This first post is a “sticky post” and stays at the top

To see my most recent post please scroll down to the bottom of this post. (or click the top one to the right here)

“Why bother?” I ask myself.

This website is for:

family and friends,

people who own my paintings,

people who still remember me,

people who don’t know me,

For self promotion (reluctantly)

To  tell my story

and explain my absence from the art scene for all those years.

To attempt to explain my paintings,

To update what I’m working on (using video?)

To air my beliefs…

My works

When required I have been calling my painting style “Ecological surrealism”

The notion that I have to have a “Style”, or that it has to have a name is simplistic and journalistic.

Every painting creates its own path as I work on it.

One of the motivations that drives me is avoiding repetition, cliches.

Boredom is my best helper. If I am getting bored its probably unoriginal, unimaginative; I have to stretch my ideas to the brink of absurdity, impossibility, otherwise I am squandering my precious time.

Mostly I begin with an idea; sometimes just a shape that will fill or grow inside the canvas. Sometimes (mostly) its the colours and tones of a place, which may exist in my mind, or perhaps out there. These colours usually find shapes for themselves, or even allow me to draw them. I like to have something happening; and lately I like it to be implausible, with prospects of being taken as an allegory or analogy. I would like to create a pseudomyth with the painting. Eventually an image begins to happen and sometimes it wants to be quite realistic. Sometimes the idea prefers to remain ambiguous and vague

Just lately I like to be not too serious.

I like to do fairly big paintings…anything smaller than 3′ by 4′ isn’t worth the effort. About 4′ by 5′ is spacious and about right, but anything up to about 6′ by 9′ is fine.

I spend several months on each painting. Its always hard work. I love to push my imagination, technical skills, endurance and perfectionism to extremes. Anything less would kill me with boredom.

My History; very briefly.

Born 1942 in Temora District hospital. I had a brother aged two, and nine years later along came a sister.

We lived on a farm. My father; the author E.O. Schlunke (Eric) preferred to be seen as a grazier and never overcropped his land. He was probably manic depressive. Had despotic mood swings.

My mother (Olga) came from a rural background, went to Presbyterian Ladies College and passionately loved/hated the farm. (She was bipolar too) She wrote poetry, and was published.

Classical music was always playing in the home: On 78s when I was little, and LPs when I was about 7 or 8.

Eric and Olga hated sport, popular music, commercial radio stations, vulgar people, drunks (!!?!!)

They loved Nature, scintillating conversation, the arts, elegance.

Eric wanted me to go to university, mostly because his father (who died before I was born, and seems to have been a religious zealot who abused the Bible to manipulate/terrorise his kids) wouldn’t let Eric go to Unversity. I started at University of New England and dropped out at the beginning of term 2 because of harassment from certain other students.

I went to stay with Arthur Murch and family, and stayed for about seven years.

Arthur took me on as a kind of apprentice. His wife Ria showed incredible forbearance and kindness.

Arthur got the contract to do the Mural in the Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay and I was one of his helpers (Along with Helga Lanzendorfer and Julian Halls) Helga and I were allowed to paint bits of it, but poor Julian was not.

I began exhibiting and in 1963 won the Rural Bank Art Prize at the Royal Easter Show. I was 21.

Naturally at that age I became convinced that I knew it all and there began subtly, my decline.

“George Lambert and Arthur Murch and me”

This was my unhung entry to this years Archibald.

It began as a fantasy wherein George and Arthur are in Big Bush (where I live) working on projects. Arthur had a large block of sandstone, into which he was carving a thirty foot high jumping spider.

George was doing some kind of environmental sculpture; using bush materials.

As the painting proceeded Arthur’s spider became the fibreglass arthropod he had often wished he could do and I had him sandpapering its leg in preparation for gluing on hairs, of which he had a tangled bundle. George’s bark and petal sculpture acquired a praying mantis. As work proceeded Arthur’s spider legs and George’s petals insinuated themselves into the entire big bush background. Arthur’s plaster cast teaching aids (he was a passionate teacher) came along to keep us company.

My reason for doing the painting became clearer as work proceeded. At first it was just the fact that Arthur was an assistant to George, and I was an assistant to Arthur. (This first idea was suggested to me by my dear friend Jeanette.)

 Quite soon I began wondering how my life works compared to those of A and G. So I gave myself some insects too, but not very big, but probably live, not sculptures. Eventually I took the look of embarrassment off my face and tried to make it say: “Hey aren’t we having a jolly time being creative…”

“…And The Rainforest Will Return to the Desert…”

This was a finalist in the Essential Energy Art prize, called “Countryscapes” and now terminated.

I wanted to do another painting about the Chewings Range. Maybe I drove past them on the way to Hermansburg Mission way back in 1962. I didn’t stop for any drawings or photos because the person I was traveling with was having a mini nervous breakdown. I used the grey dry corrugated landforms with violet shadows in a previous painting, “Western Macs circa 2084”.

But this time it had to be more than just a view.

(I feel views are dreary and unjustifiable these days for me. Boring too. A good folio of photos or a video pan, or best still, visiting the place and looking at it is the best thing you can do with a view.)

So I put something implausible in the foreground; a clump of rainforest trees, and more rainforest beginning to grow over the corrugated hills. Some of the bluegreyviolet hills were growing a green canopy. The idea excited me, but upon reflection I realised that most people would not understand.

I could not call it Chewings Range, nor even Western Macs, nor even Western Macdonnell Ranges because virtually nobody knows where they are, and that they are very dry and could not support rainforest.

I don’t often make concessions for people’s ignorance, but I had to change the wording to “Desert”, and then it sounded biblical, (Revelations) so I prefixed the “…And” and set it in the future.

I enjoyed creating a kind of Mosque dome with bright lights in the big fig tree; and a storm coming across the rainforest. Very Romantic. It was a very difficult painting, but not for a minute unenjoyable. I love extremely hard work.

“An Eiffel Tower in Big Bush”