Joe Furlonger Landscape

For over four decades, Joe Furlonger has been doggedly committed to painting the Australian landscape.

Landscape has been a dominant force in Australian art since colonial times, a place for myth and legend to play out, the supreme example being Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, 1946-47, where human and landscape meld and morph into one mythic dreaming. Then there is Fred Williams who reinvented how to describe and see the eviscerated guts of Australia with his painterly shorthand, and the hard to pin down Ian Fairweather, someone who had little to no interest in the official art world but compulsively made paintings informed by his life and exploits from anything and on anything at his adopted bush camp on Yarun (Bribie Island).

Joe Furlonger has had to navigate this rich and vital investigation of the Australian landscape, and it has only seemed to energise him. Twenty-five landscapes painted by the artist between 2010 and 2024 have been selected for the Joe Furlonger Landscape exhibition at Defiance Gallery, Sydney in late June. It will be Furlonger’s fourth solo presentation with Defiance Gallery since joining them in 2019.

Each landscape has fascinating formal elements with the colour, texture, and balance. There are none of the figurative images that have inspired many of Furlonger’s previous subjects. The exhibition reveals how Furlonger’s landscapes over the last fourteen years have become progressively quieter, almost meditative. This peacefulness might explain Furlonger’s fascination for infinite high horizon lines with deceivingly flat planes. One certainly feels this meditative vide further when examining Furlonger’s painting process which utilises gentle layering with soft pigment colours and gestural marks. They dovetail beautifully to deepen our perception and perspective of the image.

Informed by what he sees, what he has learnt from the European painters and from the Chinese ink painters he has studied, the content of these landscapes are inspired by various and numerous regional trips mainly throughout the open spaces of northern New South Wales and northwest Queensland. The earliest painting in Joe Furlonger Landscape is the two-metre-long work The Glasshouse Mountain Horizon Series Xll, 2010, which was painted in the same year as the six-meter-long triptych painting Bridge to Bribie Island which was the centre piece of his 2022 survey Joe Furlonger Horizons at the Queensland Art Gallery – Gallery of Modern Art.

Furlonger was born in 1952, Cairns. He grew up in the rural (now semi-rural) Samford Valley north of Brisbane. His early years were spent working as a farmhand and on fishing trawlers before attending art schools in Brisbane under artists Roy Churcher, David Paulson, Ann Thomson, Ian Smith, and later in Sydney with Kevin Connor and Michael Johnson. He first appeared on the Australian art map in the early eighties, winning the Moët and Chandon Fellowship in 1988 with his 1987 painting Bathers. The Fellowship’s residency in the south of France allowed Furlonger to roam European cities to study the early European and modernist painters.

At the time, Australian art dealer Ray Hughes (1946–2017) was a presence in Australian art. Known for saying, “Once you get the taste for this art thing you seek it out wherever you can.” Hughes was different in the Australian art scene because he sought out and championed previously unheralded local talents, investigated l’art brut and the local adherents to its language and he breathed that difference into his gallery. Furlonger caught Hughes’ attention. Here was a guy from outer suburban Brisbane who went to art school. He was equal parts passionate and obsessive and could draw a relentlessly consistent output into being. In an art world alive with neo-expressionists, he had an inescapable aesthetic rigour, one that dovetailed a traditionalist approach to the landscape with his own particular abandon.

There are short films online of Furlonger working en plein air. One depicts the scrawling concoction of PVA glue mixed with pigment paint, applied with clotted brushes past their use-by date onto canvases flapping like wounded birds in the wind. It is an almost comical mise en scène that somehow miraculously falls together into a personal action painting experience of the landscape he’s embedded in and deeply familiar with looking at.
The art world is self-referential, in that it has a linage that can be traced throughout its history. Artists make their work, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In all serious art you can see the DNA of past practitioners. I see the influence of the German expressionists, Georg Baselitz, Fred Williams, Picasso, and Ian Fairweather in Furlonger, yet it’s unique to his hand. As I look at two landscapes from the Defiance exhibition—Grainfield, Moree II, 2012, and Hornibrook Bridge, 2022,—William’s and Fairweather’s presence is felt. It’s interesting how an artist can visually conjure their emotional experience of being somewhere. When I look at Furlonger’s work I see the mythology of Australian landscape painting, but I also see his dogged commitment to his craft and the way he hits his mark is uncanny.

This preview was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67

EXHIBITION
Joe Furlonger Landscape
29 June – 20 July 2024
Defiance Gallery, Sydney