RSJ Barker

untitled #3, acrylic and ink on paper, 420mm x 29

My most recent exhibition, “Timelessness” was held at the Sheffer Gallery, Chippendale, Sydney 2008. In early 2009 two other exhibitions with similar titles, “Timeless” by the Sydney woodblock printmaker Cressida Campbell held in Brisbane, and a group exhibition at the MCA as part of “Primavera” with the title “To Make a Work of Art Timeless”. There is/was and never will be any connection to these exhibitions other than they were all in Australia and they all had a similar word in the title.

untitled outback #6, acrylic and ink on paper420mm x 297mm

In fact, the only reason why such a word would be used for an exhibition would be for the sheer audacity of using it as a conceit in itself. The idea of timelessness, timeless, or even the clunky “to make a work of art timeless” phrase is just a cynical wink in the direction of purveyors and fans of fine and pure kitsch.. The word itself has it’s own stringed arrangement. Anyway, I digress. I may explore this coincidence at another point. That could be something for a later date.

The RJSBarker exhibition “Timelessness”,on the other hand is really about the popular, evergreen and universal themes of death, decay, putrification, rebirth, growth, life, death and birth. The exhibition itself is the precursor to the forthcoming exhibition with the equally misleading working title of “Effortlessness” scheduled for release in late 2010. The content of both “Timelessness”, “Effortlessness” and selected recent works will form the body of the final exhibition of the series with the working title of “Pointlessness” scheduled for 2011-2012.

Untitled #5 church & state, acrylic and gouache on paper 29.7cm x 42.0cm

I’d been sketching the C. Bruce Dellit War Memorial on the southern edge of Hyde Park near the corner of Liverpool Street and Oxford Streets, Sydney for quite a while between 1991 – 1993. I also spent a lot of time working on drawings of nearby St Mary’s Cathedral. The reason for that was because there wasn’t much around that area that I thought had much dignity at all in terms of urban architecture. All the old buildings had been torn down. The Paris Theatre, The Hordern Building, the Atlantic Café on Elizabeth St had all gone. The new buildings in the area were all bland 60’s and ’70 rubbish indistinguishable from each other. So it was the War Memorial and St Marys and from time to time the Archibald Fountain. Even poor old St Mary’s though still didn’t have it’s spires after a hundred years and still didn’t quite make the rank of a proper cathedral because of this obvious shortcoming. So I just sketched close ups of the doors or the rose windows. The spires were eventually installed in the dead of a Sunday morning - a year or two after I moved out. By peak hour Monday nobody’d even noticed anything had changed. It was like they’d always been there.

untitled landscape #10 acrylic on paper 29.7cm x 42cm

I was able to maintain a certain amount of drawing and sketching while working at the Arts Council of NSW - for whom I regularly traveled to remote areas to listen to arts council members talk about the cultural needs of remote communities in NSW. During that period of traveling through the central west and far north NSW, throughout the south coast and the Riverina and the Hay Plain I was able to compile raw material to work with back in the studio which I’d later work these up in my studio and combine them with images of the local churches, the War Memorial, the fountain or local plants together with stencils, stamps, rubbings or whatever it took to complete my final composite images.

untitled landscape plains, acrylic and ink on paper, 420mm x 297 (h

Most of the drawings on paper did not go into the exhibition and remained within the portfolio. This was mainly due to the fragile condition of the drawings and the cost required for framing which was needed for archival protection. In the end the decision to keep them out of the show was the correct one. While there was a few smaller drawings their scale and the media/paper was more robust for exhibition purposes and the cost of materials much less.

Although I’m not religious I was drawn towards the graphic representation of these types of buildings and subjects more than anything else. Using even the simplest reference to a church or a memorial gave a small insignificant drawing a quasi-religious theme and subsequently a level of gravitas that amused me.

Anyway, getting back to the exhibition “timelessness” I’d wanted to have the exhibition as I’d been working consistently for the previous 3-4 years without exhibiting. After moving to Bondi from Darlinghurst I settled into the usual mode of an artist who’s gone from the city to the beach and I started painting seascapes. I managed to stop myself after a short period and got back to the subject that appealed to me most. Death. Oh, and life too!

Untitled # st francis #4, acrylic and gouache on paper 29.7cm x 42.0cm

"Untitled garden oct 16", oil on board, 150x150cm

When Andrew Purvis first saw my work for the show he asked me what I was going to title the exhibition. Not
being the sort of artist who is inclined to attempt to reproduce or represent my immediate surroundings in either a realistic, impressionistic, abstract or a surrealistic manner, I inevitably struggle with the concept of naming paintings let alone coming up with “titles” for my exhibitions. However, the nature of the paintings and drawings on display do raise the obvious questions, such as what exactly is it that I’m trying to say…or do? It’s a good question, and worthy of a considered response.

Well it’s a slender connection really but which can be justified by my method of art practice. I don’t like to classify my work along formal lines and I try not to contrive or force imagery. I prefer to let things occur on my canvases and boards naturally or intuitively or with just a little bit of prompting from my own hand. So it’s strange that I actually came up with the idea of the exhibition title well before Andrew even mentioned it. Perhaps it was my fear of knowing that it was going to have to be dealt with at some point anyway that I subconsciously sorted it out well in advance of the starting date. I’d recently acquired a box of 30 faceless wristwatches that I found on the street during a Bondi rubbish throw out. The transient nature of the Eastern Suburbs means there is always people’s detritus out on the streets whenever someone moves house. This discarded box of faceless wristwatches seemed rather odd and sort of precious in a reverse kind of way and immediately suggested the word ‘timelessness’ to me. I took them back to the studio with a view to using them in an artwork somehow. For a long time I was looking for something to do with them but hadn’t really resolved how to incorporate them into a work. So, in the end I just left them alone and went back to working with my paintings, collages, drawings and assemblages.

Untitled-landscape feb oil on board 150 x 150cm (sold)

I’d been doing some representational work, landscapes, still life, narrative paintings, but became bored with the
idea of painting “things”. It seemed like just pure exercise to me after a while, and analogous to doing push ups
with the view that it’s going to turn you into an elite athlete. In the meantime I’d become fascinated with all these piles of trash and junk that I’d regularly see around the streets where I live. I’d go out looking for little treasures or odds and ends that I may or may not use in an artwork. I loved the way some of them were stacked up in the street or the nature strip. They looked really quite thoughtful and beautiful in the way they had been arranged. They brought to mind installations by artists like Joseph Beuys, Edward Kienholz, Robert Rauschenberg or Adrian Hall, to name a few. The problem however, was that recently I’ve been more into painting in oils or acrylics or working on paper, but I wanted to work out how to bring these elements together, discarded junk and traditional materials. I couldn’t find a way to reconcile the two. I wasn’t going to sit down in front of the piles of junk and try to draw or paint them or drag it all back into my 8 x 4 by two-bit* studio. I could have photographed them but for some reason I kept losing cameras or the camera would just break down at the crucial moment.

untitled garden 15 oil-on-board 150x150cm

Anyway, around the middle of last year (2007) I was out in my backyard at dusk where I found myself gazing at a different kind of throw out, this time a compost of discarded dead leaves and bracken in my own backyard. I placed my hands over my eyes and cropped my vision to form a makeshift viewing frame - like a photographer might do when setting up a shot - I realised how perfect this simple heap of leaves and twigs really was. When I went back into my 8 x 4 x two bit studio later I approached my works-in-progress with an entirely different attitude which I believe evokes what I’d seen in the backyard earlier.

Much much later, back in the studio again and staring at yet another batch of newly incomplete paintings for about four hours or so, as you do, with my unresolved wristwatch objects laid out on my workbench, I began to wonder how something so common and plain as a pile of dead leaves and debris could offer so much, and provoke such a complex range of thoughts and questions about life, death, art, artlessness, time and…….timelessness. Voila!
Thankyou.

rsjbarker May 2008

untitled landscape may, oil-on-board, 150x150cm

untitled still life 2003

I found living close to the water for the first time in my life was a real breath of fresh air literally and I spent a lot of time on drawing the local landscape and interiors. I suppose this was in an effort familiarise myself with the new environment. I started working with still life drawings and quick sketches of anything that interested me.

View of Bondi from Mark's Park 1997Interior still life, 2003

As this is not a normal way for me to work, many of these don’t survive and are either destroyed or lost. Nevertheless some of them do find their way into the box and eventually into some form of display either in exhibition or on a website. Here’s just a few samples from 2003 when I was still coming to terms with the Bondi landscape. It was by this stage more of an issue with how I was going to work within such a confined space. Up until now, even the terrace houses that I’d rented in Darlinghurst seem palatial compared to the standard floor space availability in the Easter Suburbs.

I’d worked consistently on a scale that I would call a domestic. However I’d also been happy to work on the scale of an A5 sheet of paper. Subsequently, the lack of a huge studio space ceased to become an issue as I settled into the realisation that I was going to be pretty well limited to kitchen tables or the sun room for a while at least. One solution was to go out and draw the landscape by traveling to it, sketching and working them up later in the studio. Trouble is that it took up too much time, energy and effort during a period I was working full time so I didn’t keep that up for too long.

"Untitled, View From Bulli", 1999, acrylic on paper 148.5mm x 210.0mm

In  the end I just kept a notebook with me as much as possible and referred to it back in the studio if I felt like I need to. Otherwise I tend to let the work exist in its own right rather than as a study for a much larger painting. I always find that if I take that view it’s not going to work out.

"Untitled - Near Jervis Bay", acrylic on paper 148.5mm x 210.0mm

The pictures on this page is the outcome of the realisation that I was going to have to aim small for a while. Evenually I loosened up and the results are demonstrated later. Nevertheless I didn’t mind these types of drawings for a while and worked quite happily in the medium of watercolour and simple acrylic or water based acrylic paints to produce these research drawings while I planned or tried to figure out how I was going to be able to continue to paint in Bondi.

"Untitled - Spencer - Head - 03", acrylic, pencil and ink on paper

As I found out later there was always an abundance of subject matter when I worked this way. It just wasn’t really the way that I normally worked however and I found it rather odd to be attempting to draw everything that was in front of me, but I did persist with it and while  I don’t think these drawings really have much to do with my overall style they were fun to do and I like them for their own particular aspects. In other words, I’m going to just publish them here because they were fun and I don’t really care at this point if they’re inconsistent with my later work. Anyway, if I have a problem with that I can always remove them. That’s the beauty of this stuff.

"Untitled - Spencer 2002", acrylic, pencil an ink on paper

This was really the first time also that I’d taken the opportunity to sketch Spencer our beloved cat. He made the perfect model for me. I wont go overboard here to show too many pictures of Spencer only the ones that I thought would look best in this medium.

This gallery was located in the Haymarket next door to the Capitol Theatre. It was a double fronted shopfront with a high ceiling and north facing windows. My exhibition for Gallery 19 comprised of 50 drawings and paintings many of which were based on urban and rural landscapes combined with a series of images based on the theme of St Francis of Asissi.

"Untitled - St Francis of Assisi at the Memorial's Doors, Hyde Park", acrylic and ink on paper 148.5mm x 210.0mm

As well as being the patron saint of animals, St Francis is also considered to be the patron saint of artists. St Francis’ concept of re-creating nativity scenes while modifying his own life in order to reflect that of the life of Chris are considered to be amongst the first recorded evidence of installation or early forms of performance art.

"Untitled - St Francis of Assisi - paddington", acrylic and ink on paper 148.5mm x 210.0mm