This is a small Australian landscape painting in the Bowl at Falls creek. A related work of the same subject is Summit T-bar Fine Weather. This one is painted fast, as you can tell from the brushstrokes depicting the masses of snow gums which divide up the picture and create the form of the mountain. …
Good Cover, Falls Creek was painted in the Bowl near the base of the Summit T bar in 2016. Although it was early in the season there had been very good falls the past couple of days followed by some brilliant sunshine. Despite my warmest ski gear, I can’t stay out for long so …
Attending an exhibition opening can be a bit like going on a blind date. What if I don’t like the work? What will I say? Painting can go so wrong and often does. But in this small gallery in the heart of Richmond, sixteen paintings demonstrate that Harley Manifold knows what he is doing with paint. His surfaces are articulate, composite, layered. Colour is calibrated into convincing form.
This landscape painting prize, based in Sale, is one of those generous moments when a local benefactor makes a significant contribution to the nation’s cultural life….and ensures that serious contemporary work reaches the regions. It encompasses vertiginous highs and repellent lows. Predominantly the work is largish and surreal. Colour has mostly escaped any sense of
“A sophisticated observational drawing of a kind not seen often nowadays. The work employed a minimal range of drawn marks to represent a grand view, full of space and depth, and subtly guiding the eye to move from focal point to focal point. A devoted attentiveness is beautifully maintained.” Judges John Wolseley and Geoffrey Dupree
Categories. They are very useful things. All sorts of unlikely objects or ideas can be clumped together simply on the basis that they have one thing in common. Art historians tidily sweep works into certain little piles from which a narrative can be plotted. Post Impressionism can go over here, tuck Baroque back a bit, pop in those Futurists there, and now where did I put the Surrealists? It’s a helpful tool albeit with limitations.
In art things are always much more complex. An artist like any human being has a multiplicity of influences, yearnings and aims. And a trajectory of work over a lifetime can veer like a drunken sailor, as for instance in the case of Turner who for many years produced highly rendered topographical views and house portraits before his work transformed into almost completely abstract whirling vortices of light and colour.
If it’s hard to categorise either art or artist, you can imagine the difficulty of administering an art award that has a $50,000 purse for ‘a painting of an Australian subject in sympathy with the work of E. Phillips Fox.’ The artists trying to get their work before a judge might pause and wonder what exactly this means.