The Conti Summer Exhibition 06-07

Richard Horvath

Years back I taught a couple of adult painting groups.  My students inadvertently chose to paint landscapes and because the classes were held indoors at night, working from photos was the only available option.  I felt that I was there under false pretences because this was a working method I had never used, but it intrigued me nonetheless and I resolved to play with it at some future date.

That future date has been the last couple of years and what you see in front of you is the consequence of that resolution.  My former students used the classical chocolate box / quasi-impressionist idiom as their reference and sought solutions for 'sexing up' the feel of their paintings and generally editing out unwanted, unromantic details such as cars.  I decided to take precisely the opposite approach by using a fairly artless, unpainterly method of stippling the paint -- similar to how an inkjet printer deposits colour. And I decided not to omit the visual crud of the modern urban environment.

These first efforts are quite austere, neutral and mute in regard to the cultural meanings of landscape.  Likewise there is little investigation into the formal possibilities of arranging the picture surface, they are banal transcriptions faithful to the source photos.  The subjects are not the usual classical landscape scenes; instead of the much loved rustic homestead or humpy there is the foreshore toilet block or caravan, a bitumen strip rather than the cutesy dirt track.  The settings are local with an eye to geometric fundamentals such as the spherical blobbiness of tea tree clumps, the planar ribbons of roads, the columnar lamp posts and the rectangles of buildings. Or the quirky twisting trunks of banksias or the architectural grandeur of pines.

This minimalist agenda is now up for review. In a couple of recent paintings the meticulously painted surface has been 'defaced' by the random stencilling of mechanical dot screen. Also being investigated is the digital cutting up and rearranging of these paintings using 3D modelling software and printed using the giclee process.

www.redyellowblue.info contains more of Richards amazing works.