Acrylic, rope and pencil on canvas
190.0 x 350.0 c
Storrier’s
early childhood on a large property in northern New South Wales“...was
to have a major impact on [his] later work through the force of
memory: memories of games, of personal rituals, of constructing
toys and
inventing new worlds; of home-cooked meals and slaughtered bulls;
of fires ripping across vast spaces”. His compositions, although “meticulously
constructed and controlled ”also contain an “emotional
undercurrent ”which sometimes can take the forms of “repressed
emotion”, that is, “passion and anger finding release,
as in the burning objects of the 1980s”. (Hart 1989)
The archetype
of fire is in Storrier’s iconography a potent
poetic symbol of life and temporality (one speaks of vivifying
fire in the blood which is
the last flame of life, extinguished only instants after death), passion
(the all consuming fire of love), purification (the cleansing fire)
and the expiation
of guilt (the retributive fires of purgatory and hell). (Van Nunen 1987)
The
horse relates to Storrier’s childhood in the country and
to sporting activities but moves beyond this. Here it appears
in outline,
as if it were
a chimera; the mystery and the dream. (Hart 1989)
Represented National
Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Victoria
The Art Gallery of New South Wales
Queensland Art Gallery
Many academic, regional and other collections throughout Australia
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Reference
Hart,
Deborah 1989, Tim Storrier: Burning of the Gifts, Australian Galleries
Pty Ltd, Melbourne, pp.7,19.
Van Nunen, Linda 1987, Point to Point -The Art of Tim Storrier, Craftsman
House, Roseville East, NSW, p.77 (illus.pp.148 – 49).
