I wanted, after decades of treating gold leaf with respect, to break it and I’m well on the road, I think.

Oil, acrylic, pastel, hand cast resin & gold leaf, gilded custom textured card, artist’s hand cast framing ornament, gold leaf, imitation gold leaf, gesso, shellac, diptych on board 1180x100x45mm

I take a lot of progress photos so I can check on things through the day when I’m away from the studio

Gum tree across the road from our place. There are a lot of landscape painters in Australia and I am not one of them. This is my landscape-object

I applied some sections of my ‘gates and fences’ frame modules because it seemed to belong there

The two boards are different sizes and depths; they have something of the devotional feel, an aedicular form, like an altar in a cathedral. I think the proportions are good and its more of an object this way, than a picture plane, and it feels like me

This was in September 2024 and then my mother-in-law died. Yellow was her colour. I added some surplus plaster casts from my Heartsease phase and this artwork stayed like this for the next two months

I started laying down some texture with gesso & plaster bc I wanted to make this thing crunchy but it was hard, I’ve been making pictures for such a long time and the level of finish always needs to be really high, so its hard to let that go. This artwork took about six months to break. To ruin it so I could see how to get on with it, make the gold leaf crunchy, layer it on & destroy the motherfucker.

I bought these plastic pearl domes/hemispheres…I have no idea…they were suggested on my AliExpress page maybe. So took a silicone mold of them so I can manufacture them however I like

I tried so long to make these domes work in the picture but they wouldnt. I really wanted them to. I’d put them down, shift them around and around, hours and hours and it wouldnt work, didnt look good, I didnt know how to do it. I just knew that there was something there & I wanted to find it

Messed around with other 3D affectations. Lace fragments made for another artwork, aluminum wire with red plastic coating. This idea has troubled me for a long while, and now is also not it’s time. It will come

Flinders red violet all over the mf

Then it stayed ugly like this until it was almost done. The ugly is hard to get through but I had broken it. The picture was broken and I had to ride the thing. There is freedom in that

Some of the heartsease at top right were knocked off as I went about my business

I was thinking this was all empty foolery, this stupid artwork, so I might go break something else.

When I scattered some domes and beads on that canvas (above), I had a notion. Not really a thought, just something shifted. I knew it was time to commit to applying this decoration, and that somehow I would make it work

I estimate maybe 10+ layers of leaf went on. I’m experimenting with alternatives to gold size and its a whole new world. The crunchy was finally building up

I am actively challenging myself to use more colour

Domes blindly strewn across. I spent days and days trying to do…something. They’re gorgeous and I guess it works, I mean like they look gorgeous strewn across the board but still…not

I glued some domes on anyway what the hell. This was a good move because gluing/removing/regluing brought the surface up for crunch-enhancement. You cant be scared of the thing, you cant be afraid to ‘ruin’ it, the ruining is where you find what it is

Masked up individual domes for more layers of leaf so they wouldn’t look like they’re on the same plane. I did this again and again before thinking of blutack. Just use little balls of blutack to mask them. Fun to develop a new technique

My experiments with gold-size meant that some layers of leaf hardly adhered at all, so coverage was all increments. Layers upon layers of leaf and paint needed in order to make a difference & move this piece forward

This was the worst of the ugly phase, where I thought:

talentless foolish no-hoper.

I have somewhat bounced back, but always be a fool

It began working; the domes had to be arranged into groups like drifts, regardless of the picture content just floating on by. They just be drifting downwards to the right. I spent about eight days on this & I dont know where the time went. Eight days or maybe more, I was ruthless with it and several times just tipped the boards over in frustration, nullifying days and days of work, just dissapeared it. It had to be done the hard way, standing still at the bench, sweat rolling off me in concentration, just standing there staring at the board and these fucking domes, shifting them around

This is hard worked little mold. I think I pulled about 15+ prints from this. It is clapped out now, but it gave me what I needed. Respect. Inanimate object. Respect.

Framing detail on. It is incomplete, indicating that the meaning is open to interpretation

Occurred to me to cut these discs to cover some scars where I’d ripped domes off because I’d glued them in the wrong place. This textured gilded rag paper well contributed to the collaged, crunchy surface I now had before me like a bitch.

It is gorgeous

Topography is title because someone said how it looked like topography maps, and that is a beautiful response.

“Painting, object, relief sculpture; the textured, layered surface with hand-cast resin & gold leaf domes and gilded card, could describe topography notations; like mapping one’s memories or journeys, like wayward thoughts we try to corral as if we have control over the randomness of life, the physicality and tangibility of the atmosphere. The air around you is alive. The two panels differ in size and depth and echo historical aedicular format, while also being what I had to hand when this idea just had to be played out.”

Aedicular just means a shape like an altar piece or tabernacle, a style enthusiastically embraced by the Pre-Raphaelites. Those guys had lots of good ideas.

In this piece I have brought my jewellery work into my artwork and now I’m just going to go for it. More to come.

I encountered significant opposition to these intentions but I was right about it. I followed this strong intuition feeling but it was difficult to cross that line. To have crossed the line feels very right and I am ON IT now.

Its fun and beautiful and frustrating and challenging and I find great meaning in it

Gold leaf is hard to photograph, you have to kind of sneak up on it, catch it by surprise and on an angle, otherwise its all reflection. The front-on photo never really captures the magic

I mean, its not just me, is it? It really is good, isnt it?

Update:

Getting it framed! One never does this but Tals insisted and its been ages since we went to see Ramen, who is now Kirt, Ramen’s nephew, because Ramen retired.

Going with black but we’ll have to mill the frame down a bit because I want to leave the aedicular format intact, ie, the top panel is recessed. The black profile maintains the wood grain and I’ll gild the sight edge and maybe add some decoration to the sides as well, in the Pre-Raphaelite manner.

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