Created in the last lockdown

On Tuesday night, there were two exhibitions opening at fortyfivedownstairs, a not-for-profit gallery on Flinders Lane in Melbourne: William Eicholtz ‘Greedy Pixiu’ and James Grant ‘Retreat’. Both were created during last year’s lockdown but the sense doom has not left Melbourne.

William Eicholtz, Pufnpixiu

There were a few cases of COVID-19 in greater Melbourne that night, and masks became mandatory indoors at 6pm. I’ve had one shot of the vaccine, and I was determined to get to another exhibition opening before another lockdown. Not even Melbourne’s cold, wet weather was going to keep me away.

At the exhibition opening, William Eicholtz told me about last year and being alone in the studio, which he usually shares with four other people, without a model, without students, without commissions, wondering what to do. There were many artists, musicians, dancers, etc., in Melbourne wondering the same thing.

“I first saw pixiu, a pan Asian mythological chimera, on an artist’s residency in Beijing… Alone in my studio, the sketches I had done of Pixiu years before beckoned to me, and this group of sculptures was born.”

Made from glazed earthenware ceramics, some with embedded vintage Swarovski rhinestones, the pixiu are meant to represent good fortune through greed and over-indulgence. Money-boxes that you will never open. Others are greedily consuming social media or chocolate or eating lotuses. Other pairs of pixiu are dressed up in various costumes, invasive species, cicadas, and even 70s tv dragon H.R. Pufnstuf.

James Grant, Liv’s Apartment (photo courtesy of Grant)

In the large gallery at fortyfivedownstairs was James Grant’s ‘Retreat’. Landscapes and still life of the familiar world around Collingwood, Fitzroy and East Melbourne. Scenes of living rooms, artist’s studios, garages build on the modern democratic attitude of depicting the ordinary rather than the great and the grand. A world full of stuff, books with recognisable titles and products with labels. Paintings that show an appreciation and enjoyment of local life. Familiar environment because we were all looking at similar scenes for so much last year. Retreating from the pandemic, we watched our world become smaller and smaller.

On reading Grant’s artist statement, ‘Retreat’ turned out to be another lockdown inspired exhibition. I emailed him to let him know about his blog post, and he told me about painting them in his home studio in Collingwood during the second lockdown.

I left the exhibition opening minutes before mask-wearing became mandatory and headed home. Victoria is now in a fourth lockdown. Back to drinking Shiraz, doom-scrolling Twitter and getting flashbacks of last year.

These, and all other exhibitions, performances, etc., will close for at least the next seven days. Some might be able to go online, others may be rescheduled, but the majority will have to be cancelled. Remember that these two exhibitions represent about half a year’s work for the two artists. The resilience of Melbourne’s culture looks like it will be determined through destructive testing.

James Grant, Fitzroy Houses (photo courtesy of Grant)

William Eicholtz Cornocopia Pixiu

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Windsor Place Studio

The sculptor William Eicholtz and mixed media minimalist artist Louise Rippert have been working in the same studio in Windsor for twenty-five years. They currently shares the studio with ceramic artist Janet Beckhouse, fine artist and jewellery Rose Agnew, painter Karen Salter, and ceramics artist Caroline Gibbes. They have the lease for another four years but the construction is closing in around them as inner city Melbourne grows in height.

More than their art artists love their studios. Their art will hopefully be sold and go but the studio remains a constant muse. Most artist studios that I visit are in former factories or shops, partitioned into smaller individual studios. Aside from home studios I have rarely seen an artist studio who wasn’t sharing with other artists.

Alex Taylor Perils of the Studio (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007) is history of Melbourne art told from the perspective of the artist studio,Taylor shows that artist’s studios at the turn of the 20th Century demonstrated a range of ideas about what it is to be an artist: as an aesthete, as feminine, as a collector, as a scholar and as a bohemian.

Artists studios are considerably smaller and messier than a century ago, as described by Taylor. They are more workshops than lounge rooms. One reason for this is because artists are no longer working from models and are no longer selling art out of their studios.

There are less partitions than usual at the Windsor Place studio. Most of the artists can look up and see each other at work from across the studio. There is some cross pollination of ideas between the artists. Beckhouse has had a subtle influence on William Eicholtz and Caroline Gibbes who are both working in ceramics. They are unusually convivial studio in other ways; they go out together to exhibitions and events. The last time I ran into them at “Spring 1883” when they invited me to visit the studio. On the day I visited both Janet and Louise were wearing jewellery by Rose Agnew.

The day prior to my visit about thirty members of the NGV Women’s Association had visited the Windsor Place studio. This meant that the studio was unusually tidy and there was still left-over, but still delicious, cakes made by Rose. I know my place in the pecking order of the art world is somewhere below that of the ladies who lunch (I find it odd to imagine that such an organisation, as the NGV Women’s Association, still exists).

After morning tea the artist get back to work and I went around the studio seeing their space. I hadn’t met Karen Salter and Caroline Gibbes before so I took the opportunity of chatting with them and finding out more about their art. Salter paints the purity of forms of modernist architecture in 60s postcard colours.

Karen Salter was considering if a miniature version of one of her paintings would work in a modernist dolls house.

Louise Rippert preparing the support for her new work.

Rose Agnew was using this diorama as a model for a setting for her paintings of a hookah smoking caterpillar.

I will let the artists in Windsor get back to work. What other work place has so many visitors?

Public Sculptures – a tourists guide

Public Sculptures in Melbourne by Gera Tonge and Stanley Hammond M.B.E. is a 24 page pamphlet printed on green A4 paper, folded to A5 size, and bound with two staples. Published around 1985 it is a fascinating time slice through the history of Melbourne’s public sculpture. Thanks to William Eicholtz for this generous little gift.

Basically the pamphlet contains two pages on “Methods and materials used in producing public sculpture”, a list of 100 sculptures, a map of their locations and biographies of  some of the sculptors. It is illustrated with black and white photographs of some of the sculptures.

As a subtitle the pamphlet declares that it was intended as “a tourists guide”. The map is divided into three locations that are suggested “as a walking guide” “which can each be explored easily on foot.”

1. Spring Street, East Melbourne and Fitzroy Area
2. The City, University and Exhibition Buildings Area
3. Kings Domain, Shrine and St. Kilda Road Area

Several sculptures are no longer in their original locations, others have moved and the total number of sculptures in these areas has doubled in the thirty years since the pamphlet’s publication.

It appears to be self published. Although there is no date it is after the move the Vault to the banks of the Yarra 1983. The controversy over Vault piqued Melbourne’s interest in public sculpture and may have been an additional motivation for publication.

Stanley Hammond knew the history of sculptures in Melbourne because he had lived it most of it. Born in Trentham Stan had started off as a stone mason working on the Shrine Remembrance before becoming one of Orlando Dutton and then Paul Montford’s assistants. Hammond made many war memorials during his career, including the lions at the Boer War Memorial on St. Kilda Road. He also made the figure of John Batman near the corner of Collins and Market Streets.

Paul Montford’s Clay Is Still In Use

In the traditional way of making a bronze or stone sculpture a clay model on a wooden or metal armature is first made. A plaster cast is made of the clay model and the clay is pulled off the armature and reused for the next sculpture. The plaster cast is then used to make either a wax model for bronze casting or a plaster model for stone masons to copy. So the clay that Paul Montford used modelled his sculptures, including to create the models for his sculptures at Melbourne’s the Shrine of Remembrance, is still being used by sculptors in Melbourne almost a century later.

Paul Montford, John Wesley, 1935

When Montford arrived in Melbourne in 1923 he reported in his first letter (May 12, 1923) to his brother, Louis Montford in London on the availability of materials for sculpture: “no stone that can be carved,” “no bronze founders here worth the name” but “good clay and plaster”. This would suggest that Montford acquired his modelling clay locally after he arrived. (Catherine Moriarty Making Melbourne’s Monuments – the Sculpture of Paul Montford, Australian Scholarly, 2013, p.82)

In other letters Paul tells his brother about the difficulties in keeping clay wet in Melbourne’s summer heat. In one letter (Jan, 1926) he reports hosing the cloth covered model for the Desert Mounted Corps Memorial because using “a syringe was too slow”. (Moriarty, p.118)

Due to a bizarre treatment for tonsillitis Paul Montford died of radium poisoning in 1938. At the time radium was still considered as a potential wonder drug. And his modelling clay was passed on to his assistant Stanley Hammond, who would have used to the clay to model his many sculptures from the lions at the Boer War Memorial on St. Kilda Road to his statue of John Batman on Collins Street.

Stanley Hammond, John Batman Memorial, 1978

I lost track of Montford’s clay after Stanley Hammond death in 2000, at the age of 87. I heard a rumour that Louis Laumen had the clay but that turned out not to be true. I was disappointed not be able to trace this modelling clay from the Montford to the present as it would have given an unusual narrative thread to the first chapter of my book, Sculptures of Melbourne, but it was not essential to the history.

Then on the first day of my promotional walking tours for my book I was given the answer. Some of the Montford’s clay is now in the possession of William Eicholtz and is still being used to model sculptures, including Courage. Thanks Will.

William Eicholtz, Courage, 2014

Writing about Justice

Getting back to my visit to William Eicholtz’s studio a couple of weeks ago. The reason for the visit was to talk with William about his relief sculpture of Justice on the County Court Building in Melbourne. I had neglected to mention it in my rough survey of public art in my blog post on Melbourne’s west end.

I realised that I had neglected to write about the history of these sculptural features of architecture in my upcoming book, Melbourne’s Sculptures. I realised that classical crests had continued into modernism, for example Norma Redpath’s Victoria Coat of Arms, 1968, on the outer wall of the NGV on St. Kilda Road or her Facade Relief, 1970-72, for the Victorian College of Pharmacy, and then into contemporary art with Eicholtz’s Lady of Justice, 2002. Did they deserve a separate thematic chapter? Are there that many of these crests or allegorical goddesses? It is the kind of panicked thoughts that an author has after completing a book.

I ended up selling that story to Justinian, I thought that the best audience for the story would be lawyers. I seem to be writing a lot about matters of law lately.

There has been news about the model for Eicholtz’s figure of Justice, Hannah Russell, the then president of the Life Models Society. Two days before I visited William the Bayside Leader had story about Russell having her nude photographs ban from a local art exhibition.  Such are the puritanical times that we have to live through.

Studio Visit

The sculptor, William Eicholtz’s studio is at the far end of a graffiti covered back streets of Windsor. He and other artists have shared this former factory space for about twenty years and the idea that the area will someday be redevelop keeps Will awake at night.

As is customary in Melbourne when visiting shared studio, Will took me around to meet each of the artists. Some I had seen some of their work before but had yet to put an artist to the art, or type out their name multiple times in a blog; that does help to imprint it on my mind.

The main studio space is set out like an open plan office where five of the artists worked. There was another room with ceramics kilns, Will’s moulds and two of his sheep that he had carved in marble in China and that had recently sold. As well as, a small store room for smelly chemicals and paints. Only Jennifer Pinder had a separate room; Jennifer was half way through a complex abstract painting of weaving lines that would give an ancient monk a psychedelic trip.

There is Janet Beckhouse who the Melbourne Now Exhibition Guide described as “one of Melbourne’s foremost contemporary ceramists”. Janet, like Will, has a rococo style to her ceramics but her version is much darker; beautiful, delicate and horrifying. There was a moment of terror as we look at her work as Janet’s black cat, Noodle jumped through the handle of one of her vases. It was such a tempting cat shaped opening and, of course, Noodle didn’t touch the vase.

Louise Rippert, a mixed-media artists who was working on a post-minimalism great grids of perforated, painted cardboard squares and transparent plastic. What Louise wants to emphasis is the way that her work changes as the viewer moves.

Rose Agnew was working on small paintings based on Alice in Wonderland for the Linden Post Card Show. She was not the only one in the studio planning to enter the show; Will was showed me some small base-relief, faux or imitation grate covers that he would be entering. Will’s small workspace was crowded with earlier sculptures. A small glass cabinet hanging on the wall with small bronze sculptures, Will’s stock room for studio sales.

There was another space, a painter, also new to the studio, who wasn’t there when I visited.

After touring the studio I sat down to tea and marble cake with all the artists to talk about all kinds of things, from the balance between doing larger scale work and the limited studio space to the trial of Paul Yore. Was I just working on background information, developing contacts for future articles and blog posts? One reason why I haven’t written about artist’s studios is that the chaotic, communal studio environment is worse than an un-curated group show as far as viewing the art. I wasn’t sure, I was enjoying the conversation so much that I forget to take my camera out and shoot some ‘studio porn’ as Hyperallergic calls it. Finally, the main reason that I’d come to the studio, the commission for the figure of Justice for the County Court but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Courage

In Whitlam Place, a small park in Fitzroy on the corner of Moor and Napier Streets, just across the road from Fitzroy Town Hall there is a new sculpture Courage by William Eicholtz. It was just installed last week.

Standing on a lighted disco floor, lit by LED lights after dark, the young man is removing the Cowardly Lion costume and looking back at a theatrical medal for ‘courage’. What does the medal mean to him?

The sculpture captures the neo-baroque moment of transformation, being aware that the whole world is changing their costumes. There is so much movement in this sculpture, the costume is falling, the man’s torso is twisting and the lion’s tail curls. It makes other statues look static. The sculpture also has the baroque qualities of a sense of the dramatic that adds to it’s polemical content.

Eicholtz is already a notable sculptor winning the 2005 Helen Lempriere Outdoor Sculpture Award,  the biggest art prize for sculpture in Australia; it is like winning the Archibald for a portrait painter. He has long yearned to have a permanent public sculpture in Melbourne; he told the public in an excellent floor talk at the Counihan Gallery on February 2, 2008 as part of the exhibition, Chaos & Revelry. Eichotz’s vision for the urban/suburban environment that most excited his audience; a playful vision of a world where art exists throughout the built environment, a world where humans live in more than just well designed environments.

“This sculpture will commemorate and recognise the LGBTI and queer communities’ courage to be themselves.” Eicholtz told Matt Akersten reporting for Same Same.  The bronze plaque on the plinth records that it is “also dedicated to the legacy of Ralph McLean (1957-2010) was Australia’s first openly gay Lord Mayor (City of Fitzroy, 1984)”. Public recognition in the form of a public sculpture is important to many the communities who were marginalised and ignored in Melbourne while the conservative establishment was erecting statues for themselves. A public sculpture serves as a permanent public reminder of their presence in the collective consciousness of the city.

(Incidentally Frank Baum was the first children’s writer to have a transexual main character Tip/Ozma of Oz in 1904.)

Not that the sculpture is just for Melbourne’s LGBTI community. The figurative sculpture humanises the area bringing the suggestion of movement and life to the park and making a corner into a hub. As I am photographing it a mother with a little girl in a stroller pass: “The Cowardly Lion,” the mother says, “A man taking off the Cowardly Lion costume.”