Insights into the creative practice

John Honeywill at Open Studio

John Honeywill at Open Studio / View full image

Still life artist and art educator, John Honeywill begins our exploration of the studio as an essential site for housing the ideas, images and objects of his creative process. A place where he can work through, leave and return to his thoughts.

At its core, Open Studio at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) is a home for the creative process. Whether you are looking at artworks selected by each guest artist, sitting down to engage in a drawing tutorial at our drawing stations, watching artist interviews, reading artist books or exploring materials and works in progress on loan from the artist’s studio, you are connecting with the skills and ideas that inform a living creative process.

This is the first in a series of blogs that explores the artists space. Pick up clues and tips about how the artist experiments, manipulates and refines materials and processes. Open Studio is open daily and includes a range of onsite programs for creative activities and broader learning.

Open Studio

Open Studio / View full image

Take part in two art station drawing activities specific to the artist’s practice.

Take part in two art station drawing activities specific to the artist’s practice. / View full image

Take part in two art station drawing activities specific to the artist’s practice.

Take part in two art station drawing activities specific to the artist’s practice. / View full image

Artworks on display as part of his Open Studio

Artworks on display as part of his Open Studio / View full image

Artworks on display as part of his Open Studio

Artworks on display as part of his Open Studio / View full image

Meet John Honeywill

John Honeywill began painting in 1974 and he currently concentrates on still life, a subject that has interested Honeywill since childhood.

Honeywill engages with the genre of still life as a tradition that holds genuine relevance to contemporary life. He invites visitors to create their own still life works through two drawing stations and through a range of workshops programmed in the Studio.

Watch | John Honeywill

The first Open Studio

As QAGOMA has been interwoven into John Honeywill life since he was a teenager, Open Studio is a great opportunity to talk to visitors about the process and act of making art , and give back to an institution that has given so much.

John Honeywill’s selection of artworks on display as part of his Open Studio project includes work from artists such as Vida Lahey who have taught students and mentored other artists, along with many who are currently working as educators such as Marian Drew.

Watch | John Honeywill

The importance of the studio

A studio is a space where you work, and at the end of the day you can leave your thoughts, ideas, and when you return the next morning, they are still there. It enables the continuity of your work.

In the centre of Open Studio at QAG sits a small Artist Space filled with objects, materials, and visual stimulus from the artist’s actual studio. John Honeywill has invested time and consideration into his selection and positioning of elements from his studio to help visitors understand his way of working.

Look closely at the images and drawings on the clip board. Consider how they relate to the unfinished work on the easel and how this relationship demonstrates how an artist is able to return to the studio to pick up where they left off.

Watch | John Honeywill

Reading List
For Open Studio, John Honeywill selected these books on the artists who inspired him. To read, research or learn more about these artists, visit the QAGOMA Research Library.

Laura Mattioli and others. Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings. David Zwirner, New York, 2017.
Paul Hills. Brice Marden. Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2018.
Donald Woodman. Agnes Martin and Me. Lyon Artbooks, New York, 2016.
Chris Bedson. Euan Uglow: Sargy Mann. John Rule, 2017.
Michael Hawker and others. Margaret Olley – A Generous Life. QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2019

John Honeywill at Open Studio

John Honeywill at Open Studio / View full image

QAGOMA Research Library

The QAGOMA Research Library is located on Level 3 of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). Open to the public Tuesday to Friday 10.00am to 5.00pm. visit us in person or explore the online catalogue. Access to special collections is available by appointment.

Featured image detail: John Honeywill painting at Open Studio

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    The humanness of objects

    Renowned Queensland still-life painter John Honeywill is the first artist in the Gallery’s new Open Studio initiative at the Queensland Art Gallery. We spoke with the artist about the meaning objects bring to our lives, how he creates drama through juxtaposition, and his resolve to paint beautiful things. John Honeywill Brisbane-born artist John Honeywill studied at Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College for two years in the late 1960s, before moving to Bundaberg to begin teaching at the age of 19. The Flying Arts School, founded by Mervyn Moriarty in 1971, which travelled across the state, gave Honeywill the opportunity to work with many artists — including Roy Churcher, whom he describes as ‘a fabulous teacher’ — over the decade that followed. ‘I look back at that time in Bundaberg as a kind of apprenticeship’, he says. Honeywill’s early career was a period of exploration in which he tried different media and genres each year: he worked with pastels, created still lifes, and painted landscapes and seascapes while living at nearby Bargara. ‘I continued to try different things into the 1990s’, he says, ‘but there was something about the idea of still life that kept popping up’. In the mid 1990s, Honeywill ‘came to a point where I felt that I had been trying to be an artist that my head wanted me to be. But I kept returning to still life and decided to commit to that, and to try to simply be a good painter.’ A confluence of events and circumstances around this time were important to Honeywill’s development as an artist: ‘The late and wonderful Peter Beiers, when he was still at Folio Books, gave me a catalogue of [works by] English artist Euan Uglow’, he says — a book that he would look at every night for two years. ‘Peter was always keeping in mind books for people, grabbing you when you came into the GOMA Store and saying, “Hey, I’ve got a book I think you will like!” I owe him a great debt for that simple book, and many other things’. Uglow, who is best known for his nude and still-life paintings made in London from the 1960s through to the late 90s, slowly developed his practice while painting the same subjects throughout his career. ‘That example of someone who ignored trends was inspirational — they are such beautifully resolved pieces, and that little catalogue gave me the resolve to simply paint what I wanted.’ Honeywill’s commitment to still life was reinforced by a lecture given by John Berger at the Tate Modern in 2000 that was later published in Art Monthly. Berger wrote: The drama in a still life is the drama found in a juxtaposition, a placing, an encounter, within a protected space . . . The painter is forced to study the neighbourliness of the things in front of him, how they adjust and live together, how they intersect, overlap and keep separate, and how they converse. ‘Berger clearly articulates what is often deemed to be a very simple subject’, Honeywill says, ‘but he explains it so beautifully, with reference to some of my favourite artists, such as Zurbaran and Morandi. But that interplay — it’s amazing, when you play with objects, how we read them in human terms. Whether with apples or crumpled bits of paper, you can explore a feeling and a narrative through those arrangements.’ Honeywill has painted many objects over the years, ranging from the quirky (a Random House Australia box that resembles a ‘random house’, for example) to the delectable — meringues, licorice allsorts and rocky road. Watch | John Honeywill Margaret Olley ‘Hawkesbury wildflowers and pears’ c.1973 A series of works made during a residency at the Tweed River Gallery in Murwillumbah includes vessels formerly owned by artist Margaret Olley, which Honeywill says were a great privilege to paint. He admits that he often gravitates towards objects that have served some practical purpose, such as jugs, vases, bowls, cups and bottles. He adds: The thing I love about older things is that they have served us and they then have meaning to us. Not a specific sentimental meaning, but they’ve been a part of our lives. That’s why most of the things I paint come from around the house. It would never interest me to paint something precious or expensive, because it’s immediately weighted with too much baggage, and they’re not things that you use every day. The humanness of those simple objects is what draws me to them. Over time, Honeywill says, he has become bolder with his colour palette — a statement that immediately rings true in the fiery red of an enamel jug, the pop of orange in an oriental poppy, the appetising rose in a piece of Turkish delight, and the dazzling yellow of a group of lemons. He often determines that a work is finished when he has made it ‘sing’ or ‘hum’, a quality difficult to define but impossible to miss when looking at the harmony and balance of his finished paintings. ‘Colour has always interested me’, he says, ‘but after a six-week trip that [my wife] Trish and I took to Italy — where we saw the rich, vibrant colour in those stunningly beautiful Renaissance works — I came back and decided: I’m just going to enjoy painting. We can be far too serious about it, whereas I now aim for a lightness of touch. I’ve always been interested in the idea of light in a painting, but I think that, in the last five years, I’m hopefully getting closer to capturing the light and subtle colour interplay that I’m after.’ After the Gallery invited Honeywill to be the first Open Studio artist, the final shape of the project evolved through discussions with the QAGOMA Learning team, headed by Terry Deen. ‘Terry said, “The Gallery is full of really beautiful completed works — this is about showing...
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    Madeleine Kelly: A natural Affinity

    Queensland artist Madeleine Kelly offers insights into the complex intellectual threads that informs her practice. For her latest works, Kelly combines items from her personal collection with her love of science and the natural world. Visit Open Studio at the Queensland Art Gallery, a home for the creative process. Whether you are looking at artworks selected by each guest artist, sitting down to engage in a drawing tutorial at our drawing stations, watching artist interviews, reading artist books or exploring materials and works in progress on loan from the artist’s studio, you are connecting with the skills and ideas that inform a living creative process. Madeleine Kelly was born in Germany to an Australian-born father, a plant biochemist, and a Peruvian-born mother, a Spanish–English interpreter. After the family moved to Australia in 1980, she grew up in Brisbane and studied fine art at the Queensland College of Art, completing her PhD in 2013. She now works from her studio in Wollongong and lectures in painting at the University of Sydney. Madeleine Kelly Surveying the scope of Kelly’s practice to date, a number of themes emerge. Her works tend towards abstraction and are couched in metaphors and layers of meaning, referencing canonical art and literature or exploring the ways science and language intersect. Her process is often driven by her materials: her two new works for Open Studio are inspired by objects collected over her lifetime as an artist — vintage science lab glassware in Elective Affinities 2020, and colourful sea sponges in Structural Affinities 2020. The title of the former is drawn from a novel of the same name, published in 1809 by the prolific German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In early nineteenth‑century chemistry, ‘elective affinities’ described compounds that react with each other only in certain circumstances. ‘Goethe was a poet, scientist and pantheist. He believed in life, matter and art all being interconnected. In art college, we learnt about the Goethe colour triangle, a system of classifying different colour palettes according to different subjective moods. But the fact that he was also a scientist, and that he classified clouds and other natural phenomena, always appealed to me. His Elective Affinities is a romance novel about attraction and repulsion, and the dynamics between different couples. I decided to call my work Elective Affinities because this idea of attraction and repulsion is intrinsic to working with materials.’ Kelly began collecting the scientific equipment that appears in Elective Affinities at the age of 20, when her father salvaged various glass vessels from a lab that closed at the Queensland University of Technology. ‘After that,’ she added, ‘I would keep my eye out for them wherever I went. I got some special ones a few years ago when I did a residency in Leipzig’. She is also an avid collector of sea sponges and is fascinated by their internal structure. ‘Sponges are the only animal in the world that, if broken down to the level of their cells, can reassemble themselves into an entirely different configuration. It’s something that unequal human societies could mimic’, Kelly says. Her earliest specimens are from Brooms Head in northern New South Wales. These days, she rescues any that wash up on Wollongong’s shoreline. ‘As an artist, I’ve always got ideas on the go . . . and collections of things or half-made works. I’m always thinking, “One day, I’ll get to do something with that”.’ Kelly has chosen several QAGOMA Collection works that reflect her lifelong love of science to appear in the gallery space adjacent to Open Studio at QAG. ‘My dad was interested in plants and photosynthesis, so I’m very drawn to anything to do with growth and life and the sun. I was so happy to come across The sun lamps 1966 by legendary Australian artist John Brack.’ Fiona Hall’s Sundew 2006 is also on display, alongside an untitled print by surrealist Joan Míro depicting several dreamlike quasi-figures, with a form resembling a sun. ‘The thing that inspires me so much in sponges,’ notes Kelly, ‘is their biomorphic form, and their potential for projecting subject-like qualities onto their indeterminate features’. John Brack Fiona Hall Joan Míro Her cultural heritage on her mother’s side has also influenced her choice of works, including Peruvian earthenware and a textile wall-hanging from her own collection. ‘My mother is from Peru and my grandmother is from [the city of] Ayacucho — she’s Inca and speaks Quechua, and I was brought up with lots of [Andean] textiles hanging around our living room.’ Kelly reflects both on the cultural knowledge embedded in the textiles and their influence on her development as an artist. ‘These textiles are like a codified form of language. They’ve got all these logical inversions and repetitions, and . . . semiotically, [they are] quite a rich terrain, because they are images embodying knowledge — like pictographs, I suppose, but more material in a way, with the warp and woof of the fabric. I love the way that thread is always this transmitter of meaning.’ The inclusion of two works by printmaker and textile artist Anni Albers in the display was prompted by her recent reading about the influence of Andean textile design on Western Modernism, particularly on artists from the Bauhaus movement. Madeleine Kelly’s own artistic practice is a rich and ever-evolving tapestry that weaves together many threads — her personal heritage, her vast knowledge of art history, a keen curiosity about material culture, and an abiding love of the natural world. Bronwyn Mitchell is Editor at the Queensland Museum and former Assistant Editor, QAGOMA. She spoke to Madeleine Kelly in June 2020. Featured image: Madeleine Kelly / Photograph: Anna Kucera