Notes

This work makes reference to the famous painting, The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), by French 'naïve' artist Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). That work depicts a lion approaching a sleeping woman and her mandolin in an imaginary desert landscape on a moonlit night. The work is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This series of works is a celebration rather than a statement of the fact that there is ‘nothing new’ to be made art-wise. Falling squarely into the modernist revival, these paintings test already used images in another painted setting. The works function in an idiom of painting that has been re-hashed before, and certainly will be again.

The artist attempts homage to modernist abstract painting and appropriates well-known art work titles, giving the series of works a certain ‘back to school’ flavour. Out-of-place-objects are introduced into ‘painted out-of-place’ landscapes: sometimes the landscape is completely eliminated to make way for expressions of pure form and colour. Colour use and a sense of 'automatic' composition are at the forefront.¹

1. Adapted from the artist’s statement, 2020.