John’s next exhibtion, Into white, runs from 27 July until 10 August at Art2Muse Gallery in Double Bay.

Please join John for a drink at the gallery from 11am to 1pm on Saturday 31 July. Art2Muse is located at 475A New South Head Road (corner Bellevue road)

Into white

“I don’t like bright colours. The Chinese manage to do their finest paintings with no colour at all… To me there’s something vulgar about coloured things”.

Ian Fairweather 1973

Into white is a collection of landscape paintings. The works depict my disparate sense of home: the Finger Wharf on Sydney’s iconic harbour, my studio in the Southern Tablelands of NSW, and mountains covered in snow.  They are a collection of spatial, or landscaped, self-portraits.

Stylistically, this collection borrows from, treads broadly among, and pays tribute to, many of my favourite Australian artists. A walk through the 20^th century Australian section of the Art Gallery of New South Wales reveals the painterly exuberance of Boyd’s shrubbery, the collapsed depth and abstracted forms of Passmore and Fairweather, the subtle naivety of Williams’ mark-making, the calligraphic touch of Upward, the drawn paintings and voluminous texture of Tomescu, and of course, the affected treatment of Whiteley’s Sydney harbour.

While informed by these varied artists and styles, my paintings are bound by their common suppression of colour. They privilege the undercoat. They resurrect the provocative early 20^th century idea that a painting is, at its core, a blank plane, upon which the principles of abstraction and minimalism continue to rest. The works comment on what it means to create a pristine, unmediated contemporary landscape, whether natural or man-made. They exalt line, resist form, push colour back and move into white.

John Sheehy 2010