Artist of the Day, October 17, 2020: Richard Tipping, an Australian poet, writer, film director, philosopher (#1122)

 Richard Kelly Tipping (1949) was born in Adelaide, Australia, and studied film, philosophy and literature at Flinders University. He is a significant poet and artist working between image and language. He began composing typographic concrete poetry on a manual typewriter in 1967, exploring the arrangement of letters on the page as a field of poetic composition. Literary concern is integral to his practice in word art and visual poetry. In 1975 he co-founded the ongoing Friendly Street poetry readings in Adelaide, and edited their first anthology in 1977. In the 1970s Tipping began collecting ironies and oddities in public signage through photography, and changing public signs to make poetic messages. Signs of Australia published by Penguin Books in 1982 collected many of these found sign anomalies. Signature works from his explorations of public sign language include No Understanding in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.

 His public art projects include the well known Watermark (2000) steel sculpture (popularly known as 'Flood') on the Brisbane River which became the high water mark for a major flood in 2011. He continues to explore the physical qualities of language and making art with words, getting poetry off the page and into the streets. As a poet he is represented in many anthologies and has published five books. Richard Tipping is best known as a sculptor and word-artist who has had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Australia as well as in New York, London, Munich, Cologne and Berlin. He is represented by Australian Galleries in Sydney and Melbourne and is an associated artist with Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide. Richard Tipping completed a doctorate in 2007 at the University of Technology Sydney titled Word Art Works: visual poetry and textual objects.

Richard Tipping edited The Word as Art special issue of Artlink (Vol 27 No.1, 2007), The Friendly Street Poetry Reader (Adelaide University Press, 1977) and Mok (5 issues 1968–1969) – the first of a wave of small magazines in late 1960s defining a shift in Australian poetry which became known as 'The Generation of 68'.

Tipping is represented in many important art collections, including the print collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the British Museum, London; The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the State Galleries of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory; the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, Brisbane; regional art galleries including Lake Macquarie, NSW; Lismore, NSW; Gold Coast, Qld; major libraries including the National Library, Canberra; the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW; the State Library of Victoria; the State Library of Queensland; and international art collections such as The Kommunication Museum, Frankfurt; the Sackner Archive of Visual Concrete Poetry, Miami; the Beinecker Library, Yale University; the Rare Books Collection, Buffalo University; the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles,

In the 1980s Tipping made documentary films on writers including David Malouf, Randolph Stow, Peter Porter, and Les Murray. For two decades he was a lecturer in communication and media arts at the University of Newcastle, NSW. He currently lives in Sydney.

© 2020. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Richard Tipping. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Mr. Richard Tipping

 Private Poetry

  Sun shower from "The Sydney morning" Vol II, 1967

  Almond Blossom from "The Sydney morning" Vol II, 1968

 Airpoet, 1979

 Opening Bride from "The Sydney morning" Vol I 1979-80

  Smothered-design for a neon from "The Sydney morning" Vol I, 1980

 Unsafe art, 1980

  The Eternal question from "The Sydney morning" Vol II, 1980-82

  Smile from "The Sydney morning" Vol I, 1981

 HUM., 1981

 'HOLD UP AHEAD, 1982

  Quiet from "The Sydney morning" Vol II, 1991

 Swing wing from "The Sydney morning" Vol II, 1991

 USS$ from "The Sydney morning" Vol II, 1991

 Not-Admitted, 1993

 One-Day, 1998

 Sorry we're open, 2001

 Hypocrisy Credibility, 2002

 Exit-Strategy, 2003

 Watermark, 2003

 Artwork Ahead, 2004

  3-Hour-Barking, 2009

 Love Slowly, 2010

 Guard Cat, 2010-11

 Private Poetry, 2011,

 Hearth, 2012.

 Sexit 2012

 No Understanding, 2014

 KANGOOROO Sculpture at Barangaro, Sydney 2017

Omen

Speed Trap

stOP stART

Woman

Wrong day go back