Plasticine friendsAmanda Marburg’s worldis melancholic, somehowpoetic and strangelymedieval. She is a painterof exquisite subtlety, writesAshley Crawford. Portraitby Kirstin Gollings.

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First published in Australian Art Collector, Issue 42 October-December 2009

Once upon a time a girl sat in her room playing with her plasticine.She would make little figures who would become parts of stories thatshe’d heard or seen in movies and in her imagination they would

move and act out their wee adventures.When the girl grew older she was given a camera and so she started

taking photos of her favourite subjects, her plasticine friends and thestrange and oddly coloured, landscapes they inhabited. In the dark shewould watch movies; Psycho, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Whatever Happenedto Baby Jane? She thought she could make clay-mation figures of thecharacters and make them move. She could do what a lot of her friends weredoing and make videos.

As time went by the girl kept being told what a great painter she was.More and more people wanted to own her paintings and more and more shewould use her photographs of her made-up friends and their strange worldsto render them with paint on canvas

The girl was shy and surprised by how excited people got about herpaintings. Friends encouraged her to show them and eventually, in 2001, shehad an exhibition called The Bomb at the small artists run-space called TCBArt Inc. in Melbourne. The genie had been let out of the bottle. A man with alot of experience arrived from Sydney and the girl had the first commercialshow of her paintings the next year at Rex Irwin. Since then there has beenno turning back.

Amanda Marburg was born in 1976 and studied painting at the VictorianCollege of the Arts, finishing there in1999. Since her first show at Rex IrwinGallery she has held solo exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne almost everyyear. The titles of Marburg’s exhibitions hint at some of the strange darknessof her densely layered narratives; Misery & Gin, Giving the Devil his due, Mad Loveis Strange, The Other Side. The titles are both melancholic and romantic, darkand poetic. Like the paintings themselves, there is a hint of humour withinthe dark palimpsest of forms. More than anything, however, Marburg hasbecome renowned as a painter of exquisite subtlety – her mad plasticinecharacters take on a formidable pathos.

For some years Marburg worked as an assistant to John Young, a well-known Melbourne-based painter. A year or so ago, she announced that shewas going to attempt to live off her own painting and go it alone. Since that

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This page: Amanda Marburg, Flowers, 2007. Oil on canvas, 44 x 55cm COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.

Opposite page: Amanda Marburg, Marny, 2005. Oil on linen, 98 x 70cm. COURTESY: REX IRWIN ART DEALER, SYDNEY.

“In the painting of the flowers there’s a pink ring in theforeground. That wasmy engagement ring.Blair had the blue one.They were made from silver and Legoand the two stucktogether.”

First published in Australian Art Collector, Issue 42 October-December 2009

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time there have been major shifts in her work. Between the 2005 show withRex Irwin and her last show with Uplands Gallery this year she has focusedin on the specific subjects rather than a sense of noir-ish narrative andintrigue that had typified her work beforehand.

The Uplands show, The Other Side, was in essence a suite of exquisite still-lifes. While still rendered in Marburg’s faux-naif style, from a distance theywere realistic indeed, but somehow imbued with a medieval aesthetic. Attimes it was a cold feast, a lobster accompanied by detailed grapes or a fish,flayed, where the lemon peel was blackened, the vented acids doing theirwork while three Greek olives dried by the side, a hand-melded knobblyknife recently discarded from its task. There was a flayed rabbit carcass,stringy with white fatty tissue.

She was unafraid to tackle clichéd motifs; a human skull, its jawboneplaced to one side next to a candlestick to add the more obvious gothicconceit. She painted dark flowers, that ultimate romantic signifier – the rose– rendered in deep crimsons. Books were painted stacked, their pagesbuckled with moisture, well-travelled by both land and sea.

While in the past her paintings were complex and threatrical, here theywere honed and minimalised. The sense of theatre remained, but so did amore stringent sense of control. Marburg agrees that the shift has beendramatic. “The images from 2005 were a lot more random,” she says. “Theywere mainly just from films I had recently watched.”

The 2005 works at Rex Irwin were far more elaborate in narrativesensibility than those that followed. Grave Digger would have beenhysterically funny were it not for an inherent sadness and desperation that

Grave Digger wouldhave been hystericallyfunny were it not foran inherent sadnessand desperation thatthe main figureexuded.

This page: Amanda Marburg, Grave Digger, 2005. Oil on linen, 90 x 130cm. COURTESY: REX IRWIN ART DEALER, SYDNEY.

Opposite page: Amanda Marburg, Bird, 2007. Oil on canvas, 44 x 55cm. COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.

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She was unafraid to tackle clichéd motifs; a human skull,its jawbone placed to one side next to a candlestick toadd the more obvious gothic conceit.

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the main figure exuded. Man, telephone, plume of smoke broiled the innocence ofPinochio with the noir of Raymond Chandler via the staged melancholia of TomWaits. And, despite its deliberate crudeness, Owl summed up the powerfuliconographic threat of that all-too-gothic bird.

Inherently more formal, the seven paintings in The Other Side in 2007 allstrangely constituted one story – almost like a slice out of someone’s life, albeita rather arcane and hermetic one. But Marburg knew what she wanted and inmany respects The Other Side constitutes the most personal and cathartic workshe has created to date. In numerous ways the show was a homage to Marburg’sformer fiancée, the artist Blair Trethowan who, suffering deep depression, tookhis own life in early 2006.

“The Uplands show was more focused,” says Marburg. “For once I knew what Iwanted to do. In a way it had a lot to do with Blair. In the painting of the flowersthere’s a pink ring in the foreground. That was my engagement ring. Blair hadthe blue one. They were made from silver and Lego and the two stuck together.”

The inherent melancholia of such an impetus was balanced, perhaps notsurprisingly when one looks at the work, by the fact that she had also immersedherself in the phantasmagoria of the world of Harry Potter. The sadness and theinescapable fantasy of these works was impossible to ignore.

In many ways Marburg’s more recent work has powerful elements of self-portraiture. “In a way I guess they do,” she says. “This is the first time I think I’vereally put myself into the work. Usually I just find images that I like at thatparticular time.”

In the past Marburg has used quite specific stories or movies as sources. “It’susually about what I’m watching, reading or listening to. My next show with Rexin December is based on a short story called Lobster by Guillaume Lecasble. It’sabout a lobster and a lady who fall in love … As I usually model from film stillsor photos, this will be the first time I have to make stuff up. Luckily it’s quite avisual little novel…”

When many of her peers have turned to process-based work such as video,performance and photography, Marburg, while having some involvement in theperformance group Damp, has ended up concentrating on paint on canvas.While she has experimented with all forms of media, when asked what drives

Above: Amanda Marburg, Skull, 2007. Oil on canvas, 44 x 55cm. COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.

Above right: Amanda Marburg, Books, 2007. Oil on canvas, 44 x 55cm. COURTESY: UPLANDS GALLERY, MELBOURNE.

First published in Australian Art Collector, Issue 42 October-December 2009

her back to paint her answer is immediate and to the point: “I love painting!”Marburg’s strange and laborious process remains much as it has since she

first investigated the potential of clay-mation. “The process has been prettymuch the same for the last six years,” she says. “It’s the only way I know how toget the result I want,” she says somewhat disingenuously. “I’m not real good atmaking things up.”

But to say that there is a vigorous imagination at work here would be anunderstatement. In many ways Marburg is a throwback to the romanticvoyeurism of the painter, taking as inspiration the shimmery light cast throughwine bottles in her favourite bar, Hell’s Kitchen, which is tucked into a smallspace in inner-city Melbourne. She’s truly old-fashioned in the sense of a beer-toting, card-wrangling character straight out of a Gothic-Western. She goes sofar as to enter into poker games in Las Vegas, taking in the dark, tense facesaround the table like a stressed succor.

As she says, her true inspirations are “the other dudes in the studio and my fellow drinkers at Hells.” She relished a group exhibition called Hell NeedsThis Town... a curated show from last year based on Charles Swickard’s 1916schlock Western film Hell’s Hinges, in which the main character proclaims that“Hell needs this town, and it’s goin’ back, and goin’ damn quick!” as he burnsdown the town.

“As well as being directly related to Western films, [it] was also aboutdrinking, playing poker and music. There was a painting of Russ [thebartender] from Hells’ behind the bar, and one of Henry Wagons (a countrysinger friend who I was playing poker with every week) and myself playingcards. I was going to do a bit of a Vegas series, but the still-lifes seemed more appropriate at the time.”

But wherever she takes us, from a card game rendered through the mistyprism of a scotch glass through to a witch’s coven, Marburg is going to come up with surprises. Her quirky aesthetic is balanced by her sheer skill with thebrush. The hints of melancholia are buoyed by untarnished cheekiness and awicked humour. If there is sadness, there is also irreverence and ribald hints ofanarchy. Like following the rabbit down the hole, there are entire worlds yet toflow from beneath her brush to seduce her hapless viewers. �

Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney is showing work by Amanda Marburg from 4 to 22 December 2007.

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“As well as beingdirectly related toWestern films, [it] was also aboutdrinking, playingpoker and music.”

This page: Amanda Marburg,This is what death looks like, 2006.Oil on canvas, 90 x 130cm. COURTESY: THE ARTIST.

Opposite page: Amanda Marburg, Man, telephone, plume ofsmoke, 2005. Oil on linen, 84 x 60cm. COURTESY: REX IRWIN ART

DEALER, SYDNEY.

First published in Australian Art Collector, Issue 42 October-December 2009