flowerpieces
Flowerpieces is Tony Clark's tenth solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9, and one in which familiar themes in Clark's work have interesting contemporary resonances. The aesthetics of Clark's paintings have become progressively richer and, to some tastes, more appealing over the last ten years. His works have also tended to have a socio-political critical dimension to them. With the Flowerpieces series, this may well still be the case, but this work's possible meanings have become more problematic than those of his work ten years ago.
These paintings are certainly aesthetically appealing. Each painting is a vignette of flowers, sometimes with the addition of a single bird. Clark's palette is colourful, but still manages a similar moody darkness to his more abstract Lontano series from 2000. Given this, and his floral subject matter, there are echoes of the flower paintings of Tim Maguire in these works—in particular Flowerpiece with Daisy (2003, acrylic on canvas, 61.0cm x 122.0cm). However, Clark's flowers are much more understated. In Flowerpieces his brushwork is loose and lucid, sometimes echoing elements of Chinese calligraphy. Given the freeness of his lines, the muted colours of these paintings might well be all that saves them from a Ken Done-like Matisse pastiche. At an aesthetic level, they certainly fulfil the commercial imperative.
But with Clark's oeuvre, aesthetics have often been an avenue through which broader issues of culture and difference have percolated. In the early to mid-1990s, Clark's series of blue and white Landscape Reliefs and Jasperware Paintings were stylistic appropriations of blue porcelain chinoiserie. This Asian decorative tradition was made popular in European bourgeois parlours by manufacturers such as Wedgwood and Doulton from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s