Lot 208

Peter Carey and Alison Sommers Collection, New York

Colin Lanceley, Craftsman House, Sydney 1987, plate 39, pp. 106-107 [illus.]

NOTE:
Robert Hughes wrote, 'for all their Eliotian [T. S. Eliot] titles, most of Colin's larger paintings from 1981 onwards come from specific scenes, although Lanceley insists that they are not 'views'- and for all their formal generalisations they record a rapturous sensitivity of response to the light of high summer, [and] to the weird buzz in the bush. […] In their absorption of metaphor and their almost fanatical precision of fine-tuned detail, these paintings are a good deal less placid than they seem. Their immense strength is their colour, so wide ranging, structurally integrated and so sure in its effects. With a few exceptions, […] there are no artists in Lanceley's generation to whom the diction of colour seems to comes so naturally, across a whole range of intentions from the purely optical to the metaphoric.

Lanceley, here, as elsewhere in his work, is an intuitive painter, true to the precepts of the man he most admires. 'The choice of my colours', wrote Matisse in 1908, as he was issuing the apparent convulsions of Fauvism into the grander air of monumental decoration, 'does not rest on any kind of scientific theory; it is based on observation, feeling, on the experience of my sensibility''.

Hughes, R., 'Introduction' in Colin Lanceley, Craftman House, Sydney 1987, p. 17