Ben Quilty is an Australian artist producing richly emotive works that effectively exemplify the art of abstraction, having earned him a national reputation. Acclaimed as a portraitist, Quilty creates thickly impastoed canvases using vibrant colours and broad brush strokes that build up layers of paint. He works in a wide range of genres, including portraits and still lives, but also landscapes that reflect his fascination with Australia, a passion which has its origins in Arthur Streeton’s edict that “Australian artists should look to their own backyards for inspiration.” Portraiture for Ben Quilty is about the emotional relationship he develops with his subjects, and the creation of an intimate bond which allows them to place their trust
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Troy Park of 2012, a studio portrait and one of his collection’s key images, is a stark representation of abstract portraiture, intending to be more emotionally appealing than it is aesthetically. Keen to capture their sheer physicality, Quilty asked a soldier to sit for this portrait naked. He was not interested in creating a traditional heroic male nude. Rather, he needed to see the body after its protective layers of uniform and body armour had been stripped away. For him, their nakedness expressed both the strength and the frailty of the human condition, in time of war. The body of the man depicted appears raw and uneasy. When comparing the paintings made from photographs of soldiers in Afghanistan with Troy Park, the former appear simpler, the subjects’ pupils are restricted, the surface of the canvas less built up, as if fewer strokes more aptly convey the trance‐like clarity of active duty, in contrast with the physical and emotional weight of post‐duty reflection. An undecidable force, a wave of energy, is visualised invading the figure whose posture is slumped and melancholy. It is from his heavy head that a wide stroke of blended reds and oranges makes a continuous path like a stream of memory that burdens …show more content…
Close emerged from the 1970s painting movement of photorealism, but later moved on from its initially hyper-attentive rendering of a given subject. He went on to explore how methodical, system-driven portrait painting, based on photography's underlying processes, which could suggest a wide range of artistic and philosophical concepts. Chuck Close’s portraits, in juxtaposition to Quilty’s, are the result of taking multiple individual details to make a whole. Self-Portrait of 1997, a mosaic self-portrait, is an exceptional example of one of his evolved more refined works, focussing on aesthetics more, as opposed to emotion. Thinking of his work in mosaic terms is almost automatic. There is the tessellation of same-sized segments and he creates the texture and reflectivity found in mosaic materials through exquisite details of circles and lozenge shapes. It is as if Close creates a visual code of dots and dashes in sequences that viewer’s eyes effortlessly translate into a distinguishable face. Chuck Close's work is most often associated, in the popular mind, with his own likeness. Although it has been chosen by the artist largely for the sake of convenience, Close's self-portraits provide an interesting arena for gauging the development of his thought and work over four decades. The insouciant stare of the young man in Big Self-Portrait makes a striking
Troy Park of 2012, a studio portrait and one of his collection’s key images, is a stark representation of abstract portraiture, intending to be more emotionally appealing than it is aesthetically. Keen to capture their sheer physicality, Quilty asked a soldier to sit for this portrait naked. He was not interested in creating a traditional heroic male nude. Rather, he needed to see the body after its protective layers of uniform and body armour had been stripped away. For him, their nakedness expressed both the strength and the frailty of the human condition, in time of war. The body of the man depicted appears raw and uneasy. When comparing the paintings made from photographs of soldiers in Afghanistan with Troy Park, the former appear simpler, the subjects’ pupils are restricted, the surface of the canvas less built up, as if fewer strokes more aptly convey the trance‐like clarity of active duty, in contrast with the physical and emotional weight of post‐duty reflection. An undecidable force, a wave of energy, is visualised invading the figure whose posture is slumped and melancholy. It is from his heavy head that a wide stroke of blended reds and oranges makes a continuous path like a stream of memory that burdens …show more content…
Close emerged from the 1970s painting movement of photorealism, but later moved on from its initially hyper-attentive rendering of a given subject. He went on to explore how methodical, system-driven portrait painting, based on photography's underlying processes, which could suggest a wide range of artistic and philosophical concepts. Chuck Close’s portraits, in juxtaposition to Quilty’s, are the result of taking multiple individual details to make a whole. Self-Portrait of 1997, a mosaic self-portrait, is an exceptional example of one of his evolved more refined works, focussing on aesthetics more, as opposed to emotion. Thinking of his work in mosaic terms is almost automatic. There is the tessellation of same-sized segments and he creates the texture and reflectivity found in mosaic materials through exquisite details of circles and lozenge shapes. It is as if Close creates a visual code of dots and dashes in sequences that viewer’s eyes effortlessly translate into a distinguishable face. Chuck Close's work is most often associated, in the popular mind, with his own likeness. Although it has been chosen by the artist largely for the sake of convenience, Close's self-portraits provide an interesting arena for gauging the development of his thought and work over four decades. The insouciant stare of the young man in Big Self-Portrait makes a striking