The Three of Us - Carol Endean Little

The Three of Us

For this show I am exhibiting both paintings and sculpture. 

The paintings grew out of sessions with my sewing machine, when I began playing with the thread as line, texture and pattern.  I like the freedom it brought to experiment, tracing out the walks I took in memory along the cliff lines of the Blue Mountains, or along rocky coasts and beaches. 

In the sculptures, too, I took the freedom to experiment with different types of stone and wood, using different tools and techniques.  I have always had an affinity to stone, bringing them home from all my travels.  The weight of stone, its density and colour, its enormous age, bearing within itself the geological and environmental history of the Earth, all of this is quite marvellous and worthy of respect.

There is something rather mystical about stone.  Carving is laborious and dusty,  sometimes frustrating, but always, pleasure.

Carol

The Exhibition The Three of Us is running at the Little Gallery, 89 George St, Bathurst from 19th November until 9 December.

Postcards from the Middle - Karin Smith explains

I have included most of my postcards in the exhibition, I have always liked the idea of them being lined up together in an exhibition so this is a great opportunity. The other thing I have done is created actual postcards from them. With much fiddling about in Word I feel like I have achieved something very impressive – speak to anyone who knows – I am MAD for using Word but I don’t have access to more sophisticated programs. I plan to have lots of these at the exhibition for sale at $2 each. The money for these will go to charity. It also means I have an unlimited supply of cards for birthdays and attaching to presents. One of the good things about using postcards as cards like this is that they use only a quarter of the resources of other cards. No envelope and no double fold. I like that!

The Exhibition The Three of Us with Carol Endean Little, Karin Smith and Catherine Hale will run from 19th November to 8th December at The Little Gallery, 69 George St Bathurst.

View Karin Smith's website here

Postcards from the Middle - Karin Smith explains

Quite a while ago now I decided to do linoprints in postcard size. There were a couple of reasons, first I thought it would be easy to go somewhere and find something unique about it to create an image that easy identified a location, secondly it meant I could use them as cards. The first one was not as easy as I thought (nor do I go to too many different places!) but I have now done quite a few postcards of Bathurst. The second is an interesting dilemma. I hate spending heaps on cards that are going to be thrown out as soon as the present is opened or the birthday is over. My solution was to do lots of the postcard prints and put them on some matboard and make that part of the present. I thought they would be stuck on the fridge or thrown out like most cards. This backfired on me because the people I gave them to wanted them in a format they could frame – quite a compliment but I hadn’t intended to give them a picture that they ‘should’ frame. 

The Exhibition The Three of Us with Carol Endean Little, Karin Smith and Catherine Hale will run from 19th November to 8th December at The Little Gallery, 69 George St Bathurst

View Karin Smith's website here

A Studio is Born

The studio is being built, 5 weeks ahead of schedule. The builders came around today and poured concrete into the stump holes (painfully carved out of granite over the last 2 weeks by Matt and me). Above ground next week.

Little Landscapes

Inspired by being a finalist for the second year running in the Essential Energy Countryscapes exhibition I thought it time to explore some landscapes. This is the first one in a series of small landscapes painted around town. They are from favourite spots, particularly the old parts of town, with views to the hills beyond. This is Bathurst to me.



Milltown Oil on canvas 31cm x 34cm

This series of paintings will be part of the display at the upcoming exhibition The Three of Us at The Little Gallery, 89 George St, Bathurst, opening 19 November, 6pm

The Three of Us - Karin Smith

For artists who work solo, collaborating on an exhibition is fun. So Carol Endean Little, Karin Smith and I joined forces. We meet regularly to discuss development of work, and to plan for the opening of The Three of Us to be held on November 19th at The Little Gallery, Bathurst.

Karin Smith will exhibit a range of beautiful works, and discusses her multidisciplinary practice below:

My name is Karin Smith. I work in a wide variety of media using recycled material where possible. I make jewellery by painting on glass, lino printing, 2d and 3d mosaic, carved hebel and bronze casting. My work is representational  I love working with shapes such as the human form and pears. My latest theme is 'urban wildlife' starting with prints of slightly kitsch garden statues but it can also include many of the things we take for granted in our urban environment.
I do my best work when I don't think, and just allow the creative process to emerge from wherever it is in my being. This makes my work spontaneous and light hearted. I also want it to be accessible by being affordable, easy to understand and fun.
My glass badges, painted on recycled glass from louvre windows, are very popular because there is a wide variety of quirky images, and each badge is unique. I am also going to create postcards from my lino prints. Sending postcards or including them on presents uses one quarter of the paper that traditional cards use and are a fun way of communicating with your friends.

Karin

You can view Karin's website here 

The Three of Us

The Three of Us, an exhibition with Carol Endean Little, sculptor; Karin Smith, printmaker and myself,  opens on 19th November at The Little Gallery in George Street, Bathurst.

Carol can be seen below in her beautiful backyard studio chipping away at a large block of coralline limestone. In February, Carol attended the National Limestone Sculpture Symposium in Mt Gambier, South Australia. Sculptors from all around Australia worked with blocks on site, as the public walked in and around each piece as it was being created, engaging with the artist. No easy task transporting the block back to Bathurst.

Carol has found working with the rock intriguing, as she keeps coming across fossilised shells. A 300m deep belt of coral reef extends below Mt Gambier. Traditionally limestone was cut from here into building blocks called ashlars, and used in the 1800's and 1900's to construct the cities of South Eastern Australia.

Describing her work The Seer, Carol says it is a metaphor for the continuum of time. All life came out of the ancient seas. The past creates the present; the present will create the future. The Seer has grown out of an ancient sea, yet it looks to the future with eyes closed. Who can really tell what the future holds?

Studio Planning

So this is the very dreary denuded winter garden soon to be home to a new studio. The studio will be about the size of a single garage 6m x 3.5m and will fit snugly up against the back right corner. The bees will have to move. As it's a bit elevated up there, there are quite nice views out to the hills. Not that I'll be looking at those of course when there's painting to be done.
I purchased some doors and a window second hand last week in readiness, although the builders can't start for some weeks yet. We've started levelling the site and will widen the walkway up the middle for wheelbarrow access.
I am nutting out dimensions and light sources - I need north windows for some warmth but not too much as sun on the canvas is tricky to work with. Also building materials: i'll have a timber based floor, much nicer than concrete when standing up all day, plus insulation, and eaves on the north side to inhibit summer sun. I'll collect runoff into a raintank which can then gravity feed the veges.

In search of a studio

Interior in Yellow (Corner of the kitchen)

So my sister offers me the use of a corrugated iron shed in her sunny back yard. Great, I say. The shed is 3m x 3m, but I quickly realise that after stuffing in all my paraphanalia there's no room for me and the easel. I paint in my kitchen surrounded by dog, homework books and washing piles, packing up at 3.30 each day as the kids arrive home from school. Dog walks over palette taking cadmium red footprints with her, canvases stack up in hallway/bedroom/kitchen. I follow up a few leads on spaces available, nothing less than $50/week, or not suitable in terms of size/light/accessibility. Then a painter friend suggests saving my weekly rent and extending my own backyard shed to accomodate me. It starts to grow. I'd always wanted a backyard yurt. I draw up plans for a small (dream) studio of my own, take them to a builder, get a quote, convince my husband, source funding and it's happening.

Here goes...

Ok so this is it. Another world. The world of words. Visual artists often complain about it. So I'll start off with an easier topic for me, something concrete. My studio space.

Welcome to blog number 1. An artist in search of a studio.

I've been kicked out of my beautiful studio. For two and a half years I bunkered down on the first floor of a flour mill warehouse in the old part of town. It's not that I had done anything wrong, throwing wild parties or anything, but that my landlord realized the space was worth more to him than $20/week. I used to call it my little corner of Paris. Looking out the double doors to the north west I could see across tree tops to church steeples. I also enjoyed the hubbub of Bedwell's Feed Barn below, with utes pulling up, loading and unloading bales of chaff and lucerne, and chatting about wheat prices. I sat in the doorway in the sun eating my sandwich in between tackling canvasses. Through this doorway opening, I could haul up the timber after walking 3 or 4 metre lengths from Mitre 10 up the road. I'd then cut it with the circular saw, nail the pieces together, stretch the canvas, size the canvas, prime the canvas and cover it with pigment. The space was sizeable enough to store several years of work, empty canvasses, an easel and picture framing equipment.

View from Studio