Gallery 7 - Dreams And Practicalities

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- Limited Liability
- Liquid Real Estate
- Pets and Their Masters
- Refuge
- Secrets
- The Vista Afterwards

For the last two years I have been striving to move away from the historical nostalgia that I have been working with for the last 12 years. I feel that the new times we live in need a more direct voice. There is still a nostalgia but it is for a more recent past and a more understandable world..

My starting point for the series was a diamond shaped canvas, by turning a square canvas on its point I was able to get an active shape - one that is compositionally challenging - compositionally unstable. This fitted my direction; instability or insecurity or apprehension and how we cope are at the core of this series. The works are facets of a larger piece, they might be seen as an elaborate storyboard for a hypothetical film, but a film with no narrative arc. Rather there are threads of plots and subplots that weave a cloth of feelings between the paintings. These new works are a discursive collage of images around struggling and caring, dreaming and surviving. Some of the paintings are poetic notions from my interior while others start from documentary photographs (which are often as strange and fantastic as the ones I create from my head). I have pillaged details from family snapshots, newspapers and the photos of Australian photographers Roger Scott and John Ogden. Many of the images have been with me for decades. A battered copy of Goya's Los Caprichos has always been nearby adding definition and shape to many of my interior nightmares. It seems everything is useful in some way to give shape to the dreams and realities of daily life.