For three and half decades I’ve worked with a wide range of traditional media such as printmaking, photography and drawing; and my research for my paintings sometimes leads to essays and articles. My art draws inspiration from various sources, including world religions, science, mythology, literature, politics, and music. I mainly work as a painter using acrylics, and I filter my life experiences through the combined heritage of my Chinese, Indian, British and diverse sexuality & gender*. Without a doubt, my personal expressions also have an educational hope to support others to engage more creatively with social and political challenges, but I also strive to make beautiful visual stories. In this sense, I am working artist.

Key to my practice is my love of literature, religion, history and the sciences as metaphors within my work. I am experimental and immersive in my process. Central to everything are my human emotions and spiritual practice, which are real, and not algorithmic.

My website is really like my studios, too many storage boxes, a tad overcrowded with some broken door handles:) I’m so grateful for people’s engagement with my art over several decades. I’ll try and give you a brief overview of my art. To start with, everyone still calls me Carl Gopal from my early years, but I used my full family name these days.

Although I studied history and qualified as a typographic designer in the 1980s, I am largely a self-taught painter. I didn’t study painting formally, rather when I left school I studied graphic design in the early 1980s in Perth, Western Australia (WA). I learned design and specialised in typography and we had to do hours of life drawing.

Later, I was fortunate to learn from other visual artists while working in a small art gallery in Northbridge WA in the early 1990s called The Bridge Gallery. The Northbridge arts community really helped me through my early years as an artist. I asked for, and gratefully received, practical guidance on different painting techniques and styles from very generous artists while working at the Bridge.

My cultures of experimentation

My family story is one of migration from Asia to Europe and then to Australia. I was born in the South of England in 1967 and we lived in various countries before settling in Australia. I spent my childhood in Bankeryd, Sweden, surrounded by folk art, cakes, and stories of trolls. Folk and outsider art have always inspired me as a result, and my childhood is saturated with folk tales I have carried onto my canvas.

I value artistic experimentation, immersive research, and reflective, messy, unconventional spaces. My approach is interdisciplinary and intuitive, studying in the spaces between the social sciences and humanities, but it is not academic. I often use method acting techniques and engage with popular culture through music, theatre performance, and current affairs.

The experiences I go through before, during and after painting aren’t easy to explain or measure because they ultimately rely on an intuitive and subconscious way of bringing things together. Those ‘things’ may be a person, a cultural artifact, mathematical symbol or a song but they all interact with each other visually to form ‘sentences’ that I use to tell my stories. They are often stylistically vastly different & those sentences become, for me anyway, a very symbiotic process of meaning-making. Or, to be it simply, I mix things up a lot. So my canvases carry a lot of layers.

Civilian ‘war art’ and post 9/11 years

From 2004 much of my work took on the qualities of war art, processing not only the post-9/11 conflicts but also my personal relationships with people who had been scarred by their past experiences of war-not least my own parents. I think I have been able to do this as I am self-funded by my dayjob, which means my exhibitions and practice is unfunded by any governments, and I am able to explore wherever my art takes me, which is becoming increasingly rare. It's not always easy, but I like it that way.

Recently, I have been returning more regularly to my love of history, including my personal history. My father and mother survived traumatic childhoods during WW2, shaping my life, and in my relationships with veterans, migrant communities and the least visible, I have gained a deeper understanding of how we each navigate complexity and trauma. I am especially inspired by how healing trauma can lead to creativity and even beauty in ways we don’t anticipate.

Similarly, a deeper understanding and healing of trauma can give us insight into geopolitical traumas. I applied that art exploring the AUKUS tripartite agreement in the Asia-Pacific (aka “Indo-Pacific) through paintings, prints and articles published by respected military and literary journals.

Straddling literal & imaginal realities

I have not traveled the public funding road, working in other fields to fund my practice. In retrospect, while harder on the pocket and spirit at times, it has really given me independent thinking and creative skills that I could never have anticipated. Alongside my art I have worked in various community policy and advocacy roles between Melbourne and Perth, Australia, working in social cohesion, training others in creative thinking & (I hope) supporting social change. Contributing to social cohesion in my ‘day job’ has been a powerful learning journey. It has exposed me to different belief systems and experiences that I didn’t want to know, to be honest. It therefore prevented me from remaining in my bubble.

Strangely enough, being forced to deal with a lot of the dirt of what we call ‘reality’ convinced me that metaphor, symbols and the imaginal often do a better job at describing Truth than what we think is reasonable. My paintings, I think, straddle that divide between ‘reality’ and our imagination and seems to strike a chord with some people. That tends to be outside of the Asia-Pacific where I live, and more internationally.

Sometimes I write too & publish occasionally in journals that see the role of art, culture and faith as relevant to their communities of interest. Adjectives are limited tools these days, as everyone makes up their own language, but if you must, you could describe as a socially progressive person of faith. So when God does appear among the many themes I explore in my art, it’s not your imagination.

Beyond 2024: Creating new languages for ‘religious art’

In 2023 I became quite active with The Blake Society in London. I gave a talk in January 2023 on my painting Australia a Prophecy (about AUKUS) and wrote a text/visual essay for their journal VALA 4, 2023 themed “War & Peace”. To Blake, God was The Imagination. So, it seems natural that from 2024 my art is entering a new phase & taking my spiritual interests from sub-text to foreground. So, expect to see new and unusual visions of what ‘religious art’ is supposed to look like.

I think I returned to Blake’s poetry because I experienced him as something of a war artist in that ‘mental fight’ which we are now waging on what is ‘real’. The Blake community have been incredibly supportive of my work. As Blake writes, “The imagination is not a State; It is the Human Existence itself” and using that imagination with care and respect is so important.

In 2024 I also stretched the method acting techniques I use in my painting process through a collaborative project with a wonderful photographer I know in Australia. It’s a performance art as much as photography and uses fashion story-telling to ask theological/social questions. It’s also my first ‘non-war’ art piece in twenty years. Big change for me. I enjoyed it so much I plan to develop these new themes beyond 2024. So, working more with other artists who share my values, taking creative risks, growing as an artist and person, that’s enough to keep me busy:)

Carl

* (DSG is different but inclusive of LGBTIQ history & very inclusive of my cultural & faith beliefs).

Photographs: 1) (Top) Artist photo performance art rehearsal February 2024, 2) Artist speaking at the VALA journal launch, Nov 29th 2024, 3) Artist video printing drypoint prints Copyright©Carl Gopalkrishnan 2024.

[Updated 19th April 2024]