Event details

PERTH CONCERT HALL
5 St George's Terrace, Perth
TERRACE LEVEL FOYER

Until 30 December, 2011

9 - 5 Monday to Friday - Late nights for shows
(or by appointment)

Drop by the Perth Concert Hall to view an exhibition by internationally celebrated artist Jeremy Holton

Jeremy Holton: Journey into the local landscape

Few people understand the West Australian landscape more than Artist Jeremy Holton. Coming to painting later in life, Holton’s works are informed by his background in geology and mining and his life in the Perth hills. His experiences have shaped his ability to capture the essence and distinctiveness of the Western Australian landscape.

Holton’s artworks journey into this landscape to invoke emotion, summon admiration and draw upon the viewer’s own experiences of memory and place. His most recent works are currently on display at the Perth Concert Hall. It features a variety of his local landscapes as well asdrawn from his imagination.

At his exhibition opening this month, Jeremy Holton spoke of his work, ‘A Window into Time’, which pictures the Kimberley wilderness. He explained, “When I started painting this work I worked with such intensity that my eyes watered with tears”. As the title suggests, ‘A Window into Time’ recalls his memory and experience of the Kimberley landscape. The boldness and distinctive use of red earth palette and contrasting ultramarine blue, along with the rapidity and confidence of his brushwork, demonstrates the intense connection of the artist to his subject.

Holton’s paintings invite viewers to recall their own memories and experiences of place. When describing ‘Red Ship,’ Ainslie Gatt, who has represented Jeremy and his art for seventeen years, said, “Its boldness, movement and childlike simplicity of a ship sitting on the water and being tied up to a little jetty takes me back to memories of my childhood. I just love it!” These words express the power of Holton’s landscapesand their ability to linger in the mind.

Holton’s landscapes are firmly associated with locality and have a distinctly Australian quality. His subject matter is the North West, the Perth hills and Fremantle, all of which are readily recognisable.
The Ghost Gum’s and native grass trees that feature in the ‘Moonlight,’ a landscape of the Darling Ranges, are uniquely Australian, while the contrasting red grass trees inhabit the landscape almost like humans (in a Fred-William-like fashion).

Holton often includes figures and animals in his landscape which merge with the rocks and trees so that there is an ambiguity between reality and imagination. This captures that haunting and uncanny feeling of presence that you experience in so many special places in the Australian bush.

Jeremy Holton’s figures within the landscape revive the theme of human oneness with the landscape, bringing to it a vibrancy of colour and at the same time they create a compositional unity which envelopes the viewer in the scene. The whimsical figures in ‘Lover’s at Python Pool’ are immersed in the landscape; becoming part of it. The circular direction of the brushwork also brings the viewer into the scene as the eye is drawn to the centre, the figures and then to the margins. Indigenous natives hidden amidst foliage frequent some of his landscapes.

A moon motif characterises many of his paintings. The moon is frequently pictured in the periphery, at the top of the work. Though often small, the eye is led through the landscape to the moon as if it was a destination, and the titles of the works reinforce this.

Ultimately, Holton’s landscapes take you on a journey; a journey into the imagination, into memory, into time. The destination, that special place that can only be discovered when one allows oneself to be consumed and lost in another world, is where Holton leads us.