He had run out of ideas and was running out of time. So he turned his problems into art.
Persson has work held in most of our major galleries as well as the Auckland Art Gallery and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This month, his latest exhibition, Black Swans, opened at Anna Schwartz Gallery – and all of the works come from having absolutely no ideas, he says.
'I'd been out of the studio for a while ... and I'd just lost the rhythm,' he explains. 'For a couple of weeks I had literally no ideas... I just couldn't see it. And then I thought, why don't I make work about having no ideas – deal with the problem.'
As he gazed at Post-it notes stuck on the wall – featuring scribbled lines from texts that resonated with him – he realised he was not the first to face this predicament. Having read about 'black swan events' recently, and having painted swans in the past, he decided to get to work and combine the two.
Originally used to describe an impossible event – prior to 1697, no European knew black swans existed – the term now refers to a highly improbable event that once it occurs, seems inevitable. Coined in the context of financial markets by US-based former options trader Nassim Taleb in 2007, the term 'black swan event' now has a broader cultural meaning.
Persson's series takes quotes from some of our greatest artistic minds and makes them spout from the mouths of black swans. Some of the lines are amusing, some are poignant; all of them ring true.
'Once it happened, it came together rather quickly,' he says. 'I had this one little painting which was an abstract I had done in the '90s, that became the background. I thought about that heraldic space where animals talk, those medieval balloons.'
Though most of the paintings were well underway before the second election of Donald Trump, as every day brings new black swan events, the works feel particularly prescient.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News.com.au
2 hours ago
- News.com.au
Eddie McGuire fires a fresh shot at The Front Bar as footy's TV wars reignited
Eddie McGuire just couldn't help himself. The catfighting among the AFL's media shows has been at an all-time high in 2025, largely sparked by a host of big names leaving Nine for Channel 7, including Kane Cornes, Craig Hutchison and Caroline Wilson. FOX FOOTY, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every match of every round in the 2025 Toyota AFL Premiership Season LIVE in 4K, with no ad-breaks during play. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1. It has become common for journalists and ex-footy players to take shots at each other across television and radio, including Cornes' high-profile feud with 7 stablemate Dale Thomas among others. Wilson and Hutchison had their own slanging match on Monday night after the former had a dig at Hutchy's decision to sack some beloved staff from RSN following his $3.25 million takeover of the radio station. It's not often that Channel 7's laidback show, The Front Bar, gets into the crosshairs, but McGuire couldn't resist firing a shot at the program this week from his offering, Footy Classified. It all stemmed from The Front Bar host Andy Maher's public run-in with a spectator at last week's clash between Carlton and Melbourne at the MCG. Surprisingly, the incident wasn't brought up on Wednesday night's show, stunningly given a pass by comedians Mick Molloy and Sam Pang. But footage surfaced over the weekend of Maher getting caught up in ugly scenes while sitting in the stands watching his beloved Blues. Footage of the incident showed a fellow spectator leave his seat and walk over to Maher before leaning over the presenter to engage with him. Fans in the vicinity can be seen calling for security to remove the individual as a woman in a brown jacket attempts to de-escalate the situation. The 61-year-old Maher remained seated throughout the nearly two-minute ordeal before MCG security ultimately separated the man from Maher and escorted him out of the area, which was met with widespread applause from those seated nearby. Maher later had some strong words for the situation on SEN, asking: 'Why do you have to come along and get yourself munted and then make a fool of yourself and ruin everyone else's experience.' This is where McGuire steps in. Right before the closing credits on Footy Classified, McGuire attempted to demonstrate he was going to show some restraint, before firing off his own shot at Maher. 'All right guys. I was going to say something about a story that was coming up with Andy Maher, but I'll let it go til next week,' he said. 'I don't need to have a blue with anybody at the moment. 'But if you're hosting a show called The Front Bar, don't complain about people drinking at the footy.' Way to let it go, Eddie. McGuire's comments come after Maher spoke about the incident on SEN, where he stated the whole situation had been blown out of proportion. 'Whoever has told you that story, they're going a little over the top,' he said. Aussie basketball icon Andrew Gaze said he heard Maher had been involved in a 'heated exchange'. 'From what I hear, and I've heard this from a number of different sources, you were virtually assaulted at the football as well,' Gaze said on 'The Run Home With Gazey And Andy'. 'You were involved in a heated exchange with perhaps someone who'd had perhaps a few too many beverages.' Maher said Aussie comedian Dave Hughes had also been involved. Maher told Gaze: 'Well, he (the person involved) was escorted out of the premises. It had nothing to do with me. 'I just told the fella to sit down. I said, 'Mate, you're going to get thrown out if you keep going. ' He got thrown out. 'I missed the start of it, but Dave Hughes was in the middle of it all at the start and doing a very fine job of sticking up for one of our veteran members of society, who had, apparently, drawn some unsavoury language from this bloke.' Maher said he believes the man was not a Carlton supporter. 'Hopefully he woke up the next morning feeling like a right git because he carried on like a pork chop,' Maher said. 'If he'd have just turned around and sat down and watched the last three minutes of the game and stopped doing whatever he was doing, he would have been fine.'
The Age
3 hours ago
- The Age
Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan can't save this clanger of a film
FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE ★★ (M) 109 minutes At the outset of Four Letters of Love, a man is touched by God. Toiling away in a dingy Dublin office, middle-aged civil servant William Coughlan (Pierce Brosnan) spies a square of sunlight on his desk and spontaneously decides to chuck it all in and become a painter. Before long, he's doing artist stuff like growing his hair shoulder-length and abandoning his family. Meanwhile, in the west of Ireland, we're introduced to Isabel Gore (Ann Skelly), a younger free spirit who says things like 'I want to go wild today' as she frolics on the edge of a cliff. With all that, we're still only a couple of minutes into this wildly over-the-top melodrama, directed by UK-based Polly Steele, whose previous credits include the unfortunately titled climbing documentary The Mountain Within Me, and scripted by the Irish writer Niall Williams, adapting his 1997 novel. Williams' field isn't out-and-out trash but a particular brand of frantic 'literary' overwriting, much of which gets channelled here into Fionn O'Shea's voiceover as William's son Nicholas, looking back at his early-1970s youth from decades on ('To these days I am to return again and again throughout my life, for in them is the immanence of love'). Isabel and Nicholas are soulmates, she with her frizzy red hair, he with his look of gormless yearning. But the film takes its time bringing them together, tantalising us by having them cross paths a couple of times without meeting. By halfway through, one of William's paintings has wound up in the possession of Isabel's parents, Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) and Muiris (Gabriel Byrne). But even when Nicholas seeks it out, this isn't enough to put him in the same room as Isabel, who is meanwhile set on marrying Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), her designated Mr Wrong. In spirit, this is a very slightly elevated Hallmark movie – but there are worse things to be, and under the circumstances it's a point in Steele's favour that she isn't afraid of excess. Like Williams, she goes all out: wide-angle lenses, shafts of light illuminating otherwise drab interiors, sweeping shots of the craggy coastline with waves crashing onto rocks.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
David Williamson skewered greedy Sydney - and bought the Harbour view anyway
Sydney features large in David Williamson's earliest memories. Aged three-and-a-half, the Melbourne-born-and-bred playwright was visiting an uncle with his family, and remembers 'sitting in a backyard on a very bright, sunny day, surrounded by bougainvilleas and subtropical flowers.' 'The fact my first memory was in Sydney obviously imprinted something on me about the exotic nature of the city: the colours, the brightness, the greenness of the grass,' he says. He contrasts this with Melbourne's winter and summer brownness, while another early memory was gazing from a ferry at a harbour that 'seemed a deep translucent green, not blue'. Hence, the title of his iconic 1987 play Emerald City. Although Williamson is eternally grateful to the Melbourne theatre companies that launched his career, he was less enamoured of that city's critical response. 'When the plays were done in Sydney, it was a totally different reaction,' he explains. 'John Bell did a terrific production of The Removalists, and John Clark did a great production of Don's Party, and I have to say that the talent at their disposal was probably greater, when you consider that I was playing the removalist in Melbourne, and Chris Haywood played him in Sydney. 'The critics were terrific, and they recognised the genre. The Melbourne critics thought The Removalists was an earnest play about police violence, that didn't succeed because the characters weren't three-dimensional. Whereas Sydney immediately saw it as a darkly satirical play about appalling Australian male behaviour.' Loading Williamson also wearied of his left-wing Carlton circle dimly viewing financial success, whereas in Sydney, making money seemed 'a legitimate pursuit'. He acknowledges Sydney's shady history of 'beleaguered convicts and corrupt prison guards, but,' he insists, 'it was a vibrant and very Australian city. So I thought to myself, 'Why do I have to put up with these Melbourne dinner parties where people start abusing me that I've sold out because my plays were being done in the state theatre companies, and because I might be making roughly as much money as a suburban GP?''
