TIM STORRIER Australian, B. 1949

Fine Australian and International Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 30 April 2002, lot 42 

Private collection, Sydney

Born in Sydney, Storrier trained at the National Art School and in 1968 became the youngest artist ever to be awarded the Sulman Prize. From 1989 to 1998 he served as a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales; and in 1994 was awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for his services to contemporary Australian art. When Storrier first achieved international recognition, exhibiting in London in 1983, he was compared by reviewers with Nolan, Williams and Whiteley for his personal interpretation of the Australian landscape.

Storrier’s now famous fire paintings evolved originally from his 1981 ‘Site Project’: photographic documentation of real blazing objects in the Australian outback. Through the following two decades his imagery evolved considerably. As Catharine Lumby has noted in her recent monograph, ‘The more literal evocations of the simultaneously energising and consuming properties of fire that dominated Storrier’s 1980s work have been subsumed into a more reflective, abstract exploration of the themes underlying the paintings’. Later nocturnal landscapes such as Skyway, with its intense cobalt sky pricked with light, announce 'a more sophisticated exploration of the emotive melancholic mood that has always haunted his work'.¹

For Storrier, fire is a symbol of passion and purification, regeneration and life itself. Meticulous in their technique, Storrier’s dramatic painted images contrast the infinity of space with ephemeral conflagration. In the words of Edmund Capon, ‘The landscape remains the enduring stage of Storrier’s art… To my mind, Storrier reconciles those contradictions of toughness and sensitivity, harshness and sophistication’.²

1.   Lumby, C., Tim Storrier: the Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, pp. 142f..

2. In van Nunen, L., Point to Point: the Art of Tim Storrier, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987.