whose genius?

Look at this amazing landscape, delineated in bold abbreviated colour gestures; and who was the genius? Matisse? Derain? We have to ask ourselves why it is that there is even an ambiguity. Perhaps, the breakthrough that these artists were perpetrating was so wholesale, that they spoke with one voice??

The artist was George Braque, La Ciotat, 1907, 38 cms H X 46 cms W, Centre Pompidou Paris.

pointillist buttons

My catalogue of button assembly, comprising works of whimsy and the grand statements.

I want to compare and contrast the textures and techniques I’ve invented. Also my antecedents, from living with a couple of central Australian indigenous dot paintings by the community elder Clifford Possum Tjappaljari, to visiting the major exhibition of the French Nabi fauve painter Andre Derain, at the Art Gallery of NSW, where his amazing bridge paintings were collected in a room, and the show culminated in the Dance of Joy painting, that easily overshadowed the dance paintings of Matisse. Also my love of the impeccably realist but simultaneously intensely expressionist work of Van Gogh in Otterloo, Holland.

I need to examine the importance of patterned mark-making for me, perhaps an occasional sense that tapestry was unable to be a successful vehicle for this activity, which led me to explore the colour, texture and luminosity of buttons, their integrity and autonomous presence, greater even than wefts in tapestry, as each button sits alongside others but nevertheless presents its story, its origins. Its material origin becomes a deciding factor in how it manages to present colour, texture, luminosity: cellulose, bakelite, plastic or pearl-shell, each behaves differently.