Joe Furlonger: Into the Blue

When Joe Furlonger was around eighteen, he recalls being on a commercial fishing ship, somewhere between Darwin and New Guinea—“about thirty Ks out, where I couldn’t see the land anymore.” It was “a spooky, little feeling,” says Furlonger—but one that settled into a sense of calm.

Over fifty years later, Furlonger’s marine paintings take the reverse aspect—from shores and headlands, overlooking the water. His days as a fisherman are long behind him. (“I’m no longer a participant,” says Furlonger, “now I’m an observer.”) But from Central Queensland to the South China Sea, Furlonger continues to reflect upon the ocean and the vessels that sail across it.

His reverence for the sea is a complement to what he admires in the landscape. For decades, he has travelled west from his studio in the Samford Valley, northwest of Brisbane. The land there is flat and vast, broad enough to see the curvature of the earth. Looking out to sea, he finds similar inspiration: “It’s that spatial thing I’m looking for,” says Furlonger. “I’ve found minimalism, or a version of it, in the environment.”

Into the Blue has paintings of recent travels as well as memories from earlier times. There’s Hervey Bay—sheltered by K’Gari, no surf, in a “light, misting rain.” There’s Gladstone—Queensland’s largest port, as expansive as Sydney Harbour (“minus the coal and the aluminium”). And there’s Sydney itself—where Furlonger made “scratchy, little drawings” at Elizabeth Bay. Back at his studio, those drawings became paintings that “leaned on a bit of Brett Whiteley, whose Harbour paintings I really admire,” especially those depicting Sydney in grey weather.

But beyond this, Furlonger’s observation and memory align with world affairs. From the news on the ABC or SBS, or the business section of the newspaper, he is drawn in by images of tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz: “I like the fantastic shapes,” says Furlonger, “and the changes in shape as containerisation has moved along. They used to be more streamlined, but now these ships have a big, boxy shape—like a galleon.”

As a young man on a fifty-foot fishing boat, Furlonger was awestruck by these hulking, monstrous vessels, barrelling past at a rate of knots. In his paintings from the 1980s, tankers were “sinister figures.” Now, seen from the shore and after several decades, these same ships become focal points for contemplation. Each tanker may be one thousand feet long and carrying one million barrels of oil or more—but in Furlonger’s paintings, they are small in the great, blue sea, their forms marked by a brief gesture or suggested by a box of lines.

For many years, Furlonger has mixed his own paint from pigment powder and PVA glue. That control over his materials has allowed him to work as he likes, typically in watery layers, thin “to the point where it’s just hanging there.” Recently, he learned that Russell Drysdale would turn older canvases around and paint on the reverse. Some of the smaller paintings in this exhibition make use of these “antique surfaces,” cut and re-stretched from larger pieces of Belgian linen. The difference in surface was immediate: “the paint soaks into the canvas a lot more and it takes a few coats to get an image out of it.” That responsiveness to his medium creates subtle variation from painting to painting, each with its own surface and depth according to its subject and its form.

Furlonger is not a narrative or history painter. But he speaks about Monet, whose studio shook from the artillery on the Western Front, yet who continued to paint immense, reflective garden pictures. And he mentions, too, the shanshui ink paintings of Chinese literati artists, who concealed political messages in ostensibly serene landscapes. “They painted boatmen on the river or philosophers’ little huts,” says Furlonger, “but historically they were painted in hot political times.” In a decade of pandemic, war and political discord (all of which, as it happens, have made us acutely aware of our reliance on shipping) these paintings stand somewhere “between nostalgia and escapism,” what Furlonger calls an exercise of “contemplative optimism, considering current political circumstances.”

Now seventy-three, Furlonger finds he is often “working on memories.” A recent drive out west over fifteen days with fellow painter Jun Chen was invigorating, but the travel that used to sustain his practice is becoming gradually more strenuous. The ocean, it seems, has allayed some of these concerns, providing somewhere for Furlonger to contemplate—on the places he has been, on the places he has yet to go. The known, and the unknown, as he ventures into the blue.

Jack Howard, May 2026

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