Michael Kluckner Australian Paintings
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As I finish paintings I'm just sticking them up here -- sometimes they get pulled down, changed, then put back up -- eventually there will be some logical order, an index block .... and regular exhibitions. |
Kenneth Tribe at 93
Oil on linen, 101 x 101 cm, 40 x 40 inches
(This is the painting I'm entering in the Archibald Prize, to be announced around the end of February)
| "He was a non-representative artist and he painted portraits of her in squares and oblongs. He painted her with one eye and no mouth. He painted her as a geometrical arrangement in black and brown and grey. He painted her in a criss-cross of lines through which you vaguely saw a human face. She stayed with him for a year and a half and left him of her own accord. 'Why?' I asked her. 'Didn't you like him?' 'Yes, he was a nice boy. I didn't think he was getting any further. He was repeating himself.'" -- The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham |
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Three oil sketches of Kenneth Tribe, preparatory works for a larger painting that I'm intending to enter in the Archibald Prize in early 2008. |
A Landscape like Lue
Oil on canvas
40 x 122 cm (16 x 48 inches)
The second painting inspired by Lue, a dot on the map near Mudgee. "Inspired by" because it doesn't have the hills I've painted behind it.
Mist Rising in the Gully
Oil on canvas 3 panels: .6 x 2.1 m 24 inches x 7 feet
Decorative panels of the scene out the back windows of our house
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Tourist Map of Lue Oil on canvas 91 x 61 cm 36 x 24 inches The first of a series of pictures inspired by Lue, a dot on the map near Mudgee. |
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Distant Rain Oil on canvas 50 x 40 cm 20 x 16 inches .... talking with the guy who was laying tiles on our front porch. He would have been the 4th generation of his family to farm a piece of property out west near Wagga Wagga, but he didn't like the uncertainty and left the country to get a trade. His parents had been watching thunderstorms drop life-giving rain, but randomly across the landscape, for years. This year they threw all their savings into a last-ditch attempt to get a profitable crop, but the lack of rain for the past few months meant the grain would only be usable as hay. So they cut it. As it lay in the field, it began to rain, ruining it. |
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Climate Change #1 Oil on canvas 76 x 21 cm (30 x 24 inches) This is a fantasy based on some of the TV pictures of flooding over the past several months, first in Bangladesh, later in the Hunter Valley. I was both fascinated and appalled by the way floodwaters beautified the landscape, reducing the randomness of the human and natural landscape to a flat pattern. |
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Songlines for Sheep August, 2007 Oil on canvas 76 x 50 cm (30 x 20 inches) Another map-like long high view. Sheep must have songlines too, and like the Aboriginal ones from the Dreamtime (see, for example, the wikipedia entry) the pathways have a lot to do with finding water. Based on a sketch from the roadside on the road to Oberon in the western part of the Blue Mountains. |
Drought Town, oil on canvas, 18 x 36 inches (46 x 92 cm.) A fantasy based on our trip through the dry wheat belt of New South Wales in May.
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Landscape with Two Cows Oil on canvas 39 x 50 cm 13.5 x 19.5 inches At one point on a road trip out to the west -- the drought-stricken countryside -- I saw a couple of cows (actually, what North Americans would call "beefs") near an almost-dead eucalyptus tree. I drew the sketch for it on-site but adopted a vulture's-eye view. |
| Lonesome
Iconic Aussie Homestead Oil on board 53 x 69 cm / 21 x 27 inches An oil I painted in Canada in 2004 based on a watercolour from 2001 of an old place we happened upon out past Bathurst -- an image of the "shattered dreams" of one settler family, who perhaps moved on after too many droughts/floods/wool price collapses or who knows what? It was exhibited several times in Canada as part of my touring Vanishing British Columbia exhibition -- a colonial bungalow like the ones I'd found in Walhachin and the Okanagan -- before being shipped down here. |
Sketch of Lawson to Remember It By, June, 2007, oil on canvas, 10 pieces, 10 x 120 inches (25 cm by 3 m.)
(Lawson is 4 towns east of us toward Sydney -- its entire shopping street is going to be wiped out for a highway widening....)
Winner of the People's Choice Award at the Blackheath Art Prize Spring Exhibition.
"And to have them go, not in some violent cataclysm, an act of God, or under the fury of bombardment, but in the quiet way of our generation: by council ordinance and bylaw, through shady land deals; in the name of order and progress, and in contempt (or is it small-town embarrassment?) of all that is untidy and shabbily individual."
-- David Malouf, writing about his home-town, Brisbane, in the Review, Weekend Australian, September 8-9, 2007.
Put your mouse onto the image to pause the slideshow (the images are a little distorted, compared to the originals, & don't quite line up!)
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Artwork and text ©Michael Kluckner 2007
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