What Is This

Take a 3D tour of the Exhibition – https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=kmCcFouVid3&help=1

What is This* is over, and its time to digest the fabulous critique I received and feed it back into my work. Thank you all.    (* By the way and as I have been asked, ‘What is this?’ is an old koan.)

The work titled ‘The Tide had Turned’ with embedded ekphrasis, was short-listed for the biennial $50,000 acquisitive Len Fox Art Painting Award  that is on display at the Castlemaine Art Museum, 27th September to 2nd March 2025.

What is This was open 30 June to 28 July 2024 at Opus 30, 30 Elizabeth St. Castlemaine Victoria.
A well- attended floor-talk took place on Saturday 6th July.

“Bill’s work once teased with what he termed ‘easy beauty’ – large brightly-coloured works made without concern for any of the historic tenets of painting. For example Rococozenism exhibition 2009 and Chance Upon Nothing exhibition 2013, MARS Gallery, Melbourne.

Here, the immediately gratifying elements have been stripped away. Stripped back to the line. The line here as the mediative present, the process, and the metaphor – combined with an entirely new element, poetic lines*. This exhibition represents a radical shift in process, and the ever-present elements of Zen/Buddhist philosophies are left raw.”   (* The poetic verse has not yet been published so regrettably cannot be included here just yet.)

Artist Statement

Conceiving of a new language of the line.

The language of images was given to us by our societies.

In an Age of Unrelenting Visual Imagery, when wars, environmental catastrophes, and democracy is threatened, nothing is as urgent as reviewing what it says?

I am making an exploratory start – starting with the line – not figurative or expressive, but stiller, simpler, slower, and meditative.

Is there not another way of seeing – as Galileo Galilei did in finding that we circled the sun?

While this antipodean butterfly isn’t attempting to change the direction of the planets, I consider what might change the paradigm?

                                    “When we know what it is to be human, when we become able admit to ourselves our own frailties and dependence, perhaps then we will start acting and speaking in ways more fully humane.” Jane Hirshfield

Method: This artist/meditator, is seeking to view every point as a mediative ‘moment’ in time – and so a series of points, becomes a line.

This line is drawn, usually horizontal. Another follows, emulating the first. Never an exact copy but the next line follows the last etc. Changes get amplified or over-ridden, and obstructions like blots, may interrupt the path. The artist while maintaining their meditative moment looks only to the next moment, never the whole.

And a ‘landscape’ appears – seemingly of hills, plains and valleys, but never intentionally.

These landscapes are metaphorically rich – Human lives following paths, as calf-paths, blindly or erroneously, ideologically or every-day, or believing they are free or novel (but usually not).

Diverse people, communities, societies and nations, following what has gone before as is our common habit, and carving the good with the bad – and the dire circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Perhaps, a new language of the line suggests, as a first step, an appreciation of what it is we do, and what we value. Consideration of what is meaningfully valuable is perhaps another.

2024