JON MOLVIG

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Collection of Raymond and Diana Kidd; purchased from the above in March 1970

Jon Molvig, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, June 1962, cat. 9
A Decade of Jon Molvig, Argus Gallery, Melbourne, 22 October - 2 November 1962, cat. 75
Sulman Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, February 1963, cat. 264
A Private Collection, SH Ervin Gallery, April 1992, cat. 80 

Betty Churcher, Molvig: The Last Antipodean, Allen Lane/Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1984, p. 99. cat. 312

The work is framed in a contemporary gold and brown timber frame. The work has fine stable drying cracks through much of the white impasto areas and central figure; this appears to be instrinic to the work through the artist's technique of using a blowtorch.
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Separating these two periods of expressionism were the Eden Industrial paintings, Drawn in ink and wax-resist or painted in flat oil scorched with a blowtorch, this dark, brooding series owes much to memories of the smoke-blackened steelworks of industrial Newcastle (Molvig's own Genesis, or Garden of Eden).'  The artist himself said of these works: 'These particular pictures are what you call symbolic, I suppose, a set of symbols used to express an idea or a feeling I have about humanity. The subject of them, the title of the whole series, is 'Eden Industrial', and Adam and Eve are the two main figures in the series; they are purely symbolic and have nothing to do with religious significance. They are a symbol of humanity as it stands today, or will stand, has stood, in future or past generations, and it is a comment on the increasing mechanical aspect of the world.'

In the present work we see the third character of the Eden Industrial iconography, the figure of the gravedigger. This image is Molvig's personal Australian totem - his version of Nolan's Kelly mask, or of Tucker's Antipodean Head. The spade-headed gravedigger simultaneously evokes Adam delving (while Eve spun) after his banishment from Eden, and his son Cain, the agriculturalist, who killed his pastoralist brother Abel. Less obviously there is a personal resonance: one of Molvig's first jobs as a young man in Newcastle was in a factory making steel helmets, and he would later wear such a helmet while on active service in New Guinea and the Philippines.

1.  Tree of Man V (gallery information sheet), Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, circa 1988
2.  Jon Molvig, interviewed by Hazel de Berg, Sydney, 1962, in Geoffrey Dutton (ed.), Artists' Portraits, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1992, p. 153