Joe Furlonger: Horizons

41 DIY PAINT Having rejected commercial artists’ acrylics and synthetic polymer house paints, one of the first water-based mediums attempted by Furlonger was egg tempera (in the vein of Arthur Boyd), which he quickly abandoned as impractical. Then, inspired by the distemper paintings of German expressionist Otto Mueller and the surface qualities of natural ochre pigment in Indigenous Australian art, he began experimenting with a customised mix of powdered pigments in water-based emulsion mediums. I only started on this pigment paint — DIY pigment paint — as an experiment, because I wanted to take large rolls of canvas, pre-primed cotton duck . . . and I’d go out west with them. I wanted something that would be dry really quick . . . As soon as PVA worked I went, ‘Wow’. In many ways, this conversion to water-based paints facilitated Furlonger’s progression to landscape painting. Initially, Furlonger’s DIY paint was mixed using artists’ matte acrylic mediums, including those produced by brands Liquitex and Golden. When these were unavailable, he would substitute PVA wood glue. Irrespective of source (and as with his oil paint), Furlonger heavily dilutes his binder, using lots of water and some household detergent. When painting out in the field, the water might be obtained from a muddy creek or dam, physically capturing an element of the landscape itself. 5 Possibly because of this substantial modification, Furlonger maintains that he does not experience any appreciable difference in handling or visual properties between paints mixed with generic PVA wood glue and those made with specialist artists’ mediums: ‘It’s the same matte-ness, virtually . . . Cynical me would say that they all come out of the same friggin’ 35 000-litre bloody tank in some industrial lot somewhere — but that’s unfair’. 6 Consequently, he often works with pigment mixed into whatever emulsion binder he can most conveniently obtain. Although not a conscious influence at the time, Furlonger’s approach to painting invites comparison with Ian Fairweather; he, too, used paint mixed from products available at his local hardware store, taking advantage of the then emergent water-based emulsion house paints and binders based on PVA or acrylic copolymers. 7 The conversion to DIY paint for Furlonger occurred in the mid-1990s. The earliest example in this exhibition is Artist in Residence 1996 [p.69]. Here, we can see the relative solidity and flatness of his new medium. For a time, paintings worked in his DIY water-based paint comprised a relatively simple JOE FURLONGER’S PAINTINGS AND MATERIAL EVOLUTION