Over the next two years I’m planning to publish a portfolio of graphic art, roughly 180 pieces from the last 24 years or so. There’s a lot of it, so I’m going to do it in a series, say 7 or 8 images each month with minimal commentary and an interwoven treatment of many themes. It should be a lot of fun and may help you understand what I’ve been doing all this time.
Why 180? Why 24? Why 2 years or 24 months? These numbers obviously have powerful symbolic as well as practical (prosaic even) significance. By 180 I mean a complete about-face of the kind that might occur perhaps once in a lifetime, or twice if you’re lucky. Certainly it’s my first time. To me, such a change represents a realignment of universal polar opposites, a great swing of Yin to Yang and vice-versa.
In actual fact (this is the prosaic bit), 180 is just roughly how many pieces I’ve kept of the more portable (if not always durable) graphic art that I started doing after abandoning oil paint and the city of Adelaide (both historic dead ends) roughly 24 years ago.
That’s 24 years that these pieces have stayed with me, through earthquake and many other life-changing events, where so many framed and unframed pictures before and since have gone the ways of give and forget, through love, friendship and occasional patronage, to family, friends remembered and ever with us, to lovers and employers and ugly debt collectors, through Rimbaudian burnings and Rembrandtian slashings, for friendship, money, work, sex, or just a bed for the night.
Some got damp and fell to bits. Others were (gasp!) thrown away. But these 180 have stayed with me, not the moss but the forest that my rolling stone has gathered.
Actually it’s a bit less than 180, and a bit more than 24. But that’s OK because, on a practical level it gives me plenty of time to finish what’s missing, even at the relative snail’s pace of only 180 artworks rescued from oblivion in 24 years!
On a personal level, this is the same twenty-four years that I will have been with my one-time college stalker, now wife and life partner, who saw all this happen and had at times to clean up the mess,
Jody, I dedicate 180 DEGREES of 24 YEARS to you.
And so, my friends and family, will you join me in this bold adventure, this regularly updated entertainment made possible by the internet, as I turn the pages of a long and often apparently non-sequential life? Join me! as I point it back the other way, and pilot this mighty swing across the sky!
With much love, Michael.
Please note: These works are of enormous sentimental value. Some are in less than gallery condition. Most are not for sale. Private viewing : Contact Us
P.S. I don’t feel that I have anyone at all to acknowledge for inspiration or artistic leadership, unless like Brett Whiteley it is Vincent Van Gogh. But I never wanted to follow Vincent, he’s one of the reasons why I waited so long. And I wouldn’t ask Whiteley in case he kicked me down his stairs.
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Walnut tree and old park bench 2021Great Uncle Wollumbin 2006Black Rodger; or Meditations on a Broken Stream 2018Clouds in their natural medium 2010Last Moments of Atlantis 2023Fraggle turns away from us 2023Raranitingga 1997A ghost of Easter Island 1992Florence dreaming I 1995Eye sky 1992Fishbones prosaic 1990Fundament in free fall 1996Red river gum 1989Blue Waratah 2010Look in the window 1992Mrs P of Newton Street 2020Skinny-dipper 1990The simple prawn experiences a sudden, overpowering perception into the nature of things 1989Day and Night 1990Savaged by scribble 2005Le bateau ivre 1997The Metamorphosis of Io and Argus 2000West Ryde 1991A path through trees 1990Jo, Sunday afternoon Anzac Park 1996Message from the mesa 1989Darkness in Belanglo 2007Daulghiri, hard king of cloud (unfinished) 1997As Parsley felt herself falling from the window-sill her whole life passed before her eyes 1992Old sailor of my future 1983Silence in Belanglo 2007Experimenting with girlfriends 1995Lost in my other career 1993David hears me automatic writing, and speaks 1992Florence dreaming II 1995After Streeton 1998Apricot sky 2010The chicken in the egg 1996The clouds under high resolution 1989Matisse in the bath 1992Figure Study V 1995Sorrow in Belanglo 2007Armidale 1990Warm surge II 2007Mist in lace 2004Scenes from a bedsit 1990Hearthless 1994Sofala in mind 1993Fundament in love 1996Rushcutters Bay 1992Staring into the sun on Sydney harbour 1996Wet stars 2010Dream of short lives 1995Skeletal sky 2011Alex, chocolate and vegemite 2000Staring at my thumb again 1990High sunset 2010Study for Ovid’s Metamorphosis of Clytie and Leucothoe 1997Moreton bay 1993Warm surge I 2007The watering tree 1997Dry stars 1997Stormcloud over Broken Hill 1996Strange duckling 1989Reclaiming Belanglo 2007A child’s mind 1991Figure study I 1995Stradbroke she-oak and pandanus 1993Where to from here 1993Woodhelven 1990She who will be your mother 1992The World Tree Yggdrasil 2006Apricot shells 2010Not the picture but the frame 2000Scarred girl in the landscape 1990Specific whirlpool 1996Still life with mull bowl 1992Summer figure 1993The dragon or the egg 1995Tree of Life 1998Pemulwuy 1991Nativity 1999Eyeburst 1994Black fire 1991Plum in a puddle 1990Jody of Woodhelven 1989Fig and cathedral 1993Murrurundi Pass Upper Hunter Valley 1990Hand studies II 1993Maze haze 1994Paranoid Kings Cross window 1993Old chair 1989Shallow water boogie 1992S-bend prosaic 1992Shell of paradise 1992My right hand 1993Fundament in meditation 1996Blue eight 1992Chremophrethon 1995Fluid dance 1990Gavan Hunter 1990Tendon in blue 2005The kissing mountain 2004Soft field 2007Soon to be with us 1999Lost carapace 1993Madonna del Mar 2010Sea-sky 2010Glory 2010Figured sky 2010Dragon and damsel 1992Life on Earth 1993Moreton bay 1993Poppies 1991Strange dancer 1994Squid 1989Rocks off Main Beach Stradbroke IslandBamboo dance 1999Eye of the landscape 1993Fundament says hello 1992Dark Tree 1992Expressive jellyfish 1996Woodhelven 1997Tulips and goldfish 1992Surf 1994Dhaulghiri (impossible in pencil) 1998Blue swimmer 1993Chromatic platypus egg 2002Brick red under water 2Black eight 1993Morning Delerium 2013Irish ancestry 1993Freehand in question 2000Bushfire through waterfall 2000Wet dawn 1999Impression of Botanic Gardens, Sydney 1995Strange roses 1996Cthulhu marooned 2002Black and white broken 2005Hell is no hotter 2004Blue study 1993Moby Quink 1992Filigree filigree 2000Rooted in blue 1992Aloe we’ll meet again 1990Synapse relapse 1995Resonant canoe 2004Wishing for roots 1990Whiteley’s giraffe revisited 2009Sentinel of Wollumbin 1998This is not a sex toy 2013Diving for squid off the kitchen shelf 2013Nightmare of the nose 2010Warm undergrowth 2010Rivers of carnelian 2012Study for Blue waratah 2009Blue foreshore 1996Trying to recapture… 2005Filigree labyrinth 1998A descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allen Poe 1989Sootie 1994Quink tree 1996Visualisation of a poetic moment 1996Moreton Bay 1993The skeletal sky disaster 2011Inner city window 1992Lewis in custard 2002Blue swimmer II 1993Fine surf 1993Dhurbar Square Kathmandu 1998Heart of Dhaulghiri 1999Maze in season 2013Not for beating 2013Dragon in the data 2013Sacrifice for Lou 2013Brett and Jahne 1982Metamorphosis of Clytie 1999Nightmare in a haystack 2014Lovers in the Cloudscape 2015
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Well, here it is two-and-a-half years later and there’s 176 pieces hung on the wall; not 180, but there’s a few last minute things I could still do: beg my relatives to send me a snap of the pictures I gave them years ago; finish a portrait in oil pastels of our third son, young Zachary, before he leaves his childhood behind and makes this other project impossible; and finish an ink or dye of the house we are living in, one of the nicest places we’ve ever been.
So, on the natural assumption that I’ll never get around to these edges I guess we could say that the 180 Degrees project is now complete. Thank you so much for your patience, your very kind words, and your long commitments of friendship and family love over many years. I totally agree with all of you, even where you don’t agree with each other.
Now that the real objectives of the Backlogue are starting to emerge, may I invite you to continue to follow me, in serial and episodic form, as I unfold The Songs of the Small World and The Hunting of A Snark … here on these pages … if I ever get around to it ….
Michael Ifans 