David Frazer: Another night on earth | Interview with the artist

david it's great to have you here at the art gallery of ballarat in your exhibition another night on earth thank you um your exhibition consists of lino cuts and wood cuts which are from um the last 20 years of your practice artist lionel lindsay explained of his practice with wood engraving my interest in wood engraving lies entirely in liberating qualities contained by no other medium and stride striving for free expression by line i wonder if we could start by talking about your relationship with lionel lindsay and why it is that wood engraving is one of your preferred mediums okay well it's quite coincidental that i got into wood engraving and because i found out later that lionel lindsay was a wood engraver and then also found out that we were sort of distant cousins so um i mean maybe i like to i think he is an incredible wooden grader and i have some of these in my house and i like to think that well maybe i somehow distantly even though was very distant inherited that sort of knack for anal um wood engraving so uh i i just love wood engraving because i like telling stories and and i love the narrative um and so i really wanted to be a songwriter but i couldn't write songs and so when i discovered wood engraving it was this closest medium i found found to writing a song because it was i guess because of its intimacy it's small and its history of illustrating books and newspapers that that was its original function yeah and of course with wood engraving um all of the images in the exhibition are black and white um and you mentioned that um then it allows you to focus on the the story and what's going on in there yeah well color's just a distraction really it's it just attracts from the image and the story i find so the black and white's just more straight to the point yeah and on uh the subject of cartooning there is um quite a lot of humor in your work but um at first glance there might not always be um you might not always get it could you perhaps talk about how you do work humor into your work i just find melancholy i love melancholy and i love humor so if you combine the two together it's quite a powerful force if if it was just all melon collected and depressing it would be just a real drag but if you can um and that's why i like the the sort of the forlorn hopeless blokes in a way because they're sort of sort of sad but also quite funny just these characters that don't quite sort of fit or don't quite have never really got their together or you know it's uh it's just something i like um are those blokes are you oh no not particularly i hope not uh well there's elements of me but that's just a story i mean you know when i did try talking about songwriting when i did try to do a quick painting i tried to do showbiz for a few years and failed miserably but and then when i got back into doing art and i started doing printmaking and i discovered wood engraving the the good thing was that i had a story then i had a subject um so it's you know that narrative of the you know failed ambition and disappointment and you know just a delusion all this yearning all that sort of stuff so i had a subject which was really you know that was that half the battle one then and then um so it's just sort of my you know my stick really um and that sympathy for the for the hopeless bloke or the loser you know um so these elements of me is but um yeah i also like to win i'm very competitive yeah so if i play table tennis you're in for a um grueling i don't care whether you're you know little or you know i go i play to win yeah well i'm very competitive but very bad at table tennis so i won't join you on that note on that um subject matter of talking about about blokes i mean we've had a chat about how a lot of the blokes in your works have just been dumped um or you know there it's women walking away from men and human emotion is really important in your work as well which is obviously taken on a completely different meaning in 2020 can you perhaps talk about um that side of your work the um examining human emotion well um all my work is always a very common story of the guy sadly reminiscing about the time he had a girlfriend and or a wife and had love and i love with music and songs i love sad songs and i mean they're pretty much mostly about broken hearts i guess so um [Music] i've always um liked the idea of connecting with people and the community i've never and i've always been a bit nervous or hesitant about connecting with people in reality as in actually you know talking and socializing but i do like i do always have that urge to connect with people so i love the idea of making art that people relate to and love and actually maybe feel emotional or get some message or feel some sadness or laughter and i like yeah so i like art that is is accessible easy to understand easy to relate to um i like occasionally believe it or not i've had people tell me that they've actually had tears in their eyes or cried so i mean that's the um i find that hard to believe but yeah that's probably you know a pretty high compliment i think um so i wasn't always sure whether that was possible in art i know you can do it with songs with sad songs make you cry or feel sad so if i can ever do that with my pictures i'm pretty happy about that um so i just like you know the idea of compassion and empathy for people or sad people or people that have failed and all you know that sort of thing i i you know i like so and the figure um in holding on is one that people seem to have complete to really um the figure in holding on is one that resonates with people it has and i'm very happy about that because i was hoping that it wasn't just going to be think people who are greedy or whatever you know just their greenie if she was not happy for it to be a greeny issue but i wanted it to be an issue that could mean lots of things to lots of people like holding onto the old farm or holding onto the old days or holding onto your sanity or holding on you know it's just i wanted it to be a generalized theme and and that's often the key to a successful image i find if it can sort of mean a lot of means something to a lot of different people and mean different things to different people um so very happy about that and how people love that image so much and that on the relationship with the land then landscape plays um a huge role in your work too like the setting or the theater setting for the for the actors in the play you know in a way i i feel i grew up as a principal teacher's son in the wimra in matoa in my primary school years little flat you know small little town and very strong memories of sitting on the roof of the house looking out and or up a tree and that sort of melancholic feeling of you know on saturday afternoon and there's no one there you know everyone's just streets are empty and so i just love that that theme of and speaking of songwriters as a very young age as a child in high school i got introduced to tom waits the singer song american music singer-songwriter and he was going through a phase of that rural sort of setting and that sort of alienation and i really picked up on that as well and and so there was a similar connection there with with his music um that sort of country misfit that wants to leave but also wants to stay well you want to succeed but you're scared of success you know and i often have a figure called mr vertigo who's flying through the sky what you want to fly but you're scared of heights or you want to succeed but you're scared scared of success so that's almost your competitive nature coming back in you're competitive but then you're yeah perhaps tentative as well yeah in some things i guess but not when it comes to table tennis um and perhaps we could talk about a work that the art gallery of ballarat have recently acquired for our collection which you consider uh one of your masterpieces hopefully there's more of those to come waiting for rain well it's funny because that one doesn't have any narrative or any figures in it as such it's not an obvious narrative but i just i was just pleased with the actual visual you know impact of it and because i didn't know what i was doing and i've never been able to really replicate that sort of again that that that style of picture but i did that from um years of doing little wood engravings and i i had a bit of success in china with this new printmaking base there and i won one of their first billionaires international print b nails and i went there and did a few residencies and spent a bit of time there and i was looking at these a lot of guys a lot of the artists and women doing these big wood cuts on plywood they're sort of landscapes too that was sort of in a portrait format which is a very asian format i think and um i just thought i could give that a a go so then when i got home i just thought i'd do it online oh and i just did it on one panel and i'd put another panel of lino next to that and i didn't know what i was doing i just sort of i had some reference pictures and things but i just sort of organically start i started at a certain point and just sort of organically grew um and so that's where that was the first big big line i cut i did and that was the last big one i did um but they're very very tedious to do and very um very physically demanding and yeah and people are fascinated in the process of such highly detailed work and i know that your um the works behind us has had a huge you put a video up of you carving that work and it's had a huge number of views on youtube which people can have a look at um but also in terms of preparatory sketches and that side of things do you uh work straight onto the piece of wood or lino or i do and people find it very strange because i don't i don't draw it all up first which is a bit risky with lino cuts because once you if you cut something that's not right or you can't put it back but i kind of like that at least it added some sense of excitement to a otherwise really tedious process just seeing how it would it would grow so i'd paint the whole lino black and i'd paint i'd stick it onto a piece of wood so i was a big board i could lean it up against the wall to look at and then i just started i think i started down near the bottom of that tree and then just wound my way around as it grew over i think four months that took um yeah so i had i had photographs i had drawings i had a little wood engraving study i did that had actually had a figure in the first one but i thought the big scale once you go to a big scale it makes a whole different there's a difference it's not as i thought it would work better without the figure and then um but the trees themselves have become the figures yeah that's right i see the trees as the figures and um they're just sort of different trees from different places and it just sort of creates it as i go along and now now i'm working on lino cuts where i'm just going off the little a little wood engraving i did and then i'm rather than i'm not here no photographs which makes for a very different experience and a different picture so yeah i hope they they they work well because they're a bit more fun to do and a little less tedious yeah a bit more graphic in a way [Music] so yeah it's they're a bit hard on that i imagine it would take a physical toll on your body after a while hands elbows neck back shoulders head brain eyes yeah sanity family family yeah well hopefully um putting this exhibition together um with us hasn't been too much of a toll thank you it's been an absolute pleasure to work with you and exhibit your work here and now to have um one of your really large works as part of our collection so thank you for joining me today thank you for having me

Channel: Art Gallery of Ballarat

Views: 655

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: GKRCKColdfk

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020