ian friend
In the vestibule which leads into the downstairs display space of Brisbane City Gallery, lan Friend introduces his work by way of a quote from Gaston Bachelard's well-known text The Poetics of Space, ' .. . we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space'. lt is a highly appropriate quote for describing the character of his own art practice and of establishing the premises of this particular exhibition which attempts a partnership between poetry and visual imagery. 'The Oval Window' refers to sequences of drawings by lan Friend juxtaposed with text by British poet J.H. Prynne. An English-born and trained artist, Friend taught at Chelsea School of Art in the midseventies, and for some years he was assistant curator to Pat Gilmour in the Print Department at the Tale Gallery. He moved from London to Australia in 1985 and since then he has taught in schools of art in Melbourne, Launceston and now Brisbane. His northern hemisphere pedigree and experience has profoundly informed his approach to art making. The literary allusions, especially pertaining to poets and philosophers, and an affiliation with the 1930s English abstractionists, particularly Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, cannot be ignored in an analysis of his own practice.1 This trait makes Friend sit somewhat as an 'outsider' in the field of contemporary Australian art. From the late 1990s, which is the period covered by the exhibition, The Oval Window, the artist's work has been remarkably consistent. Inviting the viewer into complex metaphysical terrains, his drawings more often than not comprise fields of dark ink washes