I started painting these 4 panels in 2019. Landscape paintings not yet rescued from being 2-dimensional. They've been hurled around all this time and now I want to finish. I’m not sure yet how to manage the framing to create one single piece but I’m thinking about the below seen in Italy last year. Also more gold.
As you can see, I am returning my quatrefoil ornaments to the framing realm from whence they came (went sideways and made a lot of earrings with them). See how the scale of the ornaments on the panels above makes a difference to those seen below. Which do I prefer? I have yet to settle. Also I want more gold. I spend hours on photoshop, mocking up incrementally different framing options. Please note the paintings aren’t finished yet and the problem with finishing is dedication. It takes sustained concentration to paint like this, four times over, and because I am always distracted by building (interesting because they 3D) all the other things and flit between them like a gigolo
This piece is titled “Siblings”. And friends, it is heavy with baggage. I am one of four and one day I will say it but today is not that day.
I’m dying to apply another layer of something
The framing style here is after the Italian cassetta frames where the frame was constructed as part of a panel painting, but with a Renaissance love of ornament. Such frames often featured a wide flat frieze to accommodate the ornaments. This expanse of free space is also made for text and indeed it was part of my plan when I first started these landscapes and when I first used these ornaments years ago.
It is troubling to think that the meaning of the quatrefoils may not be comprehended the way I mean them to be, as a sign of love and protection, togetherness and redemption. Actually there’s probably no way anyone would read that, looking at the frames above, I will have to allude to it in the title like: Siblings (allude to attributive frame) or some other way.
Titles can be vital clues, as Marcel Duchamp famously said the title is an invisible colour or something, but the guy had very few ways to bring colour into a toilet sculpture so fine. I joke, its a clever way of saying it
But text on the artwork is something else. I made the above in 2020, in the time of the pandemic. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum 2020; there are tears in all things. God weeps with us, we are surrounded with amulets of comfort, love and protection, togetherness and redemption which the text and ornaments and title work together to convey. (I concede that one must be handy with Latin but a note in brackets could be more persuasive)
The quote below is from my favourite, The Frame Blog, discussing 15th and 16th century Italian and Spanish frames with painted and gilded inscriptions, “all of which once had an intimate connection with the paintings they held”. So nice.
“Latin or Spanish inscriptions read like poetry. These frames are, fundamentally, vehicles of stories and emotions. The verses appear simple, timeless and universal. They refer to people’s most emotional moments – birth and joy, death and pain, love and longing, justice and hope.”
Stitching, beautiful stitching
Some hand sewing ahead! I love beading and embroidery, I love doing repeatable things that take ages, esp when I can sit down all the time.
Timing wise its interesting, because I have recently been diagnosed with repetition compulsion, its a real thing and it totally explains me, how I am always processing past trauma through ‘my work’. Always driven, always work that takes a sustained period of time, involving thousands of hours of repeated gestures such as stitching. I then, regularly, destroy works, which is where the process is completed, but as mentioned previously, I cycle. Make and destroy, where the destruction sometimes takes form of overworking the piece, leaving it without any vitality and then I hate it. I really think that the making is the real work, with these crummy photos the only record. Then I remake the images to replace the lost ones and so forth.
The figure is a cast of the official 1:1 replica of the Venus of Willendorf from the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Because sometimes memories are hard to feel, so in my work I can move from being the passive victim of a memory or feeling, to the active creator controlling its scale, colour, form and life-span (they said). Sometimes it’s expressed in making multiple iterations of some motif, like this drawing of a piece of lace that I’ve recycled for years. Or the same landscape over and over. It is so soothing to work at something over & over, its why I loved making jewellery, sitting for years at the bench with pliers and files; I must have like 30 different files to smooth rough edges when finishing cast resin, assembling thousands of castings. I like an artwork I can live in for a while, its reassuring & I feel comfortable in it, like it knows my true self
Well, self-knowledge is bracing but that’s not the subject of this Artworking; June 2026 dispatch, however I will get back to you on it because it is textbook Rosie.
Gorgeous scrap of wallpaper
Beautiful
Scaling shit up
I have a velvet covered board on the benchtop to protect the embroidery because constantly flipping it over to stitch through. I came up with the rotating canvas device so I can work bigger. And eventually, I aim to go much much bigger still
My girl Venus of Willendorf & I. This figure is a very simplified model of the Venus
Muttering to myself about framing at the local art shop. None of these are good.
Sydney is the most beautiful city in the world, very extra during Vivid
Also good news! It was our 30 year wedding anniversary and we had French onion souffle for lunch. I have been so lucky in life. There is no trauma in my present
Lastly gonna give you some commerce, artworkerprojects is back in the cabinet! Grateful to be with Indian Jane at Dirty Jane’s in Bowral
If you look you will see there are quite a few quatrefoils still in circulation. I have to get back into the photography thing because the pic above right is not the best
If you go there, theres this restaurant outside Dirty Jane’s called Harry’s on Green Lane and its pretty freakin fancy looking and I like that
Bit embarrassing how unfinished they are sorry
Then I go back to this, but a little bit of bad news; I have to have surgery this week and its going to slow me down & I’m finding it difficult to accept. It may be that all the frantic drive that has propelled me through these years will slow. So anyway, see you end of next month where there is a good chance I’ll have destroyed the big pines painting jokingnotjoking. Actually I wont be able to do that kind of big work post-op but I have all that nice, stationary embroidery to do so that’s actually great. See you July…