For five years I’ve painted private commissions, figured out what I have to say in my art now, kept a low profile and worked on recovering my physical health after adverse reactions to all the psych’ meds during my hospital years. It has felt like a long metamorphosis within the cocoon of the studio. But over the last year I became restless – a side effect, I expect, of becoming well. I missed creating bodies of work to exhibit and engaging with my peers.
In February my recent non-fiction memoir essay, The future of art fraud, was published in Counterfeit Culture, issue 79 of literary journal Griffith Review – Australia’s equivalent to The Paris Review. You can read it here: https://hazeldooney.substack.com/p/the-future-of-art-fraud
I painted a portrait of art critic and writer Neha Kale, the first in an ongoing series. The starting point was Andy Warhol’s Portrait of Society series with head and shoulders composition on a large, square canvas. Mostly, Warhol photographed his subjects with a Polaroid camera and transformed the photos into negatives painted with acrylic, which became silkscreens used to print the photographic image on canvas.
Portraits from my series begin with digital photos and short films of the subject, which I collage then draw digitally using Procreate app with an Apple Pencil and iPad.
You can see my digital study of the next portrait here: https://youtube.com/shorts/ymIfaA9KXHs?feature=share , influenced by the work of Bridget Riley, Agnes Martin, Mark Rothko, Helmut Newton and Tamara de Lempicka. I think of the sitter’s energy and how it might feel to see them in another dimension. Then I paint them by hand in a laborious, anti-factory process that take several months each.
My portraits are one of several ongoing series that I’ll make by commission. I intend to use the profits to cover studio and material costs while I paint bodies of work to exhibit. Ideally, I’ll alternate between portrait commissions and exhibitions.
I haven’t decided where or how I’ll exhibit. I’m still in the O stage of the OODA loop strategy my late military friend taught me: observing and orienting before I decide and act.
After a few months of reconnecting and talking with peers – and being sexually harassed by a couple of them via email – my conclusion is that the worst of the artworld remains, hidden in plain sight or cloaked in hubris like characters from The Emperor’s New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen. Except with more undeclared vested interests, market manipulations, casting couches and artists who participate enthusiastically ’cause they benefit from it all without consequence – yet.
The more complex reconnections made me more optimistic. I apologized to and was forgiven by someone to whom I had directed my wrath, undeservedly, during my nadir. I recorded a podcast with my old friend Australian gallerist Andy Dinan and, afterwards, considered her perspective in a way I hadn’t previously. I wrote an email to a respected art critic who once described me in a major newspaper article as a “Lara Croft clone”.1 I didn’t mention that. Instead, I thanked him for writing honestly about a project I was involved in long ago, which enabled me to figure out the truth of a bad situation and extricate myself from it. He wrote a brief, gracious response. I had a belated epiphany that the worst of the artworld is not a single demographic.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am close to reaching the limit of what I can DIY. To expand and exhibit, I’ll need to work with others. I’m looking for people who share similar values to me and who have also dedicated their lives to art. I guess I’m looking for people with a similar energy. And I realised, recently, that they may not be who I expected.
Footnote 1: 2002 McDonald, John. “Incident at William Creek”, The Australian Financial Review, 28 November (p. 64).
