Joe Furlonger: Landscape

Joe Furlonger is a nine-time finalist in the Archibald, Wynne & Sulman Prizes and widely regarded as one of Australia’s most respected landscape painters. He is the winner of the Tattersalls Landscape Prize (2011), Fleurieu Art Prize for Landscape (2002) and was awarded the Moët et Chandon Australian Art Fellowship (1988). A retrospective of his work was recently shown at Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane.

Furlonger’s work is held in many significant public and private collections in Australia and internationally, including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, Powerhouse Museum, Art Gallery of NSW and the British Museum in London.

A restlessly creative artist, Joe Furlonger’s intimate history with, and passion for the landscape connects him to an enduring Australian art history: as a landscape painter, he is part of a celebrated lineage of Australian artists, including Fred Williams, Sidney Nolan and John Olsen.His paintings of coiling, swollen rivers spilling over and vast broken, bruised landscapes baked dry in the sun are worked up from sketches and watercolours, en plein air. As an artist with a lifelong daily drawing practice, Furlonger’s direct and unencumbered mark making can be felt keenly in his work, offering a distinctly fresh, spontaneous approach to landscape. His style characterised by the seeming contradiction of sketch-like impulsivity and painterly eloquence with a deceptively naïve quality oscillating between figuration and abstraction.

Furlonger has developed a unique way to present the viewer with a vertical picture plane. In many of his works, he raises up the back of the picture and politely pushes the far distance of landscapes in our faces. If a ribbon like horizon line does sometimes register blue along the upper edge, he still manages a terrific conflation of middle and far distance. These are passages where a kaleidoscopic pushing and pulling of space is achieved, and a viewer can experience the contradictory sensations of vastness and tight focus.

In the history of Australian landscape painting, there has often been an idea of an Australian sublime in its depiction. Furlonger’s work has a music like rhythm of its own. He responds to a more innate, almost spiritual sense of those same vast spaces.

A chaotic beauty is found in the power of nature unleashed and Joe Furlonger’s passion for and engagement with the Australian landscape is evidence of his meditative desire to understand this country’s vastness and ever-changing character.