Evening Notes (on the Infinite) 2022

TIM STORRIER born 1949

Evening Notes (on the Infinite) 2022

synthetic polymer paint on canvas
64.0 x 192.0 cm; 70.5 x 199.5 cm (framed)
signed lower right: STORRIER
signed, dated and inscribed verso: 'EVENING NOTES'/ (ON THE INFINITE)/ acrylic on canvas/ 2022/ Storrier

Provenance:
Acquired from the artist, private collection, Sydney

Estimate: $80000 - 120000

Result Hammer: $140000

Immense and visually spectacular skies have always been a dominant force in Tim Storrier’s work, and in Evening Notes (on the Infinite) 2022 this motif reaches its pinnacle. Storrier grew up in the vast Western Plains of New South Wales where the great sky seems to dominate the flat landscape. Here, that concept is taken further, so that the scene is actually set in the sky, with a triangle of flat plains far below in the lower right. This awareness of space, low horizons and infinite skies demonstrates Storrier’s affinity with the Australian landscape. Edmund Capon, former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, commented on his works’ uniquely Australian quality: ‘they could not, I believe, have come from any country other than Australia.’(1) Very few artists convey the sense of enormity of the Australian outback more poignantly than Storrier. 

Storrier’s very early landscapes follow the tradition established by the likes of Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), Russell Drysdale (1912-1981) and Arthur Boyd (1920-1999), whereby the Australian landscape is depicted as vast, barren and uncompromising. As with Nolan’s Burke and Wills, Drysdale’s Drover’s Wife and Boyd’s doomed brides, Storrier’s early works carry a vaguely threatening notion that, ‘the landscape is always on the verge of swallowing its occupants and their frail structures.’(2) They depict semi-decayed structures falling prey to their unrelating environment – relics of human occupation being reclaimed by the land.

Storrier went on to find his enduring motif in fire, repeatedly depicting burning ropes and logs beneath an overwhelming sky. Again, the idea of the dominance of nature and human decay are present, as well as themes of physical isolation and abandonment – the logs left to burn to dust. In his more recent Evening Notes (on the Infinite), a beautifully poetic, even mournful painting, these same themes persist as we observe paper and petals left to the mercy of the wind. Catherine Lumby posits in her monograph on Storrier, that these themes, ‘…reflect a deeper symbolic tension in the artist’s relationship with to the Australian landscape, both as a source of identity and artistic tradition.’(3)

Outback Australia has undoubtedly played a vital role in Storrier’s sense of identity since childhood. His memories of growing up in rural New South Wales, before being shipped off to boarding school in Sydney, inform the majority of his artistic practice, stating that, ‘nearly all of what I do relates to those years.’(4) These boyhood recollections of horse riding and camping on his family’s sheep station near Wellington have resulted in highly nostalgic landscapes. One of Storrier’s great talents is his ability to maintain an intimate psychological relationship to a scene that is physically lost to him via his imagination, and then relay these child-like memories into a picture with broader epic themes.

All of Storrier’s paintings are tightly structured, highly designed compositions - there is no sense that the moment he has captured is accidental, candid, or even real. Despite the fact that the flowers and scraps of paper in Evening Notes (on the Infinite) are depicted floating carelessly on the wind, their obviously devised arrangement in the formation of an infinity symbol belies any sense of randomness or reality. Instead of realism, Storrier aims to capture a more elusive, emotive, even spiritual, relationship to his subject. As the artist reminds us, his works are not literal transcriptions of the natural world, but ‘a backdrop for theatre, a stage set for human drama.’(5)

While Storrier is predominantly known as a landscape painter, and certainly the landscape does dominate his practice, still life has always been an important genre for the artist. In many ways, the still life tradition has influenced Storrier’s ‘landscapes’ more directly than the history of landscape painting itself.(6) A still life is defined as a group of ordinary objects taken from the mundanity of their everyday surrounds, and deliberately composed on an artist’s canvas, where they are elevated to objects of beauty. Storrier’s landscapes typically contain at least one such object, painted with the precision and composure of a still life, whether it be a burning rope, a snake, a pile of debris, a saddle, or a hat. In this case it is a collection of drifting papers and flowers - objects often found in traditional still lifes. Of course, the fact that they are tumbling in the breeze subverts the concept of them being ‘still’.

Storrier painted a series of brooding seascapes initially in the late 1990s. They represented an entirely different kind of wild vastness to his usual desert scenes. While his outback landscapes offered beacons of warmth in the form of fires, headlights and stars, the only offerings of softness or hope amongst the cold waves are scattered trails of roses. Similar to those in Evening Notes (on the Infinite), they float, immensely fragile, through rough terrain. Here, the scorched papers (perhaps a nod to his famous fire paintings), the flower buds, the tilted horizon and the improbably fluffy clouds are all ‘fragments from an invented, inner narrative.’(7) They coalesce in a painting that examines the tension between the representational and decorative function of art.

FOOTNOTES

1. Edmund Capon quoted in Lumby, C., Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p.8
2. Lumby, C., Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p.32
3. Ibid., p.31
4. Auty, G., ‘Burning Ambition Review’, The Weekend Australian, 8-9 July 1995
5. Tim Storrier quoted in Sarks, E., Tim Storrier: A Survey, Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 1993
6. Lumby, C., op. cit., p.46
7. Ibid., p.54

 Asta Cameron

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