BEAUTY

LIFEBLOOD Oil on linen 90 x 200 cm

FRISSON, my solo exhibition, continues all of this week, until Sunday 28 March. AND, I am very happy to report that it is attracting a steady stream of visitors and sales. The opening night was fantastic, with around 100 people through the exhibition and a number of sales, plus very ego-building comments! I did say in a previous post that I would upload photos of the opeing night, but guess what? Even though my camera was in my hand bag, I forgot to even think about it.

LIFEBLOOD, is attracting quite a lot of attention. I watch people as they look at it from a distance and then they move closer. Once up close you can see the smile....even though I am looking at the back of their heads, I can see the smile in their bodies. The reason for the smiling bodies is that up close they see the small $ signs which I have used to create the strips of rain, and the foreground. I love the fact that people move back and forth from this painting examining it from close and far distance, because this is the movement we need as we live locally in an increasingly globalised world. I have written about LIFEBLOOD before. here's the link http://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com/2009/05/lifeblood.html

AH HAs! Oil on linen 30 x 30 cm SOLD

I sold this painting on opening night! Here's the link to my previous post where I 'talk' about those instants where insights cause Ah Ha reactions. http://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com/2010/02/ah-ahs.html

LOVE oil on linen 100 x 100 cm SOLD

LOVE also sold on opening night and could have sold a few times more since then...from the comments I have received. Here's my previous post about LOVE http://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com/2010/01/love.html

DISAPPEARING PERSPECTIVE Oil on linen 30 x 30 cm
This painting was the last one finished for the exhibition. I wrote a post about my thoughts, but did not upload an image, because the painting was not finished. My thoughts revolved around ideas that we may need rethink how traditional and western concepts of perspective influence our perception of a world which has changed to the point where new ideas of perspective or even a collaspe of perspective is required. Here's the previous post http://kathrynbrimblecombeart.blogspot.com/2010/03/alternative-to-perspective-inside.html

NOW TO BEAUTY

One of the recurrent comments about my exhibition FRISSON is that it is beautiful. Also, Dr. Christine Dauber in her remarks when she opened the show, referred to concepts of beauty. She commented that in art theory there are statements about the death of beauty with contingent arguments, or suggestions that beauty cannot hold the potential for political agency. She then said that my work refuted this suggestion, because inherent in my work is a conscious compulsion to find connections between people, races, cultures and religions to make the world a better place.

This compulsion is not driven naively, but based in experience and thought with a salute, which is deliberately elided, to the existence of ugliness and all its attendant characteristics. I have often thought about beauty, and when I studied Art History at University, I literally felt at a loss when I read about theories relating to the death of beauty and the implied suggestion that anything beautiful could not contain the kind of agency that presumably something which was not beautiful could.

 

So, all I can say is that visitors to my exhibition seem to be engaged by the beauty. This engagement seems to infiltrate at an emotional level and induces a desire to engage with me. I know that when I see something which I think is beautiful it is not just about seeing it. It is also about feeling it, and this is where vacuous   prettiness collapses when positioned beside beauty. The distinction is felt in a truly sentient manner. Beauty, to me, is the kind of thing a person will remember, and when the memory surfaces they feel something delightful and reassuring in their bodies. The fact that it can feel reassuring tells me that beauty is something which possibly has a human race kind of memory imbedded in our DNA...in that huge part of DNA which has not yet been explained.

So, whilst my eyes might tell me something looks beautiful, it is my emotional response and memory of that feeling that is truly an experience of beauty. To me, this is a state of being which has far more potential to act as an agent of change than a state which is driven soley or more predominantly by ugliness. Both beauty and ugliness are identifiable because duality provides us with an opportunity to know what something is, by knowing what it is not.

I will be thinking more about beauty!

FRISSON

GRAYDON GALLERY 29 Merthyr Rd, New Farm , Brisbane 61 7 32542325

Open DAILY 10 am - 6 pm [or by appointment] until Sunday 28 March