Orbit no.1 - no.12, 2009, oil on plywood, 32 x 32cm each
ON COMPRESSION
A little while ago, while looking through my sketch books, I was struck by the fact that most of my ideas are recorded as single line Biro drawings. A line starts, wanders around the page, describes what it has to and returns to end where it started, having recorded an idea.
The works in this show, rather than use the line of the original notation as a guide to delineate areas to be painted, aim to present the original line of the sketch itself, as a viable painted image. The events usually encountered across the painted and elaborated surface of a work are now compressed or placed back into and read along a single line.
Orbit exhibition installation view
The use of a paintbrush in a drill has allowed me to imitate on canvas the original act of recording an idea as a single line Biro drawing on paper. The line produced by brush and drill and the line produced by a Biro are analogous as they both use mechanisms of rotation to deliver pigment to a surface. Although it can produce an interesting mark, the use of the drill is not an end in itself. It can quickly and often does wreck a work. Where the Biro was developed to reduce the spillage and mess of pen and ink, painting with a drill is particularly messy. The nature of the line produced using a drill is twofold and at once opposite. There is both a precise mechanical repetition evident, and an out of control natural like divergence or error. But the method does traverse the picture plane leaving fair evidence of the journey.
Church, work, shop, home, no.1 - no.8, 2010, oil on plywood, 90 x 90cm or 90 x 110cm each
Why try to compress an otherwise expansive image into a line anyway? As an artist, painting for me is an ongoing argument directed at finding formsof internal truth capable of sustaining the production of images. I once as a child carried home a bucket of seawater. The journey required two buses. Whatever I thought I was doing then with the bucket of seawater, I did know I carried an ‘image’ because I could look at the water and remember the sea. What would later become important to me about this early act, and often structure my work, was the idea of representation as a function of the reduction of means.
All representational image making may be seen as folly, or at the least an act of severe abstraction that may eventually become language. But there is always something necessarily missing. The intent here is that the line should have been the only guide. All the information and event of an otherwise painted surface should be compressed back into the line that first described it. The works are intended as journeys around the familiar, but on never quite getting it, having to go round again.
Greg Geraghty.
Seaside, no. 1 - no. 6, 2009, oil on plywood, 57 x 77cm each
Curriculum Vitae
Biography
1953
Born in Adelaide, South Australia
1988-91
Bachelor of Visual Arts, SA School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide
1994
Post Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts, SA School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide
1995-96
Master of Visual Arts, SA School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2010
Orbit, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
2006
Union Street, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
A Trip to the seaside, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria
2003
Moatland, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
2001
Paintings, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
1994
Paintings, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide
Selected Group Exhibitions
2009
Murray Darling Palimpsest #7, Visual Arts Research Studios, Latrobe University, Victoria
2006
The Ability To Lie, Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Victoria
2005
Transported, Blindside, Melbourne
2001
Paintings,AMO Gallery, Melbourne
2000
New Thinking is Rare, Arts SA Touring Exhibition
1999
8 x 8 Show, Roar Studios, Melbourne
1998
ONO, Adelaide
1997
Australia Felix, BenallaArts Festival, Victoria
1996
Sea in Overlie, Queensland Triennial of Asia Pacific Art, Hotel Art Fair, Greenaway Art Gallery
Masters Graduate Exhibition, University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide
Traversal, Adelaide Fringe Festival
1995
Assemblage, The New Museum of South Australia, Adelaide
1991
Graduate Exhibition, South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia
Awards
2005
Project Assistance Grant, Arts SA
1998
The Gunnery, Sydney Studio Residency Program, Arts SA
1995
Joint Winner, HR Kym BonythonArt Award
1991
Chroma Acrylics Art Prize
Selected Bibliography
ANDREW, Paul, ‘Transported’, un Magazine, issue 6, Summer 2005
FULLERTON, Greg, ‘Transported’, Blindside Editions, ISBN 0-9757694-6-4
HARRIS, Joanne, 'out of the kitchen', Artlink, vol.17, no.1, 1996
RADOK, Stephanie, 'fertility figures', The Adelaide Review, no.134, Dec 1994
RADOK, Stephanie, 'the country club exhibits', The Adelaide Review, Mar 1991
REID, Chris, 'master of all trades?', Broadsheet, vol.23, no.4, 1994
SPECK, Cathy, ‘Union Street’, Greenaway Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2006
WALKER, Wendy, ‘an all-pervading presence', The Advertiser, June 13, 2001
We are different kinds of things, no.1 - no.9, 2009, oil on plywood, 60 x 60cm each
