Joe Furlonger: Horizons

17 In 1988, with another of his Bathers works (Acc. 2000.159), Furlonger won a prestigious Moët & Chandon Fellowship. As a Fellow, he, wife Heidi and their infant son, Max, spent the following year based in the north-eastern French township of Epernay, from where they travelled on to Italy, and to Venice, in particular. Venice had a profound effect on Furlonger and resulted in a series of ‘mother and child’ works, in which Heidi and Max featured. ‘Figurative art,’ he noted at the time, ‘continues to interest me as it aligns with the history of the illustration of human life . . . The human figure is a painting about life’. 6 His Italian travels and immersion in Renaissance art — particularly the work of Giovanni Bellini (c.1430–1516) — influenced the series; its works also hold a debt to the simple, fluid, lined figures of Matisse. The series displays a confident handling of a variety of media: pen and ink in Untitled (mother and child) 1988; oil on canvas in Mother and child (after Bellini) 1989; and drypoint etching in Madonna and Child 1989. With the assistance of master printer Neil Leveson (Australian Print Workshop, Melbourne), Furlonger produced a significant body of prints around this time. In later years, he would regularly return to print to refresh his creativity. OPPOSITE Bathers (Acc. 2000.159, detail) 1987 Mother and child (after Bellini) (detail) 1989 RIGHT Driver, Pennzoil (detail) 1992 I felt I wanted to counter any reductivist processes by going back to drawing where form and subject matter both play a part. So I have chosen my bathers to combine realism with form and with contemporary things — maintaining a dialectic with history through the common subject of the figure. 5 JOE FURLONGER: PLACE AND TIME After enjoying the French seaside resort town of Biarritz, and surfing in Cornwall on England’s rugged south-west coast, the Furlonger family returned to Australia in 1989, relocating to another ‘resort’ location — Queensland’s Gold Coast — where, slightly removed from the Brisbane art scene, Furlonger could gather his thoughts and look for fresh material. Invited by the Gold Coast City Art Gallery (now HOTA Gallery), he became the inaugural artist-in-residence at the 1992 Gold Coast Indy Car Grand Prix, relishing his role as both documenter and interpreter of a contemporary subject. Figures dominate the series, which captures the adrenaline-fuelled energy of the Indy experience. Finding inspiration in Cubism’s fragmentation of the subject, Furlonger creates a powerful sense of space and energetic action in these works, which include Driver, Pennzoil 1992, Orange team 1993, and a vibrant 1992 ‘Gold Coast Indy’ series of editioned set of etchings. Writing on his commissioned works, then director of the Gold Coast gallery Fran Considine-Cummings drew a direct parallel to the Italian futurists of the early twentieth century, who celebrated speed, new technology, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city in their works. 7 The motor car, and its glamorous associations with adventure and sport,