Joe Furlonger: Horizons

18 are associations still perpetuated today through advertising and through the high-speed motor- racing world circuit. Considine-Cummings saw that, in these works: [Furlonger’s] uncompromising commitment to the figure has allowed him to achieve an immediately recognisable and original personal style with a potent presence, which reveals his ability to capture the energy, toil, movement and visual rhythms of the experience; a prerequisite to expressing the frenetic circus of the Indy car race. 8 In 1994, while living on the Gold Coast, Furlonger took his family to see an actual circus. Over the subsequent months, he turned his experience of the travelling show into a colourful series of paintings and prints he titled ‘Circus Royale’, which illustrate the influence of the German expressionists. After the busy energy of the ‘Gold Coast Indy’ series, Furlonger enjoyed the renewed challenge of drawing the circus’s colour, light, and theatrical figures in motion. These works are a marked contrast to his earlier ‘mother and child’ figures, which were based on static models and poses. In Australia, traditional circuses have since become somewhat passé and even considered politically incorrect due to their association with the use (and abuse) of animals. However, in France, with its own national school, circus continues to be celebrated as an elemental form of theatre. Encouraged by his gallerist, Ray Hughes, who had visited Winter Circus in Paris in 2004, the Furlongers — this time with two children — again travelled to France, where Heidi had obtained a role as a violinist in the Winter Circus orchestra.