Dubuffet 3

So I found that I was creating cartoon-like people, rather than abstract blog people (as Dubuffet does). So I tried again with a new scene, again from a Sydney crime scene in the early 20th Century. (This is Meagher Street in Chippendale).

 in progress.

Jacaranda Newtown

This work was donated to Australia Street Infants School in 2014 as part of an art auction.

My apologies for the quality of this photo - I'm unable to find a copy of the completed work in my photo archives! If you buy it perhaps you can take a good one and send it to me!

One of the marvellous things about living in Newtown is the period where the Jacarandas bloom on every corner. This is my naif impression of that in a kind of aerial view version.

It was created as part of a series of Newtown Maps I did for an exhibition at Buzzz Bar in Newtown in 2013.

Painting a Jacaranda is a very hard thing to do. Even photographs don't do them justice. There's a film: What Dreams May Come where Robyn Williams goes to heaven, and it's a painting his wife (who survives him on earth) is painting. She has the same struggle. But the film does do justice to the beauty of Jacarandas (so watch it!).

South Newtown where I live is also filled with trees. Very few people would believe how much our back yards are filled with growing living trees and birds and wildlife. So that's what this piece is about!

Ferry Ropes

This piece was donated to Australia Street Infants School for an art auction in 2014.
I am unable to find a photograph of the work, but it has lived in my bedroom with me for several years, so I know it well.
Perhaps if you buy the piece you can send me a good photo of it!

The piece began, as many of my abstract pieces do, with a photograph. In this case a ferry and porthole on the Manly Ferry.
I then extended the colours and incorporated some serendipity from other works (this work was once a painting of a beach scene for my exhibition "Coastal".
My nana lives in North Curl Curl and when I first came to Sydney for University in the 1980s I would take the bus and then the ferry back to Manly (and then another bus) to get home. That lasted only a little while before it was just too much and I moved to Glebe, thus beginning my long residency in the Inner West of Sydney!
The ferry had magical connotations for me as a child, because of fondly remembered holidays where my family would come to Sydney and we'd stay with my Nana or my aunts. There was always a reason to go to the city via Ferry.
So this piece is nostalgic and calm. I love the pale greens and blues.

Beach Blanket Celebrity Squares: National Geographic Beach

This work was donated to the Australia Street Infants School for an art auction in 2014.

This collage is part of my Cabinet of Curiosities series from 2010 and 2011.
As I worked on pieces that put objects into boxes I got into boxes that were objects.
This set of boxes contain chunks of an aerial view of a beach somewhere in the US in the 1980s. It's a photograph from National Geographic.
In 2003, I did a collage series called Epistories. It used pictures of rocks from National Geographic. It was the first "magic formula" I found for making works that I loved. My first solo exhibition (Patchwork and Stories) in 2004 exhibited the Epistories.
Because of that exhibition, people gave me their old National Geographic magazine. I have boxes and boxes them.
So this beach piece uses some of those donated magazines.
I love this work because while I know that there are people on a beach the subtle browns and greens and white highlights form abstract shapes in my "cabinet" boxes.

Cabinet of curiosities

This series lasted more than a year and morphed from simple cabinets to boxes here are some highlights.

An Artist CV

Cindy Tonkin enrolled in an improvisation course and ended up in a mixed media class in the summer of 2003, the year she turned 40. She discovered a talent for collage, and hung her first solo exhibition in the summer of 2004. She has since extended her work to include acrylic paint and artist’s books.

She has exhibited works in several Walking the Streets in Newtown and the Newtown Art Space project; in the Ewart Gallery at the Workshop Arts Centre, Propeller, Liberated Books and Lane Cove Gallery. Several of her artist's books are currently exhibited at art EST in Leichhardt.

She thinks art should be about the work and not the artist.

M et Mme Piton: the flag book

Published in 2016, but made in 2014. I had a heap of trouble finding a good way to use these vintage French postcards from the 60s and 70s. 

Find out more about it here.

Works donated to Australia Street Infants School

National Geographic Beach Blanket Celebrity Squares

Here are links to some information about each of the art works I donated to Australia St Infant's School Art Auction.

• The shops around the corner
• Jacaranda Newtown
• Ferry Ropes
• Word on the Street
• National Geographic Beach Blanket Celebrity Squares

Here is my artist's CV written for this auction.

Dubuffet 2

So once I had set up the Dubuffet style and copied it, I applied it to new subject matter. In this case some photographs of 1940s Sydney crime scenes.

Which yielded these kinds of results

Dubuffet takes over

While i will probably publish a few pages from my works (especially books, which i have been tidying up recently), I am at the moment working on a series of paintings inspired by this Dubuffet painting. I saw this painting in Paris at the Postal Museum (love a good postal museum!).
I loved the painting and since I'm always reticent to draw figures into my paintings, I thought looking at his work might give me more confidence in drawing figures (well, his kind of figures).
Here's the postcard.

And here are two of my versions of it:

more to come.