Lot 207

Colin Lanceley: The Gaudi Quartet and other lyrical digressions, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 20 July -7 August 2010 (illus.)

NOTE:
During his early years in his guise as an 'urban art guerrilla', Colin Lanceley avoided entanglement with the weighty burden of landscape painting. With maturity, his attitude and interest in landscape painting was reinvigorated with a clear embrace of Modernist principles.

Lanceley stated, 'I think painting has to have an emotional core, it has to be an intelligible language that grasps other sensibilities. It has to intensify the experience of being alive for other people; it is not the vehicle for describing emptiness of meaning. I think the only way to be original is to embrace tradition, the assumed language of the past…[This grafting of tradition] is enormously nourishing. I don't have a problem with alienation from it. I would find myself alienated if I weren't able to embrace it'.

Robert Hughes continued that 'landscape, the literal 'field' where nature and culture intersect, form their layers and complicate one another. This became for Lanceley the natural carrier of that 'experience of being alive''.

Hughes, R., 'Introduction' in Colin Lanceley, Craftman House, Sydney 1987, p. 15