Lost Pastoral
Saffron Newey 7 October - 1 November 2020
Saffron Newey is a Melbourne-based painter, who utilises digital media processes. Earlier this year she received a PhD in Fine Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). This research project, entitled The Sublime Network; Painterly Passage and Materiality in the Post Internet Era, focused on the effect of the Internet upon painting, both as a contemporary medium and as an art-historical narrative. Saffron Newey has been exhibiting for 25 years and is included in various private and public collections in Australia and abroad. As a finalist in multiple Australian prizes for landscape and contemporary painting, Saffron Newey has an established identity in Australian painting.
Image (front): Sunset Mare, in Coleraine, 2020, oil on canvas, 102 x 82 cm (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Jan Manton Gallery. Image: Hare, Nocturne, 2020, oil on canvas, 31 x 31 cm (framed). Courtesy of the artist and Jan Manton Gallery.
Lost Pastoral features reminiscences of Romantic landscape paintings, hazy and soft focused, devoid of definition and divorced from their original contexts. Painters Louis Buvelot (Swiss-Australian), Hans Güde (Norwegian), Eugene von Guerard (Austrian-Australian) and Albert Bierstadt (German-American) have been appropriated in this series to present a remembrance of Romantic landscape history painting. Animals graze across the plains of mountain-scapes, seascapes and forests as lost souls from another time and place. Out of context and out of scale they appear foreign to their environments. Again, appropriations of historical masterpieces, they evoke the paintings of George Stubbs (English), Melchior d’Hondecoeter (Dutch), Luis Melendez (Spanish) and Edwin Landseer (English). Lost Pastoral imagines a version of events that never occurred. Indeed, it is the Internet that has facilitated these conflated scenes; painterly collages of various historical paintings. It was the online environment from which these images were sourced, cut up and blended together to form new hybridized scenes, fabricated historical narratives and events. Within this body of work the Romantic sublime meets its contemporary, online counterpart – the digital sublime. The latter is a space in which time, place and context become miscellaneous and “other” worlds evolve.
Sunset Mare, In Coleraine, 2020. Oil on canvas. 102 x 82cm. Framed $4300
Proposterity, 2020. Oil on Arches Satine cotton rag paper. 24 x 22cm. Framed $2000
Gloaming of the Serama, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Bantam of Yosemite, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Hardanger; Mare and Foal, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Return to the Sea, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Eos in the Rocky Mountains, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
The Wilderness, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Pastoral Caper, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Lost in Yosemite, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Crepscular Coq, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
The Cloud (after Güde), 2019. Oil on MDF. 45 x 60cm $2500
Chestnut Horse (after Stubbs), 2019. Oil on MDF. 30 x 45 cm $2300
Hare Nocturne, 2020. Oil on canvas. 31 x 31cm. Framed $2300
Ma Retraite (after Buvelot), 2020. Oil on canvas. 102 x 82cm. Framed $4300
For all enquies email info@janmantonart.com All images courtesy of the artist and Jan Manton Gallery.
Gallery Director Jan Manton Gallery Manager Taylor Hall