ARTIST STATEMENT
"Painting has always been about making stimulating pictures from the combination of colour, form and composition, and the search for the appropriate, magical ingredients for successfully marrying these qualities is endless. The stimulus for my work is in the everyday environment in which we are surrounded. In my mode of working, with many catalysts for commencement of painting, I sift through these stimuli and create small studies in a development stage before beginning larger works. These early studies are completed on heavy weight Fabriano paper and allow for development of the drawing together of ideas, with emphasis on the drawing. The work is rooted in realism but with a distortion factor – a kind of sub-surrealism.

For the past few years I have been painting pictures of the suburban backyard. I have sought to represent this iconic Australian feature in its many facets: backyards in suburbia are secret places; secluded, imbued with notions of privacy and belonging, overflowing catchments of family memories. They have a spirit of place, quite separate to our understanding of the front, public yard of a suburban property.

In the fenced backyard we develop an attachment to place which is in stark contrast to indigenous Australia’s relationship with land. These private places are bordered to barricade us; they are places devoted to the celebration of a psychological haven, a bulwark against an invading world, and a source of private safety and emotional nourishment. They may also though embody shadows, and fears, and bad things may take place in backyards.

In many of the works a high viewpoint enables the horizon line to be marginalised, or eliminated, and allows greater manipulation in the drafting of the composition from differing vantage points and in the distortion of lines of perspective. This series offers a narrative on living in suburbia and may be navigated by the meandering eye to be read as a map of the memories of our inhabited visual space."

-Geoff Coleman, August 2007