Joe Furlonger: Horizons

22 greater affinity with the immediacy of Fred Williams’s landscape paintings, though, such as Glasshouse Mountains III 1971 (QAGOMA Collection). Furlonger, like Williams, often anchors his compositions with a high horizon line and fills the field below with refined landscape elements — minimal marks on the canvas, which often have a music-like rhythm to them. Despite the difference in their approaches (Furlonger’s dashed impressions, Williams’s laborious and careful), both artists — with their play of light and depth of colour — respond more to an innate, almost spiritual and meditative sense of those same vast spaces. Furlonger also finds a chaotic beauty in the power of nature unleashed, as can be seen in his flooded landscapes Brisbane River in flood 2011 and Balonne in flood 2012. His passion for and engagement with the Australian landscape, evident in so much of his work, has overtaken the earlier importance of the figure, usurped by his more meditative desire to understand this country’s vastness and ever-changing character. Furlonger’s evolving technique has also revivified his early and enduring fascination with the sea. Looking back to his earliest days of painting, he says I love the sea. It is really my subject matter. But it is a mixture of beauty and terror: Queensland waters are rough enough. Boats are always capsizing. Everything is double-edged; the most beautiful fish are the most poisonous. 17 Some of his most subtle and lyrical works are seascapes, such as 2 fishers at anchor 2017 and Moreton Bay mud flats 2000, which consist of childlike boat- and island-shaped notations on a flat sea of blue, greens and greys, the subject’s changeable moods ranging from hazy summer days to overcast skies and choppy conditions. These works are natural progressions from his landscapes: I find parallels [of landscapes] with the sea. I feel comfortable in big, flat areas 18 . . . I like the ‘sea thing’ because of the simplification that it represents — a horizon, foreground, and middle ground. It was a way of working at minimalism. 19 Joe Furlonger is a restlessly creative artist, driven to evoke time and place. This mutable talent sees each medium— drawing and painting, etching and woodcut, sculpture and ceramics — forming part of an organic whole. Anchored by a keen engagement with his world of experiences, Furlonger’s life is his art and his art, his life. His aim: to evade staleness and repetition. Initially inspired to portray the elements of his youth, his chosen subjects — the bush, the beach and the sea — launched him as an artist with a national profile and continue to move him today.