Bradbeer's loving spoonful

The Herald Sun, 29 April, 2008

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Being a heavy tea-drinker has helped give Godwin Bradbeer's award-winning drawings their unique burnished quality.

They have now become unmistakable, these isolated, naked and mostly standing male figures and heads with their elegant classical proportions.

The drawings have a mysterious smoky edge that gives them both a sense of movement and depth. And tea is at the core of it all.

The 57-year-old Bradbeer found if he rubbed the back of his nickel-plated teaspoon against his drawing surface he could get a halo effect, a bit like photographer Man Ray's solarisation.

The silver oxide from the spoon, combined with Chinagraph pencil and charcoal, give the drawings their distinctive glow.

'In one sense I draw quite conventionally, but at intervals I'll work with a rag or a cloth or something. At the moment I'm using lamb's wool and a saw,' he says.

'The saw creates parallel lines, whirlpools and myriad contours.

'Though I'm a figurative artist it's not just technical trickery. It makes the surface enigmatic in a way that our selves are a mystery to us. It often feels as if I'm working in abstract codes.'

Bradbeer has been carrying an assortment of saw blades, wool and wornthrough spoons to back up what have become almost mythical stories about his work.

He had this odd collection at hand when he gave a talk at James Makin Gallery, where his current work, Soliloquy, is on show.

'I knew the spoons would come up because it's the most commonly told story,' he says.

Another story is that the scale of his work, with some pieces 9m wide, occurred because he had a huge factory studio in Brunswick. But he has since lost the studio and has been producing work from a cramped shed in his back yard, albeit at a more human scale.

He's had 11 solo shows since 2001, including one that toured nationally called The Metaphysical Body.

'And most of it's come out of that s----y little studio. It's worse than some of my students have,' he says.

He has a better explanation, anyway, for making big work.

'The human scale was a standard for me and then periodically I had to do these things that were like architecture. I was deeply in love with Egyptian art and I wanted to engage in monumentality. I love the adrenalin rush of working large.'

The artist, who also heads the drawing department at RMIT, has been making drawings at times when both the figure as a subject and drawing as a medium have been pushed to the periphery in art. He's had to field accusations of being conservative.

But Bradbeer has stuck with his beliefs in classical aesthetic ideals and his sense the human form can carry meaning both universal and timeless.

'I'm caught between realism and idealism,' he says. 'And I'm very self-conscious about being seen as reactionary or hunkered down because I don't think I am.'