Harley Manifold

Grateful

Harley Manifold — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 05:36:07 +0000

I am always, always, very grateful when someone buys another work. And also a little sad, so much time and effort goes into them that they are like little kids – some of these a year +.

However! When that someone is one of your friends it is great, because you can always visit your baby

See me paint – timelapse

Harley Manifold — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 03:19:18 +0000

Here is a little video that shows a little art paint off that I was in recently down in Warrnambool, the artist I was painting against was the infamous Gareth Colliton, he was good, so good he won. Nathan Pye was the talented man who put it all together. It was the most fun I have had painting in a long time, and I really didn’t have anything to show for the first hour except a few washes of colour. As you can see, it’s not till the end that it shows what I was painting.

Double click on the video for full screen I start about 2:45 in.

Arts on the Grass 2011 time lapse from Nathan Pye on Vimeo.

Picasso did it, I’m doing it.

Harley Manifold — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 23:58:53 +0000

Strange thing this one. Started off looking like a sure fire thing. Easy enough – straight forward even. Which just really points to my naivety. Royally. Now the results look amazing, and I’m not talking about mine. And it’s a gurantee you have bare’d witness to them as well.

See all those things up there in the background of the photo, stacked like books in the shelves? Bavarian gold, people, worth it’s weight in gold for sure. They actually stumped houses with the stuff, when they realised the world was running shortsy of it – they turned around and tore all the houses down, TORE them down. Why? Well each of those stones are now worth $6,000 a piece. look at the photo and do the math…

Better than robbing a bank vault i reckon. See the Bavarians were not only good at making hot cakes, but all so sitting on top of large chunks of fine limestone. What a country.

Anyway, I did a lithography course over the weekend, and we each were assigned a stone, and went through a process which was the most complex printmaking I have ever encountered. Good stuff though. Even though my print didnt really work out the way i wanted (ok it still is good) - Needs more working up which will happen over the following weeks. This process I found more complex than oil painting.

Anyway some images from the course, good, bad and some ugly.

The interesting one in there is a lithograph print that Picasso did, as you can see he started with a quite realistic looking bull, and went through the process of redrawing it numerous times till he got what he wanted, all on the one stone. I never respected picasso till I got to visit his museum, and that’s another story.

V V Vienna

Harley Manifold — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:10:21 +0000

My little crush on this little one started with a random train trip to get the hell out of Rome, it was 13hours long it said, it said there was a sleeping carriage. A damn good place to avoid the carnage that became Roma. it went pear shaped when the carriage I was alotted was closed due to a sewerage malfucntion – some kransky filled the toilet. I got stuck in the back of a carriage with a myriad of african refugees and the crying babies. The little utopia of a cruisy 13hours slide into another country, a strange place called Wien, was not looking so smart anymore. Skip ahead a slip into a sleeper carriage and waking up to one of the most memorable views of the whole trip. I make it to Wien, Vienna, or whichever you choose to call it.

If you haven’t seen the Vienna exhibtion at the NGV you are about to miss out. Especially if you like good furniture (sitting on your ass) and beautiful artwork (voyeuristic types) Egon Schiele rocked my little world. Unfortunately I couldn’t sneak enough pictures of the works.. SO, below. Sometimes the wrong way home becomes the right way when you find a little gem. An Amusing character at lunch that took a liking to us. And a beautiful little Egon Schiele and a Gustav Klimt Equally beautiful, and rude.

Here is a link to more Egon, the funny thing is it looks like a lot of ‘contemporary’ painters works at the moment… funny that.http://www.google.com.au/search?q=Egon+Schiele&hl=en&biw=1600&bih=752&prmd=imvnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Sz6OTuGbCtGZiQeSm6SdCA&ved=0CD4QsAQ

Wahini

Harley Manifold — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:51:40 +0000

My iPhone is trying to tell me a wahini is an Eskimo… Try typing it… New little etch/sketch

Harley Manifold — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:10:53 +0000

Two new little paintings

Little tacker

Harley Manifold — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:37:56 +0000

Nice little study of an old experience – which is what they are all about really…

It took { — } years to make…

Harley Manifold — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:55:43 +0000

An interesting point to note in the making of art work. Is that no matter what sort of art, big small. Colourful, dull or dreary. No matter how much it cost, to make or to buy. No matter how many sketches or plans or photos or failed layers of paint.

How long did it take you to make that?

Well the only ever good response I ever heard to that was from Pauline, my curator, she pointed out very swiftly. ‘If anyone ever asks you that you reply. How old are you again Harley? Right then that’s how long it took you to make it’.

And she has a very good point, it was not just the brushstrokes that make each painting, the layers of medium and pigment. It is every moment that has gone into these little moments. And it terms of life – that’s the whole lot.

The latest paintings took 28 years to make. Not a bad innings, pretty cheap too considering how long it took to paint them Of which there are more to come soon…

Here is a photographer who – surprisingly – puts in as much work as I do to make a single final piece. Respect.

Meet Sam Abel.

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2011/09/commitment-to-your-work-taking-an-entire-year-to-make-a-single-image/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ChaseJarvis+%28Chase+Jarvis+Blog%29

HE WAS ARRESTED 15 TIMES

Harley Manifold — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 00:47:41 +0000

Here is a super interesting little (ok looong) interview with Shepard Fairey, through UNTITLED magazine. AKA DAvid Carson’s LoV3 Child. I am a fan – of Carson – the mag is ok….

ANyway, Shepard Fairey is the face for OBEY, you will most likely have seen his artworks on a wall in the city. good stuff. HE touches on a few interesting issues about getting your work out there and what it’s like, good and bad, being famous.

GRab a cuppa, or a jug and absorb,

http://untitledmagazine.net/shepard.mp3

Rick Amor

Harley Manifold — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 02:06:30 +0000

SO still a little gun shy on writing for more than a brief post… However speaking to a friend of mine who blogs regularly he says just let it out… Anyway this post is about Amor’s paintings. Not mine

I recently got to visit Rick Amor’s new exhibition of works in Niagara galleries on Punt Road. Now this will seem like gushing, however, I have not seen in the flesh any painters in this day and age who do realism with such a bend towards surreal and paint it so well. I have learn’t alot about painting just by looking at his paintings, for instance the colour in the sky the warm orange, is mixed down from a cadmium orange with maybe a little cadmium red in it also and lessened in intensity by a strong blue. When you get close to the canvas you can see the sky is vibrating with pigment, orange being opposite blue… Previously I would have tried making that colour by adding a red to a yellow, when it really needs to be the most intense colour first – orange, before dulling it down, to get the same vibrating effect. like red next to blue it vibrates.

Here is what I mean by a vibrating pattern, well as close to it as I can…

This next painting is a strange one, everynow and then Amor seems to do a painting that a bit out of left field, this one almost looks like a dream… The colours are very simple and there is as usual an emphasis on tone.

Though it says 2011. It feels very different. And one of his ‘signatures’ is not there, the small man. Interestingly enough there was another very well known artist visiting the gallery while I was there trying to work out how to paint. We will just call him L. L thought that with the first painting in the post ‘ he’s doing his Jeffrey Smart thing, just putting his figure there for scale’. While this could be true, I think if you see the exhibition and spend enough time with it you will see this is not quite true… Possibly L. was just being a little bit tetchy as his last exhibition didn’t go so well…

Which depending on your schooling might give different results. This new exhibtion, is interesting in that it is one of the most surreal groups of works of his. Melbourne seems to be further from his view. As L. concurred ‘quite surreal’ this time. L’s friend who I couldn’t pick thought they were ‘Timeless, yet there is a time in them like a video, but they are still and not’. All these things they mentioned are interesting as they are areas I try and include into my own work, but this isn’t about me.

The thing that interests me most about the works is the paint work, Rick always paints very thinly, and I mean very thinly. In a large amount of the surface you can see the underpainting coming through. And I think if there were to be a secret to Ricks’ work other than experience is the amount of work he puts into the underpainting. Below you can see on the right the grain of the canvas and the very thin layers of blue grey and reddish that he has applied over the canvas.

It would be easy to say there are a few issues with perspective in some of the paintings, which is obvious. However, with Rick’s interest in De Cherico it would be easier to assume that these are intentional and are echoes to that artists paintings.

Below you can see the grain of the canvas (actually linen) coming through the paintwork, and this is one of the thicker areas of paint! What is really interesting to note is this is a detail of the above painting and you can see the different colours in the structure that are, importantly, the same tone.

Oh and according to L. Ricks going to a gym now, which would explain why my hand felt like it nearly bloody broke when he shook it, regardless of having dead arms from bouldrin’. You want to see some masters work? No need to head to the NGV, just head here.

Excuse the blurriness, but above is another interesting one, though it did not really resonate with me, it apparently did with Bill Nuttal, Niagara Director, who pointed it out to Amor as his favourite one… Obviously you could impose all sorts of readings on something as amorphous and unusual as this, however I would recommend going and seeing it for yourself before you do.