I’ve decided to write some things down, my thoughts on art and what I’ve been making and currently making in the way of art. I’m not going to over-edit my thoughts or the writing, so I can perhaps continue this on a semi-regular basis without it being a chore. I’m doing a lot as it is, in terms of daily, weekly hours, so this can’t be a chore. It’s 5:30 in the morning, I woke up too early, so I’ll drink coffee and make a start, writing something while I watch the sun rise.

What have I been doing? What am I doing? I’ve been painting and making videos, really mostly videos since about March 2022. I started an audio podcast earlier than that, called The Art of Value, experimenting with something new to me, and uploading it to Spotify. Then I transitioned that into a video podcast, uploading to Spotify (which started to allow video) and YouTube. 

I don’t like to do anything half-assed really, and became quite consumed by it, addicted to getting better at making videos and finding an online audience. The videos were pretty terrible to begin with, as I was just learning how to be on camera and mic. It was tough going but after two years and seven months now, The Art of Value pod is starting to find a substantial audience of tens of thousands of views per month, particularly on YouTube, and making reasonable and welcome ad revenue as well. More on the pod later, but what the videos are about goes back to the paintings I started to make during the pandemic, and perhaps a bit before that, I don’t remember exactly. The Art of Value pod is part of my ongoing art practice, although to the vast majority of the pod audience, they wouldn’t know and likely wouldn’t care, which is fine. It doesn’t have to be seen as contemporary art to exist and be of value as something else.

After my exhibition Plastic Age at Corban Estate, I was ready to move on from using plastic as a material, having worked with that for a few years, and moving on from focusing on oil (Oil Age) before that too. Oil is directly related to plastic of course. To my great surprise, after that show I was contacted out of the blue my an overseas museum, which was interested in purchasing work from both of those series, including the central sculpture from Plastic Age, Toxtails, and four of the Oil Age paintings. More on this in a later post I guess, as I’m under an NDA about specifics for now; it’s somewhat complicated. The work was purchased some time ago, and freighted off to the far-off destination. 

The last “public-facing” exhibition work I showed was in the 2021 National Contemporary Art Award at Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, which was also my first painting in The Art of Value body of work, and the painting was titled The Art of Value. The entry process is anonymous for the Award, and as the look of the work was different from my previous work, the judge would have had no idea who made the work. To my surprise the painting won one of the Merit Awards, with the Art Award judge, Karl Chitham saying this in the videoed floor talk (YouTube transcript):

“While this one wasn’t an immediate – I didn’t immediately kind of gravitate towards this in terms of visuals. I mean it’s quite hard, it’s behind the perspex as well which makes it a little bit distant from the materials, but when you look at the content you can read the information, yeah this is the bible, it becomes really interesting. 

It’s called the Art of Value but it’s effectively looking at capitalism and commodities, so the text is all related to the study that he did. He did an online course in business investments as research for making his art and this is the logo that that course uses which is a Greek sign for Hermes, who was the god of trading commodities, so there’s all these kind of layers. And then he’s used chalk which is why we have the perspex up the top, because it rubs off and the team downstairs were a bit worried about that. But the chalk immediately in my head, I went to the stock exchange and the way that they used to have the chalkboards, it shows my age doesn’t it. 

There’s that kind of element to it, and then he’s done it on the pinstripe fabric, which is the suiting that Wall Street uses, those common commodity brokers use, used to use, probably don’t use them now. And then he’s hung it off little bull clips, so it’s this kind of the whole language of what the work is about – the kind of commodity and finance and the office and all that kind of stuff, but actually the underlying meaning of the work is about the value of art and particularly at this moment in time. 

Art has been used as a kind of well-being tool, a lot of people are talking about well-being and using artists and artworks to sort of help with that process, particularly lots of people at home doing online courses, or you know celebrities taking up felting and knitting or whatever to help. So we see art’s being used as a tool in that way, but also the commercial sector is doing really well right now for artists so in that sense the way we talk about the value of art is really changing. 

So it’s not the commodity it used to be, so there’s a lot going on in this, and that was the thing that i was drawn to, the kind of layers of meaning which again, it’s one of those things that I’m bringing a lot of existing knowledge to the works. I’m not sure that “Joe Bloggs” walking round will get all of those layers but maybe they’ll get a sense of that ideal – commodity – he does write about it though and I love the idea that he did the online course as research, on how to trade commodities and investments.”

For me, it was interesting to hear Karl speak about the work like that, as he seemed to “get it”, what I was trying to do there, as I wasn’t sure many people would really. Although, in Aotearoa New Zealand, we have the towering art figures of Colin McCahon and later Billy Apple, whose influences can both be easily found in that work. Although he didn’t say it explicitly, when Karl said, “when you look at the content you can read the information, yeah this is the bible”, he was likely referencing McCahon’s use of bible text. The Art of Value painting does indeed quite obviously reference McCahon’s work, with the strong central religious-like element, but very capitalist in this case, with surrounding scrawls of text. It also references Billy Apple’s Art Transactions and other work, which I love and May and I have several  of his screenprints in our personal collection.

One other thing, Karl said the work was made with chalk on fabric, but it’s actually oil pastel, just looks like chalk, so not as fragile and doesn’t rub off easily. The museum staff wanted to put it behind perspex, which I was okay with and was fine with the resulting look, but hadn’t originally intended to have that. I worked in an art museum in my late twenties (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney), so I do know how much works like this can sometimes be touched by visitors. The Art of Value paintings I’m doing now are with paint on unstretched canvas, partly to avoid the perceived fragility. I did make three more with oil pastel on pinstripe fabric before switching to paint, as yet not exhibited or on this portfolio site.

That’s all for now, more later.