235. Salted caramel, mint and blueberry (Gesalzenes Karamell, Minze und Blaubeere)
235. Salted caramel, mint and blueberry (Gesalzenes Karamell, Minze und Blaubeere), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 15 × 20cm, (Darryn Ansted)
By showing this view into the bowl from above, you can see the concave arc of the porcelain become a small camera obscura, and vaguely make out the sky and trees from outside. Ice cream is a scene of interaction, and by extension, a happy or memorable interaction. I chose all the ice creams in this series and my friends and family obligingly ate them. I know that nobody would order mint if they had the choice, and there would also be an over-representation of chocolate. So, the ice cream eating as a social engagement was in this case a little… complicated by my need to bring certain combinations of color together. Fortunately, nobody was arguing, and their sacrifice was greatly appreciated.
These studies of ice cream are a question, a search. They are an entry point. I don’t think I am at the ‘about’ stage with them yet. They are still a tree and not yet lumber or an axe handle.
Franz Hals has been a big influence on me since seeing the big exhibition of his work in Berlin around 6 months ago. Like with many painters, I had phases of liking his work and then disliking it and back again. The reason it really touched me recently was the embrace of things that are natural expressions of interaction. People smile and laugh in his work. The smiles seem very authentic. There are not many smiles in modernism and even fewer in art since. Even in popular culture a smile is usually something associated with the villain in the story. I had the pamphlet from the exhibition on my sidetable in the studio. When I was painting the portraits for the exhibition my eye would sometimes catch one of the reproductions of Hals’s work. It really hits you, when you are struggling to make a face just seem like a human being—to see him surf through human anatomy and psychology, while you drown. I can thank Hals for easing my apprehension about painting happy people. Large living Franz Hals with his eight children. He would definitely be the kind of surfer who ‘owns’ the beach. In 17th Century Netherlands, he probably actually had a friend who literally owned an Australian beach. In primary school we learned about the Dutchman Dirk Hartog, who sailed to Dirk Hartog Island off Australia in 1616. Hals would have been 34 years old, two years younger than Hartog. These guys really did something when they set their mind to it: crystallize human expression in oil paint, sail to Australia 200 years before it is settled. I guess painting is a bit like a camera obscura for me, insofar that it can bring the outside world inside like this in a very simplistic and distorted way.
