Freedom
Freedom
Oil on canvas
180cm x 425cm
AVAILABLE
This was the result of a remarkable art experience. I was invited to exhibit in 101 Collins Street Melbourne in March/April 1998. Allocated for the exhibition was a huge area on the ground floor opposite the grand entrance and stock and shares board where all the `suits’ passed each day. It was a vast area with a lofty ceiling two floors or more above. I agreed to exhibit and asked to paint in the area for the months from October through to May. Amazingly this was granted.
Monday to Friday, there I was, in smock and bare feet with numerous easels, one or two chairs, stacks of paints and all manner of materials.
This huge canvas was given to me. It was set up on a separate moveable wall in the centre of the space and I studied it for months. I don’t know that the painting is of water with a sunset. However, I was experimenting with the behaviour of colours as I had found them and I did want so much to be free – to discover a new neumenosity and float and fly with it. The golden line across the work is a gesture, a statement – perhaps a melody of that. Could it be a song without sound??
When I say `I want to paint the way music makes me feel’ perhaps I should recall that I have played the piano for decades and for at least one decade I worked solidly for 8 to 10 hours per day playing piano.
As my dear friend and mentor Professor Ronald Farren Price AM said at my first exhibition in 1993
`Anyone who can play the Fantasy of Schumann and the Four Ballades of Chopin must have an in-depth understanding of the complete artistic process’.
He went on `Di is exploring light, a light which I call the light of the gloaming’.
1993 Glen Eira City Gallery Di Bresciani Opening.
