recent paintings
Over the last two years John Anderson has consolidated his position as a major artist in the Melbourne scene. Anderson is a painter. He is almost an old-fashioned painter, a lover of landscape, of chiaroscuro, the shadowy twilight zone of dusk where mysteries hover just out of sight.
The well-known lawyer Julian Burnside launched Anderson’s show late last year and summed up the strange allure of these paintings in exactly the way I had hoped to describe them. Burnside saw, in these shadowy mis en scènes, the aftermath of crime, of mistakes and mayhem, hidden bodies and shady characters—even when the paintings are devoid of overt human presence. There were no dead bodies lying by the side of the road in these paintings, no clear evidence of mis-deeds, but the lawyer in Burnside could feel them oozing out of the sumptuous paintwork, the darkness created by overhanging boughs and thick undergrowth.
There is almost a school of shadows in Melbourne art. Anderson’s work would sit comfortably in a room next to paintings by Rick Amor and Louise Hearman and photographs by Bill Henson and Jane Burton. In all of these artists’ work a degree of mystery is concocted via a dark palette and a theatrical, almost baroque, sense of space.
Anderson is at his most powerful when he works in landscape. His source is the world immediately around him. He lives and works in the coastal environment of Cape Schank and the unpaved roads and bush of the region make for a rich palimpsest of nature and dilapidated human presence.
Anderson loves his cars. Almost every painting in his last show featured either a vehicle or the rough roads