GFL Fine Art is deeply saddened by the news of the recent passing of acclaimed Western Australian artist Miriam Stannage. What follows is an article of recollections by her close friend and colleague Dr. Phillip McNamara. 

Miriam Helen Stannage died early Sunday morning (September 11^th, 2016). She will be remembered by the art world for her 50 plus years of creativity – in installation, paint, photography, drawing, video and artists books – and affectionately by many artists for her quiet support of their art. Miriam diligently visited local exhibitions for decades, often leaving appreciative reflections in exhibition comments books and taking home catalogues that she inevitably passed on to me for my archives.

Miriam had many long lasting friendships. Ours lasted from 1980 until her death. I first knew of Miriam  through the praises of her brother,  the historian Tom Stannage (who worked with my father on The People of Perth) and a couple of simple line drawings of hers shown at the upstairs Carroll’s Bookshop Gallery in Hay Street.  More formal introductions occurred through my interest in the work of George Duerden, Cliff Jones and the Henry Froudist studio of the mid to late 1960’s.

Cliff and George had both done portraits of Miriam, and a vacuum cleaner spray painting (in greens and yellows) from her 1969 show of abstracts at the Old Fire Station Gallery hung in Cliff’s print making studio. I knew how radical the abstract was for both Perth and Australian art of the period and was smitten. That both these men spoke so admiringly and affectionately about her also impressed me. They informed me that she had been very important for the promotion of modernism in Perth, firstly through setting up her own gallery in 1965 (the Rhode Gallery), and through her work in establishing the Contemporary Art Society with Guy Grey Smith.  They were proud that Bernard Smith had controversially chosen one of her spray painted abstracts as the winner of the 1970 Albany Art Prize. This was clearly an independent and self-actualising person.

I became a very close friend of Miriam when I started writing a thesis about the work of Tom Gibbons – Miriam’s husband. Their conversations about art, film, philosophy, religion, art and the art world were perceptive, informative and fun to be a part of. I visited regularly and continued to do so after Tom’s death in 2012. They were very hospitable; Miriam liked Wagon Wheel biscuits and any cake from Ruby’s Patisserie in Tuart Hill.

Both Miriam and Tom were mentors in teaching me how to see beauty and poignant mysteriousness in ordinary things. Both had a religious sensibility and saw the everyday world as a celebration of the divine. Both were playful, conceptually witty and intellectually quick, whilst also being disciplined in their art practices.

I admired many things about Miriam. One was that she was very self-reliant and would go off camping by herself in the wheat belt and National Parks. One of her favourite areas was Cape Le Grand National Park near Esperance, so she didn’t mind a drive. She also had fond memories of the Northam area, where she was born in 1939, and she would go see the wild flowers every year between there and New Norcia (work from some of her most significant series are in the Monastery collection there). A pastel drawing of wild flowers by her was one of the first works I ever bought. She loved native gardens and established a fine one at her home. Miriam was also a keen bird watcher and so liked the fact that many species were attracted to her garden. Delighting in being close to nature Miriam either walked along Trigg beach near Mettams Pool, or around one of several lakes near her home, every day.

She was physically very fit, so it was a shock to be told by her that she had a terminal tumour. More so that it came less than a year after she had been named a State Living Treasure.

The last few months of her life demonstrate many of the traits that I loved. Miriam saw the interconnection – the associations, symbolism and archetypal – in all things. It was innate. Hence when she rang me on Easter Sunday and asked me to come see her in person, as she had something important but sad to tell me, I feared the worst. Miriam was also pragmatic and lived life on her own terms so it didn’t surprise me that when we met she also said that she had chosen not to undertake radical treatment and, though it would be a difficult journey, she would let it take its course. She asked me not to tell anyone else as she didn’t want people fussing.

The prognosis was a couple of months so Miriam didn’t expect to see the catalogue she had been working on with Lea Kinsella published, nor know how the accompanying Lawrence Wilson survey exhibition was received. But she was delighted that Lea had been interviewing her regularly for years and that the survey of her most recent significant series was occurring. It was with great satisfaction that we read and discussed the proofs that Ted Snell and Lea expedited to her.

Her situation became more widely known when the exhibition Miriam Stannage: Survey 2006-2016 opened at the Lawrence Wilson in July. By then she was in Hollywood hospital just down the road. There was much poignancy at the opening when people learnt the reason for her absence. On opening night I took Miriam a video that Michele (my wife) made of the occasion. Miriam had been imagining the day and the various proceedings and so we watched the recording of it many times. It may give people some joy to know that Miriam was very pleased with how the show was hung and the celebrative atmosphere of the opening. She recognised many people in the crowd, was delighted for their continued support, and it sparked many conversations about Perth art and exhibitions she had seen over the years.

One regret Miriam voiced to me was that she didn’t have the energy to write the many letters to friends and supporters that she had thought she would whilst in hospice. Miriam wanted people to know that she was very grateful for the kind comments on her art and she wanted to also encourage many younger artists to keep going! I said I’d pass these messages on.

Miriam faced her last journey with great courage and typical wry humour. When I asked about her funeral and whether she wanted me to say anything she said “Just put a pile of Lea’s book up the back and say ‘If you want to know anything about Miriam or her art, everything she wanted to share is in those books, so buy a copy as you leave.’” She added wryly that her archives – including the diaries she wrote in everyday of her life – had already gone to the National Library with a caveat of 25 years on them, so if you wanted to know more you’d have to wait.

Miriam also suggested that, as a last art installation idea and as homage to her Security Notice and surveillance series, I should put a camera sticking up out of the flowers on her coffin and attach an all-seeing eye camera to the front of the lectern. She smiled at the surreal idea that she – as artist – would be with us and “watching with an unblinking eye” as we looked on. She seriously thought about the request for quite a while. She always revised her art before deciding on final configurations, so she played with several ideas before taking the camera poking from the flowers out. She chuckled about the lectern. Eventually she said something along the lines of “There will be children there and some people who might not understand that as an art piece. Who wants to leave a funeral with more questions than answers, perhaps not… there are too many possible reactions and I don’t want to upset people who may already be upset, but it’s a great idea.”  We both laughed at the irony because Guy Grey-Smith, in the early 1960’s, had told Tom Gibbons that “art isn’t made with ideas” then Miriam, from the late 1960’s on, had pursued conceptual art throughout her oeuvre.

I already miss her greatly. I loved her dearly. She is a major Australian artist. She didn’t want to make a fuss… yet the legacy of her art oeuvre will continue to intrigue audiences for many generations on.

Phillip McNamara

Following is an article from Monday’s The Australian Business Review acknowledging the effect that the previous government’s 2011 Self-managed Superfund amendments have had on investors and the art market. This has been an ongoing drama for the arts industry since the amendments were introduced and simply requires a basic element of common sense to have the super fund amendments repealed in order to allow the market to return to a healthy state of growth. However, since the coalition came into government, the assistant treasurers – whose responsibility this area falls under – have been Arthur Sinodinos, Mathias Cormann (acting), Josh Frydenberg, and now Kelly O’Dwyer. That makes four assistant treasurers in 33 months, no wonder it is difficult for any change to come into effect. The only permanence over this period has been the bureaucrats responsible for the drafting and administration of the legislation. 

Art market painted into a corner

Article by Michaela Boland, National Arts writer, Sydney.

As an accountant, art valuer and nascent gallery owner Michael Fox has witnessed the free falling art market at close quarters.

Self-managed superannuation funds have been shedding their artworks at what has ­become a feverish pace as the June 30 compliance deadline ­approaches, six years after ­Jeremy Cooper’s superannuation review recommended tightening the rules for self-managed fund art collecting.

In 2009 Australian Taxation Office figures revealed the total value of collectibles, primarily art, in SMSF, was $700 million — by 2014 the figure was $385m and it is understood to have dwindled to a negligible amount since.

The art market has been decimated: prices for Aboriginal paintings, in particular, have plummeted. Fox has consigned for sale in his eponymous gallery two canvases by Utopia painter Gloria Petyarre, once among the nation’s most collectable indigenous artists. He bought them in 2005 for $5000 and is now endeavouring to sell them for $1000 each. “They’re beautiful”, he said, though he is yet to find a buyer.

The Petyarre owner will be lucky if he recovers 20 per cent of his original investment after consignment fees.

Another collector who spoke on condition of anonymity said he was considerably worse off, having spent $800,000 acquiring indigenous art in his superannuation fund.

He now hopes to realise $300,000 in a series of auctions this year as he liquidates all 300 works. “We tried to help the artists,” he said of his buying trips to remote art centres acquiring pieces he intended to house for decades in his superannuation fund.

“Now I’m selling them without ever really enjoying them, they went straight into storage, costing $35,000 to $40,000 a year,” he said.

At auction, savvy buyers sit on their hands if they know a work is owned by a super fund, correctly figuring that the buyer must sell and an even cheaper price is negotiable if a work is passed-in.

This collector is critical of the auction houses focused on volume, saying they just want works to sell irrespective of price.

The Australian spoke to another collector who noticed a work he liked did not sell at a recent auction where it was listed for $4000 to $6000. He offered $2000 and successfully bought it.

From June 30, in line with the Cooper Review recommendations, which received bipartisan support, all art in SMSF must be in secure storage, insured and regularly valued — combined costs few collectors consider worthwhile in the long term.

Aboriginal art was the biggest beneficiary of super fund collecting, so it follows it has been hardest hit.

Fox traces the boom in SMSF collecting to 2007 when the Howard government increased the ceiling on the amount of collectable individual funds could hold.

There was an immediate market uptick: auction records for the year show total art sales topped $175.6m, of which $25m was Aboriginal art.

Generous SMSF rules were not the only contributing factor, with the booming general economy also contributing to higher prices.

Aboriginal art now accounts for about $6m worth of annual auction sales, not including high profile collector sales such as Dutch department store heir Thomas Vroom and pathology millionaires Elizabeth and the late Colin Laverty.

Renowned collectors such as the Lavertys and Vroom can sell their art at a premium on account of their name adding prestige to the provenance of individual works.

Coo-ee Gallery owner Adrian Newstead, once of the country’s most renowned names in the Aboriginal art trade, warned “we’re coming off a bubble … and I don’t even know if we’ve hit the bottom yet”.

Newstead points to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing there were 514 art galleries in Australia in 2000, today he says there are fewer than 250. “Galleries that represent indigenous artists have been hit worst of all; two in every three commercial indigenous art galleries have closed their doors,” he said.

Newstead has called on the government to invest in supporting Aboriginal art and bring an end to ruthless undercutting whereby remote aboriginal art centres, which are supported with federal funds, sell directly to collectors.

He says this wholesale selling, more common after the introduction in 2010 of the 5 per cent Resale Royalty Tax on artworks over $1000, has driven many Aboriginal art dealers to close their doors.

He slammed the ALP’s arts policy, which vows to scrap the federal government’s discretionary Catalyst arts fund and return $70m to the Australia Council.

Newstead said Catalyst was a terrific, nimble initiative and the Australia Council represented a death by committee approach.

Art valuers have experienced an surge in business on account of the SMSF deadline, with many collectors deciding to acquire art from their funds and realise a loss on paper rather than sell work at a loss on the market.

Several valuers told The Australian they had been flat out for years working through the backlog. The action houses have been criticised because as prices for individual artworks have fallen, they have raised their buyer’s premium from 20 to 22 per cent and 25 per cent.

Sellers also pay negotiable 10 per cent consignment fees while auction houses have been negotiating ever lower pre-sale estimates, with the enticement that the lower you list a work, the more interest it is likely to generate.

Owners complain that if an artwork does not sell, the minimum asking price hangs around online perpetually clawing down the price that can be achieved.

One small upside to the SMSF changes is the artworks once collected by funds and locked away have been released for people to enjoy.

Newstead said, “to make a painting more desirable it has to be seen and to put it away is death to art. To increase the value of art you put it on your wall, have dinner parties under it and people who like it ask ‘who’s that?’.”

Accessed 20-06-2016 via http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/investment-art-market-painted-into-a-corner/news-story/ae3b92c820cdf1980bee88519ce1f925#

In order to appreciate Beards unique style of painting, as is the case with any acclaimed artwork, it is important to understand the context from whence it came.

John Beard, much like many of our favoured Australian artists from the same era, is an adopted Australian who made his way down and across the continents until settling, at first in Perth, and later Sydney – where he remains today.

Born in Aberdare, Wales, in 1943 he is a by-product of his Celtic ancestry, nurtured by an“ancient, often ravaged, perennially colonised … land of mines and chapels. The visual imprint is of an interminably grey place where silver skies merge and mingle with laden seas. It is a place where time past and present is inextricably intertwined, where the young Beard began to experience the world, his cultural endowment full of the old and the new.” (Wright, 2009, p. 663)

After receiving the Welsh National Art Scholarship at the age of 19, Beard studied at the Swansea College of Art and later studied at the University of London, and the Royal College of Art, London.

In 1965 he won the British Arts Council International Prize and Commission. He taught in the UK extensively before making his way in 1983 to Curtin University – or the Western Australian Institute of Technology, as it was known at the time – where he became the Senior Lecturer, Head of Painting.

Beard spent six years in WA, and it was in his last year here that this monotype Untitled I was produced. It came after a period of great success and warm regard in the artistic community in Perth, where he produced massive works out of his Fremantle studio the likes of The Gods (1984-85),a massive landscape as viewed from the perspective of the outsider now in the collection of the University of Western Australia.

His large scale works produced in the mid 80’s exhibit the interest he had in neo-expressionism at the time, blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration which he well accomplished, however, this monotype produced four years later – during the year that he resigned from Curtin University to pursue a travelling sabbatical from Australia to Portugal, New York, Lisbon and all over – reveals a transformation in his style, one that he would fully accomplish during his time in Adraga.

It shows a shift from the heavy impasto works that he was already becoming noted for, towards an expression of interest in the nature of the paint and medium he was using, an exploration of the ways in which he could apply his innate reception of landscape and nature in new and compelling ways.

He would come to note, in Adraga, that “I realised that paint to me was really like the sea. There’s this pliable material that could be thick and lumpy, solid like a through of water, or it could be vaporous, frothy like the crash of a wave. It could be opaque or it could be transparent; all of these different qualities. It could be still, just shimmering, it could be moving so quickly that you felt there was an incredible vibrancy about it. The totality of this experience of rock and water had this evanescence, which you felt; it came right up to you, to the top of the cliff.”

Beard returned to Australia in the late 90’s and settled in Sydney, the accomplished artist has since won the Archibald and Wynne prize among many others. He has perpetually challenged his style and medium and continues to produce the work of an artist whose eye has traversed and encompassed a worldly view that few achieve in a lifetime.

References

Wright, W. (2009). Headland. Art & Australia, 661-667.