John Olsen's prolific work has illuminated Australia's landscape for decades. Here, its features are seen anew as he approaches them with his distinctive artistic style. Containing several hundred glorious reproductions of paintings and drawings, accompanied by an historical overview and comments drawn from the artist's diaries, John Olsen: Journeys into the 'You Beaut Country' provides both the familiar and the uninitiated with a unique vision of Australia.
· 2004
On 16 June 2004, the international community celebrated the centenary of 'Bloomsday'. The epicentre of events was Dublin where the Australian artist, Robert Jacks, had been invited to exhibit his paintings at 15 Usher's Island, once the home of James Joyce's aunts and the building in which Joyce located THE DEAD, the final story of his Dubliners. This limited standard edition of 400 copies, each with a bookplate signed by the artist, uses colour and abstract shapes to symbolise the passing of one day, from morning to night. The day is 16 June 1904, when Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom junketed through Dublin and their adventures were recorded, for posterity, in Joyce's ULYSSES.
Jasper Knight is a young artist who belongs to that group of individuals sometimes described as 'junk poets'. He gathers his inspiration and builds his art from the throwaway detritus of urban society. In a sense, his art is both a celebration and a critique of consumerism. Most of Knight's iconography can be found in the decaying areas of once thriving industrial docklands. He skilfully depicts the old trucks, the discarded heavy earthmoving equipment and the smashed bodies of expensive motor vehicles. The rusting iron structures that once supported heavy industry, old piers and cargo wharfs, the ferry landings around well-used harbours, the crumbling facades of derelict buildings, lonesome chimneys, cranes and other abandoned machinery are his subjects. Knight has painted the docklands of Melbourne and the piers and ferries of Sydney Harbour. In 2006 he painted fourteen works that were exhibited in London under the title 'An Island in the Sun'. This series was painted in and around the old discarded Renault car factory at Ile Seguin, an island in the River Seine at Boulogne- Billancourt on the western edge of Paris.
Melinda Harper is a young artist who came into prominence in the 1990s as a member of the 'Store 5' group who actively sought to re-instate geometric abstraction in the contemporary art scene.
George Johnson arrived in Australia from New Zealand in 1952 and in 1956 held his first exhibition of abstract painting in Melbourne. This book marks the artist's 80th birthday and fifty years of singular dedication to philosophy-based abstract imagery. Johnson's work is uniquely consistent - rarely straying from compositions based on primary shapes and a limited range of colour preferences, but demonstrating how these minimal means can, in combination, serve as surrogates for complex ideas. Additional contributors to the next include the artist's brother, renowned New Zealand poet, Louis Johnson; Australian poet and critic, Gary Catalano and Melbourne philosopher, Patrick Hutchings.
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This volume, companion to John Olsen: Teeming With Life (2005) which contained this artist's complete printmaking oeuvre of more than 900 editions, presents a selection of several hundred paintings and drawings created over more than four decades. Perhaps more than any other post-war artists, John Olsen and Fred Williams have helped Australians see their unique landscape and its features with fresh vision. The several hundred glorious reproductions, accompanied by an historical overview and comments drawn from the artist's diaries, is certain to provide the viewer with an unique vision of Australia and particularly the spectacular 'outback' - as well as honour the artist in his eightieth year.
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Anthony Pryor's enlightenment occurred as a result of his immediate and intuitive understanding of the symbolic significance of abstract forms when combined and interpreted within a systematic language of art. This book offers a comprehensive and beautifully illustrated account of Anthony Pryor's short but spectacular career.