Dick Watkins

(born 1937)

Circus, 1981-84

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Galerie Dusseldorf, Perth
Janet Holmes à Court Collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1987

EXHIBITED
Dick Watkins: Paintings-Drawings 1981-1987, Galleries Dusseldorf, Perth, 24 July 1987


In an interview with Grazia Gunn in Art and Australia (1983), Grazia describes: 'His is a language of bare forms devoid of symbolic meanings which, however, maintain complex and vital imagery. The aesthetic quality in his work is a reflection of the quality of the various levels of his intuitive expression. Watkins emphasizes that intuition is the preliminary to contextual control. He places the broad brush marks intuitively and arbitrarily on the canvas. These spontaneous marks generate subsequent structures that are then related and ordered within a formalist theory giving unity and coherence to the picture: 'With not much premeditation, I move in with a few big brushes and splash a bit of paint around – not in a linear way – in a broad way. I get a few shapes up and then it is a matter of slowly elaborating on that with mass and line, sort of interchanging all the time until I arrive at a satisfactory complexity. Every painter knows when the picture is finished. It just gels... The way I start a picture is purely intuitive. Each time I have a certain optimism that this will be the ideal painting, the masterpiece, and that is what I believe painting should be trying to do. It should be an attempt to make something beautiful and powerful at the same time.'

Circus, 1981-84, is just that, a complex and powerful work showcasing his mastered capacity to blend colour and form. Hailing from a great period of innovation and energy, Watkins would be selected to represent Australia at the 1985 XVIII Biennial de Sao Paulo in Brazil.