Joe Furlonger: Horizons

40 ‘I was doing turps and wax . . . I just put two blocks of [bees] wax . . . [and] a few rocks of dammar . . . in a four-litre container and then just flooded in turps and let the turps melt it all down’. Oil paint tubes were squeezed into roller trays, or another four-litre tin, and thinned using the waxy turps solution. I just wanted it really fluid and I wanted it to be like ink drawing then . . . and it was — black and white ink drawing. Then I’d add blues. But I’d have a pot of red, a pot of yellow, always four or five pots . . . and a pot of white, lots of white; that was my palette. I’d just keep topping them up; I’d always keep the pot full. So I’d always be squeezing tubes. [Then] I got out of tubes and I was getting tins . . . because you needed bulk for this scale. Another advantage of using thinned oil paint was the shortened drying time. Furlonger ‘wanted to get back onto it really fast’, describing how ‘the wax would sort of surface over’, allowing more paint to be applied quite quickly. However, ‘you can’t do big oils in the landscape’. For Furlonger’s many forays into the Australian countryside, there was no escaping the fact that recently applied oil paint produced works ill-suited to transport, being, as they were, ‘still thick and sticky and wet’. Oils worked well and had the right ‘feel’ for his Gold Coast Indy paintings — for example, Driving against speeding cars 1992–93 [p.62] — where the boldness of the colour palette and thick, textured markings capture the feverish energy and movement experienced at a racetrack. However, drying time ultimately drove Furlonger to transition to water-based paint. ABOVE Visible and ultraviolet (UV) fluorescence images of Target driver 1992 [p.60]. The variable fluorescence within the UV image (right), particularly within passages of black paint, highlights the artist’s additions of wax and resin to his oil paint, and the fluidity of his medium. OPPOSITE A detail from Driver and roof tops 1992–93 [p.61], where bold colours and textured wet-on-dry brushwork effectively captures the power and movement of the race track.