Tell me about yourself, where you live and your background/lifestyle.
[Transcript from a taped interview]
Ok, about myself, well I come from Canberra Australia, a bureaucratic capital
- it's where the government is in Australia, kind of divided between the wilderness
between Sydney and Melbourne. It has a fairly progressive education system;
I'm a teacher of visual arts including photography and other media at a college
in Canberra called Hawker College. That allows me to pursue my interests in
photography, digital art and art in my day to day job (earning a comfortable
living) and to pursue my ulterior motives in the evenings and on holidays with
my own artworks. I graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor's
degree in Fine Arts. I was doing very well in an academic sense and I had ambitions
to continue in education within the university field, however, things, life-matters
interfered. My mother was stricken by cancer and my family disintegrated totally
in my last year at university and I really needed to get a job. And I was very
very lucky to land on my feet after the degree by getting a job within the college
system in Canberra, which set me up independently with my wife and two cats.
So, that about sums me up!
PIC: title: Self Portrait
Who first influenced you artistically?
My artistic influence? Ah, that is a very interesting question. I have thought
long and hard about this one with limited success. However, knowing full well
that my art was derived from my culture, I really do need to think about that.
From what I can see, from my perspective, there is a profound influence derived
from the cinema. This sounds peculiar, when I only do two dimensional art, but
I try to invest a multiplicity of meaning within my images - different concepts
of time and space, feelings of depth, disruption - all different types of action.
And this imbues my work with a bit more energy. It's certainly not static (at
least I hope not). Certainly not dull. So I think the most profound influence
would be the cinematic tableau, and hence all sorts of people provide stimulus
in that respect. The actual frame of the cinema and the desire to capture some
of the vibrancy of the cinematic are my strongest influences. I consider myself
more of a modernist than a post modernist. I don't think that my art is so much
about the semiotics within my own culture, or the process of art - it's more
of a naïve focusing on a concept of modernity - on what makes human progress
interesting and what makes our relationship with the concept of nature fascinating.
Quite a lot of my works are to do with industry, especially heavy industry;
urbanization, the machinery of modern life. In opposition to that, I try to
create a reconstruction of "the natural". So from complexity, from the process
of civilization and art comes a revivification of the natural. In a formalist
sense I am probably still tied up especially to the Futurist movement and also
to the Cubist movement - people like Boccioni and Balla, and Picasso and Braque.
But coming back to the question, I'm sure I would have been most influenced
by film. Antonioni's Blow Up for instance was a huge influence on how I formulate
and express my art. Lots of other films too, the rich metaphorical layering
within Greenaway's films for instance, but I should stop there because the list
would be endless.
PIC: Title: Yellow Works
What first attracted you to the Internet?
I guess it was kind of a buzz word that people were talking about in the early
90s as a curiosity, but what really drew me to it was the use value, or the
imagined use value I could see for it. Insofar as my artistic purpose was concerned,
I was quite ambitious about my potential use of the Net. I saw myself uploading
and downloading vast amounts of art, to both institutions and individuals, and
hence becoming well-know from that, which has subsequently (and eventually)
happened. But at the start I had a dream that it would liberate me from my antipodean
culture here in Australia, and somehow free me from my restricted geographic
location. And it has done that. In other words the Internet was a way for me
to break free and become part of an international community. Through such wonderful
things as the World Arts Association and various other very important entities
on the Internet, this is definitely happening. It was really a naïve concept
to start with, but it came true.
PIC: http://pacific-pages.com/leviart/keyjngl.jpg Title: Keyboard Jungle
Does the Internet allow you to show your work as you would like: How
could it be improved to suit you?
No. What I am not satisfied with is the resolution of the images. As a PC user,
when I look at the screen, I am looking at 95 dots per inch of resolution. If
I'm looking at a painting or photography, I am look at quite a multiplication
of that factor. I guess that as long as you are going to reproduce things, you
are going to get a loss of quality and it would be ambitious to see a world
where this does not happen. The concept of resolution is what we pay for the
concept of reproducibility. But I would like to see the Internet have a greater
capacity to hold information, to have a more realistic, more natural look to
it. To do that, for this improvement to occur, we need to be able to push out
onto the Internet bigger files and suck in bigger files so that we will have
higher resolution. And of course, cable modem or satellite modem will facilitate
that, and in countries like Canada and the United States, that is happening.
I would be more comfortable if I could put out the whole of my image. What I
am doing now is just taking a fraction, and I'm talking about 6% or less of
the image and then compressing the crap out of that so that it can be downloadable.
Things will improve.
PIC: http://pacific-pages.com/leviart/b_ac.jpg Title: Bottles and Ash 1
What kind of artwork do you expect to be doing in the next 12 months
or so?
Well I'm pleased to be able to say that I don't know. I thank goodness that
it is impossible for me to answer. I'd hate to know what I was doing in advance.
I think that would make a mockery of the purpose of art. I think that we never
know ourselves fully. The reason we create art is so that we can explore the
mysterious components of ourselves. It's all about what is going on in our minds.
I certainly would never say "next month I will be starting to think about such
and such". I may choose to practice a particular form or style of art. In that
sense I do wish to do some more figural art - integrating the human form in
my art a little more, but mind you, that won't necessarily effect the message
of my work or the thoughts or statements of it. One thing I do want to do it
to open my gallery up to other artists and to encourage people to push their
own art onto the Net, which is a big step for some artists. So I'm offering
free gallery space, and I'll be acting as curator, providing all my services
for free. And as a reward for this I will have around ten artists on my page
that others can go and see as well as my own art. So we'll be more of a cooperative.
In immediate terms that is my main focus. But that shouldn't take too long,
after that I'll be back to my own work, doing what I love to do in my free time.
PIC: Title: Metal
Have you found other artists on the Internet like yourself?
I suppose the short answer to that is no. I'm always kind of surprised by that.
Dismayed by that to some extent. I've definitely been looking for artists who
share my aesthetic concerns
But so far it has been a fairly lonely existence. Some works share basic characteristics
with mine, but I do tend to find (and this is going to sound a little bit priggish)
that most of the work out there (with the exception of the work exhibited by
organizations such as the WAA), is fairly bad. I can't say it more politely
than that. I mean, the Internet does tend to be a bit of a dumping ground for
a lot of poorly thought-out and poorly constructed art. So much is in need of
soul and purpose. I'm sad that the Internet is a dumping ground for thoughtless
art, people's last whim, or pornography or what have you.
Pic: title:drought2.jpg
Is there anything about the way you produce your work that you
believe to be unique or unusual?
There is certainly nothing unusual or unique about the methods I use, they are
fairly common place, just like brushes and paints are not unique. Using negative
scanners, flattop scanners, I transform original photographs, original negatives
into files, then I manipulate those files and then it all goes back to paper
and then to the human eye. I guess what is unusual in my work is that I don't
strive to be perfect in my work. I actually communicate and benefit from distortion
and mistakes. I guess I have a polymorphously untidy, fractured, explosive and
turbulent nature to my work. All sorts of different sources colliding together
to create new meaning. It's kind of like busting the atom. Exploding the atom
to get new information. I'm certainly not doing that in a totally wild and unrestrained
way mind you. What I'm doing is very deliberate and calculated. But this fracturing,
this fission within the work is what I find most satisfying. People are always
telling me how good "Woman" in my gallery is, but it's kind of flawless and
ordinary, neatly arranged, very polished. It's my least favorite artwork - it's
one I did for a client, not myself. My most favorite ones are the ones people
usually go "yuk" at, such as "Feet". It is a picture of very damaged and band-aided
feet and you can draw from that an ambiance, almost an aroma. It is definitely
unpleasant, but I'm looking at composition, I'm looking at a message within
the work about human flesh conforming to the world, all sorts of different levels
just being pummeled within the frame. Technically speaking, as a Photoshop artist,
I layer in an unusual way, I don't layer to integrate or to create an illusion,
I actually introduce layers to divide. I'm busting things apart and I'm trying
to create a unity through all of this dynamism - and that is what artists have
been doing all of this century, to try to re-establish reality, to try to re-establish
nature.
PIC: title: woman.jpg
PIC: title: feet.jpg