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

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.