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A Public of Individuals

A Sydney-based art journal offering an alternative view of contemporary art to that provided by the mainstream press and official art bodies. A Public of Individuals aims to foster dialogue amongst artists and those interested in art, by providing a forum for reviews, articles and correspondence. It is available as a printed publication from selected art galleries and art supplies shops in Sydney, Australia.

A Public of Individuals is a bi-monthly, released on the last Wednesday prior to the two-month period covered. Proposed contributions should be sent to the editorial board, by email or mail. Features should not exceed 2,500 words. For reviews, around 400 words per exhibition. We welcome letters to the editor.

Is the real world real? Richard Larter on vision and how little we know about it.

When I was a schoolkid I thought that we all shared what we saw and that we shared the same conscious experience of sight. I realised that the blind, colourblind, and people with eye damage did not share this with us. However I imagined thatwe all saw in the same way and that our mental pictures would be similar.

When I read about 'stream of consciousness' this reinforced my thinking, and certainly the way we used language to describe our thinking, our recollections, gave me the idea that we shared a visual vocabulary.

As a young man I soon realised that this was untrue and for many various reasons people see things differently. You could even say they see things subjectively.

My subsequent activity as a visual artist has always contained an awareness of this. When thinking of society I am aware thatthis is true of all aspects of our mental activity. People select viewpoints, they prefer and choose certain books, magazines and newspapers, and opt to ignore others. The same is true for films, television programs and videos. Likewise for radio listening, music, eating habits, sports, amusement and most other activities. They choose, or are induced to choose preferences in these matters, we usually call these 'lifestyles'.

The choosing of lifestyles is greatly influenced by the media; radio, TV and the Press. In these days of corporatism the interests of the global corporations are obtained and enforced by the trivialisation of politics and the economic totalitarianism which has led to the compliance of all mainstream political parties, on a worldwide basis. This means that anywhere in the world a General Election is incapable of electing a government that can effect real social or economic changes. This, we still stupidly imagine, is Democracy. We accept truly fourth rate Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and government officials. These people lie to us; think of Mad Cow disease, atomic waste, so-called 'non' prisoners of war, the greenhouse effect, mass starvations and the arms trade, to mention just a few.

So what has all this got to do with visual art, I hear you mutter. Well, as it happens, a great deal. In a world where bureaucracies and managers flourish, the visual arts have become the responsibility of bureaucrats, whose understanding of visual art is tempered by the economic prerogative.

Only a manager can understand our work; we are all clients; the artist needs a welcoming accreditation from one or other compartment of the art bureaucracy. Without such accreditation, or almost 'a licence to practice', the individual artist is virtually decreed 'not to exist'. As with all bureaucracies, those who are paid to look, only look at a small selection they choose to look at. Today the art world is like a large cellar, with only a small torch illuminating but a very small area. Those who have intellectual pretensions turn to other disciplines to explain what they choose to think is happening in the visual arts. They, the non-practising, feel it necessary to explain our art by what they choose to think we are thinking.

We do not know how we think - this is a scientific fact. We cannot say that when we look at something, we know what another person sees. When we see something in our memory, or mind's eye, we cannot verify what another sees. So how meaningful is a discussion? The science of the mind has not advanced sufficiently, we do not understand consciousness. You are reading these words, but who can say what it means to you? Consciousness is your own unique subjective experience. We do not understand the mind, there are lots of theories but no real breakthrough has been made.

In our extremely ignorant and imperfect world the only sensible way of dealing with the visual arts is to look. But how that 'looking' affects our thoughts, memories and imagination is subjective. We can try to share our subjective reactions to looking, with other people, and a dialogue is possible just as long as we remember that all our seeing is subjective. It is blatantly stupid to expect others to share or agree with our subjective reactions to looking.

Many such discussions however are pleasant and enjoyable as we reveal our minds to one another. Society at all levels is made up of such sharing, it is how homo sapiens passes on information. In science there are verifiable facts, that is information. Also there are assumptions and hypotheses; these are not facts but they can be useful for kick-starting thinking and ideas.

Today in the visual arts we suffer from being considered unimportant, the subject not worthy of too much attention. We also suffer a lack of interest from those who are communicators in the media so that a few scrappy reviews will suffice. You can have a retrospective show reviewed shortly and in a puerile manner by a fellow artist with an image reversed and mis-captioned. But what should we expect in such a world as ours?, with G.W. Bush and John Howard, corporate greed almost worshipped, and where the bottom line is considered the most important element in any human endeavour.

Second thoughts on beauty
In homage to the painter Michelle Hiscock following her recent exhibition at Australian Galleries.
by Jacques Delaruelle

In a welter whose basic substance is a discourse in words and material ceaselessly echoed back and forth between participants it has become most difficult to find significant currents of thought. The sheer mass of phrases written or spoken about "art" and the concomitant proliferation of meta-art (art about art) preclude critical synthesis or the possibility of common sense interpretation. An informed rumour suggests that there is nothing outside language, the indifferent flow of art's signifiers, the rules of an esoteric game or the signifying system which permits a scriptor to be read in the name of "art". Yet far from opening new vistas, this re-definition of art as language tends to restrict the space where its practitioners can question their circumstances authentically and actually work... To the proliferation of secondary discourse about images it is only possible to object in silence and I am well aware of the inherent contradiction of these lines... But inasmuch as one persists in writing one might still venture to point out the parallel between this linguistic inflation and the expansion of bureaucratic control in the field. Both echo a similarly manic anxiety concerning the vitality of contemporary art and being under continuous financial perfusion and theoretical reassurance, the art of today has for some time now experienced a most severe identity "krisis". This last word is best understood in its etymological sense as the deciding moment of an illness, a point in time after which one either recovers or dies. Here however the resolution has been delayed by the stratagem which saw the crisis of art be turned into an art of the crisis. But this semantic coup may not suffice to postpone the resolution of the issue indefinitely and soon one might have to contend with the facts...

Of course the perspective of such finiteness is unpleasant and rather than dwelling on this unpalatable reality, let us simply notice that the aesthetic, as a category of experience, seems to have grown incompatible with current artistic decorum, and is more likely to be encountered in ordinary situations than in the spaces where it is expected. Modernism taught us that the aesthetic realm is wherever seduction operates and, in its broadest acceptance, is not so much related to art as it is to every visual or acoustic pleasure that can be enjoyed for its own sake. Modernist painters or poets opposed the bourgeois prejudice according to which art's essential function is to carry one away from the unpleasantness of everyday life and with Courbet, Baudelaire and Manet taught their readers about Modern Beauty. But a century later President Eisenhower would still complain that Abstract Expressionist painting reminded him of traffic accidents. Perhaps this confusion was perfectly symptomatic of the ideology which assumes that most activities pertaining to the material provision of life are ugly and therefore to be disregarded by art. Most presidents today would probably know better and avoid this basic lack of etiquette. They would have learnt to distrust their own pleasure/displeasure and restrict themselves to sagacious remarks about the artist's hidden intention or the work's social significance without insisting on the association of art and beauty. They would expect and fear the reproach of cultural naiveté, yet would probably fail to realise that such a fear is precisely the trap... In other words, they would probably not gather that contemporary art now tends to address itself primarily to our fear of being duped.

An early objection to this reduction of the artistic sphere to an ideological conspiracy was produced by Marcuse in an early essay (1937) where the philosopher propounded that aesthetic art offers at once far more and far less than a consolation to general (social) unhappiness. Though pleasure in the presence of a work of art is comparable to a feeling of sudden liberation, such a feeling seldom reconciles the beholder (or listener) with his circumstances. On the contrary, it often has the opposite effect, and Marcuse goes as far as to argue that aesthetic art contains not only "the justification of the established form of existence, but also the pain of its establishment, not only quiescence about what is, but also remembrance of what could be"(1). By transforming this specific pain of alienation into a universal longing, aesthetic art constantly threatens to shatter the viewer's resignation to the order of everyday life. Thus artistic enjoyment ought never to be an end in itself, it is but a moment in the understanding of what works of art demand from us: to become aware of the truth or the falseness in them. As we behold a nude by Bonnard, we may realise that by painting in the colours of this world the beauty of a metaphysical happiness, the artist did plant "real longing, alongside poor consolation in the heart of his viewer". For though the pleasure of seeing is very great indeed, such a pleasure is but a first step in the realisation of the picture's meaning (i.e. beauty). The virtue of "aesthetic art" is a capacity to instil longing and regret rather than promote false hopes or soothing illusions of individual freedom in a world paralysed by universal greed.

As it ceases to be a promise of happiness beauty becomes a cause for melancholy: Plato's philosophical tale of the soul suddenly awaken by a beautiful semblance, stirred by the nostalgia of a lost Eden and finally carried beyond the opacity of this world towards a numinous realm regains some of its original significance. It is as if Mnemosyne - the muse of memory and collective appropriation - saw her power restored to integrate the art of the past along with our most immediate cultural experience. For as the leisure industry tirelessly comes up with ersatz of great narratives that satisfy nobody and turn the mind into mush, the void created by the decomposition of the classical myth becomes a felt absence in our heart and mind. Distinct from the experience of the pleasant, the experience of the beautiful makes sense as a bridge between the ideal and the real, but is rarely found in the realm of contemporary art. When small, exquisitely composed landscape paintings succeed in transcending the indifference produced by too much bad art to celebrate this world, it is urgent to voice thanks.

Notes
1. See Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, Beacon Press, Boston, 1978.

East+West Annandale Galleries, 26 June - 3 Aug
Roy Jackson Stone Country Paintings Mary Place Gallery, 26 June - 7 July
Michelle Hiscock Paintings Australian Galleries, 18 June - 6 July
James Morrison Port Davey,Tasmania Darren Knight Gallery, 9 July - 27 July
Max Watters New Paintings (Broomfield and Stewarts Brook) Watters Gallery, 17 July - 10 August

Over the last few months space travel has been a much-discussed topic in the news. Civilians are paying enormous sums to journey into space, and with the discovery of water on Mars we have heard speculations about the establishment of human colonies there. Harrison Schmitt, an ex-astronaut on tour in Australia to promote space exploration suggested that humanity's natural will to explore, coupled with the desire to secure resources, guarantees the colonisation of space. The question, he said, is not whether this will occur, but when.

An unasked question in these reports was whether it would not be wiser to moderate the use of Earth's resources, rather than yoking other planets to the supply-demand economy. For is not the will to explore and exploit space an extension of the same drive that sees the ongoing environmental degradation of this planet? A planet which, even as we abuse it, continues to be uniquely hospitable to humanity's needs.

In such a climate, landscape painting (which in its broadest sense extends to address a great range of environmental phenomena) has the potential to be an extremely important activity. It is a way of affirming that humanity belongs and depends on Earth and, at its best, proposes constructive ways of looking at and thinking about the world. Like any genre of painting, its continued success as art demands a great deal of the artist. On the one hand an intelligent and creative relation to the tradition(s) of painting, and also a full, engaged response to present-day realities. Through July and into August an unusually varied range of exhibitions in commercial galleries hinted at the breadth of landscape painting being produced in Australia today.

At Annandale Galleries, East+West brought together bark paintings and painted sculptures by artists from the lands to either side of the Maningrida settlement in Arnhemland. As the heirs of a visual tradition that is specific to their country, the Maningrida artists sidestep many of the options and problems that face western artists. Simplification and abstraction seem to have been achieved with less regard for art than for communication itself. This exhibition featured some celebrated figures from the region - John Mawurndjul and John Bulunbulun both contributed major paintings - but theirs were not the only remarkable works. In James Iyuna's paintings of spirits, linear skeletons are augmented by incomparably fine cross-hatching, structures of great purity unfolding before the viewer. The same artist's wooden sculptures of Mimih spirits lean against the wall like broomsticks, dividing into two 'legs' a third of the way up from the floor. Painted with hatching and endowed with circular eyes, Iyuna transforms these pieces of dead wood into lively, even mischievous presences. The larger Yawk Yawk spirit sculptures by Owen Yalandja were another highlight of the exhibition. Weighty and quirkily unbalanced, they stand at or above human height with a more serious demeanour.

The vitality of the works in East+West, not to mention their great beauty, made the exhibition powerful in its own right and a welcome antidote to mainstream contemporary art. Terry Ngamandara Wilson's Waterholes at Balpanara reminded one of how a great painting can hold seemingly incompatible qualities in balance. A work of striking abstractness, it possessed an iconic simplicity of composition, dynamism in the diagonal orientations of its gridded hatching and hypnotic, close-range detail.

Roy Jackson aspires to something similar to the Maningrida artists: to perceive the landscape through memory and bodily experience as much as through vision or intellect. Not endowed with their familial lineage of creativity, Jackson's work has grown in the space between artistic precedents of his own choosing. Among them there are undoubtedly some indigenous artists (Emily Kane Kngwarrye above all); also Brits and Americans, for the scale and craft of his paintings places them squarely in the line of twentieth century abstraction. Barely alluding to identifiable objects, the works in Stone Country Paintings use colour, mark and shape to articulate landscape sensations: clouds becoming rain, angular growth rhythms, or the finding of a path through dense scrub. With their arrangement of a great deal of visual information into an instantly comprehensible image, they raise the question of whether truly satisfying simplicity comes about through the resolution of complexity.

Jackson's work evinces a faith that painting can be a source of 'new' images, presenting fresh relations of form to subject. His repertoire of forms is broad and suggests a mind inquiring enough to avoid self-repetition. But there is in his work an air of containment, of the artist working within his capabilities to ends that he understands well. With so many abstract lyricists having painted the landscape in recent memory, one would like to see Jackson distinguish himself more markedly; to throw a spanner in the works and attain a vitality that he can surely achieve, but this exhibition only hints at.

Far from Jackson's abstractions, Michelle Hiscock's approach to landscape relates pictorial convention to the observation of actual places. Using a limited palette on a very small scale, her twenty-eight delicate oil paintings bear more than a passing resemblance to the plein-air studies made by nineteenth-century French painters on their tours of Italy. Through them Hiscock seems to be explaining the mechanics (or poetics) of nineteenth century vision, and applying its devices to local subjects. From painting to painting one witnesses a shift in the quality of forms: from a certain inflexibility in the views of idealised Classical scenes to a more open spatiality in the treatment of recogniseable locations (Centennial Park, Rushcutters Bay, the Shoalhaven). The exhibition demonstrates beyond doubt that art begins when the artist stops worshipping tradition and adapts its conventions to their own ends.

It comes as a surprise that Hiscock wants to spell this out. It is hardly the case that she needs to 'shape up' through contact with her roots. Several years ago she was painting with equal aesthetic sophistication to this and greater ambition. Her drawings and paintings of that period depicted overtly contemporary subjects - cars in traffic, urban and industrial scenes - and successfully managed the difficult interplay of reportage and sentiment. The current works are as surely handled, but withdraw into a field of non-problems that neither seem to need or permit exploration.

A genuine problem for contemporary landscapists is how to reclaim the genre's capacity for showing a great range of the world's phenomena and situations in a single picture. This is one of landscape painting's traditional strengths (think of Lorenzetti or Breughel) and it seems to answer an enduring human desire to see the world represented in all its variety. What sort of picture could, in the contemporary world, hold all the pieces together? James Morrison's Port Davey, Tasmania proposed an answer. Using disjunctions of subject and scale Morrison zooms in or pans away from the objects of his interest, overcoming the limitations of a fixed, one-eye-closed vantage-point. The resulting scenes and situations can be highly improbable. In The Island a family of 'primitives' is dwarfed by enormous flowers, blooming against a streaky sky of hot pink and orange. The floral forms are the picture's protagonists; the human figures are present to round out a quirky impression of pre-historic life that may be joking in the details, but has to be taken seriously for sheer imaginal dynamism.

While the setting of contrasting elements against each other is the main idea in Morrison's paintings, he sometimes works towards a more traditional wholeness. Small Brown Trout is such a work. In this elegantly composed picture the flights of fancy are not spatial but narrative. Platypus, rodents, birds and fish go about the business of being alive and visible in a pictorial harmony that might be cloying if it were not painted so exquisitely. It is when working in this more naturalistic, less bizarre manner that Morrison's paintings seem most heartfelt. This is not to dismiss the artist's bent for the fantastic, which permits him broach subjects and concerns that might be difficult to combine in any other way (sea creatures, tribal societies, aeroplane accidents). But when his super-impositions fail, as with the female head transposed over unrelated forms in Lucy, the pictures can tend towards the ridiculous.

Showing a total aversion to the fantastic were Max Watters's New Paintings (Broomfield and Stewarts Brook). Watters was born and has always lived in Muswellbrook. He paints its buildings and the landscapes that envelop or are glimpsed behind them. An untrained artist, he draws on convention when it serves his purposes, but maintains a conception of form that is inward looking and impervious to stylistic trends. His application of linear perspective is guided by a personal logic, as though he worked it out alone and over time. His colours and textural effects have become so attuned to the subjects he paints that form and subject, conception and execution are inextricably one. Watters's work is formulaic, but repetition has not deadened his sensibility. If anything, his paintings are getting better.

The greatest pleasure of this exhibition was a quartet of paintings depicting a shearing shed and ramshackle yard. Each painting places the viewer opposite a different wall, so that the series functions as a circumnavigation, leaving no doubt as to the artist's attentiveness to the motif (the details in each work are verifiable through reference to the other three, and they add up). Watters's creation of four such differently satisfying images - equally strong and well-realised ideas - from a restricted set of elements attests to his resourcefulness as a picture-maker. Like all of his work, this series convinces one of the preciousness of perception; showing how, through concentration and the sustained effort of making, the painter can transform an unremarkable piece of reality into an image that embodies what it is to be alive and sensitive to life's possibilities.

The Star Trek factor of going where no one has gone before is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of contemporary art that we tend to overlook the reason or need for a new element. Just because something has never been done before is not reason enough to justify its creation. The work has to be a necessary development of the artists’ ideas for it to be successful.

Our constant obsession with breaking from tradition has led to an atmosphere of shallow art which, with no footholds in anything but where it stands now, has more to do with transient fashion than a further understanding of life in the present. Since necessity is the mother of invention it stands to reason that when viewing something that you haven’t seen before you have to ask does this fulfill a need? Things that are new but are not the product of necessity are usually sold with a free set of steak knives outside of the art world, this enticement however does not continue within the gallery walls.

Abstract painting may be seen as an old art form, as indeed it now is, but video art comes from an even older tradition, that of filmmaking. Installation art stems from Dada or in many cases sculpture. Most forms of visual art are building on long established traditions and to call any or all of them contemporary is correct because they are still being used as a vehicle of expression in the present day. However the term contemporary is almost universally reserved for work that has the superficial glean of newness, which we now call “contemporary”. It has become a category or movement to be regarded with future hindsight in the same way we regard Cubism or Abstract Expressionism it has ceased to be a term relating to time and has become a genre.

Since computers are new to the world you would assume that computer- generated art can only be seen as new and thus contemporary. It is however only a new medium, in the same way that acrylic paint or ready- made oil paints were once new mediums, the ideas or concerns can still be traditional and often are. Innovation cannot be found in new mediums but only in new ideas.

These terms traditional and contemporary were at the forefront of my thoughts when viewing the work of Nicholas Harding. Not being a simple critic I try to base my appraisal of a body of work on more than just the aesthetic sensations needed for choosing a new sofa. Instead I look to history and ask why did the artist use these elements in this particular way? Whenever I read a review of Nicholas Harding’s work nobody ever makes mention of Auerbach. If it were not for the work of Frank Auerbach Harding would not paint in the manner he does. This statement does not just relate to the use of impasto favoured by both artists, there is also a stylistic mimicry inherent in Harding’s work. The difference, for example, between Auerbach and his teacher David Bomberg, both of whom use thick paint, is that whilst Bomberg uses impasto to describe the weight or gravity of objects so as to give more than just the surface description of subject matter, Auerbach on the other hand uses paint to show the inner workings or matter of his subjects. Man is matter and in his portraits Auerbach pushes paint all over the canvas until a semblance of the human being is achieved, not just a resemblance but their entire self. He does not get this right the first time so he piles paint on top of paint in a struggle. The end result being, I am sure, something that could not have been conceived from the start, it is intuitive, an idea that cannot be achieved through a technical process. Neither of these painters has used paint simply for the beauty of thick luscious paint, this is only a by-product of their larger concerns.

With the work of Nicholas Harding it was in his etchings that I found evidence as to the true nature of his concerns, which are to do with tonal realism. Light and shade, perspective, reflected light, in short all the concerns of a traditional landscape painter. From a distance the paintings are competent transcriptions of urban Sydney naturalistically depicted and following a long tradition of Australian landscape painting. Up close the paintings read like a sheep in wolfs clothing, the application and quality of the paint is in essence a homage to Auerbach yet it is only as a surface concern, window dressing if you like. Harding is a decent draughtsman, from his graphic work we see this. He sets the composition down and then works tonally, slowly building up the image. This technique when translated into painting seems strangely at odds with his method of application, like trying to catch a butterfly with a combine-harvester, hard to achieve and difficult to understand.

Harding is a contemporary artist because he is painting today, he is also a traditional painter because his concerns are wholly based on the ideas of earlier painters. It would seem wrong to call him a contemporary realist as that phrase has already been renovated to serve a different end, although that is the category under which his work falls, if we need a category ? Harding is not following the fashions of “Contemporary Art” which is refreshing to see, and although he has not produced any new ideas his work is of a high standard with a pleasant sense of nostalgia. His painting is capable of change and in time it may evolve into something unique as he finds his own voice.

Danila Vasilieff coined the phrase "ghastly good taste" in derision of certain of his modernist contemporaries: painters such as Kandinsky and the Bauhaus artists who had, in his view, reduced art to polite compositional sport (1). Ghastly good taste would seem to be ubiquitous, the only change being in the particular form it assumes. Today we see it in the clean, colourless, minimal aesthetic. Long since disassociated from the politics that drove Minimalism in the 1970s, the minimal aesthetic is being used at the top end of every market. It informs the way products look (everything from cars to art), and the style in which they are advertised. Of course the minimal can be beautiful, but so often it is coolly incommunicative and seems to close the door on visual experience.

At Legge Gallery into the first week of July, fourteen exultant paintings by the late Pat Larter served as a reminder of how vigorously she defied the "less is more" ethic. In contrast to the chicanery of many of her contemporaries, Larter's intent as a painter was straightforward. She used the mass-produced materials of visual celebration - fluorescent acrylic paints, glitter and cheap trinkets - to make ebullient abstract images. One is used to seeing these materials used artlessly in ill-conceived craft projects. (Larter's weaker works drop towards that level. Forms don't quite gel, the composition slackens and as a result the paint is simply garish.) But the best of her paintings - and they are a healthy proportion of the total output - effect a transformation. The artist's strange compositional sense, driven by an intuitive feeling for shape and colour, endows glitzy materials with considerable aesthetic weight. Time and again the paintings present genuinely unexpected formal resolutions. One discovers in them a sense of rightness that is real, but seems contrary to every conventional idea of good taste. And far from representing purely formal ideas, the paintings transmit the joy of life and creativity. Made with relish, they avail the viewer of all the pleasures of looking.

Paintings as rude as Pat Larter's will always polarise audiences; they will continue to be loved and hated. But it cannot be denied that she achieved an original contribution to abstract painting, and overcame one of the major problems facing painters at any time (but particularly in her period): how to embody thought and convey feeling through a physically resistant, historically-loaded medium. That she achieved this in a working life shorter even than those of Van Gogh, Seurat or Masaccio (Larter started painting at the late age of 55 and died only five years later) makes the achievement more remarkable.

1.See Bernard Smith Australian Painting 1788-2000, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p.223.

What is Conceptual Painting? To accompany his exhibition of paintings at Boutwell-Draper Gallery, Mark Titmarsh provided his own written notes on its history. The moment of greatest clarity in this paragraph (which included the priceless description of Conceptual Painting as "Interactive Stillness in Real Time") was a quoted observation by Ian Burn that "'painting is about seeing as a medium for consciousness'". The truth of Burn's statement lies in its acknowledgement that visual perception is central to any understanding or experience of painting. For although the conceptual has been cast as the enemy of the visual ever since the early twentieth century (thankyou Marcel Duchamp [1]), it manifests in painting as a visual property. One only has to read that most readable of art historians, Ernst Gombrich, to understand that painters and sculptors have invoked concepts since time immemorial. Not through verbal posturing, but through the intelligent use of the basic visual elements (line, tone, shape, colour etc.)[2].

Titmarsh's use of the proper noun - Conceptual Painting - indicates that it is not Gombrich's idea of the conceptual that he has in mind. Rather, his work invokes Conceptual Painting as the investigation of what painting is, as physical medium and cultural idea.

Measuring 80 x 100 cm, Titmarsh's paintings typically consist of a base coat of bright acrylic colour followed by some thick, multi-coloured smears of paint, large in scale. A final coat of clear resin creates a perspex-like gloss over the whole painting, rendering any textural variations in the paint surface invisible (very much like a laminated photograph). The paintings announce the presence of paint without delivering its familiar materiality. One is led to ask: why does this painting look like that? How was it made? Is it actually a painting? And by implication, what is painting?

All painting that succeeds as art addresses these concerns; they are implicit in the activity of making art. Something more is required if a painting is to at least entertain its audience. Thankfully, Titmarsh's paintings are a visual and tactile delight. It comes as no surprise that the artist refers in his writings to 'Conceptual Expressionism', for he loves colour and gesture. Furthermore, where many conceptualists intellectualise creative play out of the equation, Titmarsh's work and writing indicate that he understands its importance:

"If I set out with serious intentions to get the job done it doesn't work. It's only during playtime that it actually happens and in turn something quite 'serious' takes place. In the spirit of play a space is held open for painting to show itself and in return painting holds open a space for 'being' to reveal itself for a brief and fleeting moment".

This quote is extremely telling, suggesting that for Titmarsh the interrogation of process does not constitute an end in itself. It is a means of attaining the elusive 'moment of being', presumably that moment of creative surprise in which a material like paint can suggest more than its own brute materiality. But does this not point away from the conceptual back to the more traditional terrain of figuration and abstraction? Titmarsh's work leads me to think that the possibilities of painting are encompassed in the space between figuration and abstraction, and that in painting Gombrich's idea of the conceptual is the most substantial one.

1. In an extensive interview by Pierre Cabanne (Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, Thames and Hudson, London, 1971), Duchamp defined 'the conceptual' as the cerebral appeal of an art work, as opposed to its 'retinal' (i.e. visual) aspect. While it was his stated aim to rid art of the retinal, Duchamp's work and verbal statements evince an understanding that it is not always possible or necessary to separate them. Nevertheless, one of Duchamp's legacies has been a tradition of aesthetically impoverished, concept-driven art.

2. In Art and Illusion, Gombrich observes: "All art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself, and it is precisely because all art is 'conceptual' that all representations are recogniseable by their style" (p.76, Art and Illusion- A study in the psychology of visual representation, Thames and Hudson, London, 1996 - first published 1960).

In Susan Andrews's paintings, forms suggestive of cells or microbes are deployed in a light, atmospheric space. She recently participated in Imaging Science, a two-person exhibition at Tin Sheds Gallery, and is represented by Legge Gallery, Sydney.

Why do you make art?
Art is a vehicle that enables me to speak of that which is difficult to put into words. It’s a process that I find both satisfying and challenging and helps me make sense of my experience of living in this world.

Your paintings are suggestive of life forms at the microscopic level. Is there a definable subject matter that you work from, or have in mind, when you paint?
My subject matter has always come from looking at the world and responding physically to sensations both within and around me. At present the subject matter has become more specific in that I’ve been looking at living cells both within the human body in plants and in animals.

How did you arrive at this imagery? Was it preceded by work in more conventional genres (e.g. figure painting, landscape...) ?
The work has been evolving over the years. As an art student in the early eighties I painted biomorphic forms suggestive of body parts floating in interior spaces. The work became progressively closer to the present subject as though I were viewing the forms through a microscope. I started to paint forms that were both open and closed and produced images suggestive of a visual overlapping of plant forms and human body parts. The present imagery has concerns with fluidity, layering and transparency which is a continuation of all of the above.

Do you see your work bearing a relationship to the traditions of representing the body?
Yes I do. We exist in this world through our bodies, we perceive the world and the world perceives us in reference to our bodies. I think my work comes out of the tradition of the body perceived as an expression of space. This expression can be a metaphor for the various levels of sensations felt both internally and externally. Artists like Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse and Yves Klein are just a few artists whose work I feel embodies this particular concept.

Does your concentration on life forms that are invisible to the naked eye reflect a way of seeing and thinking about nature / life / the cosmic order..?
Yes, our vision of the world around us seems very limited and we tend to see things within a narrow perceptual field. I’ve always been one to look at the intricacies of nature, finding minute structures of nature/life/cosmos far more revealing than the big picture. We know that our bodies are a microcosm of the larger world around us and the microscopic world in turn is also a mirror for the micro/macro world - I’m interested in how we live in this inside/outside, body/world – a universe in motion.

Who is your audience?
That question reminds me of one the Tax Office asked me once! I don’t believe I have an audience as such. My experience of exhibiting work has shown me that the viewing public are often my peers, associates, friends and students and if I’m really lucky a few others may trickle through and view my work.

Do you think that your work may, at some stage, appeal to a large, non-specialist audience? (Presuming, that is, that it hasn't already reached such an audience.)
Having said that, yes I would like my work seen by more people, but I can’t orchestrate that, I can’t make art work with that as the outcome, if I did I would have to change my subject matter. While I would like my work to be more ‘visible’ I really don’t see my work appealing to a large non-specialist audience – the imagery is probably too obscure and not attached to narrative, this makes it double trouble for larger audiences.

Is this important to you?
Yes and No! All artists think they’ve got something to say and are worthy of being heard. People’s reading of the imagery often intrigues me. Some people have referred to my paintings and works on paper as meditative and thoughtful - which is a much-undesired and undervalued commodity these days.

Of peoples' responses to your work, which have you found most satisfying?
I think positive criticism from considered and thoughtful fellow artists, something I can respond to intelligently. Positive criticism can be good intellectual nourishment – to ponder and consider how, what and why I create the work I do.

Could you tell us about your hours of work - do you have a painting routine?
Yes, I do have a painting routine. I like to work consistently, regardless of an exhibition. I prefer to work during the day as I like natural light. A day in the studio often begins between 8am and 9am working until 5pm during the week and Saturdays I usually work for five hours and have Sundays off, an exception to this would be working close to an exhibition deadline, where I will also work on Sundays.

Do you work with exhibitions in mind, or compile exhibitions from the work that you have done?
If I am to exhibit in a different gallery space I do consider the size and scale of the space, and how small or large works may sit in the space, I also consider the light source. I’m flexible on the day of hanging and open to change, as my mental picture of the placed work and the reality of installing may be quite different.

Could you name an artist whose work has been important to you, and say why?
It's hard for me to name one artist as there are so many artists who have been important to me at specific times. I find my art appreciation shifts and what I would have dismissed once I rediscover with new relish as my eyes and mind open wider than before. For the last five years I have found myself being drawn to those artists who have been working with a similar subject matter, Terry Winters and Ross Bleckner. I’ve found Terry Winters' paintings, drawings and prints extraordinarily inventive in imagery, from his plant life and seedpod paintings of the '80s through to his present works of plant cell structures. I’ve also been entranced by the sensual application of paint and the dark melancholic imagery of Ross Bleckner’s large paintings from the early '90s through to his more recent cell paintings.

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