Two Artist Models

Star Gossage

Star Gossage is a Maori New Zealand painter. Her practice includes theatre, filmmaking, poetry, and sculpture. Gossage experiments with expressionism, impressionism and surrealism. She incorporates Māori concepts such as whānau and whakapapa.

Gossage works consist of mixed media. Such as watercolour, charcoal, ink, acrylic, chalk, and pastels. Her colour palette is influenced by natural pigments like fish oils, burnt kauri gum, clay, lime and earth. Her work is influenced by female figures. She references herself, whānau (family) and the spiritual essence of womanhood.

Star Gossage works through an idea, or a thought or a need… The connection is there – For herself – Like Frida Kahlo – made it traditional but made it about herself and the things that happened to her.

In her practice process, she normally sketches in her journal for example when she went to Cadaqués and Star Gossage won’t paint anything unless she feels something. It’s about the power of emotions. Getting it inside the painting.

I watched an interview on Youtube, “Star Gossage in conversation with Mary Kisler with Auckland Art Gallery Foundation Cocktail Chats”, 2021. She was travelling across Cadaqués, Spain and in Minyerri, an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. Gossage mainly discussed about her Cadaqués trip.

Chuck Close

•He has been described as a photorealist, minimalist, and abstract expressionist.

•He is best known for his large- scale photorealist portraits.

•He would lay a grid over a photo and transferred a proportional grid onto his large canvases. He would apply acrylic paint with an airbrush and scrap off the excess to duplicate the shadings int the photo.

•In addition to self-portraits, he based some of his work off family or fiends or even prominent people in the art-world.

•In his more recent works, he uses these sorts of tiles of oval shapes that are repeated across its large scale. Up close its abstract itself but far away it’s a recognizable portrait.

•He was also known for the struggles he went through as an artist, earliest being dyslextic and having trouble reading which that jump started his interest in art where he began drawing and painting, compensating for his academic struggles. Later on in life, a blood clot caused him to be partially paralysed but continued his making with an attachment to his arm that allowed him to do what he loves.