Joe Furlonger: Horizons

19 Over many return visits to the circus, Furlonger dashed off several preliminary drawings. For his paintings of the subject, he soon replaced oils with the quicker drying acrylic pigments that enabled him to capture more freely the movement and pace of the performances. He best expressed his enjoyment of and sense of capturing the moment in a comment to Australian art critic Sebastian Smee, who accompanied him on one such circus visit, saying ‘I’d rather paint a spectacle like a circus or a football game because it’s a real, not a manufactured, genre’. 9 In the ‘Circus Paris-Berlin’ works, Furlonger again uses his preliminary drawings to limber up, making numerous sketches to explore, experiment and become familiar with his subject. This is all part of getting into the zone and catching something special on which he can later elaborate and refine. Smee commented that watching Furlonger at work was ‘like watching a teenager trying to catch fish with his bare hands: there is a sense of surprise — a coup — with every success’. 10 Returning to Australia, the artist produced a series of bronze works inspired by the circus theme, including maquette-sized circus animals and performers ( Lion II 2 006, Little splits 2006). The most imposing and impressive of these bronzes is the life-sized Spiky man 2006, which depicts a harlequin. The striking, clownish figure — perhaps the culmination of Furlonger’s figurative works — encompasses something audacious and emotive, full of pathos and irrepressible, anarchic energy. Throughout these years of his career, the other great strand of Furlonger’s creative impulse — the landscape — continued to motivate him, eventually to become the dominant feature of his practice. In 1994–95, Furlonger spent three months in Hanoi, Vietnam, which spurred his interest in brush-and-ink painting. Later trips to China also engaged him with traditional Chinese landscape art and its encompassing sense of sky, mountains, trees and earth as a continuous whole. He gained further insight into the landscape through an artist residency at Moree Plains Art Gallery in New South Wales. In Moree, Furlonger spent time with Leigh Purcell, a local authority on Indigenous art, who took him to see rock paintings and dendroglyphs (hand-cut incising of marks) on trees originally from a local floodplain area. 11 Furlonger also recalls a transformative drive along the Newell Highway in northern New South Wales, the landscape ‘flat as a billiard table’ with a ‘mesmeric quality’ a meditative or even spiritual feel. 12 His immersion in the Australian landscape has taken him to many parts of the continent, including a three-month residency in the remote north-west township of Broome, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, in 1996. It took Furlonger many years to find his way into landscape painting. Compared to his impulsive approach to figurative work, landscapes have necessitated a slow permeation of his consciousness, and a much longer process of engaging with the subject. His copious drawing practice continues even while working in the landscape, and he brings a kit of paper, pencil, pastel and watercolour on each trip into the bush. This ‘note-taking’ captures close detail, and the numerous tiny movements constantly occurring within the landscape. Furlonger’s greatest Russian gymnast and Tumblers (from 'Circus Paris-Berlin suite') 2006 JOE FURLONGER: PLACE AND TIME