ARTIST STATEMENT
“Despite its size and vast open spaces, Australia is a suburban nation. The dwellings of suburbia exist in large stretches of land that reach out from our city centres, mostly capital centres, and accord over seven in ten Australians a place of residence. Rather than looking at grand panoramas of seascapes and rural landscapes and places of myth and legend, my attention is drawn to the lived experiences and environments in this suburbia. Statistically, if there are Australian heroes then this is where many of them live.

I am an observer of the nondescript, of the quiet solitude of unassuming streets, of the unremarkable reminder of human aspirations and private intentions. These current paintings explore the accumulated shapes and shadows of the built environment and of the patterns and forms that our constructed world creates in the observable juxtapositions with the natural environment. The quirky and the formally planned share a stage together.

I am drawn to the architectural characteristics of dwellings. Some are gems; many are arguably of aesthetic quality while others are poorly conceived and mundane. There are endless combinations of these characteristics: terracotta roofs framed against deep blues of the sky, low and flat post Bauhaus moderns, and others that are temples to the ordinary and extraordinary. And behind all of these are the backyards, mostly hidden from observation. Multiple generations have lived in many of these dwellings and these dwellings resolutely live on.

It is into this world that I wanted to place familiar work from art history, to appropriate segments of paintings (Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, 1770; Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, 1863; Rodin’s The Thinker, 1902; Grant Wood’s American Gothic, 1930) to both elevate the mundane and diminish and contain the import of these famous images. Much has been expressed about the tyranny of our distance from the acknowledged cultural hubs of world art, especially Europe. But the ‘chip on the shoulder’ view of our culture being of lesser import is over. We have in this country an abundance of talent and skills in all of the arts, in which we truly box well above our weight. A few of these paintings are really a bit cheeky but paradox is a great way to press home a point.”

-Geoff Coleman, June 2010