Joe Furlonger: Horizons

8 Before he set out to become an artist, studying privately under painter Roy Churcher and then attending art school in both Brisbane and Sydney, Joe Furlonger toiled in his uncle’s Samford Valley market garden, not far from Brisbane. As a young man he also worked as a deckhand on fishing boats out of Darwin and along the Queensland coast on his cousin’s trawler — the inspiration for Fishermen 1985. The land and the sea taught him the value and dignity of hard work, and gave him the heightened acuity that comes with the practised repetition of any task, which would later manifest itself in Furlonger’s lifelong daily practice of drawing. Perhaps the legacy of endless days spent among sun-drenched rows of vegetables, or on a constantly rolling trawler deck, is the artist’s direct and unpretentious outlook on the complex interconnectedness of the human and natural worlds. Reference is often made to Furlonger’s early debt to figurative works by European Modernists like Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, but his paintings also disclose a deep interest in the classical tradition and an instinct to draw from the Renaissance. Furlonger’s Bathers 1987 (Acc. 2000.159) catapulted him to national prominence when it won the prestigious Moët & Chandon Fellowship in 1988. His colossal, black-outlined bathers throwing a ball on the beach, posed as if to catch the rising sun, press against the picture plane in call-and-response to Picasso’s surrealist bathers of the late 1920s. If Picasso was revivifying and modernising Cézanne’s approach to groups of bathers as a traditional subject — ecstatic joie de vivre set against the solemn grand manner — then Furlonger’s bathers step confidently out onto a Gold Coast beach. They are vigorous, youthful and self-possessed, arriving off a path that might reach back to Antiquity. His focus on the figure is not a profound meditation on the human condition but a celebration of its strength, freedom and physicality, elevated into an unyielding Australian light. The fellowship came with a glorious residency based at Moët’s vineyards at Épernay, north-east of Paris, allowing Furlonger to maintain his connection to the countryside while traversing Europe’s cultural capitals. This experience simultaneously deepened his knowledge of the grand narratives of Western art and crystallised the development of his own artistic trajectory. He looked to art history to find his artistic bearings, while unswervingly locating his voice in the world around him. Illustrative of this shift are works like Mother and child (after Bellini) 1989, following the exemplar of the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini. They are personal — he was then a first-time father to a newborn son — but also dignified and solemn. In another iconographic appropriation, Deposition on the beach 1990, Furlonger shifts the pictorial drama of another Venetian, Jacopo Tintoretto, to that most incongruous of settings: the Australian beach. These works are driven not by religiosity but by a universal desire to comprehend our love for new life and our grief at its passing. Furlonger’s commissioned works capturing the Gold Coast Indy motor race in the early 1990s are similarly indebted to European Modernism. Foreword CHRIS SAINES CNZM DIRECTOR, QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY | GALLERY OF MODERN ART