JACK CHRISTIE
 Curated by Iain Coleman

JACK CHRISTIE

Port Adelaide, South Australia

Jack Christie has been practicing art since the early 1970s on and off; mainly off. He tends to work on blocks of time approximately 10 years apart. Partly due to time constraints, work commitments but in some ways due the culmination of explorations of style and substance; materials and methods; along with experimental explorations of the mediums used and the technical styles examined to some sort of formal aesthetic conclusion.

Over the years Jack’s work has developed into media, technique and style genre resulting in experiments in material imagery in a formal and not so formal manner. The artwork in this anthological online exhibition are generally chronological in form, showing early forays into simple ideas which show promise of further development later; which rarely eventuate. The excitement of the newly found discoveries of form and technical formation of ideas that show promise seem to satisfy his visual curiosity. It could be just that the ideas come freely and by pursuing those in more complex form would take up too much time, inhibiting the creative process; turning it into a slow laborious time-consuming visual production.

Experimental drawing captures the moment of orchestrated production, while an important construct, is more of an aesthetic visualisation of the original concept.

I will attempt to explain Jack Christie’s formal and contextual attitudes to the resultant visual imagery on show. These are a sample of a large body of work that has developed and in some cases not developed further in the last 50 years.

In any exploration of artworks one should consider any affect the visual imagery displays.  This may possibly reveal compositional relationships and reasons the elements are used in certain ways and if any significance inferred in the techniques used is present.

There may be emotional, intellectual, psychological and cultural principles imposed on artworks that may need to be resolved.

The medium and the technique in which the artwork is executed are as significant as the subject matter or overall expression. An understanding of the technique is crucial in the analysis of the artwork’s visual effects that have largely resulted from the way the artist has applied the particular materials and processes.

The artist’s personal style, philosophy and beliefs, choice and use of a medium and technique all have had a significant influence on the overall form and effect of these artworks.

Jack Christie’s work will require some objective reasoning to be considered and any or all judgments should be clearly referenced to the artwork, especially the most prominent features which can then support of any personal and subjective response.