ART INSIGHTS FROM THE CASTLEMAINE FESTIVAL


How can you be original? That’s a question visual artist Abbie Heathcote was asked at the 2017 Castlemaine State Arts festival (March 17-26). Her heartfelt response included the unexpected. Here’s a paraphrase of what she said: Find what enlivens you and put all that life and feeling into your work. It lives there, and when viewers come to the artwork they absorb the feeling and they are enlivened.
This is a potential outcome from any activity we undertake. When artworks are created with love and commitment to truth they certainly touch a viewer with their life and originality. Imagine the beauty and richness to be discovered from such a relationship. Meaning grows from that.
Stephen and I spent the weekend at the festival. If you don’t know Castlemaine, it is a country town in the central Victorian goldfields region. It’s rocky, dry and still speckled with gold. There was so much to see and hear, including a powerful opening night dance-drama by kids from Castlemaine Secondary school. Most of the main events were booked out but fortunately our friend Ken Killeen took us to meet artists in their open studios. As an artist and art teacher he was keen to show us the people whose work he valued - except that we enjoyed talking with the artists and being amidst their work so much we ‘lingered’ and didn’t get to meet everyone he wanted us to.

Abbie Heathcote                                                                        Diane Thompson
Last of all we attended the launch of a group show ‘Behind the Moon’ that included Abbie and sculptor Diane Thompson, Ken’s wife. And yes, we responded in kind to the magic and wonder in their work – to Abbie’s loving close-up views of vibrant nature, and Diane’s ‘identity crisis sheep’ with wings, feathers, echidna spines etc., a whimsical comment on how European sheep graziers thoughtlessly extinguished the farming traditions of the indigenous Dja Dja Wurrung people. Art as pure joy; art as message – different starting points, and artistic expression can be wonderfully varied. What mattered was the artists’ commitment of their inner life and feeling, and their integrity and skill with the language of art to bring this to fruition. We, the viewers, were enlivened and went away thoughtfully enriched. Good art does that.

 www.helenmartineau.com.au

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SHEILA FLORANCE AND ME

Image
My first meeting with Sheila. In the 1960s I was an impressionable seventeen-year-old keenly interested in following a career in the arts. My new boyfriend Peter Oyston took me into the ABC television studios to meet his mother who was working as a floor manager there. I knew she was an actress, a kind of alien species I had never encountered except in the movies, and I was nervous, expecting someone formidable. My first impression was of the usual middle-aged mum – a bit dowdy with a boring suburban woman’s permed hairdo (it was done that way for a play apparently). She didn’t appear one bit unusual. Then, ‘Hello dear,’ Sheila said sweetly as one does to little children. ‘Would you like a glass of milk?’ A horrified Peter whispered, ‘Sheil, she’s seventeen.’ (Sheil? I thought, I couldn’t imagine calling my mother by her given name). Then the extraordinary Sheila Florance screeched, threw her head back and burst into ripples of very loud laughter. And this being...
Read more

BUSHFIRES, BLACK FRIDAY SHOPPING AND QUESTIONS OF MATURITY

Image
I had a startling experience on November 24. It was a Friday. I opened my email inbox to find loads of messages encouraging me to enjoy the 20%, 40% etc discounts on all products 'Today Black Friday only!'  On Black Friday?! In Victoria, Australia, my home, there are certain days, black days that mark the most horrific bushfires, the unbelievable devastation and death, and the blackened land left in their wake. For example, there was Black Saturday of 2009 and one of the earliest devastations recorded (by European Aussies) on Black Friday, 1939. I wasn't alive for that one but it's  our history, the history of people pushing too carelessly, without understanding, into a dry, heat prone, vulnerable and threatened land. Bushfires were my nightmare w hen I lived in the country . I still dread hot north wind summer days in case, in case ... I have walked through the aftermath, lost a friend in a bushfire and can barely imagine the horror of being in one.  Oh,...
Read more

Comedy: The Fleeting Freedom of Laughter

Image
Melbourne, my home, is not the only city that has a month-long Comedy Festival. Comedy has always been popular.  It  can be cruel and crass, but good comedy  tweaks reality and tickles the mind and emotions. When we laugh, momentarily we become free as a child, released from what life has thrown at us, from the crises that create personal havoc to the mess the world is in. . Especially through the irony of self-reflective parody and satire we open up and can see the world from a new angle. This doesn’t happen when we choose to enter a comfortable bubble and associate only with those who are like us. Or when we protest until we boil over into anger that only makes everything worse. Or we sink into existential gloom. Better then to throw up our hands and turn despair into comedy – that is, if we can. I have just re-read George Orwell’s famous and bitterly satirical novel 1984, and was shocked agai...
Read more