TIM STORRIER Australian, B. 1949

In 1983, when Storrier first exhibited in London, reviewers compared him with Nolan, Williams and Whiteley for his personal interpretation of the Australian landscape. He is now one of the leading Australian artists of his generation - a member of the Order of Australia (AM) and a trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for three terms from 1989 to 1998. Always fascinated by the elements, his most famous 'fire' paintings evolved during the 1980s from his 1981 Site Project: documenting in photography a series of real objects set ablaze in the Australian outback. Storrier took the theme of fire in the landscape as almost his personal signature for many years, with fire a symbol of passion and purification, regeneration and life itself. More recently his imagery has conjoined earth, air and fire with water, evoking all the drama of the world's beginnings.

Here in Waterline (Reflection), painted in 1999, the flames from great glowing logs seem less destructive than strangely comforting against the vastness of an infinite evening sky. An expanse of water places the viewer at one remove from the heat and drama, lending the work a sophisticated nuancing of the melancholic mood that has always haunted Storrier’s art. As his most recent biographer, Catharine Lumby, observes, ‘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'. ¹

1. Lumby C., Tim Storrier, the Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, pp.142-3.