Last week in Capturing Creativity we looked at artists: how to become one, about Artist Run Initiatives (or ARIs), commercial galleries and the way artists make a living in the world. We visited Dianne Tanzer’s commercial gallery and her “THIS IS NO FANTASY” exhibition, as well as Gertrude Street Contemporary, and were tasked with creating a presentation on an artist from one of these exhibitions or similar.

Looking at artists as individuals, it becomes clear why they are inspired and driven to create the type of art that they do with their preferred mediums.

I chose Chris Bond as my artist to present, after feeling particularly drawn to his work in the Dianne Tanzer gallery. Chris was a student here at RMIT and earned his Honours in Fine Arts (Painting).

He is best known for his work with oils on linen and his meticulous recreations of books, magazines, art catalogues and horror novels that are hyper-realistic to the extent that you mistake them for literature. From a young age he was interested in art and “as a teenager [he] copied things obsessively with pencil – not for public display, but purely for [his] own pleasure”. Chris’s work intrigued me because as an artist myself, I understand how incredibly difficult it is to represent real life objects with a paintbrush.

“I’ve been making small paintings of fictional exhibition catalogues for shows that I’ve never had, at a range of fictional art spaces, with accompanying fictional funding agency logos, set in the past, present and future.

It’s a way of implanting myself in my work as a kind of artist of my own imagining, then using this as a basis for critique – for the shortcomings of my own practice, and as a satire of professional artistic ambition.”

                                                            – Chris Bond

I can already feel that my awareness of the contemporary art world is expanding, and with that my desire to learn more is growing too.