Georgina Cole

Ralph Balson (1890–1964) was an English plumber and house painter who emigrated to Australia in 1913 and subsequently became a key member of Sydney’s artistic avant-garde. He is credited with having the first solo exhibition of purely abstract painting in Australia in 1941. Despite his role in developing Australian non-objective painting, Balson remained principally a house painter, working on his art practice at weekends. In 1955 he retired on a state pension and became a full-time artist.

Balson’s artistic education and methods were critically shaped by his working-class background. He did not travel abroad until 1960 and was an avid auto-didact. His materials, palette, techniques and compositional strategies were likewise informed by his trade. Balson’s profession as a painter-decorator made him conspicuous within the predominantly middle-class Sydney art scene, though his painting partner Grace Crowley considered it an advantage in their pursuit of constructive painting. This paper explores the impact of Balson’s trade on his trajectory towards pure abstraction. While his art was at odds with the predominantly figurative mode of class-conscious art in Australian Modernism, we argue that it is embedded in the experience of class through its creative adaptation of labour into aesthetics.

Attitudes to the blind and the nature of blindness changed dramatically during the eighteenth century. From a divinely ordained mark of transgression or conversion, blindness came to be understood as a philosophically curious and medically curable condition linked to epistemology and morality. The empiricism of Enlightenment approaches to blindness did not, however, dispel the idea that it could lead to deeper forms of perception and even creative genius.  George Romney’s Milton and His Daughters of 1793 visualises John Milton’s blindness by drawing on contemporary theories of sensory compensation, which associated blindness with heightened powers of concentration and imagination. This paper argues that Romney represents Milton’s blindness as a sublime state of creativity and an embodiment of the doctrine of artistic invention.

Out of patience with portraits, Thomas Gainsborough turned in the 1780s to a new kind of morally serious painting directed at a polite and mercantile audience. Exhibited publicly in his painting room in 1784, Charity Relieving Distress provided an edifying spectacle of charity to a family in need. Its setting was the edge of an imagined town, an ambitious architectural space for an artist better known for his richly painted landscapes. The urban scene, however, is neither incidental nor haphazard, rather an elaborate construction of classical, medieval and Georgian building types. Gainsborough liberally quotes buildings pictured in paintings and engravings, incorporating knowing references to architectural, pictorial and theatrical traditions. This heterogeneous mix, ornamented with trees and vines, is a picturesque backdrop to the staging of the act of charity; indeed, the stairs below provide a seat for a rapt audience member. Furthermore, its multiple openings create points of access between private property and public space that suggest a metaphorical affinity with the social virtues of amiability, generosity and liberality recommended in eighteenth-century moral philosophy and religious sermons. This paper links the representation of urban space to what John Barrell has described as the " privatisation of virtue " in eighteenth-century life. It develops the author's published research on Charity Relieving Distress to argue that Gainsborough used architecture to create a built environment for virtuous sociability.

In the competitive environment of the eighteenth-century London art scene, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds were often perceived as great rivals. While they shared patrons, sitters, and a stake in the future of British art, their differing artistic approaches caused considerable friction, indeed Gainsborough seceded from the Royal Academy of Art in 1784, boycotting its exhibitions and activities. This essay, however, argues that Gainsborough’s Charity Relieving Distress, painted in the year of his secession, proposes a charitable resolution of their aesthetic attitudes. The complex interrelation of allegorical and anecdotal form is interpreted as a pictorial attempt to reconcile their approaches through the concept of charity, a virtue of powerful artistic lineage in the western tradition, and of contemporary social importance.

Review of Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, New Haven:
Yale Center for British Art, 27 October 2011–12
February 2012; London: Royal Academy of Arts, 10
March–10 June 2012 and Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed edited by Martin Postle, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011

Koji Ryui makes sculptures in response to commonplace materials, manipulating and transforming mass-produced straws, rope, coat hangers and plastic bags into evocations of life. With minimal gestures and a playful sensibility, his work activates the things of our everyday experience, sometimes to the point where they start to possess traits that we normally associate with sentient beings – desire, will, motivation and emotion. In his hands, the utilitarian stuff of the world takes on a flicker of life that is occasionally disconcerting. Informed by animism and philosophy, his engagement with materials and objects destabilises the border between animate and inanimate, seen and unseen. Soft Landing is an exhibition of new works that explore the point at which discarded or commercially produced found objects transcend the mundane and approach something more universal and archetypal, generating a kind of spontaneous narrative. At the same time, these works engage with the essential nature of sculpture, its history and formal language. Soft suggests lightness, and Landing refers to the point of arrival: the formal gesture of sculpture that is simply placing things on the floor, or the moment when an idea, intuition or desire is realised or material-ised. The sculptures in Soft Landing are responses to the orphan objects Ryui encounters both intentionally and by chance: figurines, pots, ornaments and decorations. The making has been pared back so that the found object remains obvious; the process of arranging, treating and fashioning is visible, yet it is difficult to distinguish the condition of the found object and the artist's intervention. Ryui's work is informed by the desire to transform our perception of the everyday, and in this exhibition, the artist's interest in the esoteric and the supernatural heightens our awareness of the cosmic implications of commonplace things. In Mother, a cement pot treated with Spakfilla placed on an institutional-looking stool sprinkled with dust appears like a miniature mountain. The pot and Spakfilla are each variations on the sculptural material of clay, and the title suggests life force and origins. Through these material and verbal associations the sculpture evokes the mystical Mt Mehru, home of the gods and centre of the universe in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. In Sombrero, on the other hand, the topmost ceramic component is like a flying saucer hovering above the earth, the angle of the supporting pole suggesting the smooth alien velocity of the UFO. This interpretation turns the base of the sculpture and the sandstone block into the distant land and ocean, so that the spectator becomes a monstrous figure towering over the earth. At the same time, the hat-like form and the title suggest a more anthropomorphic readingof a person walking, taut body bent into the wind. Both Sombrero and Mother play deliberately with scale, making the infinitely large seem accessible, tangible and almost domestic. Likewise, Cosmos I and II invoke the entire universe in a scattering of rocks and sand or scrunched aluminium foil. In these works, ordinary and discarded objects become potential microcosms of a universal order. With each work, the spectator's subjectivity activates a series of readings. The ambiguity of the sculptures elicits our empathy, which goes beyond the materiality of the work to open up a mental or psychological response. While Ryui often seeks the point of arrival of complex—essentially humanistic—ideas into his aggregated forms, this time, the character of those ideas is decidedly cosmic. Each work offers a way of exploring the world that engages both the seen and unseen, inviting a deep contemplation of the ordinary that transcends its physicality. Ryui's work underlines the impossibility of rationalising or verbalising all things in the world and invites us to explore them in a more intuitive, expanded and perceptive way.