Rod is a painter and printmaker based in Melbourne Australia.
This drawing WanderingFlame came about while I was reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando where references to comets and cosmic tumult were reflecting the grandeur and volatility of Orlando’s personae. Love it. What an extraordinary book.
More Bombings in the middle east this week.. more wrath…
Wrath oil on canvas 2017
This is JupiterShot, a collage I’ve made in the gallery during the Ash exhibition. I draw and paint in such a layered and painstaking way that sometimes it completely blasts the mainframe of my consciousness to make some direct collage. This work is part of The Book of Fire which you will see more of over time on this site or my instagram
There was a long spate of hedge fires in the 80’s and 90’s in Melbourne’s leafy burbs. Not sure if they ever caught those involved.
This work prefigured a return to drawing for me and seemed to trigger an analysis of the whole september 11 event which was being memorialised at the time.
CrashTest was a breakthrough painting exhibited in ASH at Space 39 in 2017. The flattening of the picture plane, the primary colours and the viewpoint all opened out the paint surface and felt utterly unique in my work process up to that point.
This painting was the most enjoyment I have had making a commission to date. The 18 year old who this was commissioned for was adamant she would ‘love a paddle steamer burning on a river and a moon too’. Having not encountered such a plain speaking commission before I set to work and was pleased where it was heading. What was unexpected and wonderfully Tao as I was making this painting was that these other fires started appearing. Fires of striking shearers? Aboriginal fires? What happened was the land started unfolding suggestive threads and this dutch landscape meets the Darling River came into being.. transforming a discarded museological specimen tray along the way into an objet d’art