's New Painting exhibition at Gow Langsford. Since that visit, I've thought about Whitney Bedford, who I've long admired; Lissy and Rudi for their fluoro crochet art. photographer David Benjamin Sherry I've just found. Apart from Lissy and Rudi, whose practice comes from one of love and hope, these artists are concerned with the transformation of the land through colonisation, climate change and productivity greed. Daniel Boyd, like Shane Cotton, has repainted an historical painting, to make a statement about the view from the colonised.

Shane Cotton
"His new works place ancestral figures in surreal, cosmic landscapes, exploring hybridities, transformation, and the cyclical nature of history. Cotton’s paintings blend history, mythology, and technicolour imagery, reflecting on the layered, nonlinear relationship between the past, present, and future in Aotearoa." https://gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/354-new-painting-shane-cotton/

David Benjamin Sherry
"The exhibition continues Sherry’s exploration of psychologically resonant color photography. These landscape photographs embody the artist’s psychological reactions to the natural world, which Sherry views as under threat of ecological collapse. Similarly, the film technology used by the artist could be considered an endangered medium now facing obsolescence."
https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/david-benjamin-sherry

 

 

Whitney Bedford @Starkwhite

"Los Angeles-based artist Whitney Bedford questions our relation to images. Her work is informed by a deep engagement with the history of traditional European and American landscape painting layered with the conceptual strategies employed by contemporary art practice. In 2020 Bedford embarked on an extraordinary new body of work. Titled Veduta after the tradition of ‘view paintings’ made for travellers on their world tour in the years before photography, Bedford literally renders, reinterprets, and collaborates with some of art history’s most iconic landscape paintings. Interpreting the works of Turner, Constable, Van Gogh, and Munch for a new era, Bedford’s ongoing Veduta series approaches landscape through a temporal lens, drawing the verdant past into conversation with the increasingly arid present. Her new body of work on exhibition at Starkwhite filters the composition of these celebrated landscapes into a timely conversation with global politics and the very real present of climate change." https://www.starkwhite.co.nz/exhibition/whitney-bedford-imaginary/

Uses styles of landscape painters from art history, and overpaints in bright colours with flora.

Lissy and Rudi

3D sculptural artists using crochet and fluoro colours.

“For Māori, as well, it brings back those nostalgic feelings of being safe under a blanket that Nanny has made. You hear that kōrero too.
Through crochet we have come to understand the symbolism of connecting ‘loops’ and how the loops reflect the complex relationships we have with ourselves and others, and to the past, present and future.” Lissy describes crochet as “a portal of joy. We see ourselves as a prism in which the aroha of our tūpuna shines through us and is expressed in our own unique ways – like the spectrum of the rainbow. As their aroha radiates through us it is reflected back to us by the light and aroha of our communities. Our practice is grounded in one central kaupapa; to transform intergenerational trauma into deeply felt joy, one loop at a time.”
https://www.timmelville.com/artist/lissy-cole-rudi-robinson/

 

 

 

New Zealand artist living in London - Robyn Litchfield

"Robyn Litchfield’s paintings are representations of sublime encounters with pristine and untouched landscapes. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, Litchfield aims to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. She is interested in the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind and as a place that induces reflexivity. Landscape becomes a ubiquitous template for exploring personal history, notions of cultural identity, alienation and a sense of belonging.

Most of her sources are photographs; archival images of early New Zealand and contemporary photographs of primeval landscape taken by herself. She applies transparent paint in expressive brushstrokes and works back into it using various implements and processes such as scraping, layering and erasure to reveal the luminous ground below. The paint mimics the emulsion on the glass plates of early photographs whose images were revealed by light shining through them. She thinks of the ground as a screen where images are projected and perceived."
https://robynlitchfield.com/about/

Emil Nolde 1867-1953
A German-Danish Expressionist artist renowned for his vibrant and emotive use of colour, particularly in watercolours. His watercolours often captured landscapes, seascapes, flowers, and religious themes. They are characterised by their bold, saturated hues and an almost luminous quality achieved.

Prohibited by Nazis from painting in 1941; worked secretly in watercolor.

David Bowie/David Mallet - Ashes To Ashes

The official music video for David Bowie - Ashes To Ashes. Taken from Bowie's 'Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)' album released in 1980, which featured the singles Ashes To Ashes, Fashion, Scary Monsters and Up The Hill Backwards.

"David Mallet co-directed the 1980 music video for David Bowie's song "Ashes to Ashes" with Bowie himself. Mallet was one of the most innovative directors of 1980s music videos. The video was filmed at Pett Level beach and was the most expensive music video ever made at the time, with a budget of £250,000 ($500,000). It's considered one of Bowie's best videos and of all time. The solarised video features Bowie as a clown, an astronaut and an asylum inmate, each representing variations on the song's theme, and is influenced by the New Romantic movement." - Wikipedia!

Daniel Boyd

"Daniel Boyd draws on his Aboriginal heritage as a Kudjla/Gangalu man from North Queensland to bring an alternative lens to bear on the images that have constructed Australia’s foundational myths. His painting We Call Them Pirates Out Here (2006), for example, mocks the official history of white exploration and settlement by suggesting that one person’s explorer is another person’s pirate."

"Daniel Boyd’s painting We Call Them Pirates Out Here mocks the official history of white exploration and settlement by suggesting that one person’s explorer is another person’s pirate. This work is a parody of a famous 1902 history painting by Emanuel Phillip Fox depicting the 1770 landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay. Depicted as a marauding pirate, Boyd’s Cook claims possession of the land with his skull-and-crossbones Union Jack. No longer the heroic and civilised explorer of Fox’s painting, Cook becomes the anti-hero of an opposing narrative in which his landing is reframed as a moment of invasion and pillage for the original inhabitants."
https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artworks/2006.25/

I like the title on the front of the painting, but especially the reworking of an historical painting or image.
 

Andy Warhol

A huge history to explore - but focusing on his use of colour and reworking of images e.g. "Warhol painted religious symbols using imagery such as Raphael’s Madonna, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, and the cross as source material."

 

 

 

 

 

Just quick notes so far - this article will be expanded.