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Hemmert online art
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Notes from a Broken Country ~The stories that are embedded in the landscape~ |
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"If the world was a tale who but the witness could give it life." Cormac McCarthy |
| This page represents a series that I am currently working on. I envisage these paintings to be presented as a whole in a future exhibition. Therefore at this stage these pieces are not for sale. I feel together they will hopefully tell a story. A painters jounrney through landscape. A landscape depicting the remnants of human habitation and a landscape touched by the hand of Nature as well as our own. Amongst these fragments and brokeness there yet remains for me a narrative of love, loss and yes, even beauty. |
 Epic Isolation 40 x 120cm |
The obvious change in this series are the built and eroding structures that I'm depicting. It's my way of expressing the love and loss in my own life and reimagining the same as I see it in the country that I've travelled through. |
 Remnants of a Life Forsaken no.1 40 x 120cm |
 Remnants of a Life Forsaken no.2 61 x 120cm |
 The Church of the Goddess of'67 (Lightning Ridge NSW) 80 x 80cm |
At first glance a Church and an odd title for a painting. This is actuelly the remnants of a film set for "The Goddess of '67" starring Australian actress Rose Byrne. So, when is a church not a church? |
 The Empty Chair 80 x 90cm |
In
one respect this is a homage to
one of my idols van Gogh.
I'd discovered an abandoned miner's cottage containing this old armchair out of Hill End. I worked on several oils a couple of years ago to the point of obsession but could never get it right. I finally realised it had a lot to do with my Mother who was in a nursing home with Parkinsons Dementia and was slowly getting ready to leave this world. When death came it came in the most horrific form. But despite that my Mother gave me a few final lessons: to be in the moment and the nature of impermanance. Although the permanance of the lack of her presence still weighs heavily. I finally revisted the subject a year after her death and I feel I've pulled it off. |
 Winter: The Rectory at Carcoar 70 x 115cm |
 Forgotten Stories: Abandoned Homestead 40 x 120cm |
Love
always goes hand in hand with the experiences of loss and grief.
For just as it is with people who we cherish in our lives thus it is with the places that we hold dear. We are living amidst the sixth age of extinction and I feel as an artist, as it is for the poet, we need to find the beauty in the midst of this broken world. |
 A Broken Country no.3 pastel on paper |
| These
pastel of "A Broken Country" are from a dry creek bed west of Broken Hill and the Mundi Mundi plain. A terrain peopled with trees many which had succumbed to thirst and I suspect ringbarking too. Some of these corpses had been mutilated and their once beautiful and gesticulating limbs sawn off from their torsos. |
 A Broken Country no.1 pastel on paper |
 A Broken Country no.2 pastel on paper |
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