Joe Furlonger: Horizons

37 PAINTING SUPPORTS Furlonger has long had an interest in surface and texture, emphasised over the decades through his work as a professional house painter: When you have to sandpaper every friggin’ lump and bump and fill every indent on someone’s precious gyprock wall — so that it’s this perfect painted finish, you perhaps pick up . . . an appreciation for irregularities. His preference is to paint on untensioned canvas, and he makes use of a variety of supports and preparatory layers to provide disparate sensations of the brush as it crosses the surface. ‘It’s feel; it’s not the colour’, he notes. In the same batch of work, he adds, ‘I’ll go from a really coarse [canvas] to a fine one, and whatever I get a result on’. He likes: cottony crappy stuff because it’s really light. I like that really fine-grain [Italian glue sized linen] canvas that’s lead-primed, really slippery sort of so you can zoom across it with thin little lines, the smoothest old surface and it smell[s] really nice. Gesso-primed things are chalky and it’s sort of a slowdown. I’ve done a hell of a lot with rice paper because I like that sort of blotting paper . . . and you just about get one go, sort of thing. I like how [lightly sized hemp] diffuses the thing and it’s really hard to make an image. All these things are good effects. JOE FURLONGER’S PAINTINGS AND MATERIAL EVOLUTION