The Long Run #1: Gareth Sansom on painting, chance and mortality

08/20/20 • 33 min

Creating, evolving and innovating over decades takes great stamina. Art Guide Australia’s latest podcast series features conversations with three established Australian artists who each reflect on their art and lives. What can they teach us about the life-stages of an artist?

Our first episode in The Long Run features a lively conversation with Gareth Sansom. Based in Melbourne, Sansom is regarded as one of Australia’s most well-known and esteemed avant-garde painters. He had his first exhibition in 1959, and since then has gone on to create admired and debated works that look into pop culture, sexual transgression, the unconscious, and the history of painting itself. In works that are simultaneously chaotic and balanced, Sansom layers and blends everything from abstraction to collage to T.S. Eliot to Swedish film.

Sansom talks about his talent in drawing, his great sense of ambition, the importance of chance in painting, his thoughts on death, and what changes he’s noticed over a 60-year practice and what remains the same.

Sansom’s latest exhibition A Case of the Old and the New is currently showing online with STATION gallery.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, music and engineering by Mino Peric.

Sansom’s latest exhibition A Case of the Old and the New is currently showing online with STATION gallery.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, music and engineering by Mino Peric.

Previous Episode

Faraway, so close #3: The future with Cyrus Tang and Lucy McRae

I would ask you the question, does it help to feel scared?” wonders Lucy McRae.

How do you think about the future at a time when the future feels so uncertain? In this third edition of Faraway, so close—a podcast dedicated to considering the anxieties and opportunities emerging in the arts in our new COVID-19 world—artists Cyrus Tang and Lucy McRae give their thoughts and feelings on where we are now, and where we’re headed next.

While Cyrus talks about loss and transformation, sitting with anxiety, and her experience of migrating from Hong Kong over 15 years ago, Lucy discusses what it’s like in Los Angeles, the importance of resilience and optimism, the fallibility of human bodies, and the future of art, biology and technology in our ‘new normal’.

As Lucy sums up, “There’s a potential revolution rendering in the background, and the opportunity that comes out of hitting rock bottom, despite the discomfort and the suffering, is a really great to create change and transformation.”

You can subscribe to the Art Guide podcast on iTunes or Spotify, and listen back to the first episode of Faraway, so close with artist Yvette Coppersmith and curator/director Alexie Glass-Kantor on solitude, and episode two with artists Tai Snaith and Ross Coulter on creating and parenting.

Next Episode

The Long Run #2: Wendy Stavrianos on landscape, nature and gender barriers

What does it mean to create and innovate over six decades? Art Guide Australia’s newest podcast series The Long Run considers this question with three artists who have had careers spanning sixty years, each reflecting on their art and lives. What can they teach us about the life-stages of an artist?

In the second episode we speak with landscape painter Wendy Stavrianos. Working from regional Victoria, Stavrianos is known for her densely layered landscape paintings and use of line in painting, creating works that evoke different environments in ways that are beautiful, psychological and mysterious. From her early work in the 1960s, to her well-known Rape of a Northern Land series painted in Darwin in the 1970s, and her recent large-scale paintings, Stavrianos is integral to understanding landscape painting in Australia.

In this episode Stavrianos talks about her childhood and youth, and how this set the scene for her to become an artist. She also discusses the gender barriers she encountered as a female painter, how she came to landscape painting, her incredible empathy with the environment and nature, and how mortality and mystery infiltrate her work.

The conversation is an interesting accompaniment to our first episode of The Long Run, where avant-garde painter Gareth Sansom talks about the mechanics and chance of making art, and his feelings on mortality and time.

This series is kindly sponsored by Leonard Joel Auctioneers and Valuers, based in Melbourne and Sydney.

Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, music and engineering by Mino Peric.

Wendy Stavrianos is represented by Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne