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.
Group Exhibition PRETTY / UGLY at Lot19, February 2024
I miss out on a lot of things. Here i have captured some of that.
I did so by cutting the top off an empty beer can, placed some photo-sensitive paper inside, sealed it up tightly, poked a hole in the side to let the light in and strapped it to something mostly stable outside. And then I forgot about it as i got on with some other common distraction...
In the words of the author Dr Deborah Wardle, Bill Sampson’s “intelligent application of his work to each chapter greatly enhances the book. His images illustrate how coalescence between surface and subterranean water and imaginary places can expand and shape imaginary invocations of groundwater’s presence.”
I thought to draw with expanding polyurethane foam contained in pressure cans – three dimensionally as it is sculptural when it expands. But it wouldn’t stand up. So I tried it in polystyrene beads and viola! 3-D drawing (sans printer) is invented.
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
For Opening Address by Emeritus Professor Richard Perry and essay by Sophie Knezic click Articles
‘Scotoma’ means ‘blind spot’ and ‘IX’ is a reference to Chapter 9 of the Book of Revelations from which Book, Albrecht Dürer drew the angels such as appear here.
Pretty / Ugly
February 2024 CamCan Group Exhibition at Lot 19
Its no ‘oil painting’, no Girl with a Pearl Earring, and for those stuckists its even ‘abstract’! But their look, and for the poetry in the way they have come about i see beauty. BS
Horizon - 2020/21
Exhibition Date and Location Details
‘Stood, just stood
Where do we go to from here?…’
Reproduction Mutation Selection - 2015
One in two (or three) parts: six pairs of paintings and small sculptures
The resin/urethane sculptures are a product of a combatative contest between toxic substances – substances that are nevertheless an integral part of our everyday lives. Together they might resemble things undiscovered, and seek to suggest new ways of perceiving the contemporary world, a new nature, and the contemplation of the future.
