Joe Furlonger: Horizons

15 In the late 1950s, Furlonger’s family moved from Cairns (where he was born in 1952) to a small crop and vegetable farm in Samford Valley, on the north-west outskirts of Brisbane. His early years in the semi-rural region profoundly influenced his career as an artist, instilling in him a love of the outdoors and the bush. In 1970, at 17 years of age, he went to work as a deckhand, periodically returning to that ocean-going life over the subsequent 15 years. It was out there — where sea meets land and sky to form infinite horizons — that Furlonger first learned to think in paint. During that same decade, with one foot on land and the other on a boat, Furlonger was also learning his artistic craft: in 1973–76, he studied for an Associate Diploma in Painting from Brisbane’s Queensland College of Art; and in 1977–78, earned a Diploma of Art from Alexander Mackie CAE in Sydney. At the end of the decade, he returned to Brisbane, where subsequent years spent honing his artistic skills eventually paid off: in 1987, Furlonger won the Queensland Art Gallery’s Andrew and Lillian Pederson Memorial Prize for Drawing, receiving $3000 for his triptych Bathers 1987 (Acc. 1988.017a-c). It was the first of many instances of public recognition, and of many acquisitive prizes, over the course of his career. Brisbane has a strong history of teaching figurative drawing, reaching back to Jon Molvig’s classes in the 1950s, which were inspired by Molvig’s interest in German Expressionism; classes that were taken over by Roy Churcher in 1958. For instilling in him the basics of drawing and handling paint, Furlonger acknowledges his early teachers — Churcher, David Paulson, Ann Thomson and Ian Smith in Brisbane, Kevin Connor and Michael Johnson in Sydney — and he maintained a focus on the drawn figure for many years after art school. Paulson, he says, taught him the importance of the initial marks an artist makes, getting the movement down and then building up a composition over those marks; while Churcher taught him how to hold the pencil — lightly, enabling a lightness and sensitivity, and to transfer that lightness of touch to the canvas, so that original impressions contribute to, rather than hamper, the finished work. 1 Bathers (Acc. 1988.017a-c, detail) 1987 JOE FURLONGER: PLACE AND TIME