Peteskibreen's Blog

When Peter Kozak accepted his $4000 winner’s cheque for the 2012 Marie Ellis Prize for Drawing at Jugglers Art Space on August 3 he said “Thankyou…I don’t do speeches”. But he has a way of drawing that has kept everyone else talking ever since. Why would a series of short lines of minimal tonal intensity conglomerating into a graphite spaghetti ball fall over the line in a drawing art prize where significant technical skills and careful subject consideration abounded in every other of the 25 finalists?

Perhaps it is the simple profundity of the artist statement. “This work is part of a series of drawings focussing on the effects of long term illness on the body. I chose to approach the subject of illness through a series of pencil drawings drawn from fragments of woollen garments in a state of stress and decay. For me, these fragments of wool are an effective metaphor for the body, with their damage representing the bodies susceptibility to violent change.”  This statement and drawing have been an epiphany for me. To see and to represent seeing like this continues to be an anchor for my life of observation and immersion in broken lives as a radiographer and in some of our programs at Jugglers. But what does it say to me about “the beautiful” and the work of artists in our collective at Jugglers and the other 100 + works that were entered in competition? While I celebrate creativity as a core element in human expression and meaning making it seems as if every now and again pain and the fraying edges of life finds a voice that is given the stage for a few moments and makes an impact only within a framework of reflective consideration. This work is not one I would pay $4000 for but it is one that in its skillful rendering, its bold story telling and beauty is worth more in its paradigm impact. It hangs now as part of the Jugglers Art Space Inc collection and I will use it repeatedly as my meditation so that I won’t have the wool pulled over my eyes by the smooth edges of  plastic superficiality. [Peter Breen as Chair and Acting Director of Jugglers Art Space Inc was not on the judging panel for the Marie Ellis Drawing Prize].

Art is story telling. Hidden meanings or not it is story telling. Putting marks on surfaces or sculpting a response to home  is story telling. If we take long enough with marks on paper or sculptures the works will play with our imaginations, teasing out our own responses and affecting our emotions. On Friday mornings this year a small group of street artists at Jugglers Art Space have been preparing for their “Favela” [slum] show on June 29, finding new ways of putting marks on surfaces, drawing, canvas stretching and preparing a body of work for their first public showing of saleable art. “Favelas” house the very poor and marginalised in South America and the Favela stories resonate with Brisbane street artists as marginalised by virtue of their choice of art form, surface and medium. Randal Breen [former Director of Jugglers Art Space] was commissioned by the Pine Rivers Art Gallery to prepare sculptured works that would tell his story of “Our House – Celebrating the Place we call home.” [Opened on Friday June 1- June 30].Randal’s strong social justice values found a voice in his works as they depicted the struggle for affordable housing, a “stilted” journey to comfort and security, a familiar story when we dig long enough here in Brisbane.

Elder Abuse was a photodocumentary at Jugglers Art Space on Wednesday May 30 by University of Queensland photographer Gemma-Rose Turnbull and Caxton Street Legal Service. Highlighting the stories of abuse in text and 40 poignant images, this event evoked strong feelings from attendees. A story of systemic abuse from Social Workers down to family relatives was a wake up call for me. Jugglers is a place for stories to be told safely and with respect.

Handle with Care [June 1, Level 1 Jugglers Art Space] featured the deeply personal stories of vulnerability from art therapists John Rohrig and Tania Balil and Paige Jayne, their friend. When stories of vulnerability are represented  in fired clay, mixed media and performance the sense is overwhelming and to some degree, healing.

Save my Soul [Saturday June 2, Jugglers Art Space] featured the amazing music of Brisbane Band The Scrapes and Melbourne based composer and guitarist Cam Butler. Accompanied by video installation Cam’s existential instrumental story journey through “Desolation” to”Some kind of Peace” was overwhelmingly haunting.

Art as story telling has been rich this week.

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Brisbane in Design was all over New Farm and Lost Movements was all over one shed in West End yesterday and into the [freezing] night [May 26]. I went to both. Art and design are proliferating in Brisbane with little sign of being affected by recent depressing decisions by the new Queensland Government’s very ordinary but symbolic funding cuts to the Premier’s Literary Awards. Brisbane in Design was well organised and highly visible market driven festival about the latest design products for inside the new  apartment /house. Up market consumers were the target and James Street was the obvious choice. Lost Movements was a well organised gig in a loaned shed by three young passionate men [with no money] from the Brisbane music and visual arts scence taking a page out of Andy Warhol’s Factory vibe that so many since have desired to replicate. The stand outs for me at Brisbane in Design were the amazing Norman Johnstone and Christina Waterson and Chair Biz’s day long car park  art installation competition with 10 artists [ selected by Chair Biz and Jugglers Nic Plowman]. Norman Johnstone and Christian Waterson are staying on the wave of creativity with never ending productions of geometrically beautiful sculptural works and utilitarian furniture. Christina’s works from rubber, plastic, wood and paper are beautiful. Their work overlaps with Norman as the creative and innovative plastics manufacturer whose stainless steel tooling devices were the most appealing to me. Norman is a generous and effusive and lateral thinking passionate creative man. He contacted me to find a graffiti artist to paint his shipping container for installation in the Brisbane in Design site in James Street! He had the artist – QUT Arts Student, John Ryder -painting graffiti on a wall in James Street during the day! He could get away with it! My kind of business man! At West End graffiti was part of the gig and inside the body painting, the stencil paste ups [Barek] the live music and other works gave me a memory throw back to the first days of the Jugglers experiment in 1998. Being at the shed in West End was like being around some kind of conception of another baby with all kinds of probabilities and potentialities. It is a very vulnerable thing. Will passion and vision get it somewhere, and given its nature, there is no end plan. Brisbane in Design and the like will grow and grow. The boundaries and the creativity are well defined enough and the money is never ending, even propped up by Arts Queensland. Consumerism at this end of the retail market is alive and well. Lost Movements has the potetial, like Jugglers Art Space, to inspire and birth a whole new wave of creativity and freedom along with Michael Candy’s Which Meat and other new artist run collectives in Brisbane. Both models of creative endeavour and the making and selling of art in community have their place in our post post modern fragile world. But there is something deeply exciting and primal about what Lost Movements is attempting. The question for me is: What can sustain them and will a short sharp blast be enough to birth long living creative collectives?

What did John Cage, or Francis Bacon or Brett Whitley or Margaret Preston listen to while they were painting? I have no idea but artists have music in their studios. I wondered what might happen if I got a few artists to paint in the Jugglers art space with some of my favourite meditative works.

With Gavin Bryars and Arvo Paart working their magic in March and May, each participant in white worked to build works on paper and canvas with other artists using only written text to communicate.  The atmospherics of the music [and in May the short train trip movie on a loop] within a context of silence created both a cohesion of work in progress as a group and a spirituality that was both mystical and almost tangible. The silence that continued after the music tracks had ended was testament to a state the whole group had found during the excercise.

Someone has said that  “art is the nerve end of the culture.” 

Conservative LNP Premier in Qld [Major Campbell Newman] tells a different story around art and culture in some sectors in “The deep north” and so too do the “white shoe brigade.” The public perception of art as the nerve end of the culture and graffiti as a legitimate art form and aerosol as a validated medium is what is under scrutiny. I suspect so too is any contemporary art.  “Graffiti is not art” was one of his proclamations in the media in the lead up to the Queensland election along with the promise of stronger law enforcement laws to drive this scourge away for ever. A sure vote winner. That Queensland has the most oppressive legislation in Australia if not the world for graffiti offences [7 years to be increased to 10 years maximum under his watch and in some instances more than for murder or manslaughter]  is apparently not enough. That imprisonment on one hand fails to deter and Youth Justice Conferencing with victim, perpetrator and mediation also fails in recidivism is a law and order issue for another paper.

Late last year as I walked around Brisbane with a young homeless 22 year old alcoholic high drug using would be artist and graffiti offender, I asked him: “What is life for you Paul? What is it that matters?” “Epiphany” he said. “Epiphany. It’s then that you get some idea of what life is about.”

For me art as the nerve end of the culture is just that. It has the potential over and over again to describe our state, to reflect our angst, to celebrate our happiness and to open a window onto spiritual realities that the rational mind will always fail to do. It is all very well to elucidate our beliefs and to clarify our boundaries but unless we learn a new path of experiential and existential spiritual awareness we will miss the parallel universe. Religion as a means of spirituality has sunk sadly into propping up the former not the latter. I believe that religion and spirituality are about mystery not clarity. And as children teach us, and as artists teach us, mystery is a never ending journey of inquiry.

“[Bishop] Bruce Wilson argues that what Western society most needs is not a system of dogma to be believed, nor a set of rules to be obeyed, but something deeper and less tangible – the inner worldly Eastern religion of Jesus. “ [Reasons of The Heart Bruce Wilson Allen and Unwin 1998].

Once we launch out of religious institutionalism and into the unknown it is possible that epiphany/theophany becomes our lifeline to spiritual reality. What happens to our social interactions and support networks that are left behind in this bon voyage? Important questions and ones that tell on our individualism but what price authenticity and spiritual desperation? I took this journey and am still on it and feel the loss of some aspects of deep connectedness with religion and it trappings but the greater search is worth the loss. And my new “church” is that eclectic mad mix of artists and musicians and comedians and performers who somehow apart from the human propensity for ego are breathing the “spirit” into this lost soul.

What happens to the moral compass of the world if religion is gone and all we have is art and epiphany? Christendom needs to keep dying and Christianity needs to find its spiritual compass via the arts and meditation and the basics of a reduced bibliolatry around Jesus of Nazareth. The moral questions will always be there. How we address them will be found in a slower paced less controlling letting go of panic about our societal and cultural futures.

Taking a long slow time with artists and their works is where the moments of “aha” can arrive, it is where the suddenness of epiphany can slowly dawn and then slip away forever only to arrive again and again at exhibitions, in conversations with street artists or in a small group reflection on a series of art works. Someone has said that the new class is the art class. Art is the nerve end of the culture but maybe the culture is being redefined imperceptibly in the underground of mystery that no one can reduce to a system. The only thing is that art is exploding and the internet is getting it out there and unless we take time with the visual stories that appear in this new order we will be stuck in any kind of system of our own and others makings.

 If I hadn’t taken the time with Paul [not his real name] I would not have had his profound statement. Who was I to think that me, a former pastor of a large inner city church had the handle on spirituality and on culture and on what might be going on in people’s lives.

Vincent van Gogh as the rejected applicant for incarnational mission by the state Lutheran church found his way into art and through it and his story has become, for me, a hero of lostness and direction at the same time. How many more artists has the church cast out with the same spirit as conservative politics?  There is a new breeze in evangelicalism through journals like “Image” and Sojourners “Spirit of Fire. “ Still a bit of an agenda based attempt but cutting the ties and drifting free never the less.

My passion for street art and street artists is bound up in my passion for art and the four “pillars” [? Drivers] of Jugglers Art Space Inc: Social Justice, A healthy welcoming community, creativity and spirituality. Our vision to “facilitate the healthy growth of the core creative human spirit” is a never ending slow journey o f discovery at the most unlikely places. As Leonard Cohen sings: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

©Peter Breen 2011

Listening to a madly beautiful  piece of music last night I had an epiphanous ahaha moment when I realised that my constant unquenchable hunger for beauty and the moments when beauty grabs me by the throat is meaning for me. It happens constantly and the more I feed it the richer it gets.It’s more than aesthetic wonder.  In my strongly religious past it all began as an idea around the possibility of knowing god. And now I realise that knowing god in the broadest sense is intuitive experience. This can become a drug of choice where justice and kindness and love and humility are sacrificed on the altar of one better experience after the other. Some religions are very good at doing the rounds of one narcissistic  “experience” after another even if they are never sure of those experiences, so committed are they to behaviour and holiness and moral hurdles. I choose to live out these non negotiable values that make for a better world and I do painfully every day with regular moments of failure. But so too is my determined commitment of exposure to the sources of beauty, as in  the music that I am listening to now [Arovo Part’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”] and making life the following of the road “less travelled” to find and experience the almost indescribable beauty and intuitive knowing. Developing awareness as the essential sixth sense for life opens me to seeing new things all the time. Seeing through ears, eyes, nose, mouth, body, touch, imagination. The fundamentalist world is afraid of all this and attaches large burdens of guilt to the pursuit of beauty and its intuitive knowing.I know. I used to attach guilt to it. “You shall know [experience intuitively] and the knowing shall set you free.”

Last night I took a group of 8 artists into the unknown and we slowly, imperceptibly over 2 hours slid into a silent white space. By open invitation via Jugglers newsletter 8 brave souls said yes to perform a painted or drawn response to a haunting music piece by British composer and producer Gavin Bryars. His “Jesus Blood Never Failed me yet” has featured on Triple J and ABC Classic FM and at 75 minutes it is a wonder it makes it into anyone’s space. But it does. I had wondered during this Lenten season how our responses might  look on paper or canvas and what emotion might look like under the influence of a kind of music that is out of the main stream.I considered using Philip Glass’s recently released 9th Symphony but Bryar’s work had embedded itself in my psyche over the past 14 years through mediations and labyrinth walks.  The “set” for last night’s event was a limited pallet – white attire, black, white and red acrylic and paper and a small spot lighted water bath into which I ceremoniously dropped a spot of red food colouring. The bath then became the wash for brushes and grew to be the centre point during the event with paper bits thrown in. And conversation was limited to written text. We eased into the installation/performance using some of Philip Glass’s works before Bryar’s homeless man began rasping out “Jesus blood never failed me yet” being eventually joined by strings and eventually, the inimitable Tom Waits. The  performance developed into a crescendo of  collaboration, concentration, reflection, movement, brush sounds, scratching pencil and charcoal on paper. As the little tramp’s song faded after 75 minutes something happened and we all stayed drawing, painting, documenting [film and photo] and just being there. We were in another space and silence composed by what had gone before and no one wanted to break the spell. It was indeed a white silence.

Someone has said “art is the nerve end of the culture.”

The potential for a crack down on some expressions of art and the culture in the public domain by the probable incoming hyper conservative LNP Premier next Saturday in Qld [Major Campbell Newman] tells a different story around art and culture in some sectors in “The deep north” – mainly anecdotally, the “white shoe brigade.” In particular the public perception of art as the nerve end of the culture and graffiti as a legitimate art form and aerosol as a validated medium is what is under scrutiny. I suspect it is also any contemporary art.  “Graffiti is not art” was one of his proclamations in the media in the past two weeks along with the promise of stronger law enforcement laws to drive this scourge away for ever. A sure vote winner. That Queensland has the most oppressive legislation in Australia if not the world for graffiti offences [14 year maximum and in same instances more than for murder or manslaughter]  is apparently not enough. That imprisonment on one hand fails to deter and Youth Justice Conferencing with victim, perpetrator and mediation also fails in recidivism is a law and order issue for another paper.

Late last year as I walked around Brisbane with a young homeless 22 year old alcoholic high drug using would be artist and graffiti offender, I asked him: “What is life for you Paul? What is it that matters?” “Epiphany” he said. “Epiphany. It’s then that you get some idea of what life is about.”

For me art as the nerve end of the culture is just that. It has the potential over and over again to describe our state, to reflect our angst, to celebrate our happiness and to open a window onto spiritual realities that the rational mind will always fail to do. It is all very well to elucidate our beliefs and to clarify our boundaries but unless we learn a new path of experiential and existential spiritual awareness we will miss the parallel universe. Religion as a means of spirituality has sunk sadly into propping up the former not the latter. I believe that religion and spirituality are about mystery not clarity. And as children teach us, and as artists teach us, mystery is a never ending journey of inquiry.

“[Bishop] Bruce Wilson argues that what Western society most needs is not a system of dogma to be believed, nor a set of rules to be obeyed, but something deeper and less tangible – the inner worldly Eastern religion of Jesus. “ [Reasons of The Heart Bruce Wilson Allen and Unwin 1998].

Once we launch out of religious institutionalism and into the unknown it is possible that epiphany/theophany becomes our lifeline to spiritual reality. What happens to our social interactions and support networks that are left behind in this bon voyage? Important questions and ones that tell on our individualism but what price authenticity and spiritual desperation? I took this journey and am still on it and feel the loss of some aspects of deep connectedness with religion and it trappings but the greater search is worth the loss. And my new “church” is that eclectic mad mix of artists and musicians and comedians and performers who somehow apart from the human propensity for ego are breathing the “spirit” into this lost soul.

What happens to the moral compass of the world if religion is gone and all we have is art and epiphany? Christendom needs to keep dying and Christianity needs to find its spiritual compass via the arts and meditation and the basics of a reduced bibliolatry around Jesus of Nazareth. The moral questions will always be there. How we address them will be found in a slower paced less controlling letting go of panic about our societal and cultural futures.

Taking a long slow time with artists and their works is where the moments of “aha” can arrive, it is where the suddenness of epiphany can slowly dawn and then slip away forever only to arrive again and again at exhibitions, in conversations with street artists or in a small group reflection on a series of art works. Someone has said that the new class is the art class. Art is the nerve end of the culture but maybe the culture is being redefined imperceptibly in the underground of mystery that no one can reduce to a system. The only thing is that art is exploding and the internet is getting it out there and unless we take time with the visual stories that appear in this new order we will be stuck in any kind of system of our own and others makings.

If I hadn’t taken the time with Paul [not his real name] I would not have had his profound statement. Who was I to think that me, a former pastor of a large inner city church had the handle on spirituality and on culture and on what might be going on in people’s lives.

Vincent van Gogh as the rejected applicant for incarnational mission by the state Lutheran church found his way into art and through it and his story has become, for me, a hero of lostness and direction at the same time. How many more artists has the church cast out with the same spirit as conservative politics?

My passion for street art and street artists is bound up in my passion for art and the four “pillars” [? Drivers] of Jugglers Art Space Inc: Social Justice, A healthy welcoming community, creativity and spirituality. Our vision to “facilitate the healthy growth of the core creative human spirit” is a never ending slow journey of discovery at the most unlikely places. As Leonard Cohen sings: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

©Peter Breen 2012

I am not good at silence. I like being alone but to do things. I sat today attempting silence in stillness. Attempting to find silence in the spaces between the incessant demands of my own mind. The lists, the phone, the anxiety, the fear and the busy body’s demand to keep moving. In one chapter in “Healing Spaces – The science of place and well-being” Esther Sternberg reflects on the healthy benefits of meditation and walking a labyrinth where physical activity and silence create a harmony of spiritual newness and lower blood pressure. Stillness does arrive for me in the labyrinth. Arts practice [painting, drawing, printing, scultpure] is a labyrinthine activity.  Artists are walking labyrinths with the rhythm of their drawings as much as reclusive monk Thomas Merton in his noiseless meditation journeys.

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When Jugglers had a silent auction on February 3  of 99 works donated by 60 emerging and mid career artists [including represented artists Anthony Lister,  Nic Plowman and Jan van Dijk and internationals Sofles, Gimiks Born, Miso and Ghostpatrol] the value was layered. All of a sudden there was the hope of “having a lister” for less than $1000! The night itself, while not without its bidding wars and dreams of investment potential was good natured and fun.  400 punters raised more than $7000 in three hours. That all 60 artists had put in the hours and then delivered them to Jugglers in support of a program for unknown “outsider” artists who are companioned towards more life and artistic possibilities is testament to generosity. The “Paper Girl” idea [on the same night at White Canvas] resonates with the same value. Give your art away! Buck the collector investment paradigm driven by white middle class white males! Works on paper were taken down after their Friday show and handed out  in Queen Street Mall on Saturday. A shift is happening. The reign of the elite might last a while more but when amazing art is given to make a difference and amazing art is handed out to enrich the receivers, then Andy Warhol and his mates might return to join in!

From “Occassional links and Commentary” by David F Ruccio

The Value[s]of Art by David F Ruccio

Paul Cézanne, “The Card Players” (c. 1890-92)—$250 million at auction

What is the value of art?

Felix Salmon, in arguing that art is not a good financial investment, analyses the current art market and presents a theory of the value of art:

The whole point of art is that it has no intrinsic value: that its financial value is a magical number which is some highly variable function of how much various incredibly rich people love and covet the work.

But she’s [meaning Sarah Thornton] right about this aspect of why the two big auction houses are doing so well these days:

Christie’s and Sotheby’s are superlative marketers who are getting better at funnelling demand for objects by a small group of well-tested artist brands.

The key word here is “brands”. CNBC’s Zac Bissonnette recently wrote to me saying that what he hates about contemporary art is the way in which “you can just put it there and all your friends will know what it is. People might as well hang a Nike swoosh over their couches.”

Zac’s exactly right about this: the one thing that pretty much all ultra-expensive art has in common is that it’s instantly recognizable as the work of a given artist. (And that goes for Cézanne as much as it does for Jeff Koons.) Fine art has become the billionaire’s-club equivalent of a Louis Vuitton bag, slathered in logos. It’s not connoisseurship which drives values, so much as recognizability. Which in turn helps to explain why the most prolific artists (Picasso, Warhol, Hirst) are also the most expensive: the more of their work there is, the more exposed to it people become, the more they’ll recognize it, and therefore the more desirable it is.

I do hold out some small hope that the Chinese art market will provide a correction to this syndrome — there, I’m told, the value of an art work is (at least sometimes) much less a function of its recognizability as the work of a certain artist, and much more a function of the way that it can fit itself into a long artistic tradition.

I want to make just three quick comments: First, art may not have an “intrinsic value” but which commodities do? Is Salmon invoking some kind of labor theory of value here? Second, precisely because paintings and other works of art are status or Veblen goods, their prices affect the desires of wealthy individuals to purchase them. And third, it is precisely because the art market is now governed by a different group of rich people, e.g., from China, the values of different kinds of art are changing and are likely to continue to change in coming years.

Yes, rich people around the world are buying famous paintings and other works of art, not because they’re a good financial investment or because of their intrinsic value but because they can own them and show to the world that they can and do own them.

David F. Ruccio | 9 February 2012 at 10:37 am

Tamawarra II Mixed media.

The art of writing a piece for spoken word performance of any kind is a long bang on an anvil with a steel hammer. Sometimes the sparks fly fast and furiously and then the slow “ting, ting” is on again. The joy of the smart phone is that an idea can be caught on the note pad or recorded. Makes banging easier. And then rewrites happen inevitably when the inspired idea sounded so good but with critique and reflection it  “falls off the anvil”. But the inspired idea and phrase still need putting down however many times they are burnt. We need others to work with us and give us reflective feedback to “co-construct the meaning.” Having never been a comedian, my observation of my son and other wonderful people I have met in Brisbane and Melbourne at the comedy festivals is that the feedback takes years but it can be the fire that the steel needs for the anvil to make an impression that delivers a work of art that get people saying: “That was bloody funny. How does he [she] do it?!”

On the way up the hill to the Mental Health Ward at RBWH I found some scrawled graffiti, old style. Stone on stone, scratched on the wall near the steps. Unmissable. “God [loves] everything”. Then last week the “everything” was scratched out. I love graffiti and this outsider artist conversation!

Mixed media on Paper – Linden Post Card Show.

ABC Radio National’s Saturday “By Design” show on Saturdays is one of my picks. I love architecture, space and place. In today’s show we were invited to join  ” Alan Saunders and the By Design team for a highly unusual forum celebrating the architecture and urban design of one of our greatest cities. Unusual because the venue for our forum is that quintessential Melbourne mode of transport, a tram: The City Circle tram to be exact.”  As radio gives space for our minds to imagine [as opposed to the dulling TV can do] I found myself at the same places they were talking about. Flinders Street Station, Fed Square, The Royal Exhibition Buildings [where I did my final RMIT exams in 1971] the Parliament Buildings. Melbourne is my home town, my heart town, my city of choice, my Paris! Paris did get a mention in the context of the 40 metre high exclusion zone in and around Flinders Street. It is in that zone that Melbourne is alive with alley ways and coffee shops and art studios. Paris and Berlin and other great cities have stood against the high rise and so have enriched their cities. Brisbane [where I live now] still has an undeveloped right brain when it comes to town planning, pulling down such icons as Festival Hall and now the Regent Theatre. Listening to Saunders and his erstwhile team led me to drag a book out of my library by Phillip Goad that  I bought in 2004:  “A guide to Melbourne Architecture.” Divided into eras of architecture in Melbourne’s development, I found reference to Snellman House near the Yarra River  [Ivanhoe]  close to where I use to live between 1958 and 1961. [This house was built in 1954] As a young kid growing up in Melbourne at East Ivanhoe State School,  I got to know Dirk Snellman. We were in the same class and I used to go  to this amazing house  that curved down the hill towards the river and we would run down the hallway with rooms branching off and the big gum just outside that seemed to hold it all together. And we would grab bits of carboard and slide down the hill on the grass next to the house. Funny that this is my memory at this moment in time as we slip into one year out of the other. Architecture and buildings hold stories and revisiting them evokes memories. Even the odd ABC program or a book on architecture can trigger a rich memory.

This Christmas I made a tree out of an old tree branch from the rubbish in our yard. There is a new fence now and to make a connection with the old discarded trees I chose a branch with long spindly branches. I pruned it and trimmed it and made it so it would fit in the house and in a pot of white stones. Then I chose an old bible that was falling apart as the covering, as the pages that would “contextualise” the tree. The bible was ripped and torn and I wrapped and glued page after page of Genesis and Luke and Micah around the branches. I would never rip the bible that I used to use as a one time preacher or the one my father had that is full of underscores and where I found a small page of drawn cartoons he did for me while we sat in church when I was about 9 months old. But somehow I could tear this other one that someone else had put together as their contribution to the “spreading of the word.” And this “contextualised tree” and the torn book became a metaphor for my imagination. When we keep the words that are precious to us or that are truth for us in a stuck state, in a covered library of museum pieces that are used to bludgeon or defend idealogoies then we miss the life that is in and around and always emerging from them.

Simon Degroot continues to accelerate the production of geometrical shapes into larger works with additions of loose marks and a vibrant pallette. The strong shape repetition is mesmerizing and could be visual response to a Philip Glass composition as in his sound track for Powaqqatsi.Simon’s two smaller ” Tie Burst” works were the only pieces Simon ventured that had no geometrical boundaries. I loved his work and the evolution of his style, the life emerging in the random colour sweeps represents his new vision. In the next and smaller – and very hot – space is juxtaposed Keith Burt [winner of the 2011 Jugglers Marie Ellis Drawing Prize] beautifully rendered realistic still lifes and portraits. Keith had been busy and had sold quite a few [whereas Simon hadn’t sold any when I was there] maybe indicative of the conservative safe collectors in Brisbane.Keith’s works are very appealing and well priced and in every sense showed the work of an accomplished painter. I could fill my house with works by both artists. Jugglers looks forward to Keith joining the judging panel for the 2012 Marie Ellis Drawing Prize. Which way will Keith go next with his works? Which way Simon?