GREG CLIFFE

Greg Cliffe was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia on 09/02/1956 and now lives in the Blue Mountains, 100 kilometres from Sydney. Over 25 years my studio painting research has evolved to embrace the concept of totalized time and the stratification of memory. I explore historical references in my paintings, creating a mixture of philosophical and ideological threads through time. I have always been interested in how social values and cultural history can be transmitted by folk narrative, fables, and absurd “yarns” and what these say about group cohesion, conformity, and shared presumptions. I like to collect a range of humorous stories and anecdotes, images of historical artefacts and documents from which to base subjects for my current fictional/factual narrative paintings.

My recent work has been focused on the significance of location, my family history and social history through more traditional genres and techniques such as landscape, still life and portraiture. It is extending the subject matter I have explored with group figurative compositions over the last 20 years into the places associated with the stories I have explored.

My painting technique having evolved from linear expressionist landscape paintings in the 1990’s to montaged compositions of family and social history images. This was previously executed in Alkyd mediums to my more recent traditional solvent-free oil painting processes used by the Baroque masters, C19th Romanticists and Pre-Raphaelites.