Author: Ingrid Christensen for Artzy Magazine

Pronounced “plen air,” and popularized by theImpressionists, this method of painting has long seen artists taking their paints and easels outdoors and working from direct observation, striving to capture the light, color, and movement of the world beyond their studios. The paint tube allowed artists to carry paint without worrying that it would dry out or make a mess in their bags, but it was the first invention of many.

Today, there is a wide array of equipment devoted to servicing plein air painters. There are easels and accessories to suit your needs, whether your goal is to paint in a city park, or at the top of a mountain.

Plein air easels fall into four categories.

1. Field Easel

Field easels are the most basic plein air option. These three-legged easels are made of wood or metal, and do nothing more than hold a canvas.
While they are lightweight and inexpensive, field easels lack the convenient storage and palette-holding capability of more elaborate easels. You may want to add both brush and palette holders (which you can clip onto your easel) or bring along a small folding table so that you won’t have to put your tools on the ground when you’re not using them.

2. French-style easel

For their plein air paintings, the Impressionists used French easels, which are still a popular option thanks to their many useful features. Available in wood or aluminum, this style offers ample storage compartments for a palette, paints, mediums, and brushes, and even has a place to hold a finished, wet painting. Its attached, adjustable legs fold up against the body of the easel to create a suitcase shape, which is easy to carry using a shoulder strap or handle.

The traditional wooden French easel is sturdy and economical, but can be heavy when fully loaded, so you may want to consider a lightweight version if you intend to carry your gear for long distances.


3. Pochade box

The French word pochade means a rough or quick sketch; pochade boxes are well-suited for small works. They’re compact and lightweight enough to fit into a backpack, making them ideal for painters who hike to remote locations to capture the views. And while they have less storage than French easels, pochade boxes do have interior compartments for a limited number of paint tubes, cups, and small tools. The bottom of the box contains a palette and storage compartments or drawers, while the hinged lid opens to become an easel for your painting panels.

One downside of the pochade box is that it doesn’t have legs. You can hold it on your lap, use it on a table top, or mount it to a sturdy camera tripod, allowing you to stand while you paint. If you choose to use a tripod, make sure it’s equipped to carry the weight of your pochade box, as most are designed for the lighter weight of a camera.


4. Tripod-based easel

Another option is an easel system that’s built around a strong tripod. These arrangements are made out of wood or metal, and have two basic components: a palette holder that attaches to the tripod legs, and a panel holder that fits onto the head of the tripod.

Tripod systems are lightweight and can be set up quickly, and their palette surfaces are often larger than those of the French easel and the pochade box. Having a generous area for mixing means you’ll spend less time cleaning your palette as you work, and it makes it easier to work on large paintings.
Like the field easel, however, these easels lack storage. You’ll need a backpack or cart, as well as a panel carrier to transport your paints, brushes, and wet paintings, along with the easel components themselves.

There’s a tempting abundance of equipment on the market to accessorize your plein air easel. You can purchase clip-on brush holders, shelves, clamping umbrellas to shield your canvas, paper towel holders, and more. However, since each piece of equipment increases your easel’s weight and setup time, it’s worthwhile to do some trial runs with your easel and a minimum amount of equipment before purchasing these extras. You’ll quickly determine which accessories would improve your plein air experience.

Along with your easel, brushes, and tubes of paint, the following items may be useful for painting outdoors.

• A wet panel carrier to transport your paintings
• Painting panels, which are sturdier and thinner than canvas, and also less likely to blow away in the wind
• A hat to block the sky’s glare and help you determine the values of the landscape more easily
• A bag for your trash
• A leak-proof container of brush cleaning water or solvent
• Lidded palette cups filled with your painting mediums
• A palette knife to mix paint and clean your palette
• Paper towels or rags
• Drinking water and snacks
• Insect repellant
• Extra clothing layers

While initially gathering an easel and other equipment may be a daunting prospect, the rewards of plein air painting will become obvious from the first time that you work outdoors. Paintings created under the abundant light of the sky are imbued with a sensation of time and place that’s difficult to achieve from a photographic reference. They are a direct visual response to the world around you.

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present new works on paper and sculptures by John Wolseley in One Hundred and One Insect Life Stories. This exhibition includes work from his collaboration with the great Yolngu artist Mulkun Wirrpanda but also charts the artist's more recent fascination with the insect and mollusc life of East Arnhem Land and the invertebrates which he encounters around his home in the Victorian Mallee.
 

John Wolseley is one of Australia's most important artists. The artist portrays the Australian landscape and its ecosystems by combining collage elements and markings made 'in collaboration' with the natural environment. These works celebrate the beauty of the Australian wilderness and encourage an understanding of the significance and environmental fragility of these remote and little-known sites.
 

John Wolseley writes, “I have uncovered these amazing systems engraved by moths and beetles - complex burrow systems laid out like strange maps under the bark of trees. I have rested sheets of Japanese paper on them, and made rubbings or frottages - in just the same way as Max Ernst did on the scrubbed boards of his seaside hotel. Often as I gently rub with graphite the engraved surface of a piece of wood, the whole life story of a particular insect comes mysteriously into being. I can trace how tiny eggs hatch into grubs, and then eat their way over many months through the wood, miraculously turn into pupae, and finally transform themselves into gorgeous moths or fearsome stag beetles. I have found these journeys of metamorphosis are the foundation of many symbolic stories and powerful myths which appear again and again in art and religion. From the sacred scarabs of Egypt to the moths as souls flying out of Greek funerary vases. Insect transformation is one of what Mircea Eliade called the great Myths of Eternal Return.”

Helen Eager & Angus Nivison are finalists in this year's Dobell Drawing Prize, an acquisitive award and major exhibition exploring the enduring importance of drawing within contemporary art practices.

The wrinkly-edged, northern tip of Western Australia is an environmental patchwork. Its radical ocean tides teem with crocodiles, pearl-budding oysters and terrible irukandji jellyfish. Seasonal cyclones dump freshwater into labyrinthine gorges. Further east, the land is arid and theatrical: ancient sandstone formations, ferrous soil, whispering desert grasses. Fifty thousand people live (among busloads of tourists) in towns like Broome and Derby, mining encampments, or on Country, days from any infrastructure. The name for this place of boabs, toadlets and zinc, ‘the Kimberley,’ is a misleadingly one-dimensional moniker for an utterly diverse region.

Curators Carly Lane and Emilia Galatis embraced the hugeness of the project as they criss-crossed the Kimberley, wrangling artworks, deadlines and patchy reception.

“It was like working with Europe!” exclaims Galatis. “The Kimberley contains over 30 language groups and over 400 communities. You are negotiating with nuanced, disparate cultural narratives.” Spectacular polarity is present even in single communities. As Galatis points out, Fitzroy Crossing “supports five language groups, facilitates artists, community members, safeguards local history, and teaches English so people can broker native title and have a political voice.”

Desert River Sea doesn’t so much summarise AGWA’s venture, as describe the work of Kimberley artists now, looking forward. Artists at Warmun, for example, saw the exhibition as an opportunity to “make themselves relevant, engage young people and use new materials to tell their stories,” said Galatis. Three generations collaborated to produce six animations that vivified the paintings of senior artists. “Video speaks to the artists’ lived experience,” says Lane. “It shows how digital media and traditional knowledge coexist in remote communities.”

Cultural consolidation was the focus at Warlayirti. Once home to a busy glassmaking hub, the studio’s kilns had lain dormant for years. “The artists were excited to rediscover glass,” says Lane. Vivid glass panels made by the Yukenbarri sisters illustrate local bush foods and echo traditional Balgo painting techniques.

“The Mangkaja collaboration is like a microcosm of Desert River Sea,” explains Galatis. “The artists worked independently to narrate a larger history.” Station Stories includes Mervyn Street’s bristly hides which illustrate stockman’s work, John Prince Siddon’s hand-scribed memoir recounts losing a leg while mustering, Eva Nargoodah’s bush-dyed Dingo Flour bags recall the upcycling of everyday materials. “They’re describing a pre-referendum and pre-wages era,” says Lane. “Mervyn says ‘you see cows and sheep but I see history,’ because to him, history is a contact narrative.”

In a third gallery space, six curators from Aboriginal arts centres have selected work from their own community collections.

Most are ambidextrous arts workers who run websites and studios, write, research and curate, yet rarely get the kudos of titles like ‘curator’ or ‘coordinator.’ Lynley Nargoodah’s selection of work by deceased Mangkaja artists uses the theme of water to unpack the political status of the Fitzroy River.

Desert River Sea will plunge visitors into the complexity and aspirations of the Kimberley. The show is part of the 2019 Perth Festival and several hundred artists and community members are represented. Together they emphasise the value of self-determination, not just for artists, but for all members of Indigenous communities, and in turn for Australian cultural wellbeing. As Lane puts it, “choice is freedom.”

(Source: artguide.com.au)
(Author: Sheridan Coleman

Rather than simply relegating the voice to mere sound, in Seeing voices the voice comes to us in many utterances and instances. It is linguistic, cultural, social, gendered, human and post-human. In this regional touring exhibition the voice is explored as a visual, political and material entity.

NETS Victoria and Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) have come together to present the show. Beginning at Horsham Regional Gallery, it will also travel to five other regional galleries throughout Australia in 2018 and 2019.

Initially sparked by MUMA curator Samantha Comte, and later picked up by fellow curators Francis E Parker, Hannah Matthews and Helen Hughes, the exhibition was developed to foster greater regional engagement with MUMA’s collection. “We wanted to work with NETS Victoria to make connections with the regional gallery network and to show the Monash University collection further afield than the University campuses,” says Parker. Seeing voices also features works outside the scope of the university’s holdings.

The show includes a series of live performances, and works by Alex Martinis Roe, Alicia Frankovich, Angelica Mesiti, Bryan Phillips, Catherine or Kate, Clinton Nain, Damiano Bertoli, Erik Bünger, Fayen d’Evie, Léuli Eshraghi, Michael Cook, Rose Nolan and Susan Hiller.

By approaching the voice from a visual art perspective, the exhibition transposes a sonic medium across drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and video.

“Text appears frequently because, of course, the encounter with it immediately triggers the viewer’s internal voice,” explains Parker. “Video, being time-based, allows the voice to be manifested through recordings, but then there are also a number of works that had their origins in performance too.”

Political understandings of the voice are threaded throughout the show, whether as a marker of an individual voice ‘speaking out’ or as collective solidarity. “This is especially so in a context such as Australia’s where the necessity of making space for Indigenous voices in projects such as this, as well as in public discourse generally, is coming to be better appreciated,” says the curator. “I think the exhibition works better as an open-ended grouping of works to which one could continue imagining further inclusions, further perspectives.”

Seeing voices offers expansion of the voice and an opportunity to understand its malleability. As Parker sums up, “Hopefully the experience of the exhibition is one that suggests how the subject of the voice opens outwards, that the various works lead off in different directions as to how speech, language and vocal sounds can be thought of in contemporary art.”

(source: artguide.com.au)
(Author: Tiarney Miekus)