Bill’s work once teased with what he termed ‘easy beauty’ – large brightly-coloured works made without concern for any of the historic tenets of painting. For example “Rococozenism” exhibition 2009 and “Chance Upon Nothing” exhibition 2013, MARS Gallery, Melbourne.
Here, the immediately gratifying elements have been stripped away. Stripped back to the line. The line here as the mediative present, the process, and the metaphor – combined with an entirely new element, poetic lines.
Thinking Gerhard Richter’s painting of his daughter Betty whom he’d photographed…counter intuitively with her face turned away towards a dark background.
Investigating Richter’s provocation: paint copy of Betty in oil on the reverse side of a glass panel (feeling being that the first paint applied might reveal a truer picture of what lay behind Betty’s gaze)
Apply glass pane to the wet paint and take print.
For a painting in sympathy with the work of Emanuel Phillips Fox
In 1911 Emanuel Phillips Fox painted On the Mediterranean Coast that presently hangs in the Castlemaine Art Museum. I took that as my starting point.
My shortlisted entry is titled On the Mediterranean Coast – One Hundred Years On, 79 x 96 cm, synthetic polymer paint on aluminium composite, 2016
One in two (or three) parts: six pairs of paintings and small sculptures
The resin/urethane forms are a product of antagonistic processes between toxic substances – substances that are nevertheless play as integral part of our everyday lives.
[MARS] Gallery 3rd - 28th September 2014
‘There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea.
Counihan Gallery, Moreland City Council
With the over-arching title of 'Co-Variance', 'Forces of Nature' is Sampson's contribution to a group exhibition with Annabel Nowlan and Mia Salsjo. October 2013
