Circular Highlights Series
The Circular Highlights series extends an investigation into the photographic tradition and new ways of seeing landscape painting.
The fleeting moment, that split second where time stands still. The Eternal Moment.
The eternal moment lies somewhere between the snapshot nature of the images and the timeless nature of their painterly surface. Some of images in this series are less landscapes but rather backgrounds to a snapshot portrait taken spontaneously without the human subject present. Left to focus on this otherwise ignored however glorious ‘scene’, we feel a ‘strong poetic sensibility’ reserved usually for traditional landscape painting.
Others in the series seem to border on abstraction in an attempt to escape their `humble’ photographic origins – “we are caught up in attempting to reconcile tonal feilds of colour and flat pattern with a latent sense of time embedded below the pictorial surface.”
The first work in this series Circular Highlights was a selected purchase as part of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery Conrad Jupiters Art Prize in 1998, and also won the Victoria Parks Artist Residency that year which was undertaken in 1999. This work, as well as Circular Highlights II and Foreground/Background, are part of the exhibition entitled (painting), which has now toured Hobart, Melbourne, Mt Gambier in 2000-2001, and will be seen at the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery in January 2002. Circular Highlights IV won the Brisbane Courier Mail Art prize in 2002.