Jon Cattapan speaks with Anne Kirker about his working processes and personal symbology, about his exhibition, The Open Line: Works on Paper, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane, and his participation in the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery.
Anne Kirker: In Backlash: The Australian Drawing Revival 1976-1986, a project that Ted Gott put together for the National Gallery of Victoria in 1986, you were described as 'an artist who has always worked predominantly on paper ... and (with) a determined bent towards figuration’. To what extent does this hold true today?
Jon Cattapan: Works on paper have always been critical to everything I do in my work. During the early eighties they became the major statements-monumental in scale and tended to be configurations of small panels that somehow were cemented together, which is an idea that I am working with still. In the meantime, oil painting on canvas has become a central preoccupation but the little images on paper, like the ones that are showing here at Peter Bellas's, are absolutely crucial to my output as an artist. In time it may emerge that these fragments on paper are the central component. I wouldn't be disturbed if this were to be the case.
Has drawing always been a diaristic notation for you?
Yes, I think the essential difference between my paintings and my drawings is that the drawings, even when they are large-scale, have quite an intimate quality to them. Part of this is because of the way I define drawing, that is as the line evolving in tandem with the thought, whereas with painting, the line, or shall we say the form, is usually pre-conceived... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline