Australian born and resident, I have been painting since I was 14 and working quietly away ever since. As I grew up I became aware of my family history, as one does. My Grandfather was the great Ukrainian painter Vladimir Kostetsky and his wife, my Grandmother, was also a highly skilled artist who specialized in anthropomorphic arrangements of forest fungi. My half-uncle was the renowned fantasy painter Alexander Kostetsky and an Uncle on my father's side was Fiji's leading geologist and I remember with distinct pleasure receiving fossils from him, which I still consider one of the most exciting non-metaphysical gifts one could possibly receive. Predictably enough, learning of the exploits of these high achievers, I was challenged to add to the family roll-call yet torn between the 'two cultures'. I knew pretty early on that no one can possibly hope to achieve a convincing synthesis of science and art as they are categorically opposed, in that new art cannot render past art obsolete (falsify it) and is, with very few exceptions, overshadowed by it. Still, I have concocted for myself an imaginary synthesis, in that I paint things that, were I a scientist, I would certainly want to study! As for achieving anything of note, I'm still working on that!
I fancifully characterize my work as 'metaphysical realism', insofar as I don't wilfully distort space and form as an expressionist or cubist would, I just imagine new 'real' things that carry 'irreal' freight, or not (I insist, when I draw a figure with an 'unnaturally' large head, that figure actually has a large head!). Yet my paintings are perhaps metaphors, or pictorial and technical analogues, for growth, survival, evolution, transcendence, recurrence, division, otherness, anxiety, cycles, from the mud to the stars and back again, all star dust, perhaps not. In a way, I paint to clarify what I secretly hope will ultimately resist clarification. As I believe all artists do. After all, what a curse to be cursorily explicable!
Amongst my inspirations are dimly recalled wonders and terrors in childhood, when the Universe was steeped in a mysterious, beckoning significance, the shifting light on the tragically dying biosphere, the pullulating, seething, million-fold forms life takes, nameless, remote and extinct things, things that can't possibly be but should be, poetry and the language of painting.
Goya, Fra Angelico, Piero, Redon, Morandi, De Chirico, Savinio, Sironi, Modersohn-Becker, Soutine, Munch, Nolde, Beckmann, Kubin, Paul Nash, Ryder, Hartley, Guston and early Baselitz are a few of the artists that have moved me and traces abound, some apparent, some better digested than others. I also admire sculptors like Medardo Rosso, William Tucker, Lynda Benglis, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Deacon, Martin Puryear and late Anthony Caro. My two favourite living painters are the great Dane Per Kirkeby and the ultra fabulous Paula Rego.
It's all ongoing and as Whistler said: "an artist's career always begins tomorrow".
For me what makes a painting a 'keeper' is the palpable yet elusive presence of a replete emptiness and inviolable remoteness that remains after we've paid it due critical respect, after the mind ceases its capering, when the isms become wasisms, and we feel the comforting chill of mystery as a kind of visitation. And in ways enriching yet beyond conscious reckoning, we are changed, we are more fully ourselves.
To conjure, to body forth, such rare quarry is why I paint. It has nothing to do with social commentary or relevance, with technological or formal innovation or any ephemeral conceptual underpinnings, which bore me to the point of rancour, stupor and torpor. It is a state akin to 'grace', a stillness in the tumult, a dignity and fullness of presence, and if one achieves it once or twice in a lifetime one's labours have not been in vain.
Selwyn Roddasl.net.au
Born:
22 / 7 / 68
EDUCATION
- Post Graduate Diploma
- BA Fine Arts
- T.O.P
ARTISTIC PRACTICE CV
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1998
“Land Ahoy!” - Westspace, Footscray
1991
“Landscape” - Botanical Gallery, Fitzroy
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2000 “Landscape” – Metropolis Gallery, St Kilda
“Our Place in the Sun” – La Trobe Regional Gallery, Morwell
“A4” - Westspace, Footscray
1998
“Ukrainian Echoes” – Access Gallery, N.G.V,
1997
“Post Card Show” - Linden Gallery, St Kilda
“A4” - Westspace, Footscray
1996
“The Love Show” -
1995
“Post Card Show” - Linden Gallery, St Kilda
“The Hotel Show” -
1993
“Dis-lo-cated” - Old Tolarno Gallery Space, Sth Yarra
“Nocturnes” - Linden Gallery, St kilda
“Post Graduate Exhibition” -
“Post Card Show” - Linden Gallery, St Kilda
1990
“Four Young Painters” - Fringe Gallery, Fitzroy
1989
“Recycle Show” - Fringe Gallery, Fitzroy
1987
“Scritture: pagine e immagini”-
PUBLICATIONS
2010 'Biological Blocks', gallery publication, essay by Steve Cox
1993
V.C.A Postgraduate
Exhibition Catalogue
Postcard - Linden Gallery
COLLECTIONS
Private
collections in
ART RELATED EMPLOYMENT
2011 CAE Special Workshops in Art Department
1996
- 2005 Victoria
University
South Melbourne campus /
Life drawing, Technical
drawing, Graphic Design and Painting
Lecturer: Australian Art
History
2010 - ongoing Luma-Flow
Animation, Sales and Marketing Manager, Web design, Graphic
design
Family business, product DVDs, distributed by Sony Australia
