Godwin bradbeer biography sample
Godwin Bradbeer
Description
Godwin Bradbeer welcomes the reader into the vast, drawing-filled studio of the Melbourne artist. Beginning his career as a photographer, Bradbeer later re-ignited a youthful passion and aptitude for drawing. His works are now held in collections worldwide, renowned for their unique qualities including scale, unusual creation process and idiosyncratic subject matter. Accompanied by studio shots of Bradbeer at work and, sometimes unusual, reproductions of his works, McKenzie guides the reader through stages of Bradbeer’s career. See Bradbeer’s epic 1980s and 90s drawings, which hang ceiling to floor in his warehouse studio, and explore metaphysical states of the human condition in Bradbeer’s art.
Additional information
| Weight | 2064 g |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 24.7 x 30.9 cm |
| Publisher name | Thames & Hudson Australia Pty Ltd |
|---|---|
| Publication date | 1 September 2018 |
| Number of pages | 272 |
| Format | Hardback |
| Contributors | Foreword by Kenneth Wach |
| Dimensions | 24.7 x 30.9 cm |
| Weight | 2064 g |
Janet McKenzie is a writer and artist who studied History of Art/Philosophy at the Australian National University and studied etching at the Canberra School of Art. She co-edited Studio International, one of the most successful fine-art periodicals in the country, and is the author of several valuable art publications, including the Isabel Alexander monographs (2016). Dr Kenneth Wach is an Associate Professor and former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne. He is also the author of 11 international texts and 330 items of art historical research.
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Conceptual drawing in Australia from 1970 – 2000s can be seen to preoccupy itself with image and meaning, and to marginalise qualities of touch and tactility that previously differentiated drawing from other works on paper. Much of the large-scale drawing made in the 1980s has been identified as having a sense of detachment. Art critic Robert Hughes argued that large scale drawing suffered because of its removal from the preconditions of its making, the processes of drawing, and also a separation from that which critic Tony Godfrey offered as a summary of the purpose of drawing: as a form of “archaeology of touch”.1 During the last thirty years, the intimacy of drawing has at times become overwhelmed by “the mural” and the predominance of conceptualism; leaving wall-sized, wall paper. “Pentimento” by definition refers to a visible vestige of a form that remains as a consequence of the artist changing his or her mind. Meaning Italian for “to repent” implies the need to improve on an original plan or form; in current terms it implies the trueness or original quality of a work, in contrast to a photographic or mass produced image. Bradbeer uses the term to refer to his long preoccupation of pitching perfect and imperfect against each other: the nobility and ignobility of the human condition. “My existential conception separates the flawed struggle of rendered figuration from the impossibly perfected surfaces of commercial digital culture and in doing so seeks to find a testament to the enigmatic nature of our flawed human beauty. As a figurative artist who developed in my art with a constant endeavor after visual acuity, it is deeply ironic that in the twenty first century it should be the flaw, the error, the struggle for verisimilitude that identifies such drawings as works of experience”. The conceptual and the subjective, arguably the most vital components of contemporary art practice - connect in drawing more forcibly and more appropriately than in any other form of art. It could also be perceived as ironic, that charged with the knowledge of new technology and the multitude of new forms and attitudes, that artists have chosen drawing in manifold forms. Over the past ten years, drawing has assumed a pivotal role in defining contemporary culture. Since the 1970s Bradbeer’s work has been characterised by the search for a visual surface and rendering of subject that is precise and true. His most recent work continues to affirm the importance of visual accuracy, though the conceptual or abstract truth is also asserted. I A Suburban Archaeology Tabula Rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception…The term in Latin equates to the English ‘blank slate’ (or more accurately ‘erased slate’, which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk) but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa. I attended this school in the company of two of my brothers; Jamie and Mark and with my friend Peter Van Der Veer. In December of 2011 we revisited the suburb and the school. The school has for several years been deregistered and is now a site of desolation and vandalism. I chose to trespass onto the site. In whatever condition the school remained it would be very unlikely to find anything – other than the essential architecture – that might be a fragment of that remote era, but amid the ruin I did find something or rather I found some things: one hundred and forty five little blackboards; blackboards used then and subsequently by the junior grades; chalkboards as held in the lap of the middle kid in the front row for the annual class photograph. These tableaux noir - not quite black, not quite blank – are for me, a mute correspondence with the past. I imagine that they might be encoded with poignant fragments of history but it is more likely that in gathering them up – over three days – that I was merely taking possession of 145 variations of nothing. But ther
Seeing art work reproduced in a catalogue is not the experience of seeing the work itself. A major Australian drawer such as Godwin Bradbeer, whose vast, dark field drawings such as Imitation of Shadow 1989 are larger than human scale, suffers in reproduction because his images are reduced to the size of postage-stamp simulacra. Here the qualities of layered surface; charcoal, chinagraph and pastel are reduced. The dynamics of the image and its meaning, as funnelled through photographic reproduction, is dissipated. It is a negation not merely of intimacy but of the domain of touch that drawing traditionally, and still contemporaneously, should occupy. “Image-making” does not necessarily equate with “drawing” at all; it is only part of its rationale.
Drawing in England at the end of the 1960s was being extended, testing the borderlines of where figurative drawing might trespass. Whether in works by artists like Hamish Fulton in The Sweet Grass Hills of Montana 1971, a small book in which the image of a mountain is redrawn, each page being reworked from the memory of the preceding one, or by Gilbert and George in a series of huge pen Godwin Bradbeer: Pentimenti
Tabula Rasa
Wikipedia
In the decade 1955 to 1964 I lived in the migrant suburb of Broadmeadows on the north west fringe of Melbourne. From 1959 to 1961 I was a student at the newly opened Campmeadows Primary School.