My father born in Linz, Austria, stumbled across NZ because the Australian Visa office was closed.  How random is that! He had to look up where it was, when they said he could go there with his friend. He slept in a car on Mt Victoria, in Wellington, enjoyed traveling the country and going on hunting trips which are a luxury in Austria. He returned to Austria and met my mother and showed her the pictures of this wonderfully promising country on the other side of the world. She comes from Leibnitz, a small town in a stunning wine growing area close to the Slovenian boarder.

My father trained as an artificial limb-maker when he left school and accepted the job and accommodation offered by the NZ government, when he applied to return. My parents arrived in NZ in 1960. My father was 25 and my mother was 20 when they sailed over and arrived in Wellington.  She gave birth to my sister soon after and then I was born 13 months later. 

Both my parents left school at 14, both were arty/crafty, and experienced the war as children. One of my fathers recollections of his teenage-hood is attending a Hitler rally. There are a lot of war heroes in my family. One grandfather was awarded an iron cross for crawling up the side of a tank and tossing in a hand grenade, and I recently had the medal sent to me. My other grandfather, a bee-keeper, escaped from a POW camp in Siberia and walked back to Austria, which took him a whole year.

Our household was very Austrian; gorgeous textiles, rugs, embroideries (yes, I think there is a connection there to the visual tactility of my painting), traditional folk furniture and art objects.  My mother had worked as a nanny back in Austria (think governess  'Sound of Music') and excelled in all the domestic arts, especially cooking, embroidery and sewing. She also played the Zither, cultivated roses, and did amazing ikebana flower arrangements.  My mother looks quite eastern European, black hair and pale skin. I always thought she was so beautiful, especially when she danced to Elvis Presley while she vacuumed. She became quite a career women in New Zealand, exhibited her needle-crafts and rugs, managed exhibitions and a embroidery shop, travelled the country giving demonstrations, and played the zither at functions.  Now she's an extraordinary and passionate gardener and her efforts in Tauranga have been featured on garden trails.

My father is a master craftsman with nearly every material, especially wood, and more recently has become an exhibiting figurative sculptor with clay. He can do incredible Leonardo da Vinci type drawings of anatomy, and is really interested in the expression in human forms. He is the ultimate handyman and can make and fix anything, and I have inherited a bit of that.  Also a very talented gardener, he cultivated bonsai's and made ceramic pots for them. He designed and made traditional Austrian furniture, (hollowed out hearts and turned legs) and built a lovely Chalet in our Melrose garden, shutters and wooden boxes filled with flowers, that we used to call 'the little hut'. My parents posed outside the chalet for Austrian Club invitation photo shoots in their national dress. My father was 'shuh-blattler' a dance where a team of men sing, carry out a log and chop it up, while slapping their thighs. I was in awe of that as a child.

German was my first language; apparently I didn't learn English until I went to school and then taught and corrected my parents. My Oma stayed with us a couple of times for extended periods and I remember her hilarious way of talking with her hands to explain German to my sister and I, and I sometimes think that gestural imprint soaked into me, and has played out in the way I make paintings. She taught me how to make apfel-strudel and had a very silly sense of humour that my sister and I loved her for. When I hear Austrian-German now, it's like hearing a nursery rhyme you haven't heard since you were 4, and it makes me feel very strange.  So I can understand spoken German really well and like to practice speaking from time to time but have very little occasion to. I try to see every contemporary Austrian film that comes out. I love the complex psychology in their filmmaking, which is so different to the tourist representations and the ideas about the 'home country' I had growing up. I spent a year in Austria, in my twenties, working in ski resorts and that really gave me a perspective on what was 'Austrian' and what was just my parents personalities, as I really found it hard to distinguish between the two.

So I am a first generation NZer, and that's tough, very little extended family, and no historical roots to any particular location. I sometimes feel I don't really understand the subtleties of this culture, which for those born here is a childhood osmosis of learning about what the right thing to say and do is, at a particular time.  Our family culture was very direct, demonstrative, expressive. We observed traditions like Christmas on the 24th and ate very European food. I have learned that I am more Austrian than I thought in relation to others born here, but have always considered myself a kiwi through and through.

I think there is significant Austrian cultural influence in my work. I see it in the baroque romanticism that I love, a kind of serious aesthetic, an intensity which appears different to some NZ sensibilities, a love of a 'richness' that isn't about Pacific relaxed ways, light and song. I also hope that some of the refined elegance that I admired so much living for a couple of years in Japan has also permeated my painting practice. I definitely inherited the work ethic of an immigrant, and I am a willing slave to art.

Back in 2006, I had my first solo show at Milford Galleries, in Dunedin, called 'Airborne'. A tribute to the elemental nature of Wellington, especially the effect of air, its cross currents, swirling energy, and the interlacing of water and salt spray, so keenly felt from my Lyall Bay home. One work from the series called 'Zephyr', I was really pleased with as it achieved a fortuitous 'moire' effect which is a psychedelic moving pattern that is created by diagonally crossing lines (see 2005 tab to view 'Zephyr').

A little while after the show Milford Galleries contacted me with a possible contract for paintings for a 5 star luxury hotel that was being built at Franz Josef Glacier -Te Waonui Forest Retreat. Have a look! The designers Dalman Architecture worked with Milford Galleries and selected 2 paintings to be featured in the restaurant and in the bar, and other works from the exhibition to be photographed and printed large for each of the 100 rooms.

Last week I dropped into the hotel to view the work and bumped straight into the manager Richard Bungeroth, who warmly greeted us with kiwifruit cocktails and a tour. He then invited us to stay! My husband, daughter and I had been touring the South Island for the last three weeks, mainly staying with friends, and were on our way to the Picton. We quickly cancelled our cabin at the motor camp.

What an absolutely gorgeous hotel, the design is so warm, so environmentally sensitive and sophisticated. I was thrilled to see my work so proudly and singularly featured and well lit. The paintings work so well with the hotel environmental immersion theme, which celebrates textures and colours from nature, the native bush, stones, rivers and glacier. I loved hearing the staff interpretations of my work, clearly reading the elemental exploration that I had tried to achieve, and relating the paintings to the flow of water. The glacial river reading is so apt in its setting.

We immersed ourselves in the luxury of the quality of everything from the linen and organic textiles, the floaty woollen bedding, the expresso machine in our room, the bathrobes and slippers that we put on to cross through to the hot pools right next to the hotel, and of course the stunning forest setting and birdsong. The breakfast was the best we have ever had and included champagne! The cocktails late at the bar were delicious and the staff were incredibly friendly, so genuinely interested and warm, we loved meeting them all.

We stayed two nights, we just didn't want to leave! The couple packages that include hotel spa therapies, massages and facials sound brilliant. Such a restorative place to stay I left feeling very rested, energised and so pampered. Many thanks to Richard for his keen support of the arts and the very generous hospitality we so enjoyed. Highly recommended.

Happy New Year!

I am so refreshed and excited about 2016, all the potential and possibilities that lie ahead and the enjoyment of time and space I have right now to create new work.

I have new representation in Palmerston North through Bronwyn Zimmerman, who has a fabulous street front gallery there. Bronwyn has a great approach to showing contemporary art and wants to make sure that her gallery is accessible and welcoming to everyone.

Zimmerman Art Gallery
Open 11am - 3pm daily | Ph (06) 353 012
359 Main Street West, Palmerston North
PO Box 1795 Palmerston North 4440
[email protected]  |  www.zimmerman.co.nz

This month at Zimmerman Art Gallery

This month, Zimmerman is showing for the first time selected works by Wellington painter, Lorraine Rastorfer. The accomplished artist, who holds a Master of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from Elam, has described her painting process as follows: 
 
"I work with the fluidity, viscosity, opacity and transparency of paint, a variety of mark-making tools that I have designed myself and the effects of chance, control and an overall conceptual intent. I keep going until a find a spatial balance; a sense of ordered freedom, a unified variety of rhythms and streams.”    

The  image below is a taste of the Rastorfer works currently on display at Zimmerman Art Gallery - come take a closer look! 










 

Brevity (2013) Acrylic on Panel, 1200 x 1200mm
Meringue (2015) Acrylic on Panel, 1200 x 1200mm
Raspberry (2015) Acrylic on Panel, 1200 x 1200mm

​The relationship between art and commerce is so fraught, how on earth can you value art in monetary terms? Yet we do. What is the real value of art? What does it do? What is its purpose and what does it mean? Thank you, Jeanette Winterson, for exploring and articulating the ideas below (edited from her speech:  http://www.phf.org.uk/news/jeanette-wintersons-keynote-speech-awards-for-artists-2015/ )



.....We sense that life has an inside as well as an outside—that our imagination, dreams, ideas, are all invisible until we give them some visible form. We create so that other people can see the invisible. Music begins in the silent space of the mind but we invented instruments so that what is in my mind can reach your ears and your heart. Yes, always the heart. Art is nothing if we can’t feel it.The strange experience we call art is how we bridge the gap between the material and the non-material. Between the everyday life of busyness and doing, and the inner life, so personal, so necessary, so hard to place or find space for in the 24/7 mania of competition and failure.

This struggle between what is seen and what is invisible—between the 3D world of sense-experience and the anti-matter world of what cannot be proved empirically, is the never resolved, un-resolvable struggle that art throws in our faces. That art tries to solve by revealing in forms we can manage—shapes, colours, sounds, light—the overwhelming totality of consciousness. We know we only use a tiny percentage of our brains;  neuro-science is just beginning to understand how vast and weird consciousness is. The composer Sir John Tavener talked about this vast consciousness of ours and tried to reveal it through his music. But artists understand and articulate the situation in different ways. So many ways. None right or wrong; all clues towards a bigger life.

Art is energy. That’s why contact with art makes us feel better. Art isn’t some Sunday afternoon pursuit invented by the middle classes with leisure and money. Painting happened on cave walls. Music and story-telling happened round small fires in dark woods. Listen, a woman is singing. Look, a man has left a carving. Walk 20 miles to an unheated room to hear a quartet.... Art is democratic. For everybody.
And people say, ‘Art doesn’t feed the hungry or stop wars. Art doesn’t build hospitals’. It’s a matter of priorities.

Yes it is. The acute problems of our world—war, poverty, mental illness, social injustice—are symptoms of the chronic problem of our values. We value profit over people. It really is as simple as that.
But art—no matter how much it sells for—no matter how it is co-opted by the rich as a status symbol—is always and everywhere about the human condition. The Who Am I? What am I? And always about the essential creativity of human beings.

The Greeks had a word for it --Temenos, a sacred space perhaps a spring or a well or a grove—where you could meet the god. This temenos was a virtual space as well as a physical space; you could inhabit it in your mind. It became a meditative space.

Art is that meditative space. That temenos. Sometimes as an object—but essentially as an experience. You can buy it, but actually it is what can’t be bought. It is outside of the circle of getting and spending.


​Many thanks to 'essay writer' for sharing her thoughts on Jeanette's article. (see comment below)

My work is all about gesture; a physical trace of movement through space, motion to express thought, embodied marks set in time.     

Each individual work has a history of 10 or more completed works until the lines and their movements synchronise into some kind of intuited whole. I work with the fluidity, viscosity, opacity and transparency of paint, a variety of mark-making tools that I have designed myself and the effects of chance, control and an overall conceptual intent. I keep going until a find a spatial balance; a sense of ordered freedom, a unified variety of rhythms and streams.    

I have considered using gold since my years in Japan and the way it was traditionally used to great effect to create mysterious illumination from shadowy alcoves in homes. These works are intended to be seen in rooms where changing light conditions fire up the work and make the calligraphic strokes blaze.  The gold under-painting is intended to add an intensity to ideas about interactivity, a catching of light when moving past the work, a light that follows the viewer.

Energy, passion, fervour, intensity, ardour. These are the ideas that have fueled this work in order to materialize and fix an unfolding event.

Milford Galleries have published a catalogue for the exhibition.  What a superb Gallery support they are.

Ok, so I ended up scrapping everything I had shown in the previous blog and made some ruthless decisions about the look of the show. I decided that all the work would be on a base of gold with a flat earthy dense mottled matt colour over it. At first I thought silver and gold and then I thought just gold, as it's so lovely and warm, and fitted the overall concept of 'Ardour ' better than steely silver.

Ardour noun
1. passion, feeling, fire, heat, spirit, intensity, warmth, devotion, fervour, vehemence, fierceness
2. enthusiasm, zeal, eagerness, earnestness, keenness, avidity

I work 'wet in wet', so once its dry the work is finished, I can no longer move things around. So I have several goes at inscribing gestures and work out where I want a work to go. Sometimes I rework a work 20 times and I photograph the versions along the way. It's a horrible moment in reflection when I look at the images and see that actually I have destroyed a  a work that had 'something' special. I cannot ever reproduce the gestures in the same way, and I ususually start pretty wild, refining and extracting as I go.

With this series they all had to have a different visual gestural unpinning idea: falling, throwing, growth, energy, 3d space, locks of hair, fire, weeds, supple-jack, ribbons, knotted trees, ikebana, grass and  agapanthus leaves.

I'm really excited about how interactive the gold makes the work. I varnished over the gold so its not a gaudy gold but more straw gold, very shiny and it picks up the light and moves it over the gestures when you look at the work. It blazes in a really dramatic way with changing light conditions in a domestic setting and goes quiet at night under electric lights.

The matt paints I use are so dense, rich and velvety. The downside is they are really sensitive to greasy fingers and scuffs so this painting has to be handled very carefully, and that's always a worry. Many artists I admire who use similar materials have work cordoned off as painting generally often longs to be touched.

Ugh, ended up being sick for 5 weeks, getting very behind in my painting and very very grumpy. But back into now, lost my thread and taken two weeks to find it again. Now at the remembering, re-evaluating and making resolutions about how to go forward, stage. To get there has meant a lot of floundering around but cleared the way for next steps. Therefore most of the work below has been an explorative process and has not survived. I saw the show as being predominantly red, but now have introduced gold and pink, so quite a romantic look, and regretting I didn't use warmer tones as under-painting. I remember then that I have thought this before (annoying to not remember that in the first place) and this means I will need to rework some of it. Next post will show the work that survived from the carnage below. I seem to be working in 2 directions - more botanical forms versus more abstract and need to synthesise these 2 looks, crossover between the forms. Running out of time, only a month to go, so will be working 7 days a week.
P.S. Click on small image for a closer look.

I've been sick in bed for a whole week, so it's been a good opportunity to ponder some new resources. One is a great book 'The Architecture of Variation', by Lars Spuybroek, an architect, artist and author. It has essays about 'Uniformity and Variety', 'Material Evolvability', 'Moire Effects', 'The Radical Picturesque' and 'Variations in Evolutionary Biology'. Quite heady stuff, multi-layered contexts and voices. More exciting though are the images, (some selected and doctored below) that analyze lines and forms of organic growth that seem really relevant to my work.

I revisited folders of 'readings' from a decade ago and I'm amazed I still get excited over stuff I collected from then that is still philosophically relevant to the things I think about now, and which has come to define my work.  I came across the statements (below the images) that I have always liked and that have held true to my thoughts about painting.

It's been a frustrating week because I have been dying to keep the momentum of the previous week going and work with the now ready under-painted surfaces. These 3 works will be pivotal to my defining my next show. I can only paint when I feel good, as it's so high energy, and I have to be feel strong and confident to pull it off.

My deadline for the upcoming exhibition at Milford Galleries in Dunedin is the end of September, in readiness for the opening on the 24th Oct. The show will be called ,  'Ardour'.

ardour (ˈɑːdə) or ardorn
1. feelings of great intensity and warmth; fervour
2. eagerness; zeal
[C14: from Old French ardour, from Latin ārdor, from ārdēre to burn]

***Please note: you are now able to subscribe to this blog and will receive it in your email account. See at end of blog.

Images no.1-5  taken from The Architecture of Variation, Lars Spuybroek.
Image no. 6, 7 & 8, and below my own.  All images colour doctored - need high colour this week!

There are all these painters. They're doing it now in the age of the internet and digitized multimedia. Why? All real painters know the pleasure of their medium... an outlaw medium.
Painting is a dense, layered and shifting thing, a complex and ambiguous visual fixing of the zeitgeist, and a cogently critical medium. 
S. Bradshaw.

Painting bears physical record to the expressions of the human hand...In no other art medium is creation more permanently and intimately bound to the movement of the human body.
J. Lasker.

We can treat (painting) as indeterminate visual noise, holding at bay it's capacity to offer us meanings, equally, we may be fascinated and absorbed by what we see to a degree that goes beyond meaning. And it is exactly the exploration of these open ended areas of the either side of meaning and symbolic communication that has driven forward the history of painting, generating much of the distinctive complexity and richness....
J. Bell.

In the 'step by step' post there were 3 silvery under-paintings, and I have rejected 2 of them, and reworked them today. One I brushed apricot bronze tinted primal, so a transparent layer and have floated some pinky iridescent paint over it. The other silver painting I took back to black. Both these rejects were tonally too dark for the next layer even though I loved some of the incidental marks in them.

I often have to reject work and redo it to push my process further. So the one I retained which is the very 'holey' bright silver one is breaking new ground, as its 'holier' than anything else I have done so far.

I'm responding to feedback that people are quite excited by the 'holes' under my combing works and I am too. Sometimes I look at these under-paintings; and think the work is entirely complete. I have an under-painting in my bedroom which I have been considering for some months to see if it actually sustains a conversation with me in its 'holy' (sic) simplicity. This work was particularly fortuitous, and it's so silky. I love how the paint is floating and transparent. So far I'm loving it as an object of contemplation, very suited to a view from a bed.

Underpainting. Quite a process for me. Love this stage though, so liquid and free. I have taken one back to black since I took these photos, think I can get a better result than I got. Will be interested to see how the very 'holey' one looks underneath the combing. Considering taking the other one back to black and redoing the liquidity for a brighter and more intense outcome,

Loving my new camera. Essential tool of course for all visual types. Can't resist posting this, driving back to Wellies. How stunning, what an end to a weekend away with my lovely family. Reveling in the romance of it all.

I collect images from everywhere and have hundreds that are my favorites from over the last 20 years or so. When I start with a new body of work, I sift through them all, which is what I have been doing recently.

Often selecting and collecting an image is a clue to some as yet unrealized work or layer of a work of the future, a kind of map that I might follow in some way. Sometimes the image may have some uncanny reference to one of my own completed works, sometimes it's just satisfies a particular aesthetic craving for a colour or form or pattern or composition or feeling or metaphor. Sometimes I don't know why the image is holding my attention, speaking to me in such a strong way that it stays in the collection. The random juxtapositions when I sift through the images can suggest new entry points too. I have photocopies and drawn some onto transparencies that I will project onto surfaces. I am about to do that.

Thank you artists, photographers, writers for your inspiring images and words that I have mixed in with some of my photos and drawings below.

YES!  Won't pretend I'm not thrilled, I am! Second year in a row as a finalist in the most prestigious National Contemporary Art Award in the country - why the most prestigious? Well it's really competitive, and at the gorgeous Waikato Museum for a start and it's there for over 3 months. The space and physical position my work was given last year, in the same award, took my breath away; the show looked fantastic. The opening had delicious food and wine, great speeches and a real buzz.

The snapshot of contemporary art is a great insight into what's happening in NZ at a given point in time. I love how it's so subjective and all left to one person. It's like lotto in terms of who wins, not the best necessarily, just what the judge happened to like.

This years judge, Aaron Kreisler, is a respected curator and he had to blind judge the entries, although he is bound to have recognised a lot of the work. When I look at the list of 52 finalists, from the 352 that entered, I know only a handful which means that most are young and emerging artists and it's great to be selected to be amongst them.

Last year very little of the work was actually painting, perhaps 7 paintings out of 50 finalists, and I expect this year will be the same. Painting struggles to be as hip as multimedia or sculpture or any kind of high tech installation in the contemporary art world. It has its limitations (which I love) but does look quite frumpy sometimes next to sleek screens, moving and aural technological processes. Mind you my process is a highly technological process, if you consider technology means, art, skill, and cunning of hand (Wiki).

Winners in the past have been: a pile of rubbish, a bush shelter, a photo of a soap dish, and last year a florescent tube balanced on a shelf, that shattered during the opening. All conceptually challenging and controversial work.

Watch this space.



*********************************
Finalists Announced for National Contemporary Art Award

National Contemporary art award judge Aaron Kreisler has selected 52 entries as finalists for this year’s National Contemporary Art Award hosted by Waikato Museum.

Faced with a record number of entries this year, Aaron Kreisler met the challenge, selecting the 52 finalists through a blind judging process.

"It is always exciting to get an opportunity to discover the rich layers and diversity of talent present in this bustling little country and the National Contemporary Art Award provides this in overwhelming abundance."

Waikato Museum Director Cherie Meecham says the National Contemporary Art Award promises artists a chance to win an art award of national significance and their work to be seen in a professionally managed gallery.

“The National Contemporary Art Award exhibition is always a highlight on our arts calendar and we’re preparing for a full and very vibrant gallery experience this year. As well as the exposure it gives to these New Zealand artists, all works are for sale, giving visitors the opportunity to view and purchase the finalists’ artworks.”

The winner and merit award winners of the National Contemporary Art Award will be announced on Friday 17 July. The exhibition will open from Saturday 18 July until Sunday 1 November 2015.

The winner of the 2015 National Contemporary Art Award will receive S15,000 from the major joint sponsors, Chow:Hill and Tompkins Wake.
For more information, follow the award on Facebook or visit waikatomuseum.co.nz

The paintings above are 3 of 8 small works (300mm x 300mm) in my exhibition at OREXART. They are in the office, not hung and not competing with the larger works. They are a starting point and a little foray into what I have been thinking of doing next on a large scale. 

There is an interactive element with all my painting, as I work with reflective and matt surfaces. The glossy under-paint catches the light and follows the movement of a body as it moves past or around the work. It's an effect that I love living with as its eye-catching and makes you hover around the work even more to look at see how the light moves. I love watching people do this in front of my work. 

A bright light shinning on the work in a domestic setting becomes like a sun of intensity, it's like the painting has an ability to radiate from it's own source.

The new work has maximum paint variance and luminosity. It needs to be held up to see just how changeable the surfaces are under the natural variance of a range of light sources.



Arts Dairy Link, with view of show

Quite a scrabbler in my downtime, since becoming a full time painter.

I've read a range of material that analyses the psychology behind games and conversations in cyberspace, and it's described as a weird combination of reality and fantasy and a whole new place in your brain to occupy. The place where conversations takes place is more like a 'dream' than anything, but made challengingly real by the 'presence' of another, the coming and going, the meetings in real time.

Scrabble got me into writing online generally, switched on a narrative voice in my head which has been quiet amidst the demands of a full time job over that last 13 years. Talking to friends through scrabble has become a place to condense and distill ideas, a discipline in communication contained within a bubble.

Phew, another solo exhibition under my belt. Some snaps pre-crowd! Yes, there was a crowd. Fantastic Auckland, everyone so social and supportive. Wonderful Rex and Jennifer and Kim doing such a great job. Great to trust that all the decisions made around the exhibition are right. Beautiful hanging decisions from Rex, really spacious and all the right work dialoging with each other.

Exhibition openings are a great opportunity to get feedback and rave...what does it all mean, how and why, lots of 'how do you do that?'. It helps me too to explain from scratch, how did I come to this kind of work? I came to this because I have a whole lot of visual and conceptual agendas that I need to fulfill. I want paintings to look like they are inevitable, that they exist because they have to exist. They must not look contrived, but effortless and spontaneous. They are not effortless! They are such hard work, but that is the fun, to make them look like they made themselves. It's walking (or dancing) the line between randomness and systems that I am really interested in, achieving unity and variety, and opening up as much ambiguity as possible, abstract, landscape, textile, wind, networking, weaving... Counting layers last night. Minimum 6 complete layers of paint, sometimes 12.

Hope people get to see the work in the flesh. There is no substitute for scale, surface quality, light, pristine white walls and a space to engage in a receptive solitary fashion to the pleasure of paint.

There and back. Oh, how can any art form possibly compete with an aerial perspective. Let us never take this for granted. Wow, majestic beauty, utter wonder, stunning Aotearoa.

For more exhibition opening shots click here: Auckland Arts Diary