Category: Uncategorized

Where should I start?

Well, like a CV, I’ll start with the most recent.

On Saturday, 29 September 2024 the JADA opens when the winner will be announced. I am thrilled to be a finalist in this very prestigious Biennial Art Prize which is held at the beautiful Grafton Regional Gallery.

The 2024 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award (JADA) celebrates contemporary Australian drawing at its finest. The nation’s leading regional drawing prize, with an acquisitive first prize of $35,000 and early career award of $5,000, this exhibition is the flagship of the Grafton Regional Gallery.
 
The JADA champions innovation and excellence in drawing and showcases the enduring importance of drawing practice in Australia. This year’s exhibition features works from 65 artists, whose approaches to drawing span the technical and traditional, through to the experimental, conceptual and performative.
 
28 September – 8 December 2024

My submission is representative of my ongoing practice as an experimenter of ideas, mediums and messages. I can’t sit still.

“Walking with Words” continues my interest in combining text and print with paint, line, ink and collage, and taking into consideration what the intangible, such as sounds, might look like and how can I represent them visually.

My statement accompanying this work:

I am numbed by the state of our world and bemused by the way words are manipulated and deliberately misused.

I am pondering the importance and potency of words. Words can be barriers which either keep you out or keep you in, imprisoning you or freeing you. Words can be liberating or they can become unwelcome obstacles.

I have selected words and the letters of words from an unintelligible language and used them as pattern. As picture elements, they are useful due to their neutrality. To add to their neutral presence, I have placed them upside-down and I have likened them to a compact bush landscape. I am imagining that I am finding my way through dense trees similar to manoeuvring my way through false and fake information. While there is a sense of claustrophobia, anxiety and helplessness, my optimistic self wants this work to offer some hope for our future.

NEXT

Every now and then, I take time out to do some observation drawing. It’s relaxing and doesn’t require quite as much brain space, something I seem to be running a bit short on recently.

Drawing is so important. It’s like the fitness that one needs to stay on top of your game. Drawing can be used as a warm-up, as a meditation, as medication, as the final prize.

My drawing of Stuart was and is all of those things.

In the pipeline are works in progress, works finished and waiting for a posting, and finished works that may be painted over, destroyed or repurposed. Who knows! These 5 works are the result of re-working original artworks. Begun in 2022 or earlier, they have now been completed in 2023.

My life has generally always been and still is, a bit…. chaotic. I find solace making these meditative works. They are like a song, like poetry and they have a calming effect. I chill out into another place.

Sometimes I listen to an audio book, sometimes music, but very often, I listen to the outside bush and bird noises.

2022 has seen me revisiting old ideas and old works on which I build new ideas and new works.

Another Covid year sees me calmly, slowly, picking through stuff trying to toss some, revitalise some and create some newies.

Although the sounds, smells, textures and views of the mountain behind me are constant sources of inspiration, the recent catastrophes of drought, floods, bushfires and Covid, have provided fodder for much of my current work. The creation of something of beauty, calm and optimism, are possibly my emotional diversions as I explore the sad, fragile and terrible beauty of our world.

My pictures have their roots in the real world, but are by no means images in the conventional sense. I don’t copy my subjects, I interpret them. Sometimes the materiality of my medium takes a dominant role and I become engrossed in its unique qualities.

Using acrylic and oil paints, collage and mixed media, I create rapidly at first, keeping up with my thoughts. Then I let the work rest for an hour, a day, a year or a decade, as if it needs an incubation period. I eventually re-see what has been created and finish the work.

I revisit many ideas, resulting in the continuous presence of common, sometimes tenuous, threads that mirror my life and experiences.

I work from my immediate responses to both tangible and intangible subjects like bushfire, illness, sunshine, quiet, uncertainty and blend them with memory. The list goes on and so my work evolves that way.

All works that have not sold already are still for sale:

https://theshac-exhibition-shop.square.site/shop/robyn-kinsela/54

Open 10-4 Fridays to Mondays

www.theshac.com.au/

Happy New Year so far!

“Views of a Summer on Edge” SOLD while a finalist at the Sunshine Coast Art Prize at Caloundra Regional Art Gallery.

“The Burning” SOLD while on display on the online gallery Bluethumb. www.bluethumb.com.au/robyn-kinsela

While 2020 has been a bit still, a bit quiet, many of us are still beavering away, keeping occupied, keeping safe.

So, now I am revisiting works from which I will pick up threads to develop new works.

I loved, and still do, love these.

We seem to be heading for further lock down restrictions.

Hello studio!

News since I last posted includes my selection as a finalist in the Stanthorpe Art Prize. Due to Covid, this exhibition has been postponed until February 2021!!! Quite a few exhibitions have been cancelled, postponed or gone to online only. Many have thoughtfully waived or reduced their entry fees.

So, here are images of works that represent what I have been, and am, up to at the moment.

I am not so much interested in the subject as such, but rather what the subject can do for me as a vehicle of expression. The windy landscape is not about landscape or wind, but about uncertainty and immediacy, rawness and exposure, and the colours are accordingly chosen, maybe, to contradict all that!

I am pleased to have had this work (below) selected as a finalist in the Stanthorpe Art Prize.

I work from my immediate responses, both tangible and intangible. I was thinking about my brother whose land in northern NSW was engulfed by bush fire earlier this year. My approach with the paint was rapid at first, as were my thoughts.

I often work in series and this, being no exception, is a follow up from an earlier one which I needed to leave for fear of overworking it. Most often, I need a sort of incubation period, after which I return to the work to assess it for changes or corrections. I was desperate to keep the freshness so I quickly photographed and varnished it to avoid any “tidying up” that I am so often succumb to.

My brother is a proud keeper of the land, and I knew that he would see this as part of its evolution. And with that, a new beauty would emerge.