27. TIM STORRIER 

My vision of landscape has to do with it being nothing more than a backdrop for theatre, a stage set for human drama travel, dreams, disaster.¹

For almost half a century Tim Storrier has largely sought to capture his personal reaction to the landscape, his iconography a synthesis of real and imagined fragments of his own experience. Though Storrier has made the landscape his primary subject he has developed his own unique way of seeing the land using light and space. Fire has emerged as his most iconic character, always manifested against the backdrop of a desolate landscape with expansive sky rendered meticulously with his signature antirealist sensibilities. The resulting memory-scapes are not about recording the landscape in terms of its topography, but rather conjure the essence of human experience using the landscape as a backdrop to reflect a state of mind.

Storriers fire paintings had their genesis in the early eighties in the outback documentation of burning objects. Art Historian Catherine Lumby recalls this pivotal moment:

One evening in 1981, Storrier stuck a couple of steel posts into some arid, clayish earth and strung a rope between them. Then he went to the back of his ute, found a tin of lacquer, coated the rope and set it alight. He says he cant remember why he decided to do it and has no idea where the concept came from. But the photograph documenting the onsite project, Night Passage, shows a motif which dominates some of his finest work to date: a blazing line of fire moving between two invisible points set against an opalescent sky.²

The first incarnation of fire in Storriers work was the burning outline of a human form, followed by a burning rope, a burning log, and then a burning carcass; it may seem as though Storriers manifesto is to set everything alight. This fire imagery has been used by Storrier to symbolise the awesome power of nature, regeneration, renewal and pure passion. Fire as a motif has been reworked and re-envisaged over the subsequent decades resulting in some of Storriers most powerful and evocative works.

Storrier is a distinguished representative of le juste milieu the kind of artist who occupies the middle ground between tradition and innovation, with ambience as the ultimate goal.³ John McDonalds observation of Tim Storriers position with the Australian art world highlights the fact that the artist has successfully travelled along the middle course, flourishing whilst straying further from the explicitly conceptual and political concerns of his contemporaries. Storrier has always stated his suspicions of contemporary art writers and critics and been open about his socially and culturally conservative standing. 'Im not concerned about the debate about what a painting is. I know what a painting is - Im not interested
in redefining what art objects are - Im not interested in that at all.⁴

Storriers flamboyant character, the urban dandy/gallant explorer/country squire, has been calculated by the artist to irritate the literal minded and po-faced that exist on the periphery of his career. This inclination is born of the artists position as something of an artistic outsider to his time. Originally a figurative painter, Storriers career has flourished in almost direct opposition to the predominant art movements of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. It is the artists strength of conviction which has seen his artistic career triumph and flourish he is one of the most secretive and enigmatic artists working in Australia today, a man of unpredictable intentions and directions, and one of the most original.⁵

Reflected Fireline 1999 exemplifies how Storriers dominant motif has been developed since it emerged in his work two decades prior. Here the posts have disappeared, the fire levitates above the earth, plumes of smoke billow into the expansive atmosphere and glowing embers rain down on the landscape. The fire is expertly depicted along the horizontal plane of the painting as though the flames were licking along the canvas itself; the glowing hot flames a triumph of illusion. Storriers interest in transience fuels the concept of reflection often articulated through both his subject matter and titles. In Reflected Fireline the trail of the fire as it devours the rope is incongruously reflected against the earth below, accentuating the impermanence of the moment. These blaze-lines, with a beginning and an end, represent a moment in time a brilliant, albeit brief episode played out against the permanence of a seemingly endless horizon line.⁶

Reflected Fireline comprises a series of expertly enacted panels that seek a perfection that is more powerful than mortal experience can elicit. The largest panel encapsulating half the paintings surface is an expansive and breathtakingly apocalyptic sky. The space is eerily grey, populated by clouds that reflect the orange colour of the fire below. The burning rope floats above the horizon delineated by a band of dark pigment to denote the mass of land below. The foreground panel is a complex web of cracked and dry earth, devoid of life. Storrier here contemplates the insignificance of humankind when compared to the awesome magnitude of the natural world. He draws upon the symbolism of the fading light of dusk as a metaphor for change and the transformative and irreversible power of fire.

Tim Storrier has been the recipient of Australias most prestigious portrait painting prize, the Archibald Prize, for his 2012 self-portrait titled The Histrionic Wayfarer (after Bosch). More recently, he was won the 2017 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize with The Lunar Savant, a portrait of fellow artist, McLean Edwards. The artist has also received numerous other distinguished prizes and awards including the Sulman Prize (1968 & 1984). These awards are testament to the artists ability not only as a landscape painter but also a portraitist of immense talent. Tim Storriers art has been collected by all major Australian art institutions and is included in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In 1989, he was appointed a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales; in 1994, he was awarded the Order of Australia AM for his services to art; and in May 2003, he received a Doctor of Arts (Hons) from Charles Sturt University, New South Wales.

Footnotes
1. Tim Storrier cited in Lumby, C., Tim Storrier, The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, NSW, 2000, pp.17,18
2. Wilson, G., Elemental Reckoning - The Art of Tim Storrier 1981 - 2011, Jam Press, Eglinton, 2011, p.19-20
3. Tim Storrier cited in Lumby, C., Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p.45
4. Ibid, p.9
5. Ibid, p.20
6. Ibid, p.23

Caroline Jones MArtAdmin