Dark Matter

Part of my Sleep series, with this painting I started to think about the relationship between the dissolution of our consciousness of self as we pass into the abstract world of REM sleep cycles, and the movement of dust in space, the potentials of dark matter and how stars are formed and destroyed in nebulae. Also about the way that dark matter pervades all of space and is constantly moving through us.

Shannon Berry Bam is a circus performer in Brisbane and we have worked on several paintings together. Like almost all of the physical performers, her sleep is both restorative and highly active and almost every time I’d look back from my canvas to her, she would be in a slightly different position. I love all of that and just keep painting them in their various new places and wait for them to cycle around again to approximate positions to continue my work.

Not a lot is actually known about dark matter, it’s one of those things that physicists have theorised and seems to make sense, though they have no real proof of, it would just make life simpler for them if we believed in it… I can live with that for a painting or two.. There have been some quite expensive tests to prove the existence of dark matter, all pretty inconclusive so far. But it is an elegant theory. Essentially it is what may make up the slight density of the universe and is lightly charged.

To me in this painting, Shannon is the essence of dark matter moving towards the ‘Eye of God’ nebula, which is in turn quietly watching all of our passing history.

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Brisbane based artist, Billy Shannon’s passion as a painter is to explore our rather questionable reality. How much tangible information does one need in order to understand the emotional life of a painting? Transitory visual clues suggest a path that the viewer may take through the work. The next time the painting is seen, perhaps another path will reveal itself.

"My work as a painter has been formed and informed by my work as a scenic artist for the theatre and film industries from 1979 to 2007. Through that experience, I developed the discipline of working daily and rather than needing to seek inspiration, it just comes as I start work if it hasn’t been hounding me all the way to the studio.

"I work with acrylic paint on either stretched canvas or on hand crafted tondi made from MDF boards that I rout into circles and rout into specific frames to go with each work. I generally work in many layers of paint, using varnish as my medium as I am obsessed with the way light travels through all the optical and emotional layers, bounces off the substratum and travels back out to where we catch some of it’s mercurial existence and are struck by what stories it tells.

"I tend to work in 2 styles, either exceedingly brief where each moment of a stroke of paint tells an exact and multilayered story akin to sumi-e, but with colours. Otherwise I seem to go into a hundred or so layers, exploring the movement of light, colour and their interpretive capabilities."

Billy has participated in many exhibitions in Brisbane, Melbourne and Tasmania and has been involved in quite a few artist run spaces since 1990. A couple of highlights of Billy's life in the performing arts as a scenic artist was working on major theatre productions such as ‘Phantom of the Opera’ whilst working with Scenic Studios in Melbourne, and then being in charge of backdrops and murals for films such as ‘Nim’s Island’