Judith Bruton
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The South Australian School of Art at Stanley Street North Adelaide 1967-70
My
four years 1967-70 studying at the South
Australian School of Art, Stanley Street, North Adelaide,
were the beginning of an art career that included 15 years lecturing in
Printmaking, Drawing and Design at the University of South Australia.
I am currently painting for exhibitions, producing an anthology of my poems and a book of fictional short stories. In 2006, I completed my PhD Poetic Visual Interplay Painting: Artists' Books and Digital Media at Monash University.
Experiences at SASA
The following extract from my exegesis highlights some of my experiences at the South Australian School of Art (SASA):
'I am primarily concerned with finding poetic visual solutions in art to relate language and form, ideas and being. The development of my intuitive understanding of what I now refer to as 'poetic wisdom'...can be traced to my initial studies at the South Australian School of Art.
During the late sixties and seventies at the SASA, the teaching of art elements, in particular colour theory, was paramount. Colour Field Abstract painting was the pervasive style in New York, followed by Australia in the late 1960s, as seen in The Field exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, 1968. The main influences upon my art then were the artists and lecturers Robin Wallace-Crabbe, Barry Goddard, Franz Kempf and Barbara Hanrahan. Wallace-Crabbe, known for his colour-field paintings at that time, introduced me to the concept of synaesthesia, while Goddard increased my awareness of colour relationships and their potent application...
My
sense of evocative, sensuous imagery was strongly influenced by seeing
work by the German painter and printmaker Paul Wunderlich, and my early
spray-paintings reflect his use of transparent layers of colour. In the
early 1970s my large-scale acrylic paintings gave me a taste for the
magic of a visual poetry that I could create with veils of colour
sprayed through paper stencils. Transparency and layering are still
features of my digital prints and paintings.
Kempf's expressive, abstract prints appeared to me to be mysterious and spiritual. His work is numinous in nature and his teaching emphasised a dialogue between ideas and art media and suggested that sometimes technique alone would stimulate ideas. Hanrahan's prints were poetic, personal, often autobiographical, and frequently an extension of her lyrical novels. She was well known for her ability to draw detailed designs of figures and text directly on to ground etching plates, even working the image upside down. This direct approach to media encouraged my involvement with printmaking and painting techniques and stimulated an awareness of working with one's intuition and poetic wisdom.'
Dr Judith L Bruton (nee Bulluss)