Rick Amor

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2003

Rick Amor, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2 - 27 September 2003, cat. 6
Rick Amor: standing in the shadows, McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Melbourne, 8 May - 26 June 2005, cat. 31

Robert Linsday, Rick Amor: standing in the shadows, Melbourne: McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, 2005, pp. 9, 43 (illus.)
Rick Amor Paintings 2003: commemorating 20 years with Niagara Galleries, Melbourne: Niagara Galleries, 2003, (illus.)

This work is framed in a limed wood frame with a gilt slip. No tears or patches on the reverse and no straches, dints, scuffs or shrinkage. This work is in good condition.
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The paintings of Rick Amor are as real as dreams. They appear as snapshots of actual times and places, but they are moments that have been drawn from the edges of Amor's perception or memory and then painstakingly recreated on canvas.  From the late 1980s Amor began using recollections and impressions of his childhood in Frankston as direct inspiration; The aunt's house (2002) is one such painting.  The painting depicts the artist's aunt, Myra Morris, hobbling up the driveway of his grandparents' home, Mile Bridge House.  It is one of three major works painted since 1989 of Amor's aunt, the others being Artist's House, Long Island, Frankston (1992, private collection) and The writer (1997, private collection).

Myra Morris was a well-known literary personality in inter-war Melbourne; she wrote a number of novels including Us five (1923), her poetry was published in the Bulletin¹, a personality in Melbourne, she regularly featured in popular magazines of the time.  Despite a period of independence following the success of Us five, Myra returned to the family home in 1927, where she remained until her mother's death. She was passionate about the garden at Mile Bridge House and deemed the garden her responsibility, even after she began to suffer the effects of Paget's Disease.²  Aunt Myra was warmly supportive of the young Amor's artistic ambitions: Gary Catalano writes that 'although she had it firmly fixed in her mind that her young nephew would become a writer, she often talked about the painters she had known and happily marketed his small plein air studies of the beach among her friends.'³

In the present work, Amor has placed Myra Morris within the garden of Mile Bridge House, simultaneously bringing us into the depths of his memory and bringing Myra and Mile Bridge House into the present.  As in the earlier painting, Artist's House, Long Island, Frankston, Myra is shown from behind, with her distinctive red cardigan and crutches, walking towards the house. Linda Short describes how since the 1990s Amor has created an uneasy relationship between the landscape and the figures, reducing the scale of the figures and allowing the environment to dominate the composition.⁴  In The aunt's house the figure of Myra is overwhelmed by the looming macrocarpas and long, dark shadows, her existence illuminated only in the pale flicker of low sunlight cast across the view. 

It is perhaps Peter Corrigan's description of Amor's paintings that best fits The aunt's house.  Corrigan describes Amor's work as presenting 'a world where figures are held still on the road or beach, on apiece or in a garden, in the midst of iridescent effects of light where mysterious coincidences occur, and intense sunsets lie beyond.'⁴ 

1. Gary Catalano, The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and his art, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2001, p. 21
2. Gary Catalano, The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and his art, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2001, p. 15
3.  Linda Short, 'A Single Statement of a Single Mind', Rick Amor: a single mind, Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2008, p. 74
4.  Peter Corrigan, 'A Civil Society', Rick Amor: a single mind, Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2008, p. 128