Fossil Landscape 1962
Oil on canvas
Signed “Louis James ’62” lower right
Inscribed with the catalogue number 549 to the reverse
100.0 x 126.0 cm
Louis James’s widow Pat, in a letter dated
18 August 2001, wrote of this painting that“... Louis regarded
it as a very important painting and did not want to part with it. Consequently
it was never exhibited in Australia. Exhibited only in two exhibitions
in G.B.[Great Britain]”. Indeed, on both occasions the exhibitions
received glowing reviews:
Mr Louis James, the Australian painter, whose recent work is on show at the
Stone Gallery,... never fails to convey his delight in brilliant colour and
in the textural qualities of paint and canvas and his paintings, as always
,are proclamations of heraldic urgency... new directions have been powerfully
realized in “Fossil Landscape” and “Red Landscape”, where
rich colour and seemingly non-figurative forms give way upon contemplation
to primitive signs and symbols and the whitened bones of antiquity. (The Times,
London, 10 May, 1963)
The agreeable fantasies of Louis James... owe a slight debt to the enchanting
spells woven by Paul Klee, but a greater one to his own powers of invention
and sense of decorative elaboration... a rich procession of private signs and
symbols suggesting a personalised mosaic... The result is chromatically attractive.
(Apollo, London, December 1963, p.499)
James himself said of his idiosyncratic imagery:
The symbols, signs and marks in my paintings are seldom literal. Individually
they may not always be translatable as a unity I hope they may. They refer
to landscapes and peoples. They are landscapes of the inner eye in which I
attempt to give meaning to the shapes, forms, colours and memories which move
me most. (Spencer 1964)
Exhibited
Stone Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, May 1963
Redfern Gallery, London, December 1963
Represented
National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Victoria
The Art Gallery of New South Wales
Art Gallery of South Australia
Queensland Art Gallery
