Aengus
Cullinan

  I was born in Australia in Adelaide in 1968 into a family of three other siblings, my sister and two brothers, working class Irish, English, Scottish background, fourth generation Australians. We moved to Brisbane in 1968, I grew up there and left when I was around 25. My oldest sister taught drawing and encourage all of us to be as creative as we would like to be. I went to architecture school and completed 2 degrees but I was looking for something more from life, never really working in an office as an architect. Life always was about painting, and drawing I was wrongfully lead into architecture. Several times I have gone back to Australia, working as an artist in a remote community in the Tanami desert. This was a very important time in my life, because I couldn’t distance myself from what I was taught to believe were the correct values to hold as an Australian. And what I learned when I was in Nyrippi was that there are a set of values that are very different from the accepted status quo values and these are much more embracing of a full life and a creative experiential life. So from this point on I became increasingly dependent on painting, as a way of expressing feelings that would build up and need to be expressed. In the last four years, I have painted large-scale paintings that help me with the deconstruction of these learnt colonialist values. Living with indigenous embodiment of Australia, and the necessity to cross the liminal into a realm where we become more appreciative, sensitive open minded regarding our environment is crucial to the sensitive seeing eye. Which has now led me to paint The Uckermark, a beautiful region of Brandenburg, Germany, an hour or so north of Berlin where the nature is still compromised, but I’m surrounded by people who are pushing the scale in the direction of nature. 

I’m a painter working with oils mostly on linen or plywood, crossing over into beeswax and lino printing. Working on plywood is a movement in the direction of relief sculpture, before that I was working on two series of large scale paintings deconstructing Australian colonialism. These paintings helped me fathom an abyss that opened up in me when I experienced the conflicting, contrasting lives of Australians who live in the embrace of the colonial system and those who the system denies basic human rights. Living in Germany with the necessary unpacking of their horrendous past has taught me the value of owning the pain that previous generations have caused. Especially when it still continues and is entrenched, systemically supported, like in Australia.