RICK AMOR Australian, B. 1948

Rick Amor, one of Australia’s leading mid-career artists, has painted the sea in many important works. Images of both the ocean and the urban coastline have for him an autobiographical element: partly to do with his boyhood memories of bayside Frankston and partly relating to numerous open-air painting excursions around Williamstown. Yet, as his biographer Gary Catalano explains, ‘there’s a sense in which he likes to distance himself from his own experience and to treat himself as if he were a third person. In his most typical paintings, the “I” is often another’. Amor has made a number of ‘ambivalent, if not expressly contradictory, statements’ about the sea – variously that it could induce terror in him as a child and yet that it might be ‘just part of the background’. ¹

Here the lone human protagonist is completely dwarfed by the elements. However, although both we and the painted viewer are confronted by deep ocean, towering storm clouds and a blackening sky, there is no real sense of menace in the scene. Rather, the artist evokes the timeless power and the mysterious otherness of the natural world.


1. Catalano, G., The Solitary Watcher, Rick Amor and his art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p. 111.

Please note this lot is subject to G.S.T.