Media

Art of Navy Film

By Australian National Maritime Museum Internationally recognised Australian artist Ralph Kerle was commissioned by the Royal Australian Navy in early 2019 to apply his innovative digital photographic technique to capture images of ships of the fleet in the waters of Sydney Harbour. Kerle's art practice creates work that is abstract and impressionistic yet anchored in the natural environment. His images are not photoshopped or artificially created. They are images that nature has created and exist in reality. They are designed as peaceful meditations on the way we engage with the environment in which we live and how we think, see and communicate our sense of “being” in it. In The Art of Navy exhibition, he asks the question "how might we think differently about the world of the Navy?" Discover this thought-provoking exhibition for a limited time at the Australian National Maritime Museum. https://www.sea.museum/artofnavy

The Indeterminate Sublime - by Rothko Museum

By Rothko Museum Ralph Kerle is an artist based in Sydney, Australia. His medium is photography, and his primary subject is the waterways of Sydney Harbour, encountered at the level of a one-man kayak. Through adventuring into the aquatic labyrinth of his home city, Kerle illuminates a world that is all but invisible to the distracted denizens of the metropolis, even as it dances and transforms in plain sight. Sensuous forms, liquid and mercurial, animate Kerle’s photographic images, at times evoking the crepuscular landscapes created by 18th and 19th-century oil painters at the height of the Romantic period before shifting to decidedly nautical scenes that celebrate the city perched on the water’s edge. Back on dry land, Kerle is fascinated by the process of image selection and the extent to which one photographic shot, as opposed to another, will draw attention. According to Kerle, the psychological phenomenon of “pareidolia”, being the ability of the brain to “extract meaningful patterns from the input it receives”, is the key to understanding his work. In effect, the abstract field invites the viewer on a journey both sensuous and intuitive. Studying these works over time, the visual language shifts and changes from the purely abstract to one where elements of the tangible world are brought squarely to mind. /Damian Smith, curator, art critic/ …when you’re on a kayak, and you’re in the water, and you’re in the bush, in nature, there’s a strange kind of transformation that takes place. Nature is encompassing you, and you’re not going to do anything with it. You just live with it. You’ve got to embrace it… Often when I see an image for the first time I think is worthy of being a potential new piece, I attempt to title it. Sometimes the title comes immediately. The abstraction in the work is apparent at first glance and will name itself. At other times, titling the work is a real challenge. Sometimes an artwork will simply not give up a title that seems a suitable descriptor for the content in the work. The works are composed of captures that reflect on abstraction in nature. Abstraction, in my view, is not an unconscious act of visualization by an artist, as some might suggest. Rather, it forms as the result of an artist’s subconscious observation, with the image being the artist’s manifestation of what their brain has perceived. The current series is my attempt to capture those unconscious selections using a 21st-century medium – the digital camera. Once completed, it is up to the viewer to form their own perceptions of what these natural formations represent. /Ralph Kerle/ Before his emergence as a photo artist, Ralph Kerle had been involved in fine art in Australia since the 1970s, graduating from the Victorian College of The Arts, where he majored in Dramatic Arts, in 1979 to be followed by a Master’s in Creative Industries. He came to prominence in Australia in the early 1980s as an arts pioneer in multi-media performance whilst he was Associate Director of Sydney Theatre Company. Kerle wrote and directed a contemporary opera, “Soul”, one of the world’s first multi-media performance works, which represented Australia at World Expo 88. Over the next two decades, he worked as creative director in his own event company, Eventures, specializing in designing and producing large-scale public and corporate live events for blue chip global brands, including Walt Disney, Rolls Royce and Foxtel. In the early 2000s, he began designing and delivering creativity workshops worldwide. Over the two following decades, he was made a Senior Leader in the US Creative Problem Solving Institute, served on the Board of Trustees of the US Creative Education Foundation and worked as an Innovation Coach at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Canada. In 2010, he was nominated by IBM as one of the world’s 100 creative leaders. The series in this exhibition represents a return to and re-interpretation of his early multi-media work in a domain that has now metamorphosed into photographic art. His focus is on capturing images created by and in nature and conceptualizing those images into fine art abstract photographic artworks. It is through his past creative experiences Kerle has developed this unique visual style – “his aesthetic eye.” His work is held in corporate and private collections in Australia, China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, UAE, United Kingdom and the USA. Exhibition period: 03 March 2023 – 21 May 2023

The kayak and I - how a crisis combined with an old kayak started a photographic career.

By Don Norris I'm a creative,’ said Ralph Kerle. ‘And most creatives at some point in time will lose purpose, direction and lose their way. You ask yourself “what am I doing this for?”. I had a first career in theatre and my second career was an events company I owned where I used theatrical methodologies. Along the way, I directed television commercials and worked a lot in the commercial area of multimedia and the moving image. But that sort of dried up [by the early 2000s], and so, I was trying to seek a new direction.’ View/Read Article PDF Here

Australian Weekend Magazine

Australian Photography Magazine Profile: Ralph Kerle

By Mike O'Connor | 16 June 2021 It’s 5.30am in Sydney, and while most of the city is starting to wake up to another day, photographer Ralph Kerle and I are already preparing for a day’s shoot. He loads his car with the familiarity of someone who has done it hundreds of times before. First, into the boot of the old Ford station wagon goes a pair of sun-faded life jackets and paddles, and then one of his three kayaks is carefully levered up onto the roof. The two-berth boat he’s chosen this morning is more practical than purposeful, peppered with scuffs and marks and a world away from the sleek, glossy crafts we’ll soon see zipping around the inner harbour. A quick check that our cameras are packed, and we edge out of his driveway and down to Northbridge boat ramp. I’m joining Ralph to find out about how he works, but also to try and answer a burning question - how does he produce images that have won him widespread acclaim, while at the same time seemingly breaking all the rules of photography? In a world of pin-sharp photos and exhaustive editing, his work is something truly unique. But first, there’s a boat to unload. Angling it and then my own unsteady legs into the water and finally onboard, we both dip our paddles in. It’s unsteady at first, before we start to find a rhythm together and begin pushing away from the shore. As we head out, I get the first inkling of time and stress beginning to wash away. Rousseau’s Desert Ebru 1 (renamed from Gauguin), Dubai Marina, Dubai UAE. This is part of the Gold in the Desert collection, a series of photographs taken during several visits to the United Arab Emirates between 2017 and 2019, representing my own impression of contemporary Arabic design reflected on the waterways of the UAE. The work is a photograph of a reflection off the surface of the water of a skyscraper located on the side of the Dubai Marina. Canon PowerShot G7 X, 1/250s @ f8, ISO 250. Fishing for photos This morning routine is one Ralph has done, without fail, two or three times a week for the last six years. Getting out onto the water has become more than just a bit of morning fitness for the Sydney-born, Victorian College of the Arts-trained creative.It’s become a catharsis, an antidote to the darkness of poor mental health, and in recent years, the roots of his remarkable photography career. It all started a few years ago, when he had what he calls, ‘an epiphany.’ Struggling to manage depression and direction after a long career in the creative industries, and burnt out from the demands of study, one morning he found himself needing an escape. So on a whim, he took out one of the family kayaks that his sons had left gathering dust in the backyard. It was a fateful decision. Red Sky on A Scarlet Night, Peach Tree Bay, Middle Harbour, Sydney. this image, part of the Land Escape series, suggests a distant horizon that is in reality a close up shot of a hull of a vessel and its reflections on the surface of the water. On first impression, a viewer’s mind often makes sense of it as a distant landscape and the more the viewer looks at the work, the more difficult it becomes to change that perception. Canon PowerShot G7 X, 1/1600s @ f8, ISO 250. “I got out onto the water, and straight away I just found it so calming,” he recalls. “Looking back now I can see it gave me exactly what I needed at the time. An outlet to help my physical and mental health, but it also put me in this compelling environment I couldn’t escape from – the outdoors.” His morning paddle soon became a routine, and importantly for Ralph, his creativity started to re-emerge as well. With a background in producing large-scale multimedia experiences like at Brisbane’s World Expo 88, he had always had an eye for captivating visuals. And out here, typically on his own and left with his thoughts, it wasn’t long before he began noticing subtle changes on the water. But before we can go any further, he interrupts. “Look – see there?” he says, pointing his paddle excitedly towards a brightly painted yacht. There’s a reflection, the yellow and gold of the yacht’s hull glistening in the morning light. It’s the kind of thing you might not easily notice at first - the light and movement where the hull meets the water turning the surface to an oil slick one second and striking panels of colour the next. We angle the kayak closer while Ralph pulls his camera from his chest pocket and frames up a shot. Later, he tells me he once contacted the owner of the yacht to share with him some the images he’d captured of his vessel. “I don’t think he really got it,” he laughs. Rip’s Liquid Surrealism 3, Seaforth Bluff, Middle Harbour, Sydney. A once in a lifetime perfect photographic moment from the kayak. Blue sky with a smattering of white cloud above and silver smooth water. I knew as I paddled towards an old ketch moored off the point at Seaforth, Middle Harbour, Sydney, there was something on the surface. It wasn’t until I downloaded the shot on return to the studio that I realised I had captured a surrealist painting completely composed by nature. Canon PowerShot G7 X, 1/320s @ f8, ISO 250. In a way, it’s kind of understandable – Ralph’s work does challenge what we understand photography to be. There’s very rarely anything in focus, and he’ll be the first to admit he’s not a technical photographer with a grounding in exposure triangles or the minutiae of controlling light. In the early days, he shot with his iPhone, only stopping when he wanted to have more control over depth of field and began to reach the limits of how big he could print his work. Even today, he shoots with a compact Sony RX100, relying on the camera’s rear LCD. The green houses. Instead his focus has always been on what he sees, which is unique in its own right due to the effects of a degenerative eye disease called Keratoconus, which brings with it an unusual perspective on the world. The disorder means Ralph is unable to see straight lines, with edges appearing with slight halos around them. It also means he has little comprehension of clarity or sharpness. The result is his work has more in common with expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko and their interest in shape, form and colour, than that of ‘traditional’ photography. On photography.. As Ralph explains, there are three photographic situations photographers will find themselves in: 1. Where the photographer has complete control of every element of the shoot - camera, lens, lighting, subject, environment. 2. Where the photographer has complete control of every element except the environment 3. Where the only control the photographer has is a camera in hand and the specific moment in time “Each photographer will have a passion or preference in one of these three areas that the eye will intuitively know, he says. “You need to recognise where the eye’s particular bias lies in order to develop a truly creative photographic practice as opposed to just a technical or technological expertise.” This fact isn’t lost on Ralph or many of the visitors to his gallery either, who are often surprised to hear his work is actually photographic in origin – instead convinced they’re admiring the work of an artist in the more traditional paint-and-brushes sense of the word. For photographer Anthony McKee, who Ralph describes as a key mentor, it was these exact reasons why he knew his work had the potential to be so successful. “Ralph is not the first person to photograph reflections on water, but he is one of the few to have pursued the idea with such tenacity, always looking for new and ever more intriguing moments in the water,” he says. “My advice to him was not to worry about appealing to other photographers and just keep on seeking his unique direction.” Coming back from his morning paddles increasingly inspired, and with new images bursting from his phone, Ralph began sharing his work on Facebook.Reassured by the positive comments from his friends he began capturing more, and before he knew it was being asked to sell prints. It wasn’t long before exhibition opportunities came knocking. The importance of print Realising he would need to print his work as large as 3x1m if he ever wanted to see it in a gallery, and fully aware of how critical the relationship with a printer would be if he was to have any success, he set his sights on working with legendary Sydney printer Graham Maslen of Spitting Image, who not only has a reputation as one of Australia’s best, but also as someone in particularly high demand. Where Gold Turns to Blue Turns to Gold, Castle Haven, Sailors Bay, Middle Harbour, Sydney. This suggests an aerial view of an unknown and unknowable coastline and is part of the Offshore Aerial series. I am fascinated by the way aerial shots of inland Australia seem to map the desert artworks of the indigenous Australians that have come to define the uniqueness of Australian culture. Canon PowerShot G7 X, 1/200s @ f8, ISO 2500. But initially at least, the master had no time for the young upstart. “I’d try to reach out to him to look at my work, but he was ignoring my calls and messages,” Ralph recalls. “But he was a kiwi, and I had heard he was a rugby nut, so I rang up and said to the receptionist in my best kiwi accent ‘My names Richie McCaw, and I’d like to print a photo book.” Well immediately, Graham was on the line. But I couldn’t keep the accent up, and he quickly realised who it was. ‘Well you better come in then’ he said.” Unfortunately, he only had bad news – the images from Ralph’s phone could never be printed large. “His advice to me was pretty blunt - ‘go out and shoot everything again’. It was a bit of a shock.” But Ralph was undeterred. As he says, he knew what to look for when out on the water, and was confident he at least wouldn’t be learning everything from scratch. “So I bought a camera, went out and started again.” 18 months later, he had 16 works ready to go, along with an offer to exhibit them through the Black Dog Institute, one of Australia’s leading mental health service organisations specialising in depression and bi-polar conditions. “Unfortunately for a number of reasons, the exhibition never went ahead, and I found myself stuck with all these prints I’d invested all this money in, thinking here we go again, another tough break in the art world!” he laughs. Evolutionary curve However, luck was in his favour. A local gallery in Willoughby had an exhibitor pull out and there was a gap in their schedule. Seizing the opportunity, Ralph sold 11 out of his 16 prints. From there, a remarkable opportunity emerged through a friend to exhibit at a major cultural centre in Lisbon, Portugal. And before he knew it, he was lunching with the curator of one of Europe’s newest cultural initiatives and was being asked to produce more work. His morning kayak trips had taken him very far indeed. Into the art world By 2016, Ralph was comfortable in his practice and ready to open his own gallery. Of course at the start, there was plenty of trial and error. “Early on, I sold two prints to a Russian bank, and before I prepared the files for the printer I made a tweak to the saturation of the yellows, just one single point in Lightroom. The prints were made, and a few days later I got a call from the interior designer telling me the yellows didn’t match what they had purchased. That mistake cost me $7,000.” Today, from both his gallery in Sydney and online, he sells his work to collectors, photographers and art lovers around the world. The Future of Brightness, Quaker’s Hat, Middle Harbour, Sydney. This image is inspired by Australian artist Tim Storrier’s paintings, specifically his Light and Fire series. In that series, Storrier paints from photographs he takes of rope covered with boat lacquer he sets on fire. I immediately saw Storrier and his iconic abstracts referencing the Australian outback and its distance horizons in this shot. I was thrilled when viewers compared the work to Storrier’s paintings! Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II, 1/400s @ f11, ISO 125. An ongoing evolution Like no two days on the water are either the same, so too are Ralph’s images. Over time, it’s natural that there’s been a progression in what he looks for out on the water. “As I’ve gone along in the journey I started to discover that the reflections in the water could, in some cases, also reflect the culture of a place,” he explains. Unfinished Surface: Red, Sailor’s Bay, Middle Harbour, Sydney. An important influence on the way I construct a work is how the image references or makes me recall the work of the master painters of the modern art movements. Many of my works reflect the works of the colour field painters, an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism. With this work, i’m reminded of American painter Mark Rothko and his giant canvases of predominantly red paint. Canon PowerShot G7 X. 1/200s @ f5.6, ISO 125. Recently, he’s travelled back to Portugal, working on a series of images that show reflections of Moliceiros, traditional seaweed harvesting boats, in the water. Likewise, he is currently preparing an exhibition from images reflecting Arabic culture he has created as a result of several journeys to the United Arab Emirates. Both are part of a wider series he hopes to shoot around the world, emphasising the visual elements that make every country unique. But even with a packed schedule and increasing global opportunities, there’s still something that keeps him coming back to his home waters, week in, week out. “I think for me, this journey has just been one of discovery,” he says. “I know my practice and what I need to do to create the images I love, and it’s just a matter of finding those opportunities.” ❂ You can see more of Ralph Kerle's work at ralphkerlesart.com.

Ralph Kerle's Journey on Water

by Damian Smith, International Art Critic, Melbourne, Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the ‘subconscious,’ usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. Water is the ‘valley spirit,’ the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water- a yang in the yin, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious.” (Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, paragraph 40) Water Sarcophagus, Kangaroo Valley, Australia 2014. Image by Ralph Kerle Artist Ralph Kerle may well have been reflecting on the words of Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustave Jung (1875 – 1961) when he began his exploration of water. Yet it was no theoretical prompting that compelled this Melbourne-born artist to set out on his arduous kayak adventures across the waterways of Sydney. Rather it was the dark edge of the psyche, clinical depression the likes of which resisted all modern pharmaceutical remediation, which compelled Ralph Kerle to take himself to the sea. For those of us who have grown up in Australia there is a casual appreciation for the spiritual significance of water. We swim in it, surf on it, dive beneath its surface. But we are weary of water, especially the ocean with its sharks, box jellyfish, stingrays, sea snakes, crocodiles and pernicious undertows. Yet for all of these forces and cohabitants we see water as that great purifier of the spirit. To be in it is to be rendered physical, strained and immersed. Water renews us. The terrain that Kerle’s photographs depict is a region of Sydney’s waterways known as Middle Harbour. Though separated from the larger Sydney Harbour the anchorage shares many of its features. Think of Sydney Harbour and one tends to picture the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, or the vast blue expanse celebrated by the painter Brett Whiteley (1932 – 1992). But as Kerle’s photographs attest, there is more to a place than the aerial view alone. Up close and personal one encounters something approximating an intimate relationship with nature. That one might find this experience in a major metropolis is perhaps a testament to the quality of Australian cities, yet it also requires a certain level of mindfulness. For Kerle the contemplation of water is as much about observing as it is about a way of being present with oneself and with the world. Hence his attraction to water is multi-layered. The liminal edge of the sea, especially when viewed from a low-slung kayak, brings into focus questions about the precise nature of reality. Where does one element end and the other begin? Such musings are hard to ignore when observing those instances where Kerle records fleeting distortions as the kayak displaces the liquid surface. In works such as Unfinished Surface I, 2015 it is hard to determine if one is observing a distant watery horizon or a close up of a sky blue yacht. Similarly in Mast on Blue Water, 2014 whether one is beneath the water or above it is ambiguous at best. This disruption of the pristine reflection, which bends what we might otherwise perceive as an untrammelled mirror suggests the possibility of illusion. If what we are seeing is only a trick of perception, then reality we must conclude is not fixed; the mind must be implicated in its creation. Ruminating on the effects that characterize his work and indeed how it registers in the mind, Kerle notes, “At first sight, the brain is forced to reassess how it sees these shapes; how the shapes created by nature reflect an abstraction questioning the way we perceive and make sense of our world.  As a result, the brain forms new neural pathways of association offering deeper insight into the aesthetic world and its potential to influence the way we think, see and communicate.” This remodeling of the brain’s neural pathways effectively reshapes the contents and habits of the mind. By extension the act of creation enables the artist to assume a role of co-creative participation within the field of perceived reality.  That art might be a means to reshape our relationship with the world, to the extent that the act of creation may have a lasting impact on the quality of our mental well-being is as remarkable as it is inspiring. Indeed it enables one to draw a link between creative practice, not only as an aesthetic activity, but also as a process that has practical implications in terms of how one cultivates inner dialogue and experience. While Kerle is by no means the first to have made a link between mental affliction and the attendant conditions of perception, his work is redolent of the possibilities of personal transformation. It is an idea that is extensively expounded upon in the context of Buddhist philosophy, especially in the Mahayana tradition. Indeed one such pundit to speak at length on this topic is the renowned teacher, Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet. He suggests, “Just as in the inner world of mental and cognitive events, every moment of experience comes from its preceding continuum and so on ad infinitum. Similarly, in the physical world every object and event must have a preceding continuum that serves as its cause, from which the present moment of external matter comes into existence.” With these thoughts in mind Ralph Kerle’s photographic impressions of Middle Harbour appear to us not only as reflections of nature. Rather they speak past the possibility of continuum, and not only of our place within the ceaseless flow of time, but also of our ability to be actors within the conditions of our existence and to shape our relationship to the world. I can picture the artist in his kayak, gliding effortlessly through the serene waters of Middle Harbour, waiting patiently for those perfect moments of light, colour and form that characterise his practice to coalesce in the frame of his lens and even as the results of that patient vision wash over me I am reminded always of the transformative dimensions of Kerle’s practice. List of Works Reviewed Sea Dunes, The Doorways to Reflection, Orange Water. Red and Grey on Water, The Heart Beat of Reflection Art Critic Damian Smith is an arts writer and curator whose involvement in the visual arts spans more than twenty years. His interests encompass Australian contemporary art and Asian contemporary Art. In 2009 he established Words For Art, a consultancy specializing in cultural discourse and the visual arts. As a specialist in Australian modernism, Damian has been a guest curator at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. He is the author and editor of multiple arts publications, spanning Australian art from colonial times to the present. He has written monographs and museum catalogues internationally, most recently for the Today Art Museum , Beijing. As a Curator for China Art Projects, Beijing, He has worked on numerous exhibitions in China, Australia and the UK.