When we went to see the latest show by Todd Hunter at GrantPirrie, we had to remind ourselves once more that he did not play bass with 70s Oz rock legends Dragon. That was a different Todd Hunter and while there may be an April Sun in Cuba, we’ll never see it. This Todd Hunter is a painter whose work we first saw about five years ago and he’s got a new show on at GrantPirrie.
His work has been a little bit Francis Bacon, a little bit Willem De Kooning, a little bit figurative and abstract too. He’s a painter who knows how to do something so very few know how to do – push paint around a canvas. With a solid education in the hard luck boot camp of Julian Ashton and a degree from Griffith University, he knows how to work oils. You find in his large canvases gestural elements sitting next to subtle illusionist effects like light and volume. His landscapes from a couple of years ago combined skyscapes above roiling brown masses of paint that conjured up the idea of the landscape without actually describing one in too much detail. Although that series was attractive, the paintings seemed to be testament to the artist’s uncertainty of how to resolve the idea of combing abstraction with illusionistic space.
Todd Hunter, Waiting For The Sun, Oil on canvas, 2005.
Copyright the artist. Courtesy GrantPirrie
The effect of combining these two types of approaches in one painting is slightly disturbing. When you look at an abstract painting – or at least when we do – we don’t try to figure out what is background and what is foreground. Although paint gets put on in layers, classical abstract painting is more about surface effects and gesture, colour and form without resorting to three point perspective.
In the GP catalogue essay, Clare Lewis says that for Hunter, painting “is not a circumstantial past-time, it is an endevour essential to his being.” You can tell by looking at the new works that Hunter has developed a keen painter’s intelligence, something to add to his living and breathing oil paint 24/7. In his latest series of there’s something more finished and refined in his use of depth and colour. Nearly all the works stick to a formula of tilting the paint so it seems to flow from top right to bottom left. This repeated approach gets messed up with the layering of gestural elements and, surprisingly, areas that looks like they could be a tiny skyscapes or a shadow of the amorphous forms floating over the black backgrounds.
We were recently told that no artist paints a masterpiece before they are 40. Give ‘em time to cogitate in the studio, work out their approach, a philosophy, and then come back into the art world fully formed. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way and we have to suffer through innumerable inadequate careers bolstered by the whisper of a promise. For Todd Hunter, although he’s been growing up in public, he’s got nothing to worry about. When he turns 40, we’re going to buy him a great big cake.
