RAYMOND ARNOLD ELSEWHERE WORLD Tching Was Introduced to Me at Art Natural Environment

THE ART VAULT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 43 Deakin Avenue Supported by Arts Tasmania Mildura, Victoria 3500 through Northern Exposure Australia grant program T: 03 5022 0013 Design: Lynda Warner E: [email protected] Images: Peter Whyte W: theartvault.com.au 20 July – 8 August 2016 RAYMOND ARNOLD ELSEWHERE WORLD tching was introduced to me at art natural environment. The ‘violence’ of photography books in particular to It took me three years to bring my in writing books and less like the energy 3 The freedom of inhabiting such a In the early 1980s I had developed even King Billy pine in evidence. It is in E school in 1977. I was enrolled at etching expressed in terms such as ‘ground’ my work within academia and, skills and technical prowess into line expended playing of music. I also milieu and living within both its several large prints about the landscape this sense of the possibility of another Caulfield Technical College in Melbourne ‘foul bite’ and ‘spit bite’ and a reliance on in turn, look for ‘artistic bedfellows’. with my ambitions to create good determined that I needed to find a more traditions and histories. of this same western Tasmania. They world, ie. one that is lost but one that and through my teachers, Geoff La Gerche the ‘nitric acid that corrodes’ had to be Photography might have been more etching print works but I’d also been authentic approach to the etching 4 The return to the city, the metropolis, were ’postcards’ for imaginary audi- might be reclaimed that I was interested and John Neeson I learnt ‘the dark art’ negotiated for me to develop images of important than drawing! In this respect developing my screenprinting and to process. I’d listened to my teachers and the urban, the constructed world and ences far over the horizon – images of in speculating on in the new work. of intaglio printmaking. I say this slightly reflection, pattern and order. For instance, I was also picking up on the ‘Pop’ some extent it took over as my major I’d rushed to the experimental aspects the gestalt of body/mind. wild, desolate, indifferent places just John Lendis, an English painter and tongue in cheek but the etching process images of shop windows displaying sensibility of appropriation of multiple print practice through the early and of the intaglio practice but I was sure 5 The synthesis of the historic beginning to feel the pressure of the friend, co-incidently sent me a volume does have associations with artists who beautiful fabrics, quiet rivers reflecting image sources. middle 1980s. It was a method that that we had all been ‘swimming in the formats of engraving and body armour approaching bulldozer. Imaginary of Seamus Heaney poems during this cultivated images of human foibles glimmers of light and shadow play across The problem and frustration was combined the technical, semi-industrial eddies’ away from the ‘main stream’. construction as originally developed in Landscape – Eighteen months in early phase of the etchings development. (Francisco Goya), atrocity (Jacques Callot) walking tracks were typical subjects for to avoid the idea of drawing, in the aspects of printing with the use of I went to France and the Atelier 15th century Germany to the end of Tasmania (1984) and Florentine Valley: I found the words for a title of the new madness (Charles Meryon) and psycho- my work as a student. construction of the etching plate, and to colour, more liquid inks and a larger Lacourière et Frélaut in Paris in 1992 metaphorically protecting the soldier displaced landscape (1984) were big etchings in that book: sexual fantasy (Max Klinger). More I’d gone to art school to study painting, cultivate a more heuristic or enabling scale, closer to painting in other words. and the world of etching as it had been within contemporary conflict. panoramic images intended for audi- …an elsewhere world. contemporary and more local Melbourne as many art students do, and it was a approach that encouraged a distance I’d found a way to bridge my interests practised through generations, certainly 6 The international group of artists ences in big city galleries. That is where Where can it be found again, print artists such as George Baldessin revelation for me to discover a process between the action of one’s hands and in form and process with stencilling, centuries, of European printers and coming through the atelier exchanging they rest now – in National and State An elsewhere world, beyond (prostitution), Udo Sellbach (Holocaust), and method to which I felt so attuned. the effects created in plate making. graphic layers, scale, painterly applica- artists opened up to me. ideas. Gallery collections, in plan drawers and Maps and atlases, Noel Counihan (exploited coal miners) By its nature the etching process slows I was learning to deal with components tions and even more ‘Pop’ appropriation. Through months and subsequent In 2005/06 I finished working across in dark quiet archives beyond the gaze. Where all is woven into and Bea Maddock (existential crisis) everything down and is generally far as one might construct a piece of furniture It also served to align with my burgeoning years of visiting this famous atelier international contexts and ‘withdrew’ My new print work ‘bookends’ that And of itself, like a nest confirmed such association of etching removed from the more haptic and with considerations of planning, scaling, interests in the environment. The screen I shed my obsessions with gimmicky to a type of exile in the mountains of earlier work. It shares some character- Of crosshatched grass blades? process and ‘trouble’. expressionist impulses of painting. There processing discreet units, assembling printing signalled a shift in my work improvisation, multiple formats and western Tasmania. I settled into the istics with those artworks from 30 years My interests were somewhat more was a small element of frustration which, and of course, finishing. The print studio from the local, the urban and the developed a series of etched prints mining town of Queenstown and ago but essentially it represents a big I see the project as a way of rounding restrained being a simple suburban boy in the end became a positive, in this is not unlike a factory with machines and domestic into the world of clear fell that I think represent a ‘state of the art’ developed my LARQ (Landscape Art change. That shift in meaning and off my print oeuvre and the culmination – ‘The boy from Bonbeach’ as one ‘slowing down’. The idea of ‘working’ the tools for cutting, shaping and polishing. forestry, dam blockades, over develop- in terms of the intaglio print. I could Research Queenstown) project at the context is bound up with the fact that of a lifetime’s work. I see it as a way of Fairfax journalist, who interviewed me in plate through many stages developing There are acid baths and darkrooms for ment of natural areas. achieve this goal because of: same time as progressing my own I live and will hopefully die within the bringing a type of stability or balance to my French studio, had characterised me, a type of matrix, however, became very exposing sheets of material. There are Screenprinting, however, during this 1 The atelier model of production artwork. I had the opportunity, living pictured landscape and that the the array of projects and print outcomes in the header for a published interview. interesting and more attuned to the proofing presses and production presses time was even more a threat to ones ie. artist constructing the plates and within the dramatic landscape of audience for these paintings surrounds I’ve worked on since 1977 when I made My family, in bayside Melbourne, had cooler, more dispassionate aspects of for multiple copies. There is noise and wellbeing given the need to use hydro- artisanal printers making the print. World Heritage classified landscape me in the ‘here and now’. those first connections to the print nurtured my creativity and I was reason- contemporary art in the 1970s. Conceptual light as sparks fly and vapour forms. carbon based products and solvent 2 The work on the plates in a consist- brushing up against very damaged I began developing new etchings medium. I see it as a palimpsest of flora, ably happy. My frustrations were tied to art and photography had gained a toehold One wears protection over eyes, ears, based inks. More masks, gloves and ent, daily manner subtly developing them mining areas, to move on with my of some terrain on Mt Lyell, near fauna and geology I encounter on daily making this complicated print process in the domain of art over the hegemony nose, mouth and skin! ventilation was the order of the day until like constructing precision jewellery or etchings and paintings. Queenstown, which is still heavily walks with my partner Helena and our with the propensity for accentuating of abstract expressionism. I looked to I got quite worn down by it. I determined the mechanism exhibited in the breast scarred from late 19th century/early pups in the Queenstown hills. I see it ‘darkness’ accord with the simple beauty to return to the ‘slowness’ of etching. plate of German armour I saw in the 20th century mining impacts. Plants are as an expression of how I now live and I saw around me in both the built and More like the contemplation involved Army Museum in Paris. re-colonising the area, however, with an expression of what I love! the White Waratah, Blandfordia punicea or Christmas bells, Celery top pine and RAYMOND ARNOLD Elsewhere world 2016 (12th state) multi-plate etching (78) 80 x 400cm Flap inset: Imaginary landscape – Eighteen months in Tasmania 1983/84 multi-plate etching (8) 120 x 400cm.

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