Ceremonial 11 120cm x 85cm Click to enlarge

Tui the Joyous 60cm x 40cm Click to enlarge

Variations on a Theme 80cm x 120cm Click to enlarge

Korean Spiral No. 2 152cm x 152cm Click to enlarge

Trinity 73.5cm x 73.5cm Click to enlarge

John Bartlett
Visual Artist (Indented Head, VIC)

John Bartlett has been practising art for 33 years, and has held 14 solo exhibitions and 32 group exhibitions. He is a self-taught painter, except for a short period with Leslie Sinclair at Monsalvat (tonalism), and most importantly, a period in the late 80's with Erica McGilchrist of Caulfield was crictical to his development.

John spent his early formative years in Melbourne and Riverina and has travelled extensively throughout through the Mediterranean, Aegean, Middle East and Europe.

John painted mainly figurative works until 1981 then worked on construction paintings utilizing Rank Xerox technology - photocopies with fitted computer circuit boards. He then moved onto geometrical figurative abstraction with figures re-enacting real-life games based on Video Games, then Hip Hop and the Peoples Ballet of Rap and Break Dancing.

From 1991 till 2002 his work featured impressions of sky reflections on water, then impressions of the land of Central Australia incorporating found-on-earth objects such as leaves, pods, twigs, etc and actual earth and sand from the Alice Springs district.

His current imagergy was developed with charcoal as drawings then completed on fabric wth paints.

For information on how to purchase or commission John's work, please contact him below or call 0402 683 753 during business hours. Gallery enquiries welcome.

Contact John Bartlett
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John Bartlett - Artist
Photo by David Johns, Melbourne

Artists Statement:
A conundrum of art practice is the tension between the planned and the spontaneous. Considerations of an intellectual nature vie with intuition, impulse, immediate and direct mark-making similar to Sume-e; I spontaneously brush in an image and when the dust has settled ignore changes prompted by rules and conventions, changes that will tidy the untidy and tame the primitive in concern for polish and refinement.

When should we intrude into a stream of consciousness? Only the artist can decide that; the artist should be true to principles, have an open mind, be resolute in bearing the burden of making art, be prepared to swim against the current seeking beauty and truth in the mundane, the imperfect, interstices and the ordinary.

Art is not to be explained, it is to be lived with; to be an “itch”.

ARTIST NOTES ON PAINTINGS

Concerning Ceremony and Change
The Ceremonial and I Ching Hexagram paintings relate ancient Chinese Oracle I-Ching Hexagrams, Ceremonial Body Painting of the Australian Aborigine and the Japanese Zen Buddhist Aesthetics of Wabi Sabi. This Body Painting of course is not limited to the Australian Aborigine.

In accordance with my practice of simplifying imagery to its fundamentals, having dealt with I Ching Hexagrams I reduced the horizontal Hexagram bars from six to four making a Quadgram, alternatively if one considers the light as background then a Trigram is formed wherein the lights and darks compete for the forward plane consequently creating tension and dynamism. I also take the liberty of realigning some bars from horizontal to vertical and breaking the unbroken Yes bars to become broken No bars thus changing the bars from I Ching Hexagram to Body painting.

The I Ching centres not on things in their state of being but on their movements in change; not what is but what IS is changing to; whereas the Australian Aborigine through Ceremony, Singing and Body painting is concerned with what WAS, continuing the past through customs and rites, reenactment and story telling. I paint using an economy of means, a limited palette of raw earth pigments and Ochres bound with virgin beeswax on 1.2mm Aluminium support.
Aboriginal Ochres on Bark is very Wabi Sabi.
John Bartlett - February 16 2009

Development of Portal Wanderer
Since the eighties the foundation of my paintings has been the Spiral; after completing the Still Point, Lasseter Earth and a few initial paintings for the Journey to Horseshoe Bend series, the spiral surfaced as the Trinity and Korean Spiral. It is my practice to simplify imagery to its Essential Essence, to achieve a Right Balance; that being the balance between the planned and the accidental that can achieve something honest, possibly primitive with a certain innocence, uncontrived whilst the product of much consideration.

So the linear spiral led to the simple six horizontal bars of the I Ching Hexagram; the simplified hexagram led to the Trigram that when further simplified became the two vertical parallel bars of the Portal Wanderer paintings.

Schubert’s Wanderer theme in his 3rd Symphony in D major comes from a Goethe ballad in which a voice asks a traveller “Where are you going?” to which the Wanderer replies “To where happiness is”; then the voice asks, “and where is that?”; the Wanderer doesn’t know, however despite doubts is convinced it exists and because he has left the place he loves he must find it. The Portal, the two vertical white bars or posts, is the gateway into the dark mysterious landscape that must be traversed by the Wanderer, also the viewer, in search for the place where happiness is. Those far-off coloured lights must be a big city, surely where happiness is, yet as he advances it retreats as did the rainbows of my childhood; nevertheless, doubts must be overcome for he knows there is a place where happiness is and he must find it for to go on his search he has left the place he loves.
Acknowledging Schubert’s 3rd Symphony in D Major.
John Bartlett - September 2008

Notes to Variations on a Theme… A Celebration of Life.
The Theme is the Life Cycle of Birth, Death and Transfiguration having particular reference to the Spirit of the Universe, the Spirit sustaining life in all its forms and relationships; that Spirit that suffuses all Creation. The Theme celebrates Place; land as a ceremonial site; the theme celebrates courage, the human spirit surviving adversity, making a way through boulders, overcoming all other obstacles of life. And so it goes, always has, always will, “Per Ardua ad Astra” “Through Adversity to the Stars” the human grows in stature as a Being through survival of adversity, is transfigured through adversity; the history of the human; a wondrous creature; is on record. For me, there is in a driving passage in Tchaikovski’s 4th symphony, also within Mahler’s “Song of the Earth”. Hendryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” Max Bruche’s “Adagio on Hebrew Melodies opus 47” and Schubert’s “3rd Symphony in D flat major” something of the grand march; the Passing Parade of humans marching shoulder to shoulder through time/space toward that distant land where happiness is.
Acknowledging T.G.Strehlow. “Journey to Horseshoe Bend.”
John Bartlett - July 2009