‘Works from New York and Prague’
1992
Holdsworth Gallery, Sydney
‘Drawings’
The Drawing Center, NYC
(‘Qantas Amnesty International Figurative Art Award’, First Prize.  Study tour (1991-1992) USA, Amsterdam and Prague)
The works in this collection are not necessarily bound by a self-conscious uniformity of style.  They neither represent landscape exclusively, nor faces or people encountered, but instead focuses on my strongest emotional response to each of the places I visited.  This response would often take the form of a myth I may have read about, ie. the Oglala Sioux Indian myth of ‘the white Bison Women’, where I saw an interesting parallel with contemporary America, or perhaps an object that had some symbolic potency for me personally eg. Walt Whitman’s poetry, the German landscape, the colonial furniture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or symbolic relevance on a more universal level – the Jewish Cemetery in Prague, the landscapes in Amsterdam and other symbolic references.
New York, for me represented above all things humanity and pathos.  The towering symbols of capitalist indulgence and indifference, belies the tolerance and consideration that must operate for such a huge densely-populated, multi-cultural city to function.  For so many people to survive in such density, everyone must learn how to co-operate.
The essence of these drawings lies with the idea of chronicling my most enduring responses in the period of time I was away.  For me they represent a search for some significance within the cultures I encountered, and an attempt to find within each city I stayed, an illustration of my emotional/intellectual response at a particular time and place.
 

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