We don't know where you live

We Don’t Know Where You Live (sad spaces and elephant from the bargain shop Carrindale QlD) 2010. 98 x 98 cm, oil paint on canvas.

Collage painting involved some digital intervention constructed as layers in photoshop painted over a period of two to three weeks. This is not to reproduce the digital version but to abstract it, mess it up, uses thin pigments mixed for this painting only, a kind hybrid mix that has the consistency of  wet acrylic or thick ink. Digital version destroyed.

Untitled Abstract Painting (Orange with yellow triangles) 2008, 52 x 60cm oil on board

Untitled Abstract Painting (Orange with yellow triangles) 2008, 52 x 60cm oil on board

I read an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono where they derided the repetitive nature of some painting practice. That it was stupid to find yourself painting triangles continually. The drawing was made with photoshop with the biggest brush on the hardest setting. While making the work I thought about spacial ambiguity  the tension between hard and soft shapes, translucent and opaque pigments.

David M. Thomas 2008, , Potent Medicine Collection
David M. Thomas 2008, , Potent Medicine Collection

40x30cm Oil and acrylic and printed paper on canvas

Material taken from woman’s magazines, I was interested in the goop that looked like paint that represented hair product. Other material I got from the large exhibition invitation for the Katarina Grosser show at GOMA. I liked the idea of recycling the material that came to me because my professional interest in art. The result is an equalising of this printed material as visual matter.This might be one area where there is a conceptual cross over in my attitude to sampling  bits of audio culture.

Capitals End

Untitled (Zones of Alienation and Becoming [Louise Lawler install) No.1, 60 x 80cm Oil on Aluminium.

The gallery as work place is thought about in this particular figure painting. A scene with in a scene, Lawler’s photographs are always images of mythical spaces, the Museum or gallery as a setting of a valued action and inaction.

An extension of the small sad spaces paintings and a side step from the gridded paintings of museum gallery tours. These paintings are made all in one go, over the space of 2-4 hours, not including the research of images. The images are stills made from video of Louise lawler installing her work in Berlin. I am interested in the function of gallery spaces as zones of bodily alienation and as a place for certain states of being, ways of being only experienced by the artist. In these installation images this state or mode seems some how shared between the figures.