By Ashleigh Fielding | posted on September 20, 2019
MOUNT Barker artist Barry Mackie will draw on his inner Jackson Pollock for his exhibition in the Southern Art and Craft Trail.
Pollock, an American artist in the 1940s and 50s, was renowned for breaking the rules of European art and adapting techniques known as the ‘drip technique’ and ‘action painting’.
Instead of classical methods of painting, Pollock would pour or splash paint onto a horizontal surface and ‘dance’ around it to create it.
Mackie has always admired Pollock’s work and hopes to recreate his style of art during the course of the Trail.
“Pollock employed new materials and avoided elegant brushwork, or any of the traditional marks that were usual for artists at that time,” he said.
“He insisted that the artist’s personal expression should be his primary concern and the abstract art dared to stand on its own merits, without the support of the older academic traditions.”
The first of Mackie’s Pollock-inspired paintings will be on three large panels and he will start work on them this Sunday at 11am at Strike Me Pink Gallery in Mt Barker.
He will continue each Wednesday, Friday and Sunday of the Trail from 11am to 1pm, plus Sunday, October 13.
The panels will be laid on the ground so visitors can walk around them as Mackie paints.
Mackie’s Imaginings exhibition will also include new works specially made for the Art Trail.
Imaginings is open every day of the Trail from this Sunday until October 13, 10am to 5pm.
