equilibrium art

last post alert - discontinuing blog

2010-01-29T09:59:00.000Z

Dear all, I have made the decision to discontinue this blog for many reasons.... but do not despair, as all art related posts will continue over at my homely blog @ www.thehomelyplace.blogspot.com. I would love for anyone enjoying this blog to stay with me over at the homely place!

Victoria and Albert museum

2010-01-19T12:39:00.000Z

I went to the V&A on Sunday with my daughter - it was her first trip there. I was hoping she would be inspired by original art and crafts, which she was, until she started finding the items in the shop more interesting than the museum.

I bought these 2 pattern books to help in my inspiration for pattern design:

Peter Godwin

2010-01-12T08:42:00.001Z

Peter Godwin has recently exhibited in London and Sydney. He works with egg tempera on board or hemp with stunning results. His works are dark interiors, often including masks, an owl and patterned curtains, all set inside his studio. These are familiar objects which he paints again as his perception of them changes. The paintings are reminiscent of old master works - the traditional still life, his choice of subject, his settings - but his use of composition and execution are more like drawings, etched into the egg tempera base. His paintings are a stage with a theatrical dramatic theme, which the viewer is invited in to watch. The choice of colours are unusual but work perfectly in the paintings. Incidentally, when I was a student at the National Art School, he took a couple of my classes - the most memorable being painting, when he brought in a rabbit carcass from the butcher and hung it on a board for the class to paint. Mine turned out terrible!

Interior with Highland Shield and Owl

Breton's Closet

Interior with Highland Shield

Cabinet with Shells

Blue Curtain II

Red Screen/Curtain I

images from defiance gallery

lazy

2010-01-11T20:43:00.000Z

I'm afraid I've been a wee bit lazy about this blog ... I can only post on it when I'm actually looking at lots of art for inspiration, and at the moment there's too much going on to be able to focus on painting or looking at art at all for that matter. I hope to be back in action again soon with more inspiring art and new ideas!

2010-01-01T21:42:00.000Z

to all my blog readers

L.S. Lowry

2009-12-16T09:48:00.004Z

L.S. Lowry is one of my favourite artists, since growing up with a print of one of his paintings in our house (see last painting). I still haven't been to the gallery in Salford where a lot of his work hangs, but saw one painting in the Tate many years ago which blew me away. He is such an important artist in terms of capturing the atmosphere and industrial landscapes of past times. His style is reminiscent of many British 'naive' painters of the 20th century.

VE Day Celebrations

Industrial Landscape 1955 oil on canvas

In Clitheroe

The Canal Bridge

Clifford's Tower

Factories, Lancashire

The Fever Van

Canal and Factories 1955

Street Scene, Pendlebury

Industrial Landscape (Ashton-under-Lyne)

This painting has special significance for me and possibly is the reason I like Lowry so much.... it was on the wall of the stairwell of our house for most of my childhood, so I looked at it several times a day as I went past. I used to stand and study it trying to imagine the landscape for real and what it would be like actually being in the landscape. Seems to have had a lasting impression!

images from tate, national galleries of scotland, manchester events guide, national museums liverpool

Ganesha

2009-12-13T21:32:00.003Z

This is a Scandinavian-inspired Ganesha that I designed over the weekend.

Matisse

2009-12-03T16:53:00.007Z

To celebrate the new look of this blog I'm doing a post on Matisse. His colours and decorative style of painting are so inspiring. I love the way all the surfaces are full of pattern and design and colour. And I especially love the odalisque paintings... and the interiors... what a great master!

harmony in red

the red studio

still life

the music lesson

music

the egyptian curtain

the bank

odalisque in red trousers

seated odalisque

odalisque with a moorish chair

images from artneedlepoint, biddingtons, museothyssen, mystic-art, ngv, smarthistory, yle

Lucy Yukenbarri

2009-11-29T19:53:00.003Z

One of my favourite Aboriginal artists is Lucy Yukenbarri. Her work depicts the many colours and shapes of the landscape of the Wangkartu region where she lived. (It is located in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.)

purrpunpa

marpa

marpa 1

gathering seeds for damper

images from artnet and art gallery of nsw

Criss Canning

2009-11-25T09:24:00.008Z

Australian artist Criss Canning has once again captured my attention, so here is the 2nd blog post on her work. The first here was back in August. The compositions in her work are deliberately simple, giving them the quality of a Japanese print, especially with her use of flat colour in large areas contrasting with the detail of the seed pods and flowers. I especially love her use of reflection and light/shadow which add depth to the works.

Here's the blurb from Metro Gallery:

Criss Canning, born in Melbourne 1947, is one of Australia's leading still life artists. Her rich strong paintings are unmistakably her own. Incredibly accomplished technically her work is sumptuous in colour, complex in design and sensuous in effect. Canning's paintings repay careful and repeated viewing. Each brushstroke is lovingly and lusciously applied. The objects in her work, the flowers, ceramics, trays and fabrics are arranged and rearranged until a wonderful balance and harmony is achieved. Only then does Canning put paint to canvas. In her next show, at Metro 5 Gallery, Canning's love of colour has taken another leap in these exciting new paintings.

A 2007 major retrospective of Criss Canning's work at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery broke all records with 22,700 visitors to the exhibition. The retrospective moved to the Mornington Peninsula regional Art Gallery where again there was a terrific response.

David Thomas's lavishly illustrated and beautifully written 2007 monograph "Criss Canning- The Pursuit of Beauty" published by Macmillan Art Publishing, sold out within a few months of its release. A second revised edition will be published this year and is to be launched at Canning's exhibiton opening at Metro 5 Gallery on the 12th of November 2008.

Criss Canning is represented at the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery and the Castlemaine Art Gallery. Canning's work can be found in collections in London, Paris, Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, USA, Indonesia, Singapore and New Zealand.

Wild Iris from Albania 2008 oil on canvas

Tulips with Stripes 2008 oil on cedar panel

Still life

Starry Starry Night 2008 oil on canvas

Shades of Red #2 2008 oil on canvas

Red Still Life with Oriental Poppy 2008 oil on canvas

Pink Poppies

Gumnuts

Anemones 2007 oil on canvas

images with thanks from Metro Gallery, Art Equity, Ask Art, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

Graham Brown

2009-11-12T20:21:00.008Z

This is a painting by Australian artist Graham Brown. It is a portrait of the great spiritual personality, HH Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, founder of Sahaja Yoga, a meditation widely practised throughout the world. The portrait is from a photograph of Shri Mataji when She was 16 years old.... She is now in Her eighties.

Graham is a trained architect and paints immaculately. He paints Indian miniature style as well as Western still life and Icons. Graham's frequent trips to India have had a major influence on his art.

'In his exquisitely intricate, sensitively coloured and totally fresh expressions in painting, Graham Brown seeks to impart a Sense of the Sacred…Through his delicate ancient imagery the new world, which is indeed the evolutionary journey to self-discovery, is beautifully unveiled.

In this day and age the term 'sacred' carries much baggage with it, but in Graham's works the religious imagery is not used to point towards any particular dogma. Rather the artwork is intended to transport one to a space where there is no divisions; a place of pure spirituality, divinity, evolution and self-discovery.

His work expresses the beauty and serenity found within the Sacred. The main vehicle for this is traditional imagery drawn from both Eastern and Western religious heritage, but also in the simplicity of still life and in the divine imagery found in landscapes. Graham Brown is not limited to religious imagery, and as he puts it This sense of the Sacred can be seen, not only in icons but also in a landscape; even in a simple still life arrangement. Where real objects or prototype images are used as models, these are points of departure only; the painting ultimately originates from within.

Through this varied subject matter, and with the incredible sensitivity of his brushstrokes, the forms of beauty uncovered are manifold.'

Here's a link to Graham's website

Shri Gajalakshmi - gouache

Lilies and Citrus (detail) - gouache

Mother and Child with Jewels (detail) - gouache

all images from Graham Brown

Anna Chicos

2009-10-26T09:59:00.006Z

'“Everything we see falls apart vanishes. Nature is always the same, but nothing in her that appears to us, lasts. Our art must render the thrill of her permanence along with her elements, the appearance of all her changes; it must give us a taste of her eternity”
Paul Cezanne

This hunger to touch the eternal in nature is an echo of my personal spiritual journey into the Imagination, the part that is ‘always the same’, pure consciousness and awareness, and a realisation that infinite reality is always with us intimate and familiar though sometimes veiled…it is the gold contained in the shadow of our earthly life. This journey of discovery is presented allegorically through the use of black, white and gold, representing the alchemical transmutation from nigredo to citrino or lead to gold.'

Anna Chicos - artist statement

Anna has just graduated from ANU with a Degree in Ceramics. These are her final works which are inspired by the nature around where she lives. They are gorgeous cups and beakers all hand thrown in porcelain with a transfer print of Anna's tree drawings which are verging on semi-abstract. She's added gold to many of them which adds interest and contrast to the design. In continuing her work and possibly a Masters, she will modify and develop this design in various ways, particularly into abstraction. I personally can't wait to see her tree forms on the platters and vases she plans to create!

Emma Walker

2009-10-12T17:08:00.009+01:00

"Still in her mid-30s, Emma Walker is already one of Australia’s most convincing and original painters. Her work is as audacious as it is poetic; the one quality leavens the other, so that just as delicate reverie sets in, you’re pulled up by a less immediately seductive note, an act of painterly boldness or some other form of tough, enlivening aesthetic decision.

Walker’s work gets stronger with the years, treading the sometimes overtrodden path between representation and abstraction in a way quite unlike any of her contemporaries. She orchestrates her constantly returned-to motifs – seas, inlets, rivers, headlands, skies, clouds and shadow – in ways that are constantly invigorating.

The emotions and moods of her works are conjured directly out of the processes of painting, unmediated by theory or jargon. And yet these are intelligent paintings – intelligent in their understanding of ambiguities, of space, and of colour. They are extremely sensitive to mood, at times reminiscent of the work of the American Luminists – especially Martin Johnson Heade’s atmospheric subtlety and bold use of pooling blacks in paintings such as Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859, and Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay, 1868. But Walker updates the idiom with her bold and brushy way with paint and her tremendous array of textural effects.

Her works on paper are also compelling, suggesting new possibilities of texture and scale, playing deftly with poetic links between the microscopic in nature and the distantly observed'.

- Sebastian Smee

creek bed

granite fire country

silent geography

root system

born into the sky

springdale II

stand

on track

stand II

the high arm

uphill II

bush bloom

the long valley

arriving colebrook

all images from tim olsen gallery

Paul Davies

2009-09-29T21:38:00.005+01:00

Aussie artist Paul Davies ticks all the right boxes. His paintings are original, display great architecture and the colours are amazing. His compositions are so interesting and give a feeling of space and light, while being painterly in parts and a bit rough around the edges.

Here's the blurb from the Tim Olsen Gallery website:

Channelling the bleak panoramic vision of a young David Hockney, Australian artist Paul Davies’s newest series of paintings, on show this month at Sydney's Tim Olsen Gallery are a contemporary lesson in pure aesthetics.

Taking his original spark of inspiration from an Aspen holiday magazine, Davies’s block-coloured, eerily empty paintings are a clear expression of the artist’s obsession with line and form.

With a keen interest in the Bauhaus and late modernist buildings, Davies’s paintings offer a striking synthesis between artistic control and abstraction. Constructed using both stencils and free hand painting, Davies multi-disciplinary approach results in overall flat paintings with an unexpected depth.

With 1970’s low slung Miami-style buildings peering ghoulishly out from amid the Peter Doig-esque trees scattering the foreground of the canvas, Davies invokes a disconcerting sense of nostalgia.

Devoid of life, the paintings are lent a surprising warmth by Davies’s striking colour combinations – Hockney he may not be, but there is no denying that what Davies does, he does remarkably well. WallpaperMagazine, Online 2009

orange staircase

falling water yellow and brown

blue pool and modern home

all images from tim olsen gallery

Mark Drake-Briscoe

2009-09-28T16:08:00.006+01:00

Mark Briscoe is an English artist living and working in Spain. His painting styles vary from Indian Miniature on a large scale, to Western tempera and oil painting. He also is a master of Chinoisserie work on furniture and mirror frames (shown on my interiors blog).

bushes and bracken

to the heights

rani with fan

lovers on horseback

rani with flower

images from Mark Drake-Briscoe

charlie sheard

2009-09-26T18:31:00.008+01:00

this artist amazes me. his use of oil paint (and other materials) is incredible and the atmospheric forms he creates are wonderfully subtle, drawing you into the painting. he paints using old master techniques, yet creates these incredible abstract works with intense colours. i would love to be able to afford one!

Here's what he says on the Tim Olsen Gallery website:

Two artists have inspired me continuously for twenty years, the sixteenth century Venetian painter Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), and the twentieth century poet Ezra Pound. In the work of both of these men, technical mastery of the highest order is married to visionary intensity and spendour.

For some years I have been working with techniques in general from Venetian Renaissance models, and in particular from Titian, whose pictures exhibit extraordinary layering of colour, thereby achieving an unprecedented richness and complexity of optical effect. Such effects, arising out of the dynamic relationship between opacity and transperancy in the oil medium, lend themselves suggestively to the rendering of atmospheric light. Like many painters before me (such asTurner, and Monet in his late work), I have drawn deeply on this branch of Titian's endeavour.'

- Charlie Sheard,

from Exhibition Catalogue 'Homage to Tiziano and Ezra Pound,' 2000

good afternoon wassily

pink lights

jade peak

landscape

green forms in red air

abstraction in acrylic, vinyl, paper, chalk in acrylic dispersion, acrylic primed linen

abstraction in oil, alkyd resin, copper powder, resin, slate dust, marble dust, phlogopite glimmer yellow, wax, on oil primed linen

images from charliesheard.com and tim olsen gallery

margaret olley

2009-09-23T22:44:00.007+01:00

Margaret Olley is a major influence on my paintings. Here are some great shots of her in her fantastic house.

86 year old artist Margaret Olley in her home in Paddington.
Photo: Tamara Dean

"It's the only thing I like doing," says Margaret Olley, in her studio in Sydney's Paddington, of her painting. The artist, who turns 83 this month, has been named a Companion of the Order of Australia.
Photo: Steven Siewert

"I thought, well, if I'm ever going to do it, I'd better not waste any time" ... Margaret Olley at her home in Paddington.
Photo: Brendan Esposito

A was an Artist

2009-09-08T09:40:00.003+01:00

this is a print i spotted in a shop window in York - it reminded me of my son who is very artistic and whose name starts with "A"

the office is in use!

2009-09-03T16:10:00.003+01:00

After 2 long months we are now using our new outdoor office - yay!! There is no more mess in the house from paper and printing and guillotining!!

spot the gym hiding around the corner, along with the guillotine on the right

our paintings decorate every wall...

the view through the front door

the outside has been rendered and painted - only the garden is left to complete now!

art in action - the ceramicists

2009-09-01T16:38:00.006+01:00

following my original post on art in action back in july, i have been meaning to put up images of my favourite crafts-people from the event. here are the first batch of ceramicists whose work really was absolutely beautiful and stunning

massive hand-made outdoor pots to enhance the patio or garden

philip simmonds - sculptural ceramics

a range of lovely coloured items

jane cox - ceramics

amazing colours and gorgeous shapes

eddie & margaret curtis - curtis ceramics

delicate porcelain expertly thrown

linda bloomfield - thrown porcelain

wonderful colour glazes and shapes

bridget drakeford - porcelain

rustic beauties

susanne lukacs-ringel

Garden office

2009-09-01T16:18:00.000+01:00

We are in the process of building our garden office. Here are some pics showing the process...

knocking down what was there before

a blank canvas

the new building emerges

structure is finished

outside is rendered

we finally painted the interior

Soon I'll upload some photos of the way it looks now with the laminate floor and bits of office furniture, not to mention gym!

pink pianos posting

2009-09-01T08:20:00.004+01:00

Hilary Hahn of Pink Pianos has done a lovely post on my card designs, along with Jill Bliss whose work I love - thankyou Hilary!

Sophisticated Surfaces

Here are some surface designs to cheer the mundane.

An artist from Britain, Natalie Singh makes graphic

prints and develops them into cards for family and friends.

I find this print especially eye-catching and could even

picture it as a wallpaper.

Love the background colors and pattern on this one!

A final fave is this curvy retro pattern below.

Natalie also has a shop where you can purchase cards

and she oozes with original features on design .

Another artist hat has caught my eye on several

occasions is Jill Bliss with her organic shapes and

eco-inspired designs. One of my favorite topics to

discuss in an artwork is nature and it’s splendor.

Based in Oregon with roots in California, Jill’s work

investigates the flora around us here.

These poppies are delicate and beautiful.

Love the minty fresh card!

Oh, what a mural.

Jill maintains a stunning shop of where you can truly

grasp her unique style. I was reminded of Jill’s work

on my trip to Kentucky, where I noticed some of her

splendid notecards for sale, these cards available here.

At Jill’s shop you can learn more about her inspiration

as an artist and look at her portfolio too.

Look forward to catching a glimpse of Jenna’s

desk redo along with another artist’s cards later today!

i love this painting

2009-08-29T00:27:00.002+01:00

i love this painting - found on decorpad - it is so vibrant and has the right kind of textured abstract qualities that i love in painting

afternoon tea painting

2009-08-23T20:03:00.002+01:00

just finished this as a commission for a friend!

(for some reason the colours are appearing slightly faded - don't know why)

new interiors blog

2009-08-19T15:53:00.004+01:00

seeing as i have recently got a bit carried away with interiors on this blog, i have decided to create a whole new blog devoted just to interiors, so i can focus more on art and other stuff on this blog.

so the new interiors blog is called the homely place - i hope you will enjoy it!