Mark Sutherland, Artist
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Transcript of Mark Sutherland, Artist
Mark Sutherland Artist
Racecourse Road
Oil on board 1986
My work has spanned many disciplines over two and a half decades, making it difficult
even for me to neatly sum up what I’m about. The short answer is that, for as long as I can
remember, I have consciously sought to gain as much knowledge and skill as I could in
every aspect of art that interested me. I love the history of art, and I love the various
challenges presented by painting murals, surfboard blanks, working in resins, creating
portraits, drawing in pen and ink or animating funny characters. The further you go into it,
the more you realise how much there is still to learn.
In 1979, I left school with the idea of becoming an artist. Like all young people, I was keen
to experience all that life had to offer and do it on my own terms. Jack Rhodes was a broken
down surfboard shaper fallen on hard times, living in the hippy enclave of Nimbin. He
showed me how to apply oil paint the way the old masters did, allowing the paint to
maintain its integrity. In many ways, Jack’s life resembled the lives of the great, troubled
artists of history. One man against the world, he clung hard to his art because it was all he
had. Though I can now place the romance of that proposition into a wider perspective, oil
painting remains, for me, where the true romance of art resides. While the golden age of oil
painting as a mainstream medium is long past, we’re told, my greatest wish is to produce
paintings that could sit comfortably beside those of the great masters of the tradition. For
all the technological breakthroughs of the last hundred years, there is still nothing to rival
nature for subtlety, complexity and enduring beauty.
That said, the most ground-breaking and broadly influential artist of the twentieth century
was not Picasso but Walt Disney. The impact that cartoons have had on our appreciation of
the visual image is hard to calculate, but it was certainly vast. Has any artist had more
imitators? A chance to work in an animation studio, in 1981, gave me first-hand experience
of art as a profession, not just some esoteric pursuit. Animation is to visual art what brain
surgery is to first aid – a whole new level. Working with Gwyn Perkins, I learnt how to
draw in a disciplined way, and what a professional sense of humour was. This gave me a
framework with which to solve creative problems. He was the most brilliant individual I
ever worked with.
When I produced Dream, my 35mm animated film, I tried to combine animation with my
love for paint, and based it on experiences in my own life. Even though it screened at the
Sydney Film Festival, nobody really got it. The ones that did get it were too frightened to
do anything with it – its message ran counter to the surf industry’s marketing fantasy. I’d
spent two years working my guts out, in complete isolation, and instead of it opening
doors for me, as I’d hoped, I found myself driving cabs, working on building sites and
wondering what I’d done wrong. Andrew Kidman was the only person I showed it to who
had the guts to offer me a job. He encouraged me to write and to draw and to play music – to
embrace surf culture and play a part in it. We continue to work together on various projects
to this day.
Comic art was a natural progression from animation, in some ways. Writing Gonad Man
also provided an opportunity to express something of the world through the eyes of a
surfer. It became instantly and gratifyingly popular, though it marked me forever as
something of a spokesman for surf culture, something I hadn’t consciously sought. I have
been surfing since I was very small, when Ray Hookham first took my brother and I, friends
of his son Randy, to the beach to go surfing in the late sixties. The heady atmosphere of the
beach scene in those days was not lost on my young psyche, and will be with me forever, I
suspect.
But a surfing background is not something to shout about, I’ve found, if you’re serious
about a career as a fine artist. Not in Australia, anyway. I recently exhibited some paintings
in Sydney, at David Rex-Livingston’s gallery, and was talking to a fellow artist about my
work. He seemed very impressed. A little later, he collared me, having just read my CV.
‘You haven’t exhibited since 1994…? Why?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ I replied, somewhat uncertainly, ‘I was busy, raising a family, working for surf
magazines…’
The look on his face was one of dismay, similar to the looks I used to get from cartoonists
when they found out I could paint. ‘What are you doing here, when you can paint like that?’
they’d say. Like I was somehow wasting my talent. Maybe they’re right, but it seems to me
the disposable nature of print art breeds a false sense of irrelevance among cartoonists,
while the longevity aspired to by those in the fine arts seems to breed an equally false sense
of self-importance. It’s all very strange, because the thought and skill that go into a
successful cartoon are often far greater, in my experience, than the purely sensual response
to the subject that a painting can represent.
All I can say is that my art is a reflection of my life and the times I grew up in. As a kid, I
was just as big a fan of Donald Duck as I was of Monet’s Waterlilies. And surfing was the
freest form of sport, because nobody had to keep score. Somehow, it’s all just stayed with
me.
Mark Sutherland, 2009
MARK SUTHERLAND – Artist CV
Solo Exhibitions
1985 Ralph Martin Gallery, Townsville QLD
1987 Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville QLD
1992 POD Gallery, Surry Hills NSW
1994 Headspace Gallery, Paddington NSW
Group Exhibitions
1986 Painting selected for Sulman Prize Exhibition, AGNSW
'Interior - Woman Watching TV' (Judge: Albert Tucker)
1987 Robin Gibson Gallery, Christmas Stocking Exhibition
1993 Painting selected for Sulman Prize Exhibition, AGNSW
'Blue'
2001-6 Tubular Cels, Silicon Pulp Gallery, Stanmore, NSW
Travelled nationally
2003 Country Energy Landscape Prize, NSW 'Newee Creek'
2003 Surf Style Exhibit 111 Minna Gallery, San Fransisco CA
2004 Bowraville Surf Classic, Bowraville Theatre NSW
Bowraville Art Gallery, Bowraville NSW
2005 Rex-Livingston Art Dealer, Surry Hills NSW
2005 Whitewash 'Surfers That Art', Torquay VIC
2005 II Mostra Internacional de Arte & Cultura Surf, São Paulo
SP Brasil
2006 Art on the Rocks, Sydney NSW
2007 Rex-Livingston Art Dealer, Surry Hills NSW
Awards
1985 Desiderius Orban Youth Award Arts Council of Australia
- Oil painting
1985-87 1st, Neta Phillips Prize, Townsville Qld
1st, Innisfail Art Prize Qld
1st, Townsville Art Prize Qld
2nd, Cloncurry Art Prize Qld
2006 1st, Scotts Head Art Prize NSW
Collections
National Maritime Museum, Sydney
Charters Towers City Council, Qld
Private collections, Australia & worldwide
Films
1989 DREAM 35mm short animated film
Finalist Yoram Gross Short Animated Film Awards,
Sydney Film Festival
Tours nationally with OZ Animation - The New Wave
1994 DREAM screens at Flickerfest, Bondi & Big Day Out,
NSW
1996 DREAM re-released as part of surf documentary Litmus.
1998 GONAD MAN Pilot animation for Southern Star
Entertainment
2003 DREAM re-released on Litmus DVD edition
2004 Animated sequence for surf documentary Glass Love
2005 Commissioned Judge, I Festival Internacional de Cinema
Surf, São Paulo SP Brasil
Publications
1993-99 Wrote and illustrated GONAD MAN cartoon in Waves
Wrote and illustrated extensively for Tracks, Waves and
various Australian and international surf publications
1996 GONAD MAN anthology of cartoons published, sells out
15,000 print run
Pen & ink drawings featured in The Surfer's Journal
quarterly magazine, USA
1998 Illustrations for Melba column, The Australian newspaper
1998-99 Wrote and illustrated opinion column The Heckler FHM
magazine, Australia
Feature interviews in Surfing World & Waves magazines
2004 Featured interview, 14pp Surfers Path magazine, UK &
Worldwide editions
2006 Feature article & artwork ‘Brasil’ Alma Surf magazine,
Brasil
2009 Feature article & artwork ‘My Life as a Surf Cult’
Kurungabaa Journal, UNSW Launched GONAD MAN as a subscriber-based online
comic