James Guppy

Ascension 2006

acrylic on linen
106.5 x 71 cm

Cloudfront 2006

acrylic on linen
180 x 180 cm

Etiquette 2008

acrylic on linen
61 x 150cm

Spinosissima Altaira 2007

acrylic on linen
45.5 x 30 cm

James Guppy is a contemporary Australian artist living in a small coastal town in northern NSW. His medium of choice varies from painting to assemblage. The narratives which dominate his work use the traditions of western figurative painting to explore contemporary issues with a surreal and absurdist twist. These dramatic art works examine social issues through the lens of western art history. They reference artists and traditions such as J.M. Turner, Piero della Francesca, Dutch Baroque painting and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Guppy is intent on examining our secret inner lives. His relentless gaze fixes on the domestic, love and power, the body and our physical identity, gender, sexuality and taboos. His art ranges widely across the private dreams and nightmares of life in the twenty first century.

His work does not fit easily into the categories of western art. He is a figurative painter, a flower painter, a magic realist, but his paintings are postmodern and fetishistic. He is a surrealist and an absurdist who deconstructs the traditions of western art to create intelligent engaging artwork that can haunt and transform the way we subsequently see the world around us.

When we think of European art, one of the first images that comes to mind is of a richly coloured and modelled oil painting - a portrait, landscape or still life. The illusion in this painting is so real that we feel a heightened sense of the material world: the work seems to be a window into another space.

Throughout my career I have been asking myself whether this heritage has any relevance now. Since the development of photography, the role of figurative painting in portraiture and as social chronicle has all but died and the craft of illusionary painting has become largely relegated to the backwaters of romantic nostalgia and reactionary historicism. Painting in general will clearly continue; but have the figurative traditions of illusionism been technologically outflanked by photography, film and computer generated imagery? Frankly, I don't know and I sometimes wonder at the quixotic nature of my need to find a contemporary relevance for these pre-modernist styles of depiction. This site shows where I have gone in my search so far.

My paintings are all in acrylic. I love oils but the facility I gained as a mural artist working with fast drying paints means I can get the same effects as oils quicker, without worrying about the more complex chemistry of oils. I also get a sort of perverse pleasure creating paintings that can look like they were painted in one medium when in fact they were painted in another.

I use different strategies to develop the subject matter for each series of works. I begin with a point of fascination and the scent of an idea. This period of tracking down the vision may take weeks or years. I will return to themes from years ago if I think I might have something more to add or a new take on it. There is then a slow stumbling towards the form and how the idea or vision might be made to work successfully. Some works begin with thumbnail sketchs of inner visions and ideas with no models in the outside world (ie. It's all "made up"). As often as not, I am a merciless appropriator, constructing my paintings from details taken from old photos, old masterpieces, flower catalogues, magazines etc. Some works require the use of models either in conjunction with appropriated material or on their own. In these cases I will either photograph or work from life, whichever is appropriate.

The actual execution of a painting begins with a fairly clear vision. At any one time my studio walls are covered with many canvases in varying stages of completion. When I get "stuck" on a work, I either begin a new one or return to a piece in progress on the wall. I usually have about twenty canvases in various stages of completion. I get "stuck" a lot. Quite a few works "in progress" will actually end up permanently unresolved waiting in the reject pile till I can reuse the canvas.

The actual execution begins by covering the white gesso with a coloured ground. This might be anything from black, burnt sienna, terra verte or scarlet. I then carefully grid up my design and transpose it to the canvas using white conte. The first coat of acrylic is applied thick with no water. Subsequent layers are more and more diluted and the brushes tend to get smaller and more delicate as I progress. I usually varnish with two coats of dilute acrylic medium and a final coat of Paraloid varnish.

Paintings are rarely "finished" rather it's the case that I give up and hope that I can resolve the next one a little better. The work then is declared "finished" often by my deliberate signing of it. This stops dead any tendency I might have to continue toying with the piece.

James Guppy, 2005

http://www.jamesguppy.com/index.php

Michael Zavros

http://www.philipbacon.com.au/artists/MichaelZavros/extract.htm

In more physical than cerebral times, trophy hunting was a life or death journey requiring craft, cunning, timing and strength. In a successful hunt, an adrenalised few minutes would culminate in the kill, after hours, or days, of stalking, with big game yielding not only meat but a souvenir in the form of horns, a head or tusks, a spectacular skin, a sought-after prize. A release of euphoria, emotion, even sadness or tears is commonly reported by hunters in the immediate aftermath of such a kill. The questing nature of this pursuit, with its inherent dangers, becomes an arc of memory contained, for the hunter, in the souvenir trophy.

This exhibition of new work by Michael Zavros describes trophy hunting as an end in its own right, with the trophy more likely a painting by an A-list artist, a coveted prestige vehicle, a strange or exotic orchid found only in the forests of northern Borneo, narwhal tusks or other natural curiosities, or creatures such as the Onogadori chicken, a bird bred for exhibition, which can barely move without human intervention. And then there are the designer labels ‘to die for’, peddled in the lush fashion magazines the artist buys obsessively, which plunge us into a world, like that writ large and small by Zavros, where fashion designers are treated like household names and codified like a new language with nuances that we instantly understand.

Zavros is himself an A-list artist, outed as one of Australia’s ‘most collectible’ in recent years and regularly the subject of waiting lists for his work. This is his first exhibition with Philip Bacon Galleries and places him in context with many of Australia’s senior and most in demand artists. As a result the subject matter and circumstances of the exhibition in this venue gives his titling and themes an exquisite irony, one on a par with the sumptuous realism of the paintings and the low-patina black sculptures.

He is best known for his highly realist style of painting and its ambiguous portrayal of subject matter from male fashion to extravagant follies like horses and exotic chickens. The work has been praised for its obsessive pursuit of beauty which carries with it an air of melancholy, a warning perhaps that coveting objects or creatures no matter how rare or strange will not assuage the hunger that set us in pursuit of them in the first place. Yet still we hunger.

Zavros knows his subject intimately and obsessively. He collects fashion iconography. He was, in his teens and early twenties, a competitive rider, and as a child bred chickens and regularly and successfully showed them. Just over a year ago he moved from inner suburban Brisbane to acreage on the city fringe, and after ten years without animals (apart from the family cats) he has begun to surround himself again — with various chooks, peacocks, and a horse which grazes in his paddocks. The subject of Hanoverian is a neighbour’s warmblood performance horse, bred and trained for dressage.

In this exhibition, many of the trophies come from his immediate environment. An inveterate collector — Zavros has an African Cape buffalo head, a bugling Elk, and various antelopes adorning his walls, a zebra skin graces the floor, and many paintings by friends and peers such as Archibald Prize winning Cherry Hood. There are also designer icons like the Le Corbusier chaise — and these observed and styled objects are recommodified here — through the challenge of another folly, realist painting.

A slow, obsessive technique sees Zavros buying the smallest paint brushes available and shaving them down further. Hours of painstaking work and an immaculate surface contribute to the thrilling beauty of these images and their ability to transfix the viewer. It is hard to look away, and when you do your eye is drawn back again, as though the meditative process in their making extends into their hypnotic qualities and reluctance to disengage.

I am reminded of a passage in a book by Annette Hughes about her experience of The Wilton Diptych, an altarpiece from the twelfth century in London’s National Gallery:

The painter is anonymous — probably a monk whose body took its name with it to its grave, but the evidence of the life invested in that work is still vibrating, after all this time, with the energy of all the human hours it must have taken to make; all the love and devotion to stick at the task for long enough. When I stood in front of it, in the middle of the medieval galleries, the whole universe shrank to the space between my eyes and the surface of that mesmerizing work of art. (Hughes, Annette, Art Life Chooks, Fourth Estate, 2008: 284)

There is a similar sense of love, an ability to be transfixed by these images of such beauty which is inspired by Zavros’s work. The almost sinister pursuit of perfection that in itself is a trap — like being caught in the sway of romance for its own sake — echoes around Zavros’s paintings and is often its subject. I Versailles is a portrait of Marie Antoinette’s palace. In this large charcoal drawing, the architecture is rendered in all its detail, in the manicured gardens the sculpture is cloaked, and above the extravagance of the architecture, birds, themselves ensnared, form a heart. The manipulation of nature by man creates a double-bind to which both become subject.

This entrapment, by love, biology, destiny, is a theme to which Zavros continues to be drawn. His new sculpture, Swell, is a homage to the Pigmy Pouter pigeon, bred for showing, with a swell of the breast which overwhelms and obscures the head position of the bird. Its feet are fluffy with decorative extension of the feathers. Zavros’s sculpture reproduces this impossible bird, lovingly rendered in black patina bronze, tying it to the enslavement of fashion with the dandyish title of Swell.

Impossibly elegant and dandified too is Alexander McQueen/Bay, a polished centaur with the human figure dressed in iconic clothes from this high-end designer. The detail of the clothes is lovingly and painstakingly rendered as is the horse’s body and shiny coat. A pared back and almost blank background stretches either side of the image, giving no clues as to the origins or future of this centaur. The highly civilized man/beast is breathtakingly impossible, but the realism so highly plausible that the shoulders of the horse segue dramatically into the hip swagger of the original model. This centaur beguiles in its coolly romantic style.

Equally entranced by the romance of a highly-sought after orchid, Paphiopedilum Rothschildianum, found in northern Borneo, Zavros has developed his own fictional and rare object, the Black Orchid (Paphiopedilum Vanitas). This exotic object is cast in bronze with a solid base which has less romance but just as much vanitas — a gymnasium barbell weight.

The sensibility in all of these works is a discomforting glory in beauty, detail and objects, one that may be doomed to emptiness. Sebastian Smee described this sensibility as narcissism in 2007 (‘Brittle Beauty’, Weekend Australian, March 24–25, 2007), an apt analogy in the sense of excessive self love as told in the Greek myth of Narcissus, where the youth falls in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to move on he starves to death.

Mirror-like in their blank faces are two intricately depicted portraits on a large scale. Debaser/Burberry Prorsum and Debaser/Gaultier are images of two male figures, their hair and clothes meticulously rendered, while their facial features have been rubbed away. It leaves them in a curiously empty state with the individual distinction sought through fashion and commerce making only for anonymity.

But it is not only clothes that seduce us and the key work in this exhibition is 1820s Regency leather sofa/Favela chair/Champion Dachsund ‘Windkiedach Wiggle’/a Dale Frank. This painted rendition of a Vogue Living photograph shows a highly fashionable trophy for our times, the lush and exuberant Dale Frank abstract painting hanging over a Chesterfield-type leather lounge. A patterned rug, objects on side tables, another chair, ensure that this painted trophy is perfectly accessorized. With the ultimate irony of art enslaved by interior design — the old cliché about the painting matching the couch — and the vehicle, a magazine that makes us want, this image sums up desire. But the moment of halt and possession, a melancholic climax and an unpeopled interior, leave an internal emptiness as possible corollary to this dalliance in the world of luxury.

Trophy trickery is on the agenda internationally, with new museums in the US described recently by Jed Perl as ‘only brands designed to contain brands’ with trophy choices for these venues including Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. (Jed Perl, The Weekend Australian, July 26–27, 2008)

Zavros targets yet reveres the thrill of the chase, the trophy hunter’s prowess, desire, preparation, fight to the death, and the melancholic mood which may follow. His interest in beauty is antithetical to much contemporary art, and the emotional engagement his work may conjure is at odds with an echoing internal sensibility in each work. But unlike much of the trophy art that Perl dissects, we are engaged by Zavros’s imagery. We want to look back, we want to allow its flirtation and affectation, even haunted by its echoes of a strange truth, we can’t walk away. It is aesthetic enslavement.

Louise Martin-Chew, 2008

Michael Zavros

Gucci Black

195 x 250cm

Oil on Canvas

2008

Dior Breton/Bay
167 x 210cm
Oil on canvas
2005

collection of the artist

Bruberry Prorsum/Bay

195 x 250 cm

oil on canvas

2006

private collection

Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking/Bay

195 x 250cm

oil on canvas

2006

Michael Zavros was born in 1974. He graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1996 where he has subsequently worked as a sessional lecturer in painting and printmaking. Since graduating he has taken part in numerous group exhibitions including Primavera 2000 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Sebastian: Contemporary Realist Painting, Quiet Collision: Current Practice/Australian Style, Associazione ViaFarini, Milan, Italy 2003 and New Nature at Govett Brewster Gallery, New Zealand in 2007. Solo exhibitions include Everything I wanted, for which he was awarded an Arts Queensland Development Grant, at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in 2003/2004 and Egoiste at Wollongong Regional Gallery in 2007.

Michael Zavros is the recipient of several awards and grants, including the 2002 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award. In 2004 he was awarded the Primavera Collex Art Award through the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and in 2005 he won the Robert Jacks Drawing Prize through Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria. In 2004, 2005 and 2006 he was a finalist in The Archibald Prize. In 2007 he was awarded the Kedumba Drawing Award and was appointed to the Visual Arts and Craft Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

In 2001 Michael Zavros was awarded the Australia Council Visual Arts/Craft Fund, Milan Residency and more recently, the VACF Barcelona Residency in 2005. In 2003 he was awarded a Cite International des Arts Residency in Paris through the Power Institute, University of Sydney. In 2004 he was the recipient of a residency at the Gunnery Studios, Sydney, from the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

Forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions at Sophie Gannon Gallery in October 2007 and Gold Coast City Art Gallery in 2008 and a show with Nell at Gertrude St Contemporary Art Spaces in 2008.

His work has been included in the Craftsman House publication Awesome! Australian Art for Contemporary Kids, featuring 50 Australian contemporary artists. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including Artbank, National Portrait Gallery, Collex, ABN AMRO, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Grafton Regional Art Gallery and TMAG (Tasmanian Museum and Gallery).

APT6

Kibong Rhee/South Korea, Seoul

There is no place- Shallow cuts 2008

This is one of my favourite piece of artwork I saw during the excursion to APT6. I love how the artwork has the feeling of mysterious and phantasm just by looking it at it. Although if I was in the room looking at that artwork alone would be a little scary. But I love the whole idea of mist and tree. Love the name 'Willow Tree'! It was suprising finding out that the artist of this artwork is from South Korea.

APT6

Gonkar Gyatso

Gonkar Gyatso b. 1961, Tibet/England Angel 2007 Stickers and pencil on treated paper. 152 x 121.5cm The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2008 with funds from Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

http://qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/current/apt6/artists/gonkar_gyatso

Kohei Nawa

Kohei Nawa Japan b.1975 PixCell-Elk#2 2009 240 x 249.5 x 198cm Taxidermied elk, glass, acrylic, crystal beads Work created with the support of the Fondation d’enterprise Hermės Courtesy the artist and SCAI, Tokyo Photograph: Seiji Toyonaga

b.1975 Osaka, Japan
Lives and works in Kyoto, Japan

http://qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/current/apt6/artists/kohei_nawa

Example of Artist Books

Procedures in my visual diary

Me: Christian, Korean, American, Only Child, Sohyun Jeong, Australia, QLD, Southport, Grade 9, St Hilda's School, Middle School, Korea, Bundang, Creative, Art, Criminal Psychology, 3 Language - Japanese, Korean, English

Age 2: Very Lovely, cute, extra adorable

Age 6: Lovely, Cute, Adorable

Age 10: cute, energetic, annoying

Black N White : Although it's not a colour, it's my favourite because I love SIMPLE

Yellow: Cute colour, I like it, but I don't think it suits me

Red: One of my favourite colour because it represents passion for me

Purple: Some people treat this colour as gay colour..I don't think so, it's a mystery colour to me