Human Nature Under The Spotlight

Illawarra Mercury

Saturday December 18, 2004

with KILMENY ADIE

KIAMA artist Michael Beare is looking at people's characteristics and global influences in his exhibition Foibles and Fables.

The works were created as the studio component in his study for a PhD through Charles Sturt University.

Beare says the works, which are themed around the concept of people's idiosyncrasies, took three years to complete between his thesis research and overseas travel.

They vary in size and the exhibition includes not only the finished oil paintings on canvas or the works on paper but also the sketches he drew as part of the creative process.

"If you look at it, the works go from smaller works in 2002 to larger in 2003 and the largest in 2004," he says.

"In the exhibition they are arranged in such a way that right in the middle are the small studies. They're used to make the larger works a genesis of creation."

Beare, who has worked as a high school and tertiary visual arts teacher and an arts consultant, says his PhD study field was a fairly new area of research.

"It's only a recent thing that artists do, that qualification and use artwork as a form of research and consider it for analysis and contextualisation," he says.

"To look at the processes in the work and where they fit in is much easier in someone else's than your own."

Foibles and Fables will run at Wollongong City Gallery until February 6.