Raymond Arnold: Elsewhere World - To See the Bones and the Tombstones at Once

Opening Friday 18 March, 5.30 - 7.00pm 
Artist Talk Saturday 26 March, 1.00pm 
Exhibition continues to Saturday 9 April

There is nothing of the void about this magnificence. Instead this space, inside this cosmic envelope is everywhere vectored, scored by ordinate and abscissa, marking out the numberless sites of an always potential Pragnanz. (German for Good Figure). For form is possible everywhere. 
Rosalind Krauss ‘The Optical Unconscious’ pp 186 

I’ve been living across the Mt Arrowsmith divide in Western Tasmania for many years and within that ‘cosmic envelope’. In my eighth decade the void looms but for now ‘form is possible everywhere’.

My Elsewhere World etchings have also been in development for some time and they have ‘shape-shifted’ from an initial small plein air fragment of a rocky landscape on the slopes of Mount Lyell to a large panoramic image involving a swathe of sooty blacks and glacial whites. From a depiction of random/‘erratic’ forms to a flow of mining impacts across rocky terrain. The prints mirroring the landscape’s bones i.e. the rock and the tree stumps exposed as textural elements by the ‘sgraffito’ of etched line. 

Other components of this exhibition, including the assemblage of paintings under the collective title of The Road to Other, pick up on another cavalcade of portentous sites along the road axis into the trashed valleys of the West Coast Range watershed. Initially glimpsed in the final moments of a long journey, with my feelings amplified by dazzling afternoon light, the works are developed ‘plein air’ encounters and studio follow ups rendering the graphic ossuary. 

Raymond Arnold was born in Victoria in 1950 and moved to Tasmania in 1983.  Under the influence of the island’s natural environment, Raymond developed his career to become a printmaker and painter of international reputation. Raymond’s legacy to Tasmanian art is well established and in 2006, he established Landscape Art Research Queenstown (LARQ), a non-profit studio and gallery in the mining town of Queenstown in Tasmania’s west, where he lives and works today.

Raymond is a Glover Prize winning artist who has held more than 50 solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in Australia, Europe and the USA. His work can be found in the collections of the Imperial War Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Musee Courbet in France, as well as the National Gallery, the Australian Parliament House and all state galleries in Australia.

Listen to Raymond's artist talk from the 26th of March at Bett Gallery: