Inspiration found us here
Muse–
Heath Newman
@heath_newman
Words & photography–
Anna Hutchcroft
@annahutch_photo
Originally published in Paradiso Issue 13
The day I visit Heath Newman’s house, the sky is heavy. The grey clouds above are pregnant with rain, and we’d deliberated whether or not to postpone our meeting until the sun came out. But when I get there, I’m met with a warmth that can only come from a home carefully and lovingly curated by diverse sensibilities. Heath’s paintings on the wall are accompanied by polaroids and botanical knick knacks, and the new plaster sculptures he’s been working on sit between indoor plants that look too happy to belong to a share house. Sage and incense piggy-back the crisp winter breeze, and I walk through the front door just as Heath puts the kettle on.
Who lives here?
So the house consists of Jess or ‘Jume’ as we like to call her, she runs the ethical clothing label ‘Jume’. Then there is my partner Tais also, she works at the Steiner School just down the road and is completing her masters in teaching. It’s a super creative household, we all share the studio and are always making things. Tais is a master weaver and does beautiful watercolours and Jume is a whirlwind of creativity, from ceramics to photography and everything in between.
What was your childhood home like?
My childhood home was in a little surf town kinda close to the beach. My Mum was/is a super meticulous cleaner so the house was always cleaned to the point of unlived in. The house had this kinda terrarium green house thing that ran down the side where my bedroom was with lots of big ferns growing everywhere and it would cast this lovely green colour down into my room. All in all the house was pretty norm-core, rendered brick one story house on a semi busy road. It was nice being so close to the beach, only a short ride. On nights when the surf was big you could hear it from our house and I always loved that.
What part of your house says the most about you and the people who live in it?
I think as a collective the kitchen brings us most together, but the house has so many talismans and strange objects we’ve all collected from all over the world that the space really works as a totality of reflection. When we moved in within 24 hours we had the place complete, decorated from top to bottom. Jume had all the things we didn’t and vice versa. Since then the house has kind of worked like a ‘gallery/museum’ with all our little objects and artworks being cycled around the house every couple of weeks.
What is it about this area that most inspires you?
I think the quietness of where we live is super inspiring, we all moved back here from Melbourne and to be in such a beautiful pocket of the countryside is really lucky. It’s so still in the morning and all you ever seem to hear is birdsongs. We have this huge cattle farm behind us that sits on a couple hundred acres and we are always walking around and exploring new parts of that. We ventured up into the hill behind us the other day and popped out in Main Arm, overlooking the most beautiful farmland with subtropical bush and watched the sunset over our house. It’s super magical getting to enjoy this part of the area instead of Byron where we used to live or Melbourne for that matter. There is a serenity out here unbeknownst to me until now.
Your work is deeply rooted in myth, ritual, and esotericism. How have these teachings influenced who you are, and how you live your life?
To participate in the ritual is to participate in the myth, and to participate in the myth is to actualise archetypes, and it’s a really cool way to demarcate time. I love the concept of a ritual anyway. I’ll smudge the house, or work with the Bonsai, and everything is really ritualistic, very symbolic of the seasons. Even in terms of paintings: the tones of the backyard will come into the tones of the paintings and everything kind of becomes this symbiosis of growth and development. I think people give too much power to the one identity. In Chinese Medicine, your constitution is always changing. So who you are is always developing. Who I am at the beginning of a sentence changes on a cellular level by the end of a sentence. We’re always developing to be a different thing. I think people kind of get caught on the idea that they always have to be the same person, and if they break free of that then they’re losing themselves. In a world where things are changing and growing, people get scared, and people have to hang on to these pillars or ideas, they have to box themselves in. I think that’s why I’m so driven by plant medicine. It blows whatever you thought you thought out of the water. It’s amazing to have those lighting bolts of clarity. I think that’s where esotericism is really useful – the tarot might not actually be telling you your future, but you’re identifying with something in that card that’s giving you a better insight into the subconscious.
These sculptures are amazing! What did you use to make them? Can you tell me a bit more about the process?
They’re plaster. Plaster’s so cool, you can kind of bricolage it, and then assemble it together. It kind of just works with air and water, and it’s super malleable but within six minutes its completely hard. So I’ll wrap found objects in it and dangle it and hold them in place (and six minutes is actually ways longer than you think) until it hardens. So this one, for example, is a Chinese lotus pod on the end, and those are seed pods from that tree in my backyard. You can just cut bits of plaster and make little shapes and add it all together. That one there is an urn for a blue faced honey eater that I found dead in the garden. I love blue faced honey eaters. I thought it’d be nice to give him a final resting place, so I made him an urn. I originally wanted them all to be urns. I really got around doing those little urns and vessels.
Your paintings often feature words. “Serpent,” for example, scrawled in red across a burnt orange palette. Considering the power of words, how does this impact the visual hierarchy?
When you write the word, you visualise the serpent, but you’re also looking at the serpent so it almost becomes a second layer. There’s the aesthetic process in your mind, but then there’s your mind’s eye showing you the thing as well. Sometimes I like the idea of it being layered imagery, so the next part of the text actually works on the right side of your brain, so although you’re looking at something, and it says paradise, you’re imagining a paradise as well as looking at a word which maybe invokes the idea of paradise.
Your paintings often feature words. “Serpent,” for example, scrawled in red across a burnt orange palette. Considering the power of words, how does this impact the visual hierarchy?
When you write the word, you visualise the serpent, but you’re also looking at the serpent so it almost becomes a second layer. There’s the aesthetic process in your mind, but then there’s your mind’s eye showing you the thing as well. Sometimes I like the idea of it being layered imagery, so the next part of the text actually works on the right side of your brain, so although you’re looking at something, and it says paradise, you’re imagining a paradise as well as looking at a word which maybe invokes the idea of paradise.
It’s so personal, as well, the connotations that words hold for different people conjure up such varied memories and experiences.
And subjective! I really love that. You say the word love, and initially people agree that we’re all talking about the same thing but you’re talking about all those experiences that you had, and I’m talking about all of my experiences (which are probably really different) and so we feel like we’re understood but we’re actually just using an inert symbol to communicate something that is so grand and so impossible to render into a single word. I just love that about language. It’s ambiguous, and yet it’s a way of making us feel understood. Which is why it’s so nice to use visual things. Artwork is subjective anyway, but you can include words, or scripts, or poetry, and it adds a little realm that people can connect to and feel like they understand that.
I usually dig through books and just find a fraction of a sentence and abstract it from its context and it becomes its own reference for the work. There’s this one line: “The sparrow; the bird of Venus, was lecherous” and I just love that as a three part sentence, so sometimes you’ll just find fragments of that in my work. And there’s another one: “Nightshade, and other plants, from whose juices, night collects slumbers.” I love that because it was taking about Somnus who’s the Roman god of dreams and sleep, and out the front of his house he had poppies and nightshades and all of these plants growing and it was talking about the approach to Somnus’ cave, and describing the garden out the front, where the concept of “Nightshade in the Sun” was born. But the work isn’t necessarily about nightshades, or the sun, but they’re ultimately about all of those things. I also liked the idea of it being oxymoronic: nightshades in the sun. Everything’s kinda there, you just draw on whatever works. I feel like my works are more poetic than they are literal, and it could just be based on a wafty word, or an image, but everything’s about the collective consciousness.
It’s simultaneously an inside joke for yourself, and a catalyst for someone else’s imagination.
Well that’s it! You don’t own the artwork once it leaves your house, you don’t get to control what people think about it, and I love that. I just get to plant these little ideas, and watch people digest what they think. People will always extract their own stories out of it. It’s the death of the author – once you put that work on the wall, you don’t own it. It’s not up to you. People can try to do that, but I think it’s so good to just throw those ideas out there and put those symbols out there that resonate with you and ultimately someone just takes it on their own journey afterwards.
You seem to be purposefully ambiguous as well. When people come to you with their own interpretations of your work, does it turn into a bit of a feedback loop where your work becomes influenced by these interpretations?
Absolutely – especially when people see a painting and it’s halfway done and they’re like “is it like this?” And I’m like “no, but that’s great!” And I always describe my paintings as a mental map, it’s all collective consciousness anyway. I don’t own any of these images, I don’t own any of these concepts, all this stuff exists in the ether, it’s field above. Plato’s world of ideas. There’s the world of ideas, and there’s the world of actuality. Where your mind is, exists somewhere outside of your body and I like to look at things like that. Everything’s coming from this outer world, and I’m just the vessel that puts it out. And I feel so detached in the nicest way possible. Of course I get nervous when I’m presenting works or whatever but I’m also aware that it’s not my stuff. I may have painted it, or rendered it, or done my best to articulate whatever that mental map was, but it’s not mine.
You use a combination of big, broad, brush strokes that establish a solid colour palette, but then there are these other little gestures that evoke a different state of mind entirely. What are some of the ideas behind this?
Good observation! It’s actually a super long story but there’s this particular style of Bonsai, called Literati Bonsai. When the Samurai were kicked out of Japan, post Shogun dynasty, they all had to take noble death. A lot of them fled to the mountains and became sages up in the hills. They couldn’t find trees that they used to find down in the lowlands where they were originally making Bonsai so they would find these semi-grown trees, stunted by lack of light, and they would craft Bonsai out of them. It became something that symbolised anti-establishment and was a bit of a dig at the Shogun Dynasty, and they birthed this whole school of Literati, which means “scrawl of the drunken monk,” and that’s where ink painting came from.
The idea is that every scrawl is a recording of the moment. Every ink splash is not just ink touching paper or canvas, it’s a recording of what the temperature was, what the wind was doing, how your emotions were, what you were thinking when you did it. Everything is recorded in the moment. And so those scrawls and glyphs, and cyphers, they’re all momentary recordings. I think the hardest thing is that you need to be in a meditative state, where you can make that stroke or make that scrawl, and it be unbiased and naive and childlike. That’s what you really want, and when you see that as an artist, it’s like “Oh my god!” and most people would be like “it’s just a scribble on a piece of paper,” but you’re like “yeah, but how good is it.” Because even trying to do a scribble looks real contrived, so to get to that state where you can actually get those scrawls and splashes as they come, and as individual recordings of all the moments it took to create that artwork, it’s amazing.
All of my paintings have these scrawls in the background and I’ve been building these layers up and it invokes the concept of the spirit veil, the world of ideas that exist behind layers of consciousness.
Describe your relationship to creativity.
I’ve learnt that I’m just a vessel. The ideas are here, and I’m putting them on canvas, but I’m just doing the work. It’s a hard thing to explain, but it’s also amazing. Inspiration finds you where it wants to find you. So if you’re in the studio all the time, odds are you’re going to get some inspiration and it’s going to come out. I’ll buy 10 metres of canvas and it won’t be until the last two metres that I’ll feel like I’m in the zone. So I just paint over the previous eight metres of work that I made, and then the new works will come out over the top of them, and sometimes I’ll paint over them again and again. All of my works have like eight paintings underneath them, and within that you get the little bubbles of texture that you see on the surface. I feel like it all relates back to that veil, the layers of reality.
How does the art of Bonsai and the art of painting intersect for you?
I guess it all kind of starts from an aesthetic principle. It’s the idea that you’re collaborating with something to create something else. I feel the same whether it’s a tree, or a painting. You can’t make it do anything that it doesn’t want to do. You have to work with the materiality that you’re given. With Bonsai, it’s always a collaboration with the tree. I can’t make this branch grow in a way that it doesn’t want to grow. I can train it, but I still have to collaborate with the tree. If you work with a tree for long enough, it grows to respect you. You’re giving it the ultimate conditions to thrive. You have a vision, and the tree has a capacity, and you work together to create something. It’s fully about the collaboration. And I think I took the idea to painting, and thought “ok, so there’s a finite potential to this paint, but I want to see how many directions that can go.”
So I use the principles of the Literati style, like ink, and movement, and connection to nature, and I think that’s one of the things I started doing with my still life. When working with bonsai, the idea is you want to look at a full sized tree, put everything to scale, shape the branches, and represent that tree with a bonsai. You capture the essence of the big tree with the small tree. I think thats what I want to do with still life. Rather than making the branch look exactly like a branch, I’m more interested in capturing the essence of the tree. Or the essence of what I’m growing. With a lot of my paintings, I try to capture the essence of how it feels rather than how it looks.
There seems to be a real flow-on effect that carries you beyond bonsai and still lifes to this greater life philosophy. How has that evolved for you?
Being interested in Bonsai got me interested in Literati school which got me interested in painting which got me interested in calligraphy which got me interested in then applying that into painting. Everything bleeds into one another. Even the alchemy of tinctures, there’s three philosophical principles: mercury, sulphur, and salt. And you need all of those things to make an effective tincture, to be strong, and you just start seeing these patterns. It’s always an interaction, always a collaboration.
I feel like everything I do, even if I’m painting geometry, it’s still about nature. The inert framework of the earth is math, and you’re using geometry to explain something, or just to realise something. You may not even know what it is initially, but it just comes through, within the art. And I think nature’s such a good example of that, it’s got this ingenious structure of things that the more you look at, the more you realise that everything holds this same structure of growth and development, and everything is literally interconnected.
So I feel like sometimes when I’m writing an artist statement, all I want to really say is “Everything is everything!” Ultimately I just talk myself to the same point anyway. You just use symbols to make people relate to other types of symbols, it’s such a strange thing. Was it Socrates, or Plato that said “The only thing I know is that I know nothing?” I think that everything always brings me down to that point of being like, “it’s only ego that thinks I need to know these things anyway, I’m just existing, and that’s ok.” But sometimes you get caught up in the language, or the context, or the environment, or the people, or the interactions, or the relationships, but ultimately, the idea is to be as zen or as taoist as possible. Just be the water. We struggle so much to find our place instead of just being like, “I am and that’s bloody great.”
