Amalgum Exhibition 2002, explanatory essay

Explanatory essay accompanying the painting Post Industrial Muses at the Amalgam Exhibition at 4Cats Galley 9-27 April 2002

POST INDUSTRIAL MUSES

Paintings sometimes develop as a consequence of forms suggested....

In this painting forms are suggested by the machinery.

The work has to be consistent with the visual iconography of past works. The machinery can accommodate bony structures at any point. This painting, one of several versions based on what are abandoned steam-engines at an old disused rock-quarry at the Grampians (Victoria Australia), shows bony appendages evolving into the muses.

Other versions have bony appendages developing at other points but devoid of any human element. In this painting the figures evolve from the machinery. The title is actually an afterthought.... The figures appear as muses, created by an industrialised culture then abandoned. The explosion in the background adds drama. It was selected because it looked good. Sometimes critics and viewers have to accept that aesthetics come before psychology..... which means that the psychoanalytical approach, quite popular for most of the last century, was more a betrayal of various critics’ own perceptions... and hardly relevant in the analysis of either the art in question or the artist who created it.