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16 17 ARTLINES 4 | 2020 THE GORDON BENNETT STUDIO The painting space Gordon Bennett worked in during the late 1980s, as he studied and then graduated from Queensland College of Art (QCA), was cramped and modest. He and his partner, Leanne, converted their garage and set it up as a purely functional area under the family home on Deckle Road, Petrie: on the outer edge of Brisbane, with virtually no natural light, rising damp, and barely enough space to cut and stretch his own canvases. He established highly pragmatic ways to keep things moving there, with every material, paint pot or tool methodically positioned and labelled. The maximum dimensions of major works made at this time, for example, equalled Gordon’s own height and the width of his outstretched arms or comprised two or three units at that scale rather than one vast surface. He often unpicked blank, primed and pre-stretched canvases from their stretchers and stapled them to ply boards erected as makeshift walls, increasing the available surface space on which to paint. Gordon soon came to dislike this method, however, due to the difficulty of re-stretching painted works later and because there was little room to get long views on works, or to document them. Despite space limitations, Gordon was determined to keep as much of his process in-house as possible. Just as the content of his work resonated with his lived experience, he also spent much time and skill creating the conditions for his work to be realised and documented — from cutting and priming substrates to DIY lighting for photography. As a former fitter and turner and Telecom linesman, completing manual tasks other artists usually outsourced or making products usually bought off the shelf gave Gordon a quiet sense of fulfilment and helped to build his confidence as an artist. It also drove necessary changes to ensure the studio remained functional and safe: fumes from the oil paints and cleaning solvents he used at that time, for example, were an ongoing challenge in such closed quarters, and it was not long before these were replaced with water-based synthetic polymer paints. This switch from oils to acrylics was a key early developmental shift in Gordon’s studio practice and led him to discover a new high-quality product, known as Derivan Matisse Flow Formula acrylic, which would become a favourite staple. The shift was also an early indicator that Gordon could adapt any medium to arrive at the image he was seeking. It was the conceptual and suggestive power of a work — its attendant narrative and contexts — rather than the medium he used to get there, that really mattered. Gordon’s days were scheduled around his life as a mature-age art student, and the QCA’s studio-like teaching spaces and open critique presented him with a disciplined way of working. Rooted in centuries of Western tradition, this way of making art was a useful context for his analyses of representation, Modernism and the canon he studied. Accordingly, although Gordon’s voracious reading, notetaking, research and sketching was peripatetic, any act of ‘making’ a painting had to happen in his own dedicated studio space. The converted undercroft at Deckle Road suited his independent temperament and natural inclination for isolation; for him to have a very private retreat, far from the madding crowd, was ideal. Here, he could be immersed in his thinking and interact with the outer world on his own terms. This was no ‘drop-in’ or Above, clockwise from top left Leanne and Caitlin Bennett, University of Melbourne artist-in-residence studios, 9 October 1993, with Self-portrait: Interior/exterior 1993 (left) and Bloodlines 1993 (right) on back wall; Gordon Bennett in the University of Melbourne studio, 9 October 1993, and Bennett’s Petrie studio, with works in progress, December 1992 / Photographs: Leanne Bennett / Images courtesy: The Estate of Gordon Bennett; and views of Bennett’s Samford Valley studio, with Notes to Basquiat: Bird 2001 and other works from the series, the ‘Stripe’ series in progress, 2003, and with Notes to Basquiat: Volcano 2 2001 and other works from the series / Photographs: Simon Wright Opposite Gordon Bennett Mirror (Harlequin) 1994 / Private collection / © The Estate of Gordon Bennett / Image courtesy: The Estate of Gordon Bennett Pages 14–15 Gordon Bennett at the Queensland College of Art, Morningside campus, Brisbane 1987 / Image courtesy: The Estate of Gordon Bennett / Photograph: Leanne Bennett