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Max Lovell: Ahayuta II, drawing

Valerie Galbraith-Lovell, fabric and mixed media collage

From top:

Small God of the Timely Prophesy

Quiet Evening Deity

The Meditating King contemplates the Third Eye

Crucifix II

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VALERIE and MAI LOVELL In 7 990, Valerie and Max Lovell intended to take a year out from working as

artists and teachers in South Australia, to travel around the continent. They had already travelled extensively in England, Europe and North America, and their

experiences had provided rich stimulus for their work.

An advertisement for a post as artist in residence at the New England Girls' School in Armidale brought a change of plans . When Max wrote to the school, suggesting that it could have two artists in residence at the same time, the offer was taken up and the pair found themselves teaching again, before they embarked on one of the most productive times of their careers.

Valerie, a painter and worker in textiles, and Max, who has long worked in graphics, painting, sculpture and collage, promoted the idea that art should be pleasurable . Max's teaching credo was 'I would want them to try something different, because every student is as important as another; it's not a factory'. And because they believed that art teachers should have exhibitions, the couple continued to build on their reputations with

individual shows, before establishing a gallery to encourage young, or relatively unrecognised artists whose work they admired.

In July 1993, they launched a series of one-month shows of works by contemporary Australian artists at Aries Art Gallery, near the centre of Armidale.

Armidale has long been home to the famous Hinton Collection and the Chandler Coventry Collection, both of which are held in the New England Regional Art Museum (NERAM). In recent years, NERAM has shown many local and visiting artists' work, but the confines of space have limited the exposure of numerous local artists in particular. The history of independent galleries in the region has been characterised by intermittent commercial successes in promotion of

local or other artists. The opening of Aries Art Gallery in an Indian restaurant, Spices, has gone further in boosting contemporary works by adopting an approach to exhibitions which is increasingly common in European, American and Australian urban galleries.

During their travels in the USA, Valerie and Max noted the drift towards such cafe and restaurant-galleries, a result of artists' and curators' disenchantment with forbiddingly impersonal galleries and, more particularly, prohibitive prices for works by artists whose works were plainly not intended for ordinary homes. Their own home in Armidale is filled with their own works and those of artists whom they have taught, met, or been impressed by . The Aries Gallery is pitched at exposing works which visitors might not otherwise see unless

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These pages: Max Lovell, mixed media/ collage

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Towers of the Rainbow King

Opposite page top left: Shrine of the Rainbow King

Top right: Lilypond of the Rainbow King

Below left: Ode to Harlow

Below right: Journey of the Rainbow King

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Max Lovell: Old and New on the Mediterranean, mixed media/collage

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by chance at some nebulous future · date in a metropolitan setting. The

Lovells unabashedly promote works which are a pleasure to live with, at the same time encouraging the artists through more rapid exposure .

A tangible form of this encouragement stems from Valerie and Max's practice of framing graphic works accepted for exhibition on a small-fee hire basis. This way, artists can submit graphics unframed, and avoid the delay and cost of framing their own works. Prices are affordable, and patrons can frame the pictures how they please. It is apparent that teaching and mixing with younger artists has given the Lovells an unusual and a practically-expressed sympathy for artists who struggle to get acceptance by galleries. This is particularly so at a time when high costs of mounting works and publicity have frustrated desires to connect with a wide public. The Lovells' emphasis

has been on accessible art, and their practice in every respect reflects their curiosity and commitment .

Valerie's academic qualifications­ranging over visual arts, Australian Studies and Koori Studies-have been supplemented with postgraduate research into labour history and industrial relations . Her advocacy of harmonious industrial conditions for professional colleagues has led her to represent and support her peers. This sense of fair dealing provides an exceptional underpinning for her support of other art workers . Her academic dissertation concerns the development of the community arts movement in Australia . No division appears in her work between intellectualisation of art and her own productions. The Lovells' commitment to encouraging well-being through every channel is of a piece with their individual and joint pursuits.

This is not to say their productions are the result of collaboration. Their works reveal distinctly separate themes and mannerisms.

Valerie was an established textile artist before she met Max in 1983. Her drawings, quilts, sculptures and paintings are represented in many collections, and her major exhibitions include Studio 20, the Jam Factory and the Barry Newton Gallery in Adelaide, and Melbourne's Sweet Jamaque. In all these exhibitions, Valerie's works reflect fascination with handicraft techniques and artworks from cultures off the mainstream routes.

Her most recent exhibition in Armidale featured what she describes as 'precious' things: textile shapes designed on a small scale, incorporating reminiscences of folk art and precious art, so that feathers, stones and varied textures combine to resemble pots and other objects which trigger memories in those who look at them and feel them. Her works have featured

textiles and materials from the Yemen desert, Guatemala and Goa, the Apache, Navaho and Hopi locations. Her quilts feature geometrical patterns adapted from North American folk art, and other boundary-crossing forms. The imagination is hardly limited by geographical locations, and Valerie's work is understandable when one considers that when artists look at other works, they see much to accept in technique and theme as well as aspects to reject so far as their own purposes are concerned.

Max Lovell's career as an artist spans a longer period than Valerie's. Starting as an art teacher in Victoria some thirty years ago, he gravitated toward fulltime involvement in art in the eighties, when his work was frequently exhibited. Besides multiple solo exhibitions at Studio 20, Barry Newton Gallery and Sweet Jamaque, he has shown works at Adelaide's Lombard Gallery and in Armidale galleries before he and Valerie established Aries Art Gallery.

Max sculpts, paints and works in collage and mixed media . His interest in collage was encouraged by James Meldrum's teaching and practice at Melbourne's RMIT. And while Max 'stuck things on paintings', he observed the commercial uses of collage, and saw that it was possible to make some sort of a living out of art. As conditions changed through the eighties and nineties, though, the living became less assured. Since the seventies, as Valerie also found, the .size and prices of art works have shrunk-which goes some way to understanding the Lovells' interest in accessible smaller works in the 1990s. As Max observes, a successful exhibition in Adelaide in the seventies or early eighties was where your work sold; in the late eighties or the nineties, 'if you sold anything, it was a success'.

Max's current work still reflects experience with commercial processes

including extensions of photography, photocopy and lithography, as well as mastery of brush, pen and pencil works on paper . His work incorporates pop elements, American Indian motifs and European and Australian traditional art . Thus, in some representations, Aztec and Mixtec physiognomy combines with shapes reminiscent of Punch and Judy show puppets, in works treating themes of sacrifice (particularly of the young in society). Other works focus on regeneration and reverence for the soil and crops: North American motifs including ears of corn and shapes suggestive of fertility and growth reflect Max's sense of the simultaneous savagery and gentleness of Indian art. Max describes his travels with Valerie as 'ideas trips' rather than touristic sightseeing. His works correspondingly indicate sympathy with other ways of seeing and portraying the physical world, and of revealing spiritual beliefs.

Max emphasises the appealing insistence of the connectedness of all things in American Indian philosophies, and the equal insistence that it is man who is the disturbing element. He is also drawn to pre-Renaissance European art, in particular Celtic art and art of the 8th century. He has found the exploration of ancient stone monuments and ruins in England and Europe as stimulating as the experience of 1,000-year-old Indian dwellings in the Arizona desert. He likens the feelings evoked by physical contact with these memorials to 'time-travelling, in your mind'. Accounts of his own Cornish forebears' experiences

· enhance this sense of the connectedness of things . To touch a wall or ascend the same steps in the same manner, in the same place, as someone else did, 1200 years previously, provides Max with a necessary extension of self which is essential to' his art.

At the same time, Max's eclectioism is reflected in an idiosyncratic list of 'heroes', including Mick Jagger and

Peter Pan (neither of whom had to grow up); Mr. Punch (the foe of everything in authority: perhaps like Mick Jagger in his early pop­emanation?), and Joh Bjelke-Petersen (perhaps because of physical affinities with Mr. Punch, and a similar attitude to authority) . Common to these figures is an anarchic attitude to the world, which is perhaps the flip-side to that connectedness which Max admires in philosophies associated with societies who live in harmony with their environments and among themselves.

If their individual work shows few obvious signs of convergence, Valerie and Max Lovell have combined forces on one recent project, which has come to fruition through 1994. After seeing several artists' books in New York, they thought they could do a better job themselves, and wrote to some twenty artists with an audacious request for eighty original works from each, to be made into a limited edition. The artists would be paid with copies of the works, while a limited number were available for sale by subscription. The works were to be bound in such a way that subscribers could provide more permanent rigid binding or remove individual works to mount their own changing exhibitions.

The response was unanimous, and Valerie and Max began to collate the artists' submissions, interleaving the individual works in each volume with overlays bearing statements by Valerie about the contributors, or poems by commissioned writers or associates of the artists. The works include lithographs, woodcut and silkscreen prints, paintings, pop art, collage, mixed media works, and two textile constructions (the latter by Valerie). All the contributors are artists of standing among fellow practitioners. They include Canberra artists John Pratt, John Gould and Steve Raper, Melbourne artists June Young and Di Burns, Joy and Alan Phillips from Darwin, Lindal Findlay (from

Max Lovell: The Emperor's Regatta II, mixed media/collage

Goondiwindi) and New Englanders Alicia Larkins and Helen Hume, as well as several others, including the Lovells.

The book is projected as the first in a series of limited editions, destined for release each few months. As such, it is a logical development of the Lovells' aim to give artists greater recognition and to make art a more common experience for people who cannot conceive of access to vastly larger and more expensive objects in their homes.

Michael Sharkey

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