Warrenbreningerart | Visual arts
Warrenbreningerart
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25.01.2022 Human Figure Approaching A Burning City, 1988-90, Mixed Media. In 1851 (Black Thursday) a quarter of Victoria was aflame. All grass was ignitable after a prolonged drought and then came the North winds. There were no camera phones or photo records. Then Melbourne experienced the effects and the Argus began reporting the devastation across the state from the Otways to the Dandenongs workers, properties and crops gone in an instant, farmers and their families rushing to beach...Continue reading
24.01.2022 AMOR VINCIT OMNIA Series 5, 2020, Mixed Media (Vertical Text - Enemy of the State) Seatedness as explored in this series can only be a splinter, a particle of the whole, yet here in our world microcosms are rich. Being seated is meant as a dim reflection of a whole world of unseen being. Here the human vessel, heavy with the weight of water and blood is also an orb of borrowed light. A frail radiating luminosity leaks out now from wounds, words, works, looks and gestures, se...Continue reading
22.01.2022 Amor Vincit Omnia Series V, 2020, Mixed Media
21.01.2022 Images #3 - 1972 Moving away in 72’, from girlfriend/city/college/home/friends/art contacts to Derrinallum in the Western District of Victoria to start teaching, began a year of shared accommodation and an imposed geographic/psychological isolation that embedded in me the creative instincts which would sustain my art making for decades to come. On weekends when I chose not to return to Melbourne, or after school in the early evenings, I would often drive out into surrounding ...Continue reading
20.01.2022 AMOR VINCIT OMNIA Series V, 2020, Mixed Media. I recognised in 1975 that a certain ‘Seated Figure’ was representative of the invisible/inaudible inner life, one that marks us as unread secrets pierced only by the eye of God: as well, it was an image that signified elevated social alienation, relational dysfunction, artistic isolation, career collapse, political impiety, institutional incompatibility and cultural concealment (compared to living spirits under threat of being w...Continue reading
20.01.2022 The Artist's Wife Series, Oil, 1995-2010, #1-44.
19.01.2022 Heart In The Head, 1976 This early drawing from 1976 (titled ‘Heart in the Head’) seems now in 2019 like something alien, made by another artist I no longer know. Its linear method and form of expression, an impossibility to return to. A little like Dylan interviewed, speaking of his early surreal songs, as something he cannot do now. In this drawing there is both a calculated simplicity and cold purity of approach which is at odds with this 'early' intention of bringing the ...Continue reading
14.01.2022 This, the third and last of three posts on the Gates Series, repeats the first image, but in the context of the studio for sake of scale. Is prayer a human imperative and a legitimate artistic subject? All art- forms including visual arts, literary forms, music, film, opera, plays and even psychology have always been preoccupations with our ‘human spirit’ coming to know itself, being enriched on the human drama involving our relationship to all things, and that is generally...Continue reading
10.01.2022 Gates of Prayer, 1990-99, #1-84, Grid 2 (7 Grids of 12) -the previous post of this Series was about method, this is more about meaning. The 12 images in each of 7 grids are framed as close-up and therefore not identifiable as individuals, races, genders or even types, yet they remain both intimate, intrusive and claustrophobic. This choice and approach aggrandizes this part of the whole in order to focus attention. Observers inadvertently search for a sense of the whole, thou...Continue reading
10.01.2022 This artwork from 1972 titled ‘Self Portrait at Herod’s Feast’ is mixed media on a silver gelatin print with found objects. The following story is from 1959, at Doutta Galla upper Primary School, which was less than a mile from my home and marked at that time the edge of Melbourne as I knew it. Behind the road and last row of houses at the back of the school was what we referred to as the ‘hills’. It began with a steep slope into a valley with a well-worn track that we would...Continue reading
10.01.2022 Self Portrait, 1998, Oil ANOTHER SELF Sept 98 A memory of lost kingdoms appears crystal clear impregnable pasts lifted like dust in a faint breeze ... child sacrifice calling to famine or unprovoked war traces of paint on pottery, carvings and mural walls yes, the evidence of human burning and violent end. There is a gold ring on the remains of a royal wrist slim Princess bones bound in plaited ancient hair morsels of writing engraved on metal and stone speaking of paradise and chaos in close proximity yes, as if it were the very last days of the final end. From a multitude of inferior and forgotten selves one wicked self rises and exits its place of hiding spilling high disdain like an Amazonian waterfall as worlds bury truth and cut the heart out of pity yes, whilst all the time cursing a divine birthing. The determination toward disgrace and caressing a willingness to vanish into grotesque group think yes, the need to wholly disappear into minority mobs to shun and keep one’s distance from God’s majesty whilst this life continues to overflow with blessing. Horror of constant self betrayal and contradiction that does the dirty on the most precious of things. A faint sound, a perfume trace floating in the air reminding the senses of what is received and lost the new born brushed by a departing angel's wing.
09.01.2022 Self Portrait, Oil, 1997 BELONGING Oct 97 In what future, unwritten and unformed... is there a private space, a sunlit clearing in which the slimmest version of ourselves is cleansed of unspared shame and fearing? In whose stylized translation or new edition of a saints view of a wasting world do we live? In what rhythmic meaning and Godspell cast do we willingly settle into, and fall fast asleep? Under what zeitgeist’s seditious and foul breath inhaled deeply, are we told is fresh air breathed? In which lost holy harbor of the unknown God are we burnt, scuttled, sunk, buried and preserved? In whose divine dreaming or heavenly presence are we already dead, yet as living newly alive? Before whose vast universes’, birthed in a whisper do we lay bare rank acts before an unseen throne? In what worshipped, unworldly voluptuous heart are we washed clean in lugubrious beating blood? Within what tarnished truth or banished gospel are we guaranteed life, eternally undeserved?
08.01.2022 Gates of Prayer, 1990-99, #1-84, Grid 1 (7 Grids of 12) From 1975 onward there was a slow artistic drawing near to the features of the human face, especially the mouth that became evident across a range of works, culminating in the Gates of Prayer Series in 1990. (This interest in faciality is to be distinguished from any form of portraiture I rarely use a model; preferring in this case to consult books on dentistry, medical books on diseases of the mouth, fashion/film phot...Continue reading
04.01.2022 Amor Vincit Omnia, Series V, 2020, #1-44, #12. It is now 45 years since I made the first seated figure - a series of large etchings of which only a few were printed or survived. It was also anticipated, with the purchase of a wheelchair in the same year (75) that in it a fibreglass sculpture of this figure would reside. The sculpture along with most of the etchings were deliberately destroyed in that year. The seated image disappears after this (except in a different Series ...Continue reading
