The past is presented

Please see my gallery.

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It always amazes me that I now have an exhibition history of forty years which is something that the little boy sitting under the pergola at the back of the house in Adelaide, in those now hazy (in memory) days of the 1940’s and 50’, had no inkling of. He had a better idea in grade seven when he knew he was going to be a world famous artist. This was helped by his grandpa giving him a book on how to draw the human figure when he was about ten. This book fascinated him with the reduction of the human figure to the symbols of circle rectangle oval and triangle.

I find it interesting that I get obsessed these days by an image and keep using it in drawings and paintings. It as if there is something mysterious about it that needs to be found out about and so I tease it into different configurations and combinations with other images to see what it will reveal to me.

High school education included art as a subject under the well known Adelaide water colourist Ron Bell. To this day I can remember Mr. Bell bringing in his beautiful traditional landscape water colours into the class room for us to see. Art at high school was really training us to become draftsmen or graphic artist with just one class every now and again with the dreaded suggestion that we paint “A Bushfire” or some such awful idea that froze me into incompetence.

At the moment I am coming out of a two year period where I found it difficult to paint. I could draw and in that period I did a lot of drawing which no doubt will turn themselves into components of future paintings.

I need to now acknowledge Helen MacIntosh my design teacher at art school for she taught me how to design more through example than actually sitting me down and making me do things. She knew I had to work things out by myself so she would gentle guide me and leave me be. She had the most beautifully designed and hand made teaching aids I have ever seen and it was this incredible attention to detail that has remained with me as an ideal. The other teacher from art school I want to acknowledge is Anton Holtzner who took me for painting two. He had a very refined earthy palette and I was using household enamels straight from the tin so we were at the opposite end of the colour palette but he could see what I was on about and had the grace to get me to look at De Stael’s work which mystified me at the time but now I realize why he got me to study his works.

A few weeks ago my good friend Steve after viewing my recent drawings said to me some of those images would look great as paintings why don’t you just float them on one of your free flowing colored backgrounds and don’t put the fussy florals around them like you normally do. A few days later I was searching the web and wondered what contemporary Pakistani artists were doing so I brought the site up and lo and behold there was a female artist ( Ambreen Butt ) there who was doing work based on Mogul miniature painting which struck a chord with me and with what Steve had said so a new group of paintings have been started.

There have been no more teachers after Anton in my life which doesn’t mean that I haven’t been influenced by other artists and the ones that have are legion but there are several that need mentioning. The first and fore most artist in my creative life is and has been Jackson Pollock. To that rather uptight Baptist boy (me) in the early 60’s Pollock was a figure whose life and art fascinated me by the contrast between his life as an artist living in New York with all the possibilities that that allowed him and the confined and limited choices that I had or perceived that I had in Adelaide. Pollock’s art spoke to me in ways that I couldn’t articulate then, looking back I can see that it was his artistic and personal freedom that he insisted on that fascinated me and I can remember pondering HOW could someone get away with being like him. It is still a question that challenges.

Themes and concerns and images keep recurring in my work, it seems as if I travel through my creative life in a vast circle where every now and again I come back to a place an idea a concept that had been dealt with before visually years before. I also quite deliberately also use a limited number of repeat pattern floral decorative designs for my backgrounds for like life repetition is a major feature of our daily lives no matter how free we think we are. It is in the minor changes to the repeats in the background that I find fascinating. I also use a limited number of colours for I have discovered that out of limitations grow great variety for all my painting from 1972 until the present have been created with two yellows a red a blue and indigo.

I also must say that more general but none the less important influences have been oriental art, aboriginal art both traditional and the more recent contemporary art, the so called primitive art of Africa and more importantly the pre colonial art of Papua New Guinea. There has always been an affinity for me with the art of Japan and China and how they handle the water colour medium

Life after art school (1960) was spent in the cartographic section in the mines department where for six years I was trained for and became a cartographer. I was a cartographer until 1979 and this profession took me first of all to Papua New Guinea in 1972 where I was the first person to map all of Papua New Guinea at 1:200,000 scale for the then government and secondly to the North West of Western Australia as a geological draftsman for a mineral exploration company. I cannot stress too much the importance that being a cartographer has had on my art. First of all it has trained my hand eye co ordination to a superb degree so that these days I have a very good quick intuitive drawing hand. It also gave me an appreciation of doing detailed work and a joy in the accurate drawing up and designing of my paintings. There was an incredible discipline in cartography associated with the accuracy of the image being drawn up that has been carried across to my paintings.

The other artist that has had a great influence on me was the notorious homosexual artist Francis Bacon and there was an actual painting by him in the Art Gallery of South Australia. He was and is the master of cruelty and lush looking paint and it was the pin in the work in the galley that fascinated me with its placement and its suggestions.

From 1979 until the present I have held many different jobs for varying amounts of time and at the moment I am working four days a week and enjoying painting and drawing on the other three days of the week. In that period I have been to America several times for residencies, the first one was at the Visual Studies Workshop Press in Rochester New York where I published my artist book ‘Mother Sun’ with subsequent visits to the Mercer Gallery in the same city for month long residencies. I have also traveled to Japan Russia Germany and England several times.

There has been a progression in my painting over the years. The early period I did small intuitive figurative work which over a period of time transformed themselves into large highly coloured abstracts which lasted until 1972 when I discovered my affinity to water colours. The abstracts were continued in water colours until 1985 when I rediscovered the human figure again and it has been the main image in all my painting since then. The use of the human figure has enabled me to look at issues such as man’s relationship to his landscape both internal and external and his relationships with other people. Over the years there has been a slow change from images of men from fashion magazines to the exclusive use of images of people I know personally or from people I get to know from various computer chat rooms I belong to. The depiction of the human figure in relation to other figures culminated in a series of eight paintings that I completed for my 2002 show in America. Those eight paintings looked at the Oedipus complex in all its aspects and when I finished them I knew I had come to a full stop. There was a feeling that I had said everything that I needed to say in those paintings and it is only now two years later that I am being able to see a new direction a new possibility a new format for my paintings to grow from.

Group Shows

1986

ALICE SPRINGS AWARD, N.T.
7TH MINI PRINT INTERNACIONAL, Barcelona, Spain
2ND MINI ART EXHIBITION Del Bello Gallery, Toronto, Canada

1988

8TH MINI PRINT EXHIBITION Barcelona, Spain
3RD MINI ART EXHIBITION Del Bello Gallery, Toronto, Canada
YOKAICHI CULTURE ART CENTRE, Yokaichi, Shiga, Japan

1990

RUN LIBRO MAS PAR ARCHIVERO, Mexico
ARTIST BOOKS IN SCHOOLS, Germany

1992

ROYAL SOUTH AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY OF ARTS, Adelaide, S.A.

1993

ROYAL SOUTH AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY OF ARTS, Adelaide, S.A.
MERCER GALLERY, Rochester, New York. Montage 93 Festival Show

1994

ROYAL SOUTH AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY OF ARTS, Adelaide, S.A.

Two Person Shows

1986

BEAVER GALLERIES Canberra, A.C.T, Australia

1987

1987 DONCASTER GALLERY, Victoria, Australia

Curated Shows

1989

MELBOURNE ARTISTS Geraldine Phelan, Shepparton Regional Art Gallery Victoria, Australia
FLOWERS AND STILL LIFE PAINTINGS FROM THE WROBEL COLLECTION,
Elinor Wrobel. Campbelltown Regional Art Gallery, N.S.W.,Australia

1990

CROSS CURRENTS. BOOKWORKS FROM THE EDGE OF THE PACIFIC

Judith Hoffberg. College of creative Studies Gallery,
University of California, U.S.A. Selby Gallery
Ringling School of Art and Design, Sarasota, Florida

1991

ARTISTS MAKE BOOKS.

Christine Johnson.
Linden Art Gallery, St. Kilda, Vic.
Chameleon Gallery, Hobart, Tas.
La Trobe Valley Art Centre, Morwell, Vic
Contemporary Art Space, Canberra, A.C.T

THE BOOK AND PRINT SHOW.
Liz Jeneid. The Long Gallery,
University of Wollongong, School of Creative Arts, and Regional Galleries in N. S. W. and Queensland.

1992

A BRUSH WITH THE STAGE.

An Adelaide Festival of Arts exhibition presented by The Royal South Australian Society of Arts
and The Performing Arts Collection of South Australia.

GRADUATE EXHIBITION, 1991-2.
ARTISTS BOOKS.
Nancy Chalker- Tennant.
Mercer Gallery, Rochester, New York, U.S.A.

1994

FIRST ARTIST BOOK FAIR.

Noleen Graham, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia .

One Person Shows

1988

Artists Space, Melbourne, Vic.

1989

Artists Space, Melbourne, Vic.

1991

A.R T. (Art Round Town), Melb. Vic.

1992

A.R T. (Art Round Town), Melb. Vic.

1993

Forum Gallery, Guttersloh, Germany

1994

Artists Books, Art Post, Ballarat, Vic.

1995

Mercer Gallery, Rochester, New York, U.S.A.

1996

Castlemaine Art Gallery, Vic.

2002

Mercer Gallery, Rochester, New York, U.S.A.

Commissions Awarded to Graham Willoughby

1987

Limited edition (100) Etching. Nth Ward LILYDALE SHIRE

1988

Limited edition (100) Etching. PRINT COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA for their 10Oxl00 PORTFOLIO.

1991

Limited edition (250) Artist's Book MOTHER SUN Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, New York, U.S.A.

2002

Mural Monroe Community College, Rochester, New York, U.S.A.

Public Collections Containing Works of Graham Willoughby

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL GALLERY. Canberra, A.C.T.
FLINDERS UNIVERSITY. Adelaide, S.A.
FOOTSCRAY COUNCIL. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
PHILLIP INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY. Coburg, Victoria, Australia
THE SHIRE OF LILYDALE. Lilydale, Victoria, Australia
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, ARTIST BOOK COLLECTION, New York, U.S.A.
VISUAL STUDIES WORKSHOP ARCHIVAL COLLECTION, Rochester, New York, U.S.A.
THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, ARTIST BOOK COLLECTION,Chicago, Ilinois, U.S.A.
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO RARE BOOK COLLECTION, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.
NEXUS PRESS ARCHIVALCOLLECTION, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
SACKNER ARCHIVE FOR CONCRETE & VISUAL POETRY, Florida, U.S.A.
ELVEHJEM MUSEUM OF ART, University of Wisconsin, Madison, U.S.A.
ART METROPOLE ARCHIVES, Toronto, Canada.
EL ARCHIVERO COLLECTION, Mexico.
JAMES HARDY COLLECTION, Queensland State Library.
STATE LIBRARY OF N.S.W.
STATE LIBRARY OF VICTORIA.
MORTLOCK LIBRARY, Adelaide, South Australia.
FLINDERS UNIVERSITY OF S.A. LIBRARY. South Australia
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL LIBRARY Canberra, A.C.T.
LATROBE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY RARE BOOK COLLECTION, Victoria, Australia
MONASH UNIVERSITY LIBRARY RARE BOOK COLLECTION, Victoria, Australia
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY RARE BOOK COLLECTION, Victoria, Australia

Major Private Collections

WROBEL COLLECTION, Sydney, N.S.W. LEFREBVRE, Sydney,N.S.W.

Representative

Graham Willoughby is represented by TONY ZWICKER New York, V.S.A.