christmas show
@ The Oats Factory Gallery
Cynthia Ellis movement paintings
december 4th to 24th 2011
all enquiries contact Melody at
| The Oats Factory |
milky way sworl painting 2011 sold
pleiades sworl painting 2011 sold
Sgr- A sworl painting 2011
spiral gallaxy sworl painting 2011 sold
Cynthia Ellis paintings as reviewed by David Bromfield
http://vicparkarts.com.au/styled-2/index.html
Review 15/12/11 7:39 AM
Victoria Park Centre for the Arts
Art for All
Welcome to my review page.
As this web site develops I will be commenting on art and related matters once a week for this page and for the Centre Gallery Facebook .
Watch out for announcements of my new articles by email. David Bromfield
The Oats Factory Gallery, Christmas P-arty until December 25th
Everyone knows about Christmas shows. They are the place where, ‘The Christmas Present that Time Forgot’ first saw the light of day. Work that failed to sell in previous exhibitions comes together with ‘affordable’ small works made especially for the occasion by artists, under some pressure from their dealers to make something suitable for the occasion.
Fortunately the Oats Factory, just over the tracks and past the bookshop on Oats Street, has chosen against this popular but pathetic response to the festive season. Every piece in its Christmas P-arty show (on view until Christmas eve) is first, a work of art, and only second affordable. This is important, as, whatever the price, a work of art is always a work of art, so paradoxically an affordable work is often a huge bargain that will engage you forever just as the most elaborate and expensive work might.
The Oats Factory is filled with opportunities. For instance, the delightful small ‘paintings’ of Cynthia Ellis delight with their precise manipulation of a dense square mass of multicolored oil paint, often 4 or 5 centimetres deep, so that the slow moving, solid, mass of oil paint, flowing and articulate, with its internal stresses rendered in coloured striations, like a gloriously over ambitious, but joyous, humbug. Ellis is better known for several superb massive large paintings in corporate foyers, each several square metres, covered in paint 15 centimetres deep but these small works have an identical, absolute, undeniable presence.
This is not paint applied to make an image or at least the reminiscence of an image or an optical experience produced by carefully shaped layers of paint. It is paint as creation, the world before the big bang, paint heaving to give birth to a new world, as did the dark waters when the Lord of all Creation passed across them.
By contrast the classical small figure sketches in oil, by Zoe Chong Seng are about the image as it emerges from paint, into a world of light, energy and movement. Paint suddenly develops hard and soft edges, which instantly become peaks and troughs of light, moving across a male figure lit from the side, in an open white shirt, as it turns, slowly, but dramatically, before one’s gaze.
Figures without paint feature in a tiny dramatic montage by Peter (no relation) Ellis, with the title Quick Franz! The Fuhrer is a Zombie shoot him in the head. Their tiny scale and the absurd, but poetic, premise of an alternative version of the last days of the Third Reich somehow echoes the slow disappearance of the most evil man in history into a mushy digital myth, the last glimpse of a childhood game of soldiers seen from a great distance. Soon the great mass murderer with the strange moustache will be no more ‘real’ than Attila the Hun.
Several other painters pursue different versions of this great dissolution of anything that could be taken for granted. Matthew Jackson deploys some familiar resources of Pop art - words painted over and under faces and details of figures, cropped from unseen complex events in the imagination. Jackson, however, paints the fragmentation of clues to identity, metaphysics, not the brash confidence of consumer Pop. His hard edges are uncertain, his colours deliberately fugitive. David Ledger interpolates the geometry of the outdoor Pop concert into landscape and jungle. This is the universe as a stage of mirrors an infinite trap for the ego.
Abdul Rahmen-Abdullah’s striking bronze figure Heifer delicately covered in glowing red lacquer is an even stronger challenge to western high art conventions of truth to materials. The bronze only shows its shiny hooves. This exciting entry to the new year by Victoria Park’s only commercial gallery promises very good things for the future.
http://www.vicparkarts.com.au/styled-2/index.html Page 4 of 5 Review 15/12/11 7:39 AM
painting no 1 (perceptual acquaintance) 2011 poa
paintings no 2 (perceptual acquaintance) poa
painting no 1 and painting no 2 poa