Today I saw the John Wolsely exhibition.
I adore his work for its colours, its map like qualities, his studied use of serendipity.
This one was interesting because I was able to see the marks of his process – I often see little circles and crosses in his work, and it turns out these are registration marks for when he adds an overlay (clearly he doesn’t add all the overlays he plans). Anna and I saw parts where he’d drawn into a drawing, then overlaid it with collage, where he’d put in layers of Japanese paper (tissue?) to distract and reincorporate. it was just beautiful.
There were small works for less than $1500 (prints) which was new.
He did a lot of printmaking from logs and trees, and some of the trees he used were there (there’s something uncomfortable for me that he’s doing this in the natural world, and then he destroys an aspect of the natural world to bring it to others…) the trails of termites gave beautiful organic marks
