Featured Artist - John Gilfillan

The Landscape:
The landscape is an important element of the Australian society and its culture. Even in the major cities we are conscious of it. Even in its absence we pine for it. Our notion of the landscape is subtle. It reveals and withholds. It abstracts and repeats its motifs. Yet the variations and shifts in patterns hold our attention as we gaze at it.

These notions are important to my paintings where the brush works to create these rhythms and subtle variations. Light and colour are important elements of the landscape. My works use paint and the brush to re-create the shimmer of the horizon, the sparkle of light reflected in water broken by the wind.

The rectangular picture plane gives us an immediate abstraction of an image. The Chinese tradition has shown us that a landscape can be compressed into an abstraction within this plane. My works are conscious of this abstraction. Rhythmic elements break this plane in a series of kaleidoscopic fragments that play and bounce from one to another. Sometimes these fragments combine into recognisable forms. At other times the fragments exist in their own right. Underlying all the works is the indefinable and experiential pleasure that we take away from that part of our lives that we call ‘landscape’.

The Pulsar Line:
The pulsar line is the unseen influence of all elements of the landscape. My work is completed with the intention of making the viewer aware of the unseen aspects within the landscape: wind, heat haze, sound, tidal movement,the sun's rays. The viewer will discover the rest of the landscape after time spent looking, and reflecting. The line was first developed to mimic a shimmer in the landscape and thus it is the final process in completing a work of art, an overlaying process which in turn changes the nature of the work, giving it a three dimensional quality that allows multiple viewing perspectives.

John Gilfillan
February 2005

For further information, please enquire at Salmon Galleries.