Mackay's Innovative Art Awards & 3 Day Exhibition Opening Evening 20th June 2011 3 Day Exhibition 21st to 23rd June 2011 The 500 Pavilion, Mackay Showgrounds Entry Forms now available at: *AFS Friendly Care Pharmacy *Artspace Mackay *Arthouse Gallery (Cannonvale) *Colour Me Crazy (Proserpine) *Derek Frames *Gargett Gallery *Mackay Entertainment Convention Centre *Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens *Mackay Regional Libraries *Mackay Showground Office *Mackay Town Hall *Sarina Art Gallery *Sarina Tourist Art and Craft Centre *TJ Picture Framing * or online at www.mackayshow.com.au VOLUNTEERS PROGRAM Art on Show is looking for enthusiastic artists and arts patrons to join our volunteers program and assist with our arts event. We would love to have you on board in 2010 for further information contact Art on Show Coordinator *Melissa Broadhurst on 07 4957 3916 or email artonshow@mackayshow.com.au or click on the link below to view program IMPORTANT DATES Entry form/fee close: Friday 27th May by 4.00pm Delivery of works: Wednesday 15th June by 4.00pm Judging: Sunday 19th June Presentation of Awards & Exhibition opening: Monday 20th June Commencing 6.30pm Exhibition close: Thursday 23rd June 3.00pm Collection of work: Friday 24th June 9.00am - 5.00pm Exhibition opening hours: (Free Entry) Tuesday 21st June 10.00am - 8.00pm Wednesday 22nd June 10.00am - 8.00pm Thursday 23rd June 10.00am - 3.00pm All Exhibits For Sale (ask our friendly exhibition staff) Enquires to: Mackay Show Association, Showgrounds Office, 24 Milton Street, PO Box 1014, Mackay Q 4740 Tel: (07) 4957 3916 Fax: (07) 4953 4524 email: artonshow@mackayshow.com.au
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AFS Friendly Care Pharmacy Art on Show Awards 2011 JUDGES STORY - JOE FURLONGER
Joe Furlonger Nationally Acclaimed Australian Artist - Winner of Australia’s most prestigious Art Prizes including the Fleurieu Art Prize, Moet & Chandon Fellowship and 2010 Stan and Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize Born 1952 Cairns, Nth Qld and currently living and working in Samford, Queensland
For more than thirty years, Queensland artist Joe Furlonger (b.1952) has been blurring the line between art and life. Restlessly creative, Furlonger draws every day - he draws incessantly, with pencil, charcoal, brush, pen or crayon. He has filled countless sketchbooks and completed a large body of works on paper. These drawings are both preparatory studies for paintings and self-sufficient works of art. The quick, spontaneous transfer of his observations onto paper is at the heart of all Furlonger's artistic activities, from painting and printmaking to ceramics and sculpture. His other main point of inspiration comes from visits to museums, and his appreciation of the art of the past.
After two decades of activity, it is now impossible to say where observation gives way to influence in Furlonger's work. On a drive through north-west Queensland he reputedly kept his sketch-book poised against the steering wheel, jotting down features of the landscape as they flitted past. Yet the results of that trip, as recorded in the lino-cuts and gouaches of the Brigalow country in this exhibition, enjoy many affinities with Chinese art and with the work of the great Australian landscape painter, Fred Williams.
Without doubt, one of the most fascinating aspects of this survey is to trace the patterns of inspiration in that have left their mark in successive series. The large bathers of the early eighties have affinities with artists such as Picasso and Beckmann, the following series of Mother and Child pictures and Depositions, were influenced by the first-hand experience of Italian Renaissance art, particularly the work of Giovanni Bellini. Yet the impact of Matisse can also be detected in these works.
In later years, trips to Vietnam and China spurred Furlonger's interest in brush and ink painting, and the use of negative space - that emptiness which in also a fullness in traditional Chinese aesthetics. Shortly afterwards, he became excited by the National Gallery of Australia's traveling survey of Ian Fairweather's works on paper, and began layering his pictures in a manner strongly reminiscent of Fairweather's technique. This is perhaps most pronounced in the series based on the town of Moree. Shortly afterwards, a different locale and a different set of preoccupations led to a series of Broome swimming pool linocuts, and then woodblock portraits, that strongly echo the art of the German expressionists. The very latest works, a new series of Australian landscape etchings, reveal a renewed interest in the work of Fred Williams.
Throughout this extraordinary visual journey, one never loses sight of Furlonger's own personality and distinctive touch. Everything he looks at, every influence he absorbs, is adapted for his own purposes in drawings that can be wristy and fluent, or resolutely cack-handed. His work serves as an object lesson for any young artist that one must embrace influences as fully as possible. One must not be afraid of losing one's individuality, or waste time with the pursuit of novelty for its own sake. It could even be argued that Furlonger's work shows that an artist only becomes most fully himself (or herself), by taking on the very best artists of the past, learning from their example and adapting those lessons for one's own purposes.
This lesson also includes the dilemma of subject matter. For Furlonger, as for so many great modernists, the figure and the landscape have been sufficient for the most rigorous and exhilarating visual experiments.
This phenomenon is discussed by Simon Leys ( AKA. Pierre Ryckmans), in an essay on Chinese painting and poetry, in which he writes: "By narrowing the field of its invention, an art intensifies the field of its expression - or rather it shifts creation from the first arena to the second."
"For Braque, Picasso and Gris," he continues, " the world suddenly seemed to shrink to the mere dimensions of a guitar, a newspaper and fruit dish - the very conventions that freed these artists from the need to define a new subject matter allowed them to concentrate entirely on the problem of elaborating a new language. Earlier, one mountain and twelve apples had already fulfilled the same function for Cézanne." (The Burning Forest, p.36)
These thoughts are highly pertinent to Furlonger's work, which rarely departs from conventional subject matter such as the figure, the landscape, and the occasional still life. He is, in many ways, a willfully old-fashioned artist who knows that one cannot move forward without regularly looking back. He is also one of the most dedicated and skilful draughtsmen in contemporary Australian art. In this body of work, one finds a defiant reassertion of the central value of drawing to artistic achievement, and the portrait of an artist who does not shirk the fundamental task of continually reinventing himself. Excerpt from article by John McDonald, Director New Contemporaries Gallery 2002 on Artist Joe Furlonger 1973-6 Associate Diploma in painting, Queensland College of Art, Brisbane 1977-8 Diploma of Art, Alexander Mackie CAE, Sydney 1988 Awarded second Moet & Chandon Fellowship 2002 Awarded the Fleurieu Art Prize, SA 2010 Winner of the Stan & Maureen Duke Gold Coast Art Prize, QLD 2011 Currently living in Samford, Queensland EXHIBITIONS 1982 Community Arts Centre, Brisbane 1985 Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane 1986 Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 1988 Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane 1989 Joe Furlonger, La Mer et L'Enfant, Galerie Cadran Solaire, Troyes, France Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane Air and Space, London 1990 Madonna and Child and Bathers, Prints, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 1990 Figure and Sea, University of New South Wales, Sydney 1990 Madonna and Child, The Crypt, St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney 1990 New Work, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 1993 Furlonger at Indy, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Gold Coast 1994 Circus Royale, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 1995 Paintings After New Guinea, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 1996 Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 1998 Queensland Landscapes, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 1999 Joe Furlonger Survey, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Gold Coast 2000 Moreton Bay, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 2001 Sydney, Paintings and Etchings, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 2002 Land, Sea, City, Drill Hall Gallery, Australian National University, Canberra 2003 Central Queensland Landscapes, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 2004 Improvisations, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 2005 Circus, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 2006 Furlonger Circus, Bronzes, woodcuts, paintings, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 2007 Three Australian Painters, Guan Shanue Art Museum, Shenzhen, China 2008 China, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney 2009 The Samford Valley, Auckland Art Fair, Auckland NZ COLLECTIONS Gold Coast City Art Collection; SGIO Collection; City Council Collections of Innisfail, Bundaberg and Maryborough; Phillip Morris Collection; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; Private Collections
The Mackay Show Association would like to thank Artist Joe Furlonger for accepting our Invitation to Judge the 2011 AFS Friendly Care Pharmacy Art on Show Awards |
