I grew up in my grandparents’ house in Brighton, Australia. I loved seeing my grandfather leave the house for work at 5pm every day, dressed in tails carrying his gold tipped baton, and white kid gloves which once belonged to King George, to drive his enormous black car to work at the Palais Theatre, St.Kilda. He was the resident orchestra conductor. My grandmother would arrive home about that time having returned from teaching ballet. When younger she was the Prima Ballerina in her company. The company toured India in their own train and that was where she met my grandfather, who was conducting the orchestra. My childhood was full of theatre, dress-ups, play and art.
I approach my work from opposing directions: from a studied figurative practice (I have two art degrees: one from RMIT in Melbourne, where I graduated in Fashion Design, and one from FIT in New York, where I completed a second degree majoring in Illustration), to abstraction. The dual approach reflects the two sides of the one coin and from one I learn about the other. From life drawing I learn to practice accurate observation, then to translate what my eye sees to the canvas in order to represent what is before me with as few marks as possible. I apply the same principle to my abstract work where I look at every shape as a thing in itself, with edges, boundaries, inviting negative and positive pressure for the eye. The elements in the abstract work are symbolic and tell a story, and when I am painting the details in a face, for instance, the shapes often tell the same story, or become tiny symbols in themselves: representing the other, rather than me.
The concepts from which I create shapes in the abstract works are well articulated by Carl Sagan, in A Pale Blue Dot:
"Look again at that dot...on it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…”
In reference to my on-going 'Selfie' series, I recently explained:
"That’s a self-portrait, not a portrait of you. I’m interested in how one person knows another. Usually it’s by our face, metaphorically and literally. I’m subverting that by taking a selfie in the mirror to parody those idiotic girls who obsess over showing themselves off that way, then I’ve removed the way in which I am recognised, my face, from the equation. Can anyone recognise anyone by their most intimate details? Can a lover recognise me without my face? Who are you? Who do you know, really? By what assessment do you know them? How they look? Or your understanding of their inner self? Which may or may not be accurate. Mostly our interactions with others are facile. That is the point of that series. The burqa is purely something I had at hand to cover my face. Sometimes it's a Mobil oil can. Or Ned Kelly's tin can helmet. I realise these things have symbolic meaning to others, but to me they are simply masks. That they take on another meaning within the context of the work means a new door opens for me to explore within the series."
In 1997 I started a Clothing label specialising in Equestrian Clothing, which went on to hold worldwide trademarks and sell throughout Australia, USA and the UK, until in 2009 I survived the catastrophic Black Saturday Bush Fires in Victoria. As s a result of that experience I suffered crippling PTSD. My art practice became the ‘I wish you were dead’ series in which I obsessively drew tiny black lines, reminiscent of the rows and rows of burned trees, and coloured in significant shapes in red. I did thousands, a hundred or so of which are in the permanent collection of the DAX Museum in Melbourne.
The repetition and focus gave me relief from the trauma and I hid there for a few years. Gradually as I healed I started to include colour, and fell in love with the pleasure I derived from an emerging beautiful shape, then colouring it in. This practice became massive oil paintings, often spanning 6m or more. In time I felt compelled to paint out the obsessive counting, the repetitive lines and detail, to focus on the shapes that emerged. I had no will in creating them and yet they came, and I love them.
Art is not a healing process it is an exposing process. Artists don't put dressing on wounds, and expect them to heal: we pick them like scabs and look inside. I had a life changing experience surviving the 2009 Black Saturday bush fires, and as a result suffer at times crippling PTSD. Art is the best distraction. I can focus on feelings, memories, narrative arcs, to figure keep anxiety at bay by giving me tools to understand. No heal, understand. And with understanding some comes some level of control. When I lay out a panting – whether it be figurative or abstract – and allow my mind to switch off and see only shapes and colours and their intersection I give myself a few moments, or a few hours of peace. All that concerns me at those times is how the paint is going down. I love the smell. I love the minute detail where shapes butt up against each other, or merge. I find peace in the activity, and satisfaction in the pleasure the result gives me and for a moment I am not myself.
The picture of me from which I drew the seated image was taken at the Bonnard show at the NGV in Melbourne: another show, by another average man, taken from a time when women artists were simply ignored and men got all the gigs. Bonnard’s work left me cold – poorly observed, awful colours, ugly composition, very little feel for the objects or subjects. However, the curation of the exhibition was stunning and my sister and I took many photographs of each other using the wallpaper, the gorgeous chairs, the open window installation, as the focus of our interest.
I place myself, sitting on the chair (or oil can, or other object of interest or symbolic meaning), demure, reserved, hands on my lap clutching my handbag, invisible in the world of men. I looked stunned, blank. In fact I am bored and can’t wait to leave to get back to my studio.
I place myself in front of my work to symbolise how it I feels to be before my work. My work is greater than me in every way: in physical size and also in metaphorical size. When the work comes it comes from ‘somewhere else’ and I am the conduit.
I place the ‘me’ figure in different contexts to represent different responses to events in my life: like finishing a 6m x 2.7m painting and wondering how it came to me. Half is knowing it is because I show up and practice, and half is feeling it is also some kind of voodoo magic that gifts me with knowing without doubt what needs to be done on the canvas. I continue find comfort in repetition – same element, different location or context, to symbolise myself (or ones’ self) across time, across experience, emotional states or physical locations, or interacting with other living or inanimate things (which in turn are symbols in themselves). Nothing in the work is without conscious inclusion but sometimes it comes there by what seems like accident – a slip of the hand, a drop of the wrong colour. It’s not an accident when one recognises the slip and embraces it. Yes, the work is metaphorical.
"Amid the chaos, a feather fell,
landing on the business end of a kalashnikov,
it caused the soldier to pause, and for a moment there was peace."
I have a huge studio at home from which I work, five days a week, 9-4pm. Without fail. I go to my studio and continue my practice every day. Whether I paint, draw or make things, I do this religiously Monday to Friday. I never wait for ‘inspiration’. All I have to do is pick up a pencil, or a brush, or a piece of metal, and begin doing SOMETHING and the ideas come. Then I follow that thread till I feel satisfied. Sometimes it leads to months of work or one work – such as, ‘The secret life of ants’, a 6m x 3m piece – which took two years to complete and was featured in my solo show at Murray Arts Museum Albury https://www.mamalbury.com.au/cornelia-selover-i-wish-you-were-there
I was studying art in New York at a time before Keith Harring was famous and I saw him and his work on the subways around NYC. Jean-Michel Basquiat was at my wedding at the Mudd Club and he was a huge influence on my abstract work. I have always loved to draw with thick black lines, then colour in and I still do. It’s direct, powerful, and requires the confidence that comes from acquired skill to do well. I do it very well.
For large abstract works and portraits, I mostly paint in oil on canvas, or cardboard, and have recently been drawing using the pen tool in Illustrator to painstakingly reproduce my own paintings as graphic works, and float other elements (also hand draw) over unrelated spaces. The juxtapositions are symbolic, and are often portraits of myself, or a loved one/thing as symbolised by an object.