Joe Furlonger: Horizons

39 OPPOSITE A detail from Fishermen 1985 [(panel a), pp.46-7] showing a gap in the assembly of paper sheets. The painting was worked before and after mounting on plywood. ABOVE A detail from Bathers 1987 [Acc. 1988.055, pp.50-1] showing the bather’s calf. Intentionally exposed drawn lines, transparent washes of paint and drips from the thinned medium each contribute to the form of the leg. OIL-BASED PAINTING Furlonger’s preferred painting medium in the 1980s was oil paint. While fellow house painter and artist Robert Morris adopted commercial acrylic paints very successfully, Furlonger disliked their rubbery feel and certain kind of flatness, saying ‘I stuck with the oils because . . . they had more of a feel for me’. Interestingly, he brought many of the ‘burnt out’ brushes and rollers from his house- painting trade into his creative practice, but never the industrial paints. His use of oil paint was significantly influenced by his ‘watercolouring’; notwithstanding long days painting houses, followed by several hours in his studio, Furlonger would return to the family home mid-evening and paint watercolours at the kitchen table. The handling properties of watercolour were qualities he sought to replicate by thinning his oils with turps. In addition to the appeal of using very fluid paint, thinly applied washes of oil colour allowed his underlying line work to remain visible and form part of the composition. This approach can be seen in Bathers 1987 (Acc. 1988.055), where pencil and brush lines are interspersed with thin washes of transparent paint, each contributing to the final composition. In a detail of the right-hand figure, the form of the calf is shaped by drips of dilute medium, which run down the back of the leg. Initial problems with drying cracks forming in paintings produced with an overly diluted medium were overcome with additions of wax and a little dammar (see Target driver 1992, p.40): JOE FURLONGER’S PAINTINGS AND MATERIAL EVOLUTION