The Cutting

Four paintings for Fort Delta

Ieuan Weinman

 

I set out to create multiple descriptions of the same place.

The styles that occurred were to me responses to trying to record and systematize various aspects of a place (landscape):

 

- the restricting of colours

- the looseness or tightness of marks – the speed of painting(process)

- the rigidity to the matrix (gridded up photo)

- to rigidity to detail (working from a series of photos and drawings)

 

The attraction to the scene/image:

- the combination of man made and natural elements

- the ease of a pleasing composition ie nice landscape

- the multitude of elements and shapes

- the hidden aspects of the picture ie the zoo to the left side and that it occurs in a zone that could be termed transitional gateway to the northern suburbs

 

The paintings explore the nature of attempting to record information, of what to do with the excess of what cannot be recorded and how to read between the different pictures. (to avoid reading as relativism, difference…..as a way of  trying to get at what is beyond the explicit narrative content)

 

• I classify the pictures as different narratives that are partial and engaged - with each picture is an alternative to the other.

• The gap between the different narratives brings out what is primordially repressed between the form and the content. (Zizek)

• Failure of each rendering to describe what is there (the excess/beyond the content)

• the content of the work has contaminated the very form in which it is reported

• The Real is not found in what is the same but in the gap between the narratives

 

Apects of the work.

The frame as part of the content; across the four works are the grey lower band and grey sky that represses a certain aspect of the content.

 

Content: the vista of the Royal Park station, Melbourne and railway line cutting.

Form: traditional landscape painting (variations) shown in a stockroom of a commercial gallery