Large Scale Painting by Lindsey Horne

From the 2011 Art Week Magazine - will post a pdf and photographs soon. It was so exciting picking them all up!!!

Lindsey Horne's large-scale painting is impossible to miss. Hanging just inside the Richardson building, her portrait of a boy with braces was almost imposing.

"I've kind of always just done art," she explains as we sit down. But it was only when she went on exchange to California that she started doing a lot of it. "It was there that I had the studio space and the time to get into it."
The incredibly large scale of her canvases comes from when she started stapling them to the wall because she "felt really claustrophobic within the small canvas", and is largely influenced by her admiration of "that duality of going up really close and seeing a texture or a pattern, then having that really zoomed-out effect as well." Surprisingly, they're not very hard for her to paint, taking two eight-hour sessions to get through. "I don't really paint up close, I get sore arms from my style which is big and fast and swipey. I like working on the whole thing at once, so I use lots of linseed oil to keep the paint runny. I like how I don't let myself have rules when I paint."

Influenced by Jenny Saville, Horne's exhibited portrait has a similarly striking beauty, but not quite the same element of grotesque. Rather, the work is only slightly disturbing insofar as it looks sickly; the colours of the boys' face unnatural and feverish, his eyes longing and emptying.

A huge contributor to Art Week, Lindsey also made a fascinating presentation for the Pecha Kucha night on personification and how faces can represent something purely because of people's super-sensitivity to them. "Faces can be a really powerful tool no matter what realm you're going into. I was talking about that and how if you don't see a face people act differently. I just like faces."

They said that when Lucien Freud died earlier this year, it was the death of painting. But thanks to the likes of Lindsey Horne, I beg to differ. In the contemporary art world where portraiture has been almost exclusively replaced by photography, it's refreshing to see a painter so inspired by faces yet not entrapped by classical representation.

P.S. I found and changed an editorial faux-pas in this piece - particularly embarrassing as the writer AND editor!

A Short Film by Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.

A short animated film by Spike Jonze in my favourite Paris book store :)

Wonderful and slightly creepy in a Tim Burton sort of way

David Merritt - Poet And True Role Model

Surrounded by his books, David Merritt sits on the bench by Rob Roy's. Buying us coffee, I sit down for a yarn and proceed to establish this unfortunate-looking man as a true role model, an intellectual who is kind and reasonable.

Merritt's work is astounding - a poet and artist in the traditional sense of both these words. His poetry; I can't help but go back later with a tenner for a few of his pieces. His art; the recycled book covers he uses are sustainably genius, cut and staple-bound with poetry glued in as he works on piece after piece while seated at the bench.

We chat about everything. At 52, Merritt was even active on the web development scene as it boomed in the 1980's. He actually started off as a student newspaper editor and politician in the mid-to-late 70's, but moved to Christchurch where he worked with Flying Nun Records after he "got the sex, drugs and rock n' roll bug". Five or six years later he went on to work as a tour manager for bands including The Herbs. But 'The Herbs were a fucking hard band to look after", and around 1985, after thinking "fuck this, I'm sick of looking after other people's creativity," he moved to Dunedin to do something he'd wanted to do for a long time: "become a Bohemian poet." Here he even did a stint as a guitarist for a noise band; it turns out he'd spent so much time stage-left watching performances that he'd somehow learned to play guitar. But then children started to arrive and his marriage fell through because he "was the wrong sex and the wrong colour all of a sudden".

Nowadays, when not hanging out in Dunedin and other New Zealand centers, he lives a humble and self-stocked country life in the central North Island, "sixty k[m's] from anywhere". He's a 1970's Land Rover enthusiast, too - his collection of 9 (down from 18) is his own kind of super-annuation plan.

Art Week was a small shift for Merritt. Parking one of his vintage Land Rovers in front of the OUSA lawn every day, he made and sold his poetry from a table by the bonnet. I daresay I hope people took notice; his poetry chalking around campus was only a small, but inspirational, taste of what David Merritt has to offer us all.

"You need to do what you like to do," he says. "There's no such thing as a rich poet."

*thanks to Lucy Fulford for the first photo*