JOHN COBURN

Quentin Gallery, Western Australia
The Rural and Industries Bank of Western Australia
Fine Australian and International Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 2 May 2000, lot 239
Axia Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection, Singapore; purchased from the above in 2000

Nadine Amadio, John Coburn: Paintings, Sydney: Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, no. 51, pp. 114-115, 202, illus.
Barbara Chapman, The Rural & Industries Bank of Western Australia Art Collection, Rural and Industries Bank of Western Australia, Perth, 1988 no.48, pp. 9, 13, 55, illus

Good condition. Minor scuff marks in blue section to lower right and minor specks of substance to left of scuff marks. Two small flecks of black substance in blue section uper right. A small group of minor moisture specks in blue section to lower left. This work has not been lined and has original stretcher. Would suggest a light surface clean. No evidence of re-touching.
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In describing the development of his painting, John Coburn once noted that 'my work has, over the years, and following a natural progress of development, gone from simplicity to greater complexity and back to simplicity again a number of times.'¹  The present work is from one of his periods of restraint and refinement, the ebb tide of the early 1980s.

Utilizing only seven forms - large, irregular triangular, quadrangular and lenticular shapes - the artist creates a kind of abstract narrative: a story of pictorial elements in magnetic-gravitational tension with each other and with the edge of the canvas. Yet this is not a flat, post-painterly abstraction; within the painting's pattern-structure, subtle manipulations of pigment - dabbing and dry-brushing - create a velvety, shadowed, harmonious surface.

The poetic title is particularly apt. It alludes to 'the compelling heaviness, the spatial arrangement and pressure of the Romanesque,'²  while the tonality has the darkness of a medieval basilica, and the rich blue suggests the colours of early stained glass.

1. Nadine Amadio, John Coburn: Paintings, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1988, p. 110
2. ibid., p. 114