Four Trees 2001

RICK AMOR born 1948

Four Trees 2001

oil on canvas
100.0 x 81.0 cm
signed and dated lower left: RICK AMOR '01
dated and inscribed verso: FOUR TREES OCT 01/ 100 x 81

Provenance:
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)
Private collection, Melbourne

Reference:
Fry, G., Rick Amor, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2008, cat.119, p.216 (illus. p.119)

Related Works:
Three Trees, 2010, oil on canvas, 130.0 x 89.0 cm, private collection, Melbourne

Estimate: $38000 - 48000

Result Hammer: $34,000

Rick Amor knows his subjects intimately, but the paintings are not always literal representations; they have evolved over a number of years, and are often underpinned by several layers of memory, knowledge and perception. Amor once said: ‘I’ve always thought that what we see is not necessarily what’s there. There’s extra things we don’t see, there’s layers of reality...The twentieth century seems to be a struggle to relate perception to reality.’1

Paul McGillick’s article on Amor’s New York paintings of the mid-nineties perfectly sums up this process: ‘…the artist has intervened to reconstruct reality so that it becomes a projection of the imagination. This is a phenomenological process by which the world as we think we see it is actually a construction based only partly on our prior understanding of it…there is a disconcerting quality to the pictures, as though they were not so much snapshots of reality as frozen frames from the moving pictures of our dreams. Typically, the paintings are powerfully perspectival. But invariably the eye is pulled up short on its journey to the vanishing point by a visual fragment, an image or a person which resonates with meaning, except that, as in a dream, the meaning is something felt rather than understood.’2

Such images are also deeply influenced by the artist’s youthful reading of contemporary literature concerning cities, from T.S. Eliot’s poetic verse, to the classic dystopian texts of George Orwell and Franz Kafka. Discussing his depictions of urban Melbourne in particular, Amor mused ‘…I’ve always thought that behind the façade of a building all sorts of mysterious things go on. I suppose it’s from my childhood and reading Kafka. I like to suggest that behind the prosaic reality something else is lurking.’3

A true flâneur in the modern sense, Amor often revisits the same urban corners of his favoured cities - both literally, and in his paintings - namely Melbourne, Barcelona and New York. The present painting, Four Trees 20014, was revisited by Amor almost a decade later in 2010, with the same area depicted in Three Trees 2010.

In his book on Amor, The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and His Art, Gary Catalano wrote, ‘…he visits it often [Melbourne], generally with a camera, and has made a habit of recording anything he thinks he might like to use in his paintings. Moreover, he frequently consults the albums in which he keeps his snapshots and every time he does so he makes a point of rearranging the images so that unsuspected conjunctions come about. These random conjunctions have, on occasion, led directly to compositions.’5

It is likely that we are presented here with a Melbourne scene. With its enigmatic, layered space veiled in half-light and shadows, Four Trees 2001 resonates with a disquieting sense of both beauty and menace that is the essence of Amor’s vision. Mysterious and intensely poetic, the work encapsulates the ‘other-worldly’ quality of Melbourne, ‘a city ethereal and without substance, a city of enchantment.’6 

Footnotes

1. Amor, R., in Catalano, G., Building a Picture: Interviews with Australian Artists, McGraw Hill, Melbourne, 1997, p.141

2. McGillick, P., ‘The City as Dream - The New York Paintings of Rick Amor’, Monument, no.22, 1998, pp.84-88

3. Rick Amor cited in Harford, S., ‘The bronze age of a city seer’, The Age, 30 September 1994, p.16.

4. Fry, G. Rick Amor, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2008, pp.119 (illus.), 216

5. Catalano, G., The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and His Art, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p.148

6. Morris, M., Australian Landscape, John Sands, Sydney, 1944 (Myra Morris was the artist’s aunt)

Tracy Le Cornu BA (Hons)