View from the Saddle, March 2022
Paul Johnstone Gallery, Darwin Northern Territory
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The Alexandria Quartet Paintings 2006, 2016, 2017
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After reading Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet many times over four decades Geoff Todd chose to make paintings relating to these novels.
10 works for each book. The artist's comments - "For forty years I have been reading and re-reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartetin such a committed way that I felt unless I responded to the power of his prose by doing something myself, I might never put the novels down. I have completed a group of paintings and drawings as a response to the Alexandria Quartet. I hasten to add that this collection is not a case of illustrating his novels nor is it a case of extending his story through illustration.What I hope is that this group of paintings and drawings will reveal a few points about evocation and inspiration. I wish mainly to focus on the wonderful truth that one person’s art can provide inspiration for another person without plagiarism, “appropriatism” or imitation clouding the process and one need not be embarrassed about being inspired by another. It is a case of Durrell's writing evoking images for me which I have chosen to paint or draw. A concept based on intense inspiration created for one artist by an artist from a completely different discipline. With my work many people no doubt will say “This isn’t what I saw when I read the books!” I say in response, “Thank Durrell that you saw anything at all.” Surely this is what good creative writing is about and an added bonus that we are all free to react to art in our personal way." |
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The Rime of the Ancient Mariner series
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Arnhem Land & the Top End of Australia
Figure Studies with Fabric
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Death Sentence Notes 2008
These works were completed during three visits to Kerobokan Jail in Bali, 2008. The artist worked successfully with lawyers and Scott Rush to save him from Death Row.
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Floral Tributes 2007
A series of seven painting in oils and bitumen on carved wooden lining boards.
Each of the panels is painted with the national flower of a country which has at some time been war torn by the modern world. All of the panels also carry two bullet holes which are very subtle in some of the panels and need to be discovered by the viewer. Two different military calibre rifles have been used to actually shoot each piece. A .303 British calibre in the imperial system and a 6.5 x 55mm in the metric system. Both calibres have been used extensively in war by various armies. The 6.5 x 55mm was originally developed by a Norwegian / Swedish collaboration while the .303 British was a product of the British Empire. By using two different calibres, I intended to represent casualties on more than one side of conflict. |
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Collateral Damage Series 2004 -2005
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Christiane Keys-Statham
Collateral Damage series
Collateral damage is a United States military term for “inadvertent casualties and destruction in civilian areas in the course of military operations”. The fact that this term is now so commonly used and understood is a sad indictment of our society, and the fact that these sorts of casualties have become so prevalent. It also indicates that the use of such military terminology in film and television, and the increased occurrences of incidences involving collateral damage, have led to our desensitisation concerning the actual meaning of the phrase.
Wars and conflict continue to be waged all over the world, and a particular type of conflict has become the norm. Beginning with the Vietnam War, conflicts have become indefinite, continuing for years or even decades, and extending beyond their borders, their timeframes, and their initial strategies. Afghanistan plays host to the most recent example.
Artist Geoff Todd has always manifested a visceral response to social injustice in his work, particularly in his Collateral Damage series, completed in 2004-2005. These paintings show women and children, often ‘inadvertent casualties’ in any war, but also record the names of photojournalists, some of whom became ‘collateral damage’ themselves. In the case of the painting “Cambodia - Tea Kim Heang”, the name Tea Kim Heang refers to a freelance photographer killed in Cambodia in 1975, and the painting is based on one of the photographer’s most famous images. Todd’s “Gernika” paintings refer to the Basque town whose bombing inspired Picasso’s famous paintings (Todd’s spelling of the town’s name is the Basque spelling, whereas Picasso’s was the Spanish). Todd’s paintings share Picasso’s spirit of outrage, and show that the story of our times is being written in the blood of the innocent, as it was in Picasso’s time.
These paintings are both a form of homage, and a reconfiguration; the photographic images of women and children affected by war have been recreated in paint, and joined to the names of the journalists who sometimes gave their lives documenting these victims. In the translation of image from photograph to painting, an important shift has also occurred: the figures of women and children have become almost iconic, classical in their sweeping lines and gestural expression. They stand isolated and rendered in flat perspective, the composition reduced around them to blank space, only punctuated by the names of journalists, dates or sites of war.
Collateral Damage series
Collateral damage is a United States military term for “inadvertent casualties and destruction in civilian areas in the course of military operations”. The fact that this term is now so commonly used and understood is a sad indictment of our society, and the fact that these sorts of casualties have become so prevalent. It also indicates that the use of such military terminology in film and television, and the increased occurrences of incidences involving collateral damage, have led to our desensitisation concerning the actual meaning of the phrase.
Wars and conflict continue to be waged all over the world, and a particular type of conflict has become the norm. Beginning with the Vietnam War, conflicts have become indefinite, continuing for years or even decades, and extending beyond their borders, their timeframes, and their initial strategies. Afghanistan plays host to the most recent example.
Artist Geoff Todd has always manifested a visceral response to social injustice in his work, particularly in his Collateral Damage series, completed in 2004-2005. These paintings show women and children, often ‘inadvertent casualties’ in any war, but also record the names of photojournalists, some of whom became ‘collateral damage’ themselves. In the case of the painting “Cambodia - Tea Kim Heang”, the name Tea Kim Heang refers to a freelance photographer killed in Cambodia in 1975, and the painting is based on one of the photographer’s most famous images. Todd’s “Gernika” paintings refer to the Basque town whose bombing inspired Picasso’s famous paintings (Todd’s spelling of the town’s name is the Basque spelling, whereas Picasso’s was the Spanish). Todd’s paintings share Picasso’s spirit of outrage, and show that the story of our times is being written in the blood of the innocent, as it was in Picasso’s time.
These paintings are both a form of homage, and a reconfiguration; the photographic images of women and children affected by war have been recreated in paint, and joined to the names of the journalists who sometimes gave their lives documenting these victims. In the translation of image from photograph to painting, an important shift has also occurred: the figures of women and children have become almost iconic, classical in their sweeping lines and gestural expression. They stand isolated and rendered in flat perspective, the composition reduced around them to blank space, only punctuated by the names of journalists, dates or sites of war.
Rorschach Paintings 2002
A selection of a large series of "Rorschach" works the artist completed in 2002. Some of these works stood alone as Rorschach paintings while others fell into his Weeping Waitress series. Unlike the Rorschach blots where accidental figurative imagery may have been found, Todd began with a figurative image and allowed the mirror image to control the composition.
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