Director's Statement
The Living Artist is my first personal project for television.
I had just finished working on Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Australia’ shooting ‘behind the scenes’ footage. The experience of shooting almost a hundred hours documenting the epic journey that was Baz’s film gave me the confidence in my camera skills to pick up a prosumer video camera and find a story I thought would be worth telling.
Having spent a lot of time in recent years in the Bega Valley on the Far South Coast of NSW I decided to follow what I thought was a unique arts project. The Far South Coast Living Artist Project is a new and exciting idea that involves the arts community in the area getting together and raising enough money to give a years scholarship of $35000 to an emerging artist, the idea being that through the absolute dedication to their work for the year, and with the right mentoring, they can elevate themselves to being a full-time practising artist.
I thought that by following this process I would find a natural narrative and hopefully some interesting and unique characters along the way.
To my advantage I knew the committee and the organisers of this project, and it being a small community I was able to find out which artists were planning to apply. All of the artists were obliging and happy to talk to me, and fortunately I was also granted access to film the judging process and the panel interviews, something I thought was important to the telling of this story.
One of the important elements for me was to film the inner workings of this process.
I believe a certain cynicism exists in the greater population about the art world, and by showing that there is rationale and hard work behind the process hopefully this opens the door to the stories and the artists.
Making this film off my own back was hard work both emotionally and financially, but ultimately very rewarding to see it finished and being broadcast. The ABC coming on board with some post funding was a great boost for both myself and the film, and I’m glad that they saw the potential in what is I hope an entertaining and insightful story.
