Dive into your imagination

If you like film outside the mainstream, don't miss the Animation + Experimental + Avant-Garde film program, screening 2-4pm at the Portarlington Neighbourhood House (28 Brown Street), Sunday, 18 November 2018. FREE entry.
 
Part of this year’s North Bellarine Film Festival, this two-hour film program presents an eclectic array of visions from 18 known and unknown fimmakers from around the world who happily sit on the fringes and create work that’s anything but mainstream.
 
Writes David King, Director of the short program: “Whether it's the sublime animation and surprise ending of Paris Mavroidis' Divers, the nightmarish black and white vision of Johnny Clyde's Noctiflora, the toe-tapping swing of Stuart Pound's Boogie Stomp Pink, the surreal mindscapes of Murat Sayginer's Dust, the eerie procession of painterly images in Ihor Podolchak's Merry Go Round, or the silent interrogation of Lucia Sellars' The Line, the program will have something to feast the eyes and feed the mind. Clifton Springs artist Tony Convey opens Pandora's Box in The Box and Portarlington's David King takes us on a haunting existential journey in Lost in a Borgian Labyrinth. Gold Coast video poet Marie Craven delights with The Sea, Melbourne's Kim Miles tantalises with To Master A Long Good Night, and South Australian experimentalist Alison Chhorn pays homage to some classic avant garde works in her music video Author of the Accident. For an eye-popping grand finale we have the mesmerising USA - Australia digital animation 140 Characters.”
 
Local self-taught artist, Tony Convey, says: “The Box was part of a series of short films on mythical themes I made in Canberra. I used 'found footage' as well as planned footage I shot in my garden. The soundtrack features an improvised electric guitar solo. The idea behind the myth, curiosity overcoming the fear of consequences, had intrigued me since childhood.”
 
For more information about the Animation + Experimental + Avant-Garde film program, please visit:  www.northbellarinefilmfestival.org/2018-experimental-films


In brief:
Animation + Experimental + Avant-Garde
2-4pm, Sunday, 18 November 2018
Portarlington Neighbourhood House
28 Brown Street, Portarlington, Victoria.
Australia. FREE entry.

The Sacrededge Festival, dedicated to spirituality in diversity, has been a yearly event in Queenscliff since 2014. The Festival explores the themes of living together, the sacred, justice, mindfulness and an inclusive community. It has a special focus on refugees, Indigenous issues, LGBTI, wellbeing and sustainability. These themes are addressed throughout the festival by artists, musicians, performers and writers from all over the country.

Tony Convey was recently announced as the winner of this year's 'best exploration of festival themes' award with his painting, Seeds Of A New Knowing.

Judge Steve Singline wrote:

'Tony Convey has created a work which is rich in colour and beauty. The human family is portrayed on a circular panel that speaks of a global connectedness. There are multiple scenes depicted within the composition, each one speaking in various ways of connection. Connections between people and the environment.

'When we thought about the themes of Sacrededge, the principles and values of inclusion, diversity and care for the environment we felt that Tony's work embodied this beautifully.

'For each of us, Sacrededge provides us with opportunities to learn and grow, to be more aware, intentional and conscious. To borrow the title from Tony's work, to sow 'Seeds Of A New Knowledge'.

'So take care of the seeds that you have gathered on your journey over the weekend. May they find rich soil in your lives and enable new life to emerge in your relationships with each other and the world in which we live.'

Steven Singline is a Geelong based artist who works in the mediums of sculpture and painting. He facilitates stone carving and painting workshops for people of all ages and abilities. In addition to his studio practice, he is employed by the City of Greater Geelong as the Public Art Officer.

Tony Convey's Seeds Of A New Knowing will be on display until May 23, 2018.

Celebration: 20 years of collecting visual art opened at the Canberra Museum and Gallery (CMAG) in March, 2018, and as its title suggests, this is an exhibition that celebrates 20 years of collecting art and social history objects in and around Canberra.

Featuring the works of more than 100 artists, its broad themes, writes CMAG Director, Shane Breynard, “embrace our Canberra identity and sense of place” that reveal “rich patterns of connection”. Certainly Deborah Clark, CMAG’s Senior Curator of Visual Arts, should be commended for bringing this diverse selection of works to the public.

With almost 200 pieces, the exhibition spans fine and applied arts including painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, ceramics, textiles, metalware and more. Works of art include Dianne Fogwell’s linocut, Encounter (2017), Across town by Rosalie Gascoigne (screenprint, 1991), Kangaroo dreaming by Treahna Hamm (etching, 1997) and Frank Hinder’s lithograph, Office staff, Canberra (1942), which was gifted through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Rex & Caroline Stevenson in 2018.

Also included in the exhibition is Tony Convey’s etching, Seek Shining Life (image [1], top left; 32.6 x 45.1 cm, page 33 of the exhibition catalogue) from 1990. Gifted to CMAG by Studio One Inc in 2000, this is a significant work from the artist’s eclectic oeuvre.

Writes Convey, “Seek Shining Life was an image that haunted me for quite a while and I did several versions. The first version was a large painting (see image [2], left middle), which was the title piece for my show at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia in 1989. I also did a couple of drawings including a collage/drawing in the monograph, Spirit Lines as Happy Rider. I guess it was about looking for the positive things in life and seeking the ‘light’ rather than the dark.
 
“I really enjoyed making the Studio One etching and I remember thinking at the time that it was one of my best prints… Looking at it now I think it is one of my best graphic works as it has an energy and sense of movement, which almost lifts the figures off the paper. I also like its positive message, which is even more relevant today.”
 
Studio One was an open access printmaking studio set up by Diane Fogwell and Meg Buchanan in 1982. Convey completed a small printmaking course shortly after it opened that same year. Master printmaker, Petr Herel was the first artist to edition there, and Convey, the second, with his “little Rooster etching”.

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Celebration: 20 years of collecting visual art runs till July 25, 2018. To view the exhibition catalogue, which features the Director’s foreword, the curator’s statement, and quality reproductions of the artists' works, please click here.
​

The Crown (detail) by Miloslav Javanovic

Grand Final by Tony Convey

Germ of Life by Sava Sekulic

In 1989, VIVE LA VIE magazine published Sophisticated Naive, a feature article by Elana Steinberg that offered a unique insight into Serbian and Australian naive art. The Australian outsider artist, Tony Convey and his work was also discussed. Following is an extract from that article.

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Painters of the naïve style take the history and lore of the peasant village and landscape to create art of purity and sophisticated innocence.
 
By Elana Steinberg

Among the dictionary definitions of the word ‘naïve’, Oxford could perhaps be taken mightily to task for its use of ‘artless’ as a fitting synonym. These two seemingly incompatible terms achieve a remarkably successful marriage actually, in a unique school of art that began in the fields and meeting places of peasant villages and has wound its way across the globe to include all manner of culture and practitioner, in a discipline that is bounded only by the artists’ personal interpretation of their everyday domestic and spiritual lives. Naïve art is entirely based on response rather than formula – the constraints of which are fact, happily unchartered waters for the purist naïve painter.
 
Described variously by observers as ‘primitive’, ‘folk’ or ‘peasant’ art, Naïve artists are all bound by a common creed – to depict personal vision and individual experience above and beyond formalised technique. Whilst lesser know Naïve artists include Serbian masters such as Janko Brasic, Sava Sekulic and Milan Rasic, names associated with contemporary mythology are also prime protagonists of the naïve artform. Grandma Moses, arguably the most famous of naïve artists, first put brush to canvas in the naïve style towards the end of her very long life. Before her death at age ninety-six, she managed to convince a collector to part with $50,000 for one of her paintings. French painter, Henri Rousseau was credited with first bring the naïve style to mainstream attention, and he was supported in his efforts by affirmed cubist, Pablo Picasso who was also an ardent private collector of Serbian naïve art.

"Naïve art is entirely based on response rather than formula"
 
Picasso was not alone amongst his prominent brethren in actively encouraging the naïve style; French artists Jean Dubuffet and Paul Gauguin, British painter T.S Lowry, critics Anatole Jakovsky and Andre Breton amongst many others, were all unlikely champions of this ‘unsophisticated’ artform. But perhaps the most inspired and inspiring was the magical Marc Chagall whose status as a naïve painter is often called into question, but whatever his classification, the simple serenity of his angels and the brightly coloured stylised approach are all trademarks of a gifted ‘naivety’.
 
Within the generic term ‘naïve art’ there are countless schools and stylistic approaches, largely due to the fact that works are autobiographical in perception and interpretation.
 
“Naïve artists have no formal training; they taught themselves between themselves and they teach each other. They don’t talk about specialised art techniques like mixing the paints, the colours, preparing the canvases, they talk about philosophy, about life. These were people who worded on the land; they were taught by nature and what was accumulating inside them was the urge, the sense of needing to say something and to start painting,” explains Vasa Carapic, curator of the recent Serbian Naïve Art Exhibition with Australian Guest Artists.
​
To read Sophisticated Naive in full, please click here.
Naive Art of Serbia is also a great resource.

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We welcome your comments, insights, and experiences with naive/ outsider art. We'd love to hear from you!

Strong Bond​ by Sylvia Convey (1986)

Maternal​ by Tony Convey (1998)

Maternal by Sylvia Convey (1997)

Maternal 2 ​by Tony Convey (1998)

In an extract from his essay featured in our second monograph, SPIRIT LINES: Graphics by Sylvia and Tony Convey, writer, curator and artist, Colin Rhodes offers a fascinating insight into the Convey's graphic oeuvres. And in doing so, he somehow manages to reveal something about us all.

It is an unfortunate truism of art history that graphic work has usually taken second place to other media. Art museums like to collect and show painting and sculpture.[i] At times this has resulted in the relegation of artists who work primarily on paper to minor roles in movements in which they were centrally involved. Or, more likely, the public comes to understand only partial practices in the cases of those artists for whom drawing and printmaking played active and vital parts. True, works on paper tend to be less physically hardy than painting and sculpture, but the museum tradition of placing them in a closed ‘graphics cabinet’ as distinct from open gallery display also suggests a distinction between private and public practice. Perhaps there is something to this. There are many artists who draw incessantly, yet never show this work. They consider it too speculative, or too personal. After all, the immediacy of image making in the graphic media lends itself to revelatory statements, whether intended or not.
 
So it is with the graphic work of Sylvia and Tony Convey. Though they have shown works on paper at times throughout their lives (Sylvia more often than Tony), they have been represented overwhelmingly in public by their paintings, sculptures and constructions. They produced much of their mountain of graphic work over the years, as it were, in secret. It was done in a domestic setting, with no audience in mind except themselves.
 
It is worth pausing here and saying something about the Conveys. Sylvia and Tony are fiercely individual, with distinct characters and backgrounds.[ii] Their work is similarly distinctive, not only stylistically but also in its expressive sensibilities. They do not collaborate on single works, so there exist two separate oeuvres. And yet… Sylvia and Tony have as often as not worked together; that is, in the same space at the same time. Together they have shared new discoveries and great swathes of the highs, lows and mundanities of lived experience. During a period when Sylvia was very ill in the mid-1990s, for example, she introduced Tony to monoprinting and the two of them worked in the medium every day in a shared artistic adventure that lasted over a year. They have explored identical narratives and subjects from their particular viewpoints – compare Sylvia’s Strong Bond (1986) and Maternal (1997) and Tony’s treatments of the same subject from 1988 and 1998, for example. Their common bond goes beyond mere partnership and the transactional. In a real, though intangible, way time and interaction has performed a kind of seeping and intermingling of personhood the one into the other. The result is a kind of pronounced connectedness that actually enhances rather than threatens individual personality. We might also similarly read the sum of their work, and especially their graphic output, which reveals itself with great immediacy.

Sylvia has always made drawings, whereas Tony started, as he puts it, with a brush rather than a pen. He had already been painting for a dozen years before he began to draw. This he sees as a disadvantage since he was already accomplished in the other medium. He had developed a method. Yet the evident struggle he brought to drawing has resulted in the creation of a body of gritty, authentic work. In general, Tony’s graphic work is all accumulated tectonics – of the earth as well as the built environment. Forms are excavated, as it were. Chthonic landscapes erupt and figures reveal themselves with the primal mud or stardust still clinging to their persons. Look, for example, at images like Maternal (1998), Strange Growth (1997), and Lay of the Land (2016). Sylvia’s graphics meanwhile seem to draw their life from more ethereal realms. While no less authentic in the immediacy of their complicity in the dynamic of communication with creative forces, Sylvia seems to look out, rather than down, so that her drawings report back those experiences with a fluid lyricism that departs from simple optical verisimilitude...

This is an extract from the essay, 'The Graphics Cabinet Opened' by Colin Rhodes featured in 'SPIRIT LINES: Graphic works by Sylvia and Tony Convey' (Published in Australia by Tellurian Research Press in November 2017).

Click here to purchase your copy of SPIRIT LINES. 
 
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[i] And contemporary video and installation art are proxies for one or other of the two putatively primary fine art mediums.

[ii] They describe their stories in life and art in Sylvia and Tony Convey, Double Vision: a shared journey, Tellurian Research, 2015

Collected Works Bookshop is an important meeting place for writers and readers
​(photograph: Richard Mudford, 2015)

Your Scratch Entourage​ by Kris Hemensley
(Cordite Books)

In the second part of our two-part series on Collected Works Bookshop, we look at the future of the iconic Shop – the heart of independent bookselling in Melbourne, and Kris Hemensley, one of the few Shop volunteers left, tells us (a little reluctantly, but wonderful effusively) about his life.
 
The Shop
 
Currently located on the first floor of the historic Nicolas Building, Collected Works Bookshop has been run by a small group of volunteers since its inception, which has shrunk to three, Kris and Loretta Hemensley, and Cathy O’Brien (who has run her unique i:cat gallery in Vientiane, Laos since 2009).

​With 2018 fast approaching, the Bookhop is contemplating a move out of the city beginning in 2019.
 
Says Kris, “a by-appointment ‘uncollected works’!”
 
For many of us, this is heart-breaking news, so if you’ve been meaning to visit, or you haven’t dropped in for a while, take the time to wander in. Chat with Kris or Loretta, browse the treasures that populate the many bookshelves, and marvel at the rare ephemera – posters, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, signed scraps of paper – each offering visual cues into the long, rich history of our arts and literary culture.
 
Outside, Melbourne is being reconstructed.
Inside, people sit quietly reading, exploring, ruminating… they're a little wild sometimes too!

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​ 
in the other room so often close to me… (HE)
Kris by Kris…
 
I was born in 1946 on the Isle of Wight, UK. My father was English, my mother from the illustrious Tawa Family of Alexandria. Our family lived in Egypt between 1949-52, returning to Southampton where I completed my schooling. Dropping out of full-time education in 1964, I had a succession of jobs (dustman, encyclopaedia salesman, railwayman) before working on the Fairstar in 1965, during which voyage I first saw Australia, immigrating to Melbourne in 1966.

I met Loretta Garvey in 1967 who introduced me to the New Theatre (Melbourne), where I edited some issues of the newsletter, Spotlight, and had my first play, The Soul Seekers, produced. I became a friend and ally of Betti Burstall and her La Mama Cafe Theatre in 1967; several of my plays were produced at La Mama between 1967 and 1989, and I directed the influential weekly poetry reading aka the La Mama Poetry Workshop, 1968-9.

I met Ken Taylor at La Mama in 1967 and we collaborated with poetry readings, a book (Two Poets, 1968), and several radio programmes including "Kris Hemensley's Melbourne" on the ABC in '69. Between 1969 and 1972 I lived in Southampton, UK, where my son, the rock-n-roll musician Tim Hemensley, was born. (Tim played with such bands as God, Bored, & The Powder Monkeys; died 2003.)

I threw myself into the English small-press poetry scene, publishing widely and editing the magazine Earth Ship (1970-72). My other magazines include Our Glass (1968-69), The Ear in a Wheatfield (1973-76), The Merri Creek Or Nero (1978-80), H/EAR (1981-85), a selection from The Ear in a Wheatfield, "The Best of The Ear", was published by Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books in 1985.  Rigmarole also published several collections of my poetry (e.g., Sulking in the Seventies, 1978) and prose (e.g. Down Under, and Games, both in 1975).

My English collections include the prose No Word No Worry (Grosseteste, 1970), and Dreams (Aloes/Edible Magazine, 1971). Other Australian collections include The Going (Crosscurrents, 1969), Domestications (Sun/Macmillan, 1974), The Poem of the Clear Eye (Paper Castle, 1975), A Mile from Poetry (Island Press, 1979), Christopher (Swamp Press, 1987). Other publications include Montale's Typos (1978), The Miro Poems (1979), and SIT[E] (1987), all with my brother Bernard Hemensley's Stingy Artist press. In 2009 I published the cd + booklet, My Life in Theatre (River Road Press), and in 2011 the chapbook Exile Triptych with Vagabond Press.
 
In 2016 I published my first full collection of poetry since 1979, Your Scratch Entourage (Cordite).

I was briefly a co-editor of New Poetry magazine for Bob Adamson (1973-4), poetry editor of Meanjin Quarterly (1976-1978), and a contributing editor for Hobo in the early 1990s. I also contributed some Melbourne commentary for Michael Schmidt's PN Review (UK) in the ‘90s. Late '70s, early '80s I was Melbourne commentator for ABC radio's Books & Writing programme. 

While I continued to write poetry, and works for theatre (e.g. European Features, 1989, whose cast included the young Cate Blanchett) and for radio (eg, The Mysterious Baths), I began withdrawing from publishing in the late '80s. Apart from the mixed prose and poetry work, TRACE (Alex Miller's Ingle Publications in 1986), I didn’t publish another collection in Australia until 2016.
 
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In her 2016 review of Your Scratch Entourage, Gig Ryan aptly wrote: “...although there is a looking back over time, there is more a re-inhabiting of time, a sense that all times exist at once, that all we experience is forever in us and with us, with all those colleagues who have died still being present in our poems.” 
 
I travel the trains as tho’ in a stagecoach
or on the back of a recalcitrant angel
who can’t yet dispose of his love of the earth

(English Sweets, 1)
 
More about Your Scratch Entourage soon...

Bloomsday 2016, Collected Works Bookshop
​(photograph: Richard Mudford)

Kris Hemensley's book launch, 2016
(photograph: Richard Mudford)

Vali Myers in her studio in the Nicholas Building, 1997
​(photograph: Liz Ham)

In the first part of our two-part series on Collected Works Bookshop, Kris Hemensley writes about the Shop’s inception, its early history and the Vali Myers connection.
 
A meeting place for writers and readers, Collected Works Bookshop is one of Melbourne's favourite independent bookstores currently located in the historic Nicholas Building on Swanston Street. In fact, writes Kris Hemensley, the bookstore's current location was "an idea promoted by the late Vali Myers”.

Collected Works Bookshop was the natural issue of the Small Publishers Collective of 1984, the most important literary press among which was Robert Kenny's Rigmarole Books. It was Robert's brain-wave to create a bookshop dedicated to small press literature, run by a voluntary roster of writers and publishers. Some of the better known members were Jurate Sasnaitis, Des Cowley, Pete Spence, Nan McNab, Rob Finlayson.
 
Vali Myers began visiting the Shop when it was situated in the Flinders Lane Arcade building on Flinders Lane (our home from 1987-99), opposite Ross House. It would have been into the ‘90s when she first came in. Vali and friends, kind of Pied Piper-ish. She found us again in the 99-02 when we were down in the basement at 254 Flinders Street, a tenant of the CAE. As it became increasingly uncomfortable down there (CAE plans to sell that part of their property) we began sussing out other locations. And Vali’s famous comment was, ‘What are you doing in this dungeon, darling? Come up to my building [the Nicholas]’ …which in fact is what transpired, but at the eleventh hour, last days of December 02, receiving the keys the day before Gross Waddell (the agents at that time) closed their office for the holiday! I love the thought of the connection with Vali… several visits and conversations over a period… When we got into the Nicholas I sent her a card to tell her we’d made it to her building. Very sadly she was in the Epworth Hospital at that time… I’d seen a piece on her in The Melbourne Times, and photographed in her hospital bed… looking forward to her next journey she said… She died shortly after. Would have been wonderful had she been able to visit us there… Hers, of course, is an important spirit of the Nicholas Building…

​- Kris Hemensley, 2017

'It Takes Two'  by Sylvia Convey. Oil stick/paper, 1988.

Whenever I look at my brother's pictures I am taken back to our childhood. Our environment the inner suburban world of Prahran, Richmond and South Melbourne; small houses, streets, factories and parks was, from our angle of vision, imbued with the marvellous and populated by strange and baffling people. We loved exploring this world on long spontaneous walks. We would stare wide-eyed at the 'Meanie' shrieking and gesticulating with a gnarled oak branch outside his tumbledown home. We had to step back into the lane as the 'crazy girl' chased her father down the street with an axe. Between two side streets there was a factory complex with oddly shaped yards littered with tangled metal and crates of various sizes. The juxtaposition of fire escapes, pipes, vats and rainbow-coloured slime in the gutters made it a fascinating but overwhelmingly sinister place.

Stephen was drawn to a small courtyard near the entrance which always had large patterns drawn with coloured chalk on the pavement. 

Once at twilight in a blind alley we were horrified to hear screams tearing out of the barred windows of an empty factory. When we breathlessly told a cop in Chapel Street he grabbed us by the arms and said, 'There are two kinds in the world, the quick and the dead. Piss off.'

Empty houses, especially when reputed to be haunted, were magnets. They were psychic traps in which random aural and physical manifestations of previous occupation lingered. Stephen would stand in the middle of a room and momentarily close his eyes...

Sometimes at the end of these walks we would sit in the no man's land between the grimy factories and the Yarra River feeling the earth turning and listening to the hum of the wheels and wires. We had left the world of school and regimentation and our eyes had gorged on wonder. Later we moved to Glen Iris, a garden suburb with tree-lined streets built on the slopes above Gardiners' Creek. This became Stephen's special place and he formed a strong attachment to the rippling creek. It was as if he intuitively empathised with the original inhabitants whose stone tools lay buried in the grass.

Stephen never lost his sense of wonder and every time he picks up a pen to make a picture his quest continues.

Tony Convey

Originally published in 'Outsider Art In Australia'. Ulli Beier, Philip Hammial [eds]. Aspect, 1989.