The Empire (of Dust)

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The flooded library by the street artist Rone part of his Empire exhibit/installation

A post shared by Norm Hanson (@normhansonart) on Mar 26, 2019 at 7:38pm PDT

It didn't take me long to break my own #TURNOFFSOCIALMEDIA campaign. I had the fortune to get tickets to Rone's Lastest Exhibition/Installation at Burnham Beeches. Its amazing, so I just had to upload a photo of the flooded Library via WiFi from my Olympus camera to my phone and then onto Instagram. All so easy and I've fallen off the wagon already

Time to Smile

I’m looking rather pleased with myself,  because I just got a highly commended for "my gingko leaves in time" pencil study at the victorian artists society student & teacher exhibition

The exhibition is on until 7th August.

Many thanks to VAS  & Art Spectrum

Full Moon over East Melbourne

In a good omen for have a clear view of the full moon tomorrow night/Saturday morning, there was a full moon rising over East Melbourne as I made my way to The Victorian Artist Society Gallery (yellow build on the left).

Van Gogh the Seasons

The NGVs winter extravaganza, the 2017 Winter Masterpieces, is a collection of Van Gogh’s work from several periods related to his focus on capturing the seasons.

It was just a little too busy for me, I was continually crossing paths with a guided tour and because photograph is not only allowed but also encourage so there was a line up in front of all the later paintings. Still there was a very comprehensive range of work from early scrapbook inspirations through to a small self portrait.

I have always liked Van Gogh’s line/marks of tortured brush strokes in his wheat fields and cypress trees. I had not realised they where subjects that tortured him. Perhaps I would have liked to see a few more of his drawing

David Stratton and David Wenham’s multi-media guide provides a lot of context and is really worth listening too before you visit the exhibition.

“I’m drawing a great deal and think it’s getting better.” – Vincent van Gogh

Sometimes things just have to go

 

There are times when you can not avoid some obstructions the way of a clean composition, Usually it is best to walk around a little and it is surprising how easy it can be to avoid signs, lampposts etc. Other times it does seem to be impossible to avoid distracting objects in a good composition. You might avoid that sign but then a tree or parked car pops into frame.In such cases it is handy to have a context sensitive easer, (or alternatively a cloning tool). There is a really neat context toll in OnOne 10 Enhance called perfect Eraser. It works best if you just remove a few sections at a time, but it does and amazing job with a relatively few strokes. Photoshop has a similar tool and lightroom has a liner clone tool, similar to the spot removal tool and make need a few more corrections. The results can make a significant to your compositiom

ClimArt Exhibition

My “Paradise Lost” painting is currently on display (and for sale) at the ClimAart Exhibition at Artspaces Gallery in Wonthaggi. The exhibition runs until May 29th If you are down that way please drop in. Below are some deep dream style “sketches” of the exhibition opening created on my phone using prisma.

 

David Hockney Current @NGV

I had a short amount of time in the city today and went to the David Hockney Exhibition at NGV. It was wonderfully Inspiring, Big and Colourful. I loved it

I loved the comprehensive nature of what is exhibited from the tiny IPhone and IPad drawings. the large colour blow up and the videos of the painting and the multi-camera movies. Especially the Four Season, a synchronised set of 36 videos of driving down a country lane in the four Seasons. Having the experience of seeing “Bigger Trees Near Warter” full size was amazing.

An Interesting Exhibition and Wonderful Staircase

With some time to spare before The Canadian was due to leave vancouver. We thought we might visit an exhibition of Picasso and the Influence of his Muses (all 6 of them). It was a really comprehensive exhibition showing how the women who inspired Picasso lead to his artistic progress. A wonderful surprise, {not Picasso’s work} was the internal staircase in the gallery decorated with bold simplicity of rhyming words, simple verse and emoticons, a kind of oversized physical tweets.

ArtInspired :: Seeing a photo via a painter’s eyes

“I see things in terms of paint, all else is irrelevant.”

… Fred Williams

Following on from my experiments with textures, I went and had a relook at the Fred William’s works currently on display at the NGV Ian Potter Centre (there are currently 5 but they are spread around, One in the Luminous Australian Watercolour exhibit, two in the 20th Century Australian Gallery and my two favourites in the Joseph Brown Collection).

Fred’s landscape inspired abstracts work so well at a large scale, at a distance they are compellingly interesting, very characteristic of the bush areas he used as inspiration, particularly in colour and textures. Close up they are very confidently painted splodges and squiggles on a rich ground, essentially abstract.

 

I have deliberately begun with two simple images of the scrub and gumtree truck taken in Jells Park plus and image of the same place taken without a lens and deliberately under exposed.

 

These form my “sketches”, to which I added another simple sketch of some line work. It is important that these are the way I might make marks. However it is not a realistic sketch more an exploration of composition and line. After the success of using dreamscope and layering back into the work I again generated a couple of deep dream interpretations of the photos above. Firstly just using some of the standard filters provided.

 

 

The magic started to happen when I used my line work sketch as a custom filter. So the deep dream process in dreamscope was looking for the style of lines I might have used and emphasising them.

 

I’m still not sure how to tackle his rich selectively coloured backgrounds. In Enchanted Forest 1, (below) I tried using the the len-less image after it was interpreted via a Picasso filter, Its certainly a colourful result, but perhaps too colourful and not really characteristic of the Jell Park scrub but I trust you find still a pleasing interpretation.

I noticed that the sketch dreamscape of the tree truck did have the limited range of colours I was after, perhaps a bit more vivid than Fred’s treatment, yet his colours are undeniably rich. So I have used that image to bleed through the background and a descent into my line work style at the bottom of the image.  Enchanted Forest 2 (below)

Start your own Provenance, sharing into the future

Social media is often prompted as a way an artist can reach a larger audience. This is really only partly true. Just putting works on line doesn’t mean others will look at them.  For a start it will probably just be a tiny thumbnail to most until they click on it, if they click on it. Further in a time where almost everyone has access to the net, via smartphone, tablet or computer and their own web presence, via a social media service. Everything quickly gets swamped by a plethora of other distractions. Many of those distractions will be striking similar because the web is full of copy cats and people who “wanna bee” celebrities.  They either are ignorant of, or just wish to remain ignorant of, intellectual property rights and ownership, they are just chasing likes, views and +1s. If your work is original, you may not want it devalued by lots of “clones” or just simply having it “stolen” and reposted without attribution. Well maybe you don’t actually need to post it, just about it.

Establishing provenance (the chain of ownership) for art works is an important historical undertaking. It helps detect and eliminated forgeries (unless the forger can also “plant” an elaborate chain of fake histories) and it is fundamental in establishing the value of the work. It is not possible for you to write the provenance but things you do, write about, sketch and/or photograph will form the foundation of this future value. Posting about your current work, including sketches and photos of you working on it and/or others in front of the work (say at an exhibition) are probably better ways to use social media to promote your art than just posting a thumbnail of it.

The Short Black was painted in 2013, as a donation to the Art Auction at Alphington Primary School

Is it a self portrait of a still life?

In a very popular move the Archibald Prize finalists are being toured around some regional galleries giving more the opportunity to see the original paintings. This year for a second year running they are currently being displayed at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.

One painting I liked is Peter Churcher’s quirky ”Four self-portraits in a bunch of balloons”. It is both vibrant and fun yet deeply detailed in an MC Escheresque manner. What caught my attention was the replicated reflections, the self portraits. In many ways it bought home my attempts to get a “floating” selfportrait onto my stainless steal espresso cup, for my patch entry last week. The question asked in the accompanying note for this painting being so relevant. “Is it a self portrait or a still life?”

Before photography any artist wanting to make a self portrait had to resort to a mirror (and therefore the resulting portrait will be back to front). A few brave artists, and MC Escher is a prominent one of them, dared to include reference in their painting and illustrations that they were indeed looking at reflections.  Thus I think it is cleverly both.

My Art In the Clouds

An on-line “cloud” gallery for just my art (& photographic) works has been a sub-project of mine for a long time. Many social web services promised such things or even greater wonders but none seem to deliver what I wanted. I wasted a lot of time on the likes of Redbubble, Google+ pages, Adobe’s creative cloud and Behance, but you are supposed to learn by your mistakes they say. So I have created one of my own. Its pretty simple. It contains just my recent works available for sale or rental.

It doesn't have any built in web store features like a shopping cart but you are welcome to email me directly. More details in the cloud gallery itself.

finding a surprise (or two) within Melbourne Now

rory hyde’s bin dome

I was visiting the Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. I could not help noticing rory hyde’s bin dome, part of Melborne Now, an ambitious exhibition covering many, probably too many, contemporary Melbourne based artists. The dome is made of the type of waste paper bins you can buy from ikea and today the bins sported grasses and bromeliads. It is wonderfully positioned in the entry hall and beautifully lit with natural light from the high open ceiling. The video and HDR image were all taken on my humble HTC Wildfire (android phone)
I can definitely recommend the Edward Steichen exhibition but other than the dome I’m not sure I’m that inspired to track down the rest of Melbourne Now. For those that like a puzzle can you find the location of the photo below?
 
HINT ::: It may not be an actual exhibit!

Hung and open …”meet the artist” next weekend

My exhibition “An Artistic Journey :: In Search of Sir John Monash” is hung and open at the Highway Gallery in Mount Waverley. It includes a range of my works, few of which I have been posted on the social webs, so if you are in Melbourne and interested in my geological panels, photography, and photo mosaic collages please consider coming along to the “meet the artist” on Sunday 10th. November.

My Monash works follow on from my previous geological panels and paintings, on the surface they are firmly represented by earthly things, the soil and rocks. Yet they also reflect on three key aspects of Sir John's life. His military life, his life setting up the SEC and powering Victoria and his passion to build the Shrine of Remembrance. They have been created with the assistance of an arts and culture grant from the Monash City Council, which allowed me to learn about casting and moulding, to bring stronger dimensionality into my geological panels, experiment with a range of materials and hold this exhibition.

The Importance of Provenance

I have been watching the great ABC TV series where Edmund Capon tells the story of the Art of Australia. Given that the series is only in three parts it is not surprising that the works presented are just a snippet of what was going on, albeit a handpicked subset that tries to represent the import works that bought change. However it was watching the discussion of the intense group of artist in the Heide Circle that bought home to me one very important aspect of photography for artist, often overlooked. That is the important task of just recording what is going on, establishing provenance, where did the works come from? why where they created? or simple what is the work behind the artist’s shoulder? Not every one will be famous and have future gallery curators forensically combing through their old photo collection, perhaps it will be more like someone interested in your art checking the social web. Galleries of your works are probably not going to please them as much as a picture of you working of some important piece (especially the work they want to buy!)

These are a couple of photos of me working on the clay pattern for one of my bas-reliefs of John Monash for my next exhibition “In Search of Sir John Monash” to be held at The Highway Gallery, Mt. Waverley, 2nd to 15th November 2013.

Edible Art

The cafe at the Groningen Museum has a special cake, museumtarte & koffee  €4.00. To my surprise the cake was a work of art promoting the museum’s current exhibition  “Material World – Art, Design, Fashion”. The coffee (koffee) that went with the cake was pretty good as well.

Does this mean there must be a new cake each new exhibition?

Visiting the Archibald

The Archibald price is Australia’s premiere portrait prize, most notable for controveries. This year the collection have travelled south to the Tawa Wara Museum of Art, near Healesville, within Victoria’s Yarra valley. So it was an easy decision to make a day of it and have a look at the original art work. The exhibition only has a week to go and if you haven’t been its well worth the trip. The Tara Warra Gallery itself is worthy of the visit,The gallery design was selected by a competition, with Allan Powell's elegant design the winner and it is set beautifully atop a hill surrounded by vineyards.

I should have realised when I took the Dandenong Creek panorama, which I was very disappointed with at the time and inspired the series of comparative posts, that poor resolution of that image was really a function of the camera’s own in-phone panoramic feature. I would have been much better off to take multiple overlapping cameraphone images and use autostitch (as I have done above)

Retracing Darwin

My Exhibition of Photos, Painting and Rock Art is coming up this weekend.

Opening 2:00PM

Sunday April 18th

Gecko Studio Gallery

15 Falls Road, Fish Creek

South Gippsland

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin Of Species, Norm Hanson followed the trip Darwin undertook in 1836 from Sydney to Bathurst through the Blue Mountains. This exhibition of Photography, Paintings and Rock Art is inspired by what Darwin saw.

The Exhibition runs from April 18th to May 15th, 2010.

Darwin In Australia according to Robin Williams

Last night our PM waffled on about offence at Robin William’s comment that Australians are basically English Red Necks, and failed in an attempt at humour himself suggesting Robin should visit Alabama. All Americans know all to well about red necks, no visit to Alabama is required. What probably annoyed our PM was a reference later in the interview, I’ll let you find that yourself. In the context of the interview with David Letterman Robin’'s comments were actually funny (see full interview You Tube video below) although so many of the notations are just wrong (flying snakes, scrums in aussie rules etc). The more interesting part is Robin’s take on Australian Animals and Darwin (it starts at the 4:10 minute mark)

Well Charles Darwin did actually visit Australia. If only Robin knew that it was on the exact same day he helped shoot a platypus and watched a conical sand trap created by an ant on a sunny river bank. He noted these strange animals were so different to English fauna yet they behaved and filled a familiar ecological niche.  He wrote in his notebook -

"Two distinct Creators must have been at work; their object, however, has been the same, and certainly the end in each case is complete."

Several scholars believe this is the first time he commits to paper his growing beliefs that are moving away from belief in a single creator (strict biblical interpretation) and the Immutability of species (the jargon of the day for all species where created at the same time and are permanently the same).

I know all this because I have been researching and have retraced Darwin trip from Sydney Bathurst in 1836. I am having an exhibition of photographs and painting at the Gecko Gallery in Fish Creek from April 18th to 15th May, inspired by what Darwin saw.

VACS Exhibition 2010 as a virtual tour

I have a few works in this Years Venus Artists Contemporary Showcase. So I have decided to try and create a virtual tour. It may not be anywhere close to visiting the exhibitio0n yourself but I hope you can get to appreciate the works.

You can use seadragon (above) to click on the panoramam and zoom in and out or pan along using just your mouse. If you are accessing this on a microsoft windows based machine, you can enjoy an "almost" 3D virtual tour through the exhibition by clicking on the photosynth below.


The exhibition is open daily 10:00am to 4:00pm until Sunday 21st. At The Venus Bay Community Centre, 27 Canterbury Road. Venus Bay