Hobie Porter : Contemporary Landscape Artist

PRESSING CURRENTS: A SELECTION OF NEW WORKS BY HOBIE PORTER

11 May- 31st July, 2011
Tweed River Art Gallery

Resorption

Hobie Porter
Resorption
Oil on polyester canvas
135x120cm
2011

The Tweed River Art Gallery has scheduled this display of Porter’s new work to coincide with World Environment Day on Sunday 5 June 2011. Both the artist and the Gallery are pleased to participate in this globally significant event which seeks to focus world attention on the environment and recognise positive environmental programs and initiatives. The selection will be on display from May 11th to July 31st 2011. Visit the gallery's website for opening hours.

This presentation is also timely given the exhibition currently on display in the Friends’ Gallery which showcases a magnificent oil painting by artist Elioth Gruner titled Valley of the Tweed. Currently on loan from the Art Gallery of NSW, this work offers a more traditional treatment of the picturesque landscape of the region. However, both works share a sense of grandeur, meticulous attention to detail and play homage to the sublime.

Pressing Currents is a sequence of paintings that depict intricately observed flotsam suspended over vast seascapes. Each work focuses on a weathered item of manufacture, lost, abandoned or perhaps jettisoned by an excessive society into the ocean. This debris is often encrusted with sea life, reminiscent of artefacts dredged up from a previous civilisation. They hover just above churning waves which threaten to engulf their story into a great silence (if they haven’t already). Lit dramatically, painted delicately, the objects are crafted with a type of trompe-l’oeil in mind. Their fragility is dwarfed into insignificance when contextuallised amidst vast oceanic sweeps.

“The paintings are involved with turbulent seas in an age of climate volatility and are intended to refer, somewhat futuristically, to our precarious civilisation amidst the infinite.”

Yet the collection strangely evokes a tranquillity within the maelstrom. The sea’s unruly energy is countered by spatial skies. Porter's colours are restrained to subtle blue-greys and russets.

The circle has become an important motif in Porter’s recent works. Its shape suggests both completeness and limitlessness. The rise and demise of past civilisations is evident in their fragmentary artefacts. The recent Japanese Tsunami catastrophe intensifies Porter’s deep concerns that Modernity is headed for its own ‘full-circle’. However, the circle does offer a sense of hope; having no beginning and therefore no end, it is rich in transformative power.

Documentation

Queensland: Lorraine Pilgrim

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