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Artist Statement for House and Car Paintings:
I grew up in a small suburb in Sydney’s West that felt more like a village than a geographical division on the map. It was surrounded by a river on two sides and an airport on another. Most of the people who lived there knew each other despite language and cultural differences. It was small, safe and familiar. I was a child, growing up in the 1960’s and the streets and paddocks were the places where my Myths were formed.
Every house had it’s own presence. Fibro, for those who could afford to build a house, was the construction material of necessity and conformity. Many people lived in garages and “temporary dwellings†Landscaping was unknown. Gardens were modest or non-existent.
Every car had a face, a body, and a spirit. It was the time of the fabulous beasts. Cars were still a luxury. They were more than transport- they were sculptures on wheels that spoke of people’s aspirations. The American influenced styling of some gave unreliable predictions of a supersonic future; they exuded wealth and sexuality in ostentatious displays of chrome and colour or, alternatively, the European cars modestly proclaimed their post war practicality and opposition to excess.
To be “Modern†was to be at once admired and placed under suspicion. These were uncertain times.
The images of those houses and cars had a powerful presence for me that seemed to by-pass language and etch themselves directly into my emotions, my dreams and my memories. They were archetypal. They will always be with me.
Hiraclities said that you couldn’t step into the same river twice. Plato said that the world of things is an allusion, that the only true forms are abstract conceptual forms, which eternally underpin and determine the physical world. The American physicist John A Wheeler says that matter, when taken to its most reduced state, is simply energy, vibrating in exquisite geometric patterns. The artists of Islam represent the universe in amazing interlocking geometric patterns, an infinity that is at once inside and outside the body.
Most of these works have a substructure that underpins the more familiar visual manifestation of the subject. I use it a metaphor to suggest the passing of time and the relentless change that is only challenged by human memory.
The place that I grew up in is gone forever, but I’m making it again in these paintings.
-Rhett Brewer
