These works have all been completed this year – 2024.
The Martin Luther King Jr mixed media drawing is on the book cover remains of a 1950’s Funk and Wagnells Dictionary. I have used all the pages over the past few years in this book to draw and print on. Mixed media included black and white ink, charcoal, red pencil, and gouache. This is a work for the invitation only Vacant Assembly Block Show where artists are asked to prepare a work in the general dimensions of a besser block. The book cover has been secured by using liquid nails to adhere two strips of wood on the back with options for hooks to hang it with. I’m interested in the use of old books, old book pages and old book covers through the work of William Kentridge and Sam Lock [ a British minimalist abstract painter].
The office worker drawing is for an invitation only group show at Flying Colours bar in West End. The theme: “Out of Office”. The idea of desperation of the masses who grind away on the treadmills of living in a capitalist society at breakneck – and break the spirit – pace to fund the growth myth leads to starved souls, vacant eyes and a longing for the flowers of beauty and renewal. “Out of Office, Out of Mind” I posted a work in process as well as the finished work in the back end of the studio.
The first charcoal drawing:
“City Lights – A Mile Up“
“This work was drawn in response to Australian composer Stuart Greenbaum’s work “City Lights – A Mile Up.” I drew this in my home studio with the paper pinned to the wall. When I heard Greenbaum’s music i imagined flying into Melbourne [Naarm] my birth place. I sketched the first idea in my journal with fountain pen. Flying into Melbourne is always a joy with rolling hills on the approach, mostly dark skies and at night, lights and roads scattering and moving, heaving and dropping away. This work is about that anticipation and the inherent beauty of lights and industrial constructed impacts on once pristine space, landscape and country. My regular ritual is to draw daily, with pencil, ink or fountain pen in my studio or back deck and I have a print making practice relief print [ lino – cut] and monotype.
What is a work of art
if not to be a squeeze of something inert untouchd
and unable to be assessed by smart logic
a kind of smart not felt but deduced outside of intuition and affect
while small marks and loud, colours and movement of charcoal
splashed with bent brushes finding not a design but a final resting place
that births a song in slow sincopation.
Peter Breen
November 5 , 2024
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