The social circle
  
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Notes from my painting studio in 2021!
Nearing the end of 2021, 2 exhibitions open in the same week!! Downlands annual exhibition opens in Toowoomba, the same night as Plexus Gallery's, 'Second Bloom' opens in Teneriffe!
  
 
After developing the 'tondi' (round) works, I decided to start printing limited edition prints of some of my favorite paintings. They will be available through Plexus Gallery! (Click here to go to my page there)
  
From 7th June I did a 3 week artist's residency in at 282 Wickham St, Fortitude Valley! It was organised through Plexus Gallery and their ongoing sponsorship from Northshore Group, a local property investment group who have done some quite magnificent refurbishments around Brisbane.
Check out their site to see what they are working on now.
I developed a new series of works during this period! Many thanks Northshore Group!
 
Mostly I am busy with commissioned works at present. Though as always seems to be the way when one is very busy, new ideas pop up! In the last few weeks I have started exploring routing MDF boards to make framed round works. I had some spare boards and love working on the hard, smooth surface. If it's completely sealed front and back, it's an excellent, stable surface which is easily shaped.
  
Plexus Gallery's first pop-up show, 'in situ' was very successful!
There were 17 artists involved in the show and it was located in a beautifully renovated building that was lent to Plexus by Northshore Group.
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At the opening of in situ
Many thanks for coming!
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Eugene Gilfedder's poetry with music by Tom Adeney for our dear friend, Donald Hall, given in front of my 'Requiem for Donald' painting
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Teaching my granddaughter the finer points of the art business
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Coming up in September, I will be involved in the Downlands Annual Art Exhibition in Toowoomba and will be in another pop-up exhibition with Plexus Gallery to be held at Bib'n'Brace Collective in Teneriffe, Brisbane
Here is a recent painting from the 'Sleep' series, It is simply called 'Sleeper' and was shown in the last exhibition with Plexus Gallery
More information on this work can be found here on the Plexus Gallery site
My dear friend Pat Hoffie, wrote this about the sleep series.
'..that you have but slumber'd here,
while these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
no more yielding but a dream.'
(Puck, in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Sleeping figures, wrapped around a dream. The subjects of these paintings seem caught between the very skeins of the paint; wrapped within the gauzy sheets of the image's layers.
If they are, in part, portraits, they are also evocations of states-of-being. Captured in repose, they dream in the shadowy spaces of half-realms, suspended between the between the here and the not-here.
The dreaming subjects in these paintings have entered this state of being willingly. In delivering themselves into the hands of the artist's other-role as a masseur, they allow themselves to be lulled into sleep - suspended into a kind of temporary trance, they become the willing subjects of the artist's other-role as a painter.
The images are evocative, then, in two ways, for they are experienced and realized by the artist as both the solid flesh of physical bodies and as the numinous ineffable nature of a sleeping spirit. There is a sense of hypnosis at play; and with it a nod towards the role of artist as a creator of visual imagery capable of mediating between our conscious and sub-conscious awareness.
The growing public interest in the sub-conscious that emerged in the late 18th century was influenced by the experiments of Franz Mesmer, a German doctor who described the 'invisible force' (lebensmagntismus) that all animate beings possess. Mesmer believed that the capacity for harnessing that force could generate a range of physical effects, amongst the more positive of which was a kind of healing. Since that time, practices of 'mesmerism', experiments with somnambulism and treatises on vitalism were continued in hundreds of volumes of documented experience up until the 1920s, when such practices were dropped to the side in the enthusiasm for more rational approaches to understanding unconscious states. Up to that point, the proponents of such far-reaching experiments were variously referred to as hypnotists, animal-magnifiers, mesmerists and vitalists. And although these practices ultimately failed to be recognized by Western medicine, their efficacy in generating positive results to a range of ailments that include pain, depression, anxiety disorders, addictions and psychogenic illnesses are still recognized by many traditional practitioners.
Visual artists share, along with the mutable practices of the mesmerists, work sites that traverse the shifting grounds between material and spirit, and practices that call attention to the shifting, uncertain territories between conscious and unconscious states of awareness. Throughout art history, artists have painted dreamers; from the biblical dreamers of Marc Chagall to Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy (1897) to Picasso La Reve (1932) and right up to the present, the subject matter of dreamers reminds us that even precious flesh is capable of melting and dissolving into a dream. Billy Shannon's ongoing experimentation with dreamers and their dreams continues the theme in this new series of paintings.
Pat Hoffie
www.pathoffie.com.au
And here's a great article about my 'Sleep series' by Carol Shwarzman in the arts blog, Polycentrica
Here is a PDF version of that article, in case the link breaks
Enjoy the studio site!
Billy Shannon, painter
Brisbane, Australia
I don't place cookies on my site. I dip them in coffee and eat them! It's much more fun!!
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