The chough that changed my mind

'The chough that changed my mind' 

Silk cut lino print © M.Burton

This is what happens to you when you move out of the city and disappear into the Red Box trees.

Material Things: Group printmaking exhibition coming soon

                                                    'One day it might all be gone' 

                                                     Silk cut lino print © M.Burton

This is the start of a new series of prints for a show in October at the Eltham Library with fellow artists Libby Schreiber, Maria Barbaro and Kylie Sirett. The theme for this exhibition is 'material things.'

Sam Wallman: Being born is goin' blind

 

I don't seem to leave the bush much these days, but I was more than eager to break out of the trees for the launch of Sam Wallman's fantastic new comic book 'Being born is goin' blind.' The delivery room was 'Wooly Bully' in North Melbourne, a great little venue that deals in beverages and comic books.

I love Sam's work. Sam can write, draw, tell stories, and make mini visual essays that leave you with a heightened sensibility of all things. ALL things? Holy moley, what does that mean? It means that as I sit here I'm making connections between the rarely considered amoeba, fossilized plant matter and anonymous factory worker that made the plastic keys that are clicking away under my fingers. These thoughts are simultaneously subdividing into continents, religions, political systems, loaves of bread, draining baths, ring tail possums, sex, the tips of tree branches, future meteorological projections and synthetic polyester fabric. Sam joins the dots and after you close his book your mind keeps going.

'Being born is goin' blind' asks some grubby questions, but criticism of humanity comes across as affectionate, detailed, and often very funny. See more of Sam's work and buy his book HERE.

I saw it in a dream

                                       'Scribbly boring'   silk cut lino print      © M.Burton

I have just completed the sequel to 'Self portrait with beetle,' an image I have struggled with for weeks. I have been very taken with the patterns of the 'scribbly borers' in some of the fallen trees around my house. 'Boring' and 'drawing' have become a kind of rhyming slang to me. I wasn't sure what to do but luckily my subconscious took over and I literally saw the the design in a dream. So fitting, as this week also marks the posting of Jeannette Davison's lovely article about all that emerges from my cocoon of a studio. ISIIAD (I saw it in a dream) is an art and design blog, and her recent post is HERE.

Epileptic: David B

The English version of David B's graphic novel 'Epileptic' (originally published in French as 'L'Ascension du haut mal') emerged in 2005, and although it has taken me 6 years to finally read this extraordinary work, the timing is perfect. It is a synthesis of everything I have been investigating in printmaking, autobiographical comics and the human condition, making it the most resonant read I have had in a while.

The author's world is a vivid, confronting and personal account of his childhood growing up with an epileptic brother, and I have never felt more inside a narrator's universe. Panels are layered with different levels of consciousness, with the illustrations departing from the text to describe both the surreal and everyday dimensions of the story utterly seamlessly.

A beautiful and haunting graphic novel.

                                                  
                                                   A panel from David B's 'Epileptic'

Teasleeves

 

                                           'Teasleeves' silk cut lino print © M. Burton 

Back to the printing press

'Self portrait with Beetle' 30 X 30cm silk cut lino print © M.Burton

A new chapter has begun, and the spring weather sprung here at my new digs at the Dunmoochin Foundation. Here begins a new journey as artist in residence, following the footsteps of so many others who have been inspired by this unique pocket of protected Australian bushland. 

It is my great fortune to have 24 hour access to Clifton Pugh's old etching press, which shall hopefully see a new body of work and some bolder experiments in printmaking techniques over the next year.